Today the Open Government Partnership (OGP) released its final report on New Zealand’s progress towards fulfilling its international commitments to transparency, accountability and participation.The good news is that our second action plan looks a bit better, though it still suffers from a lack of ambition. But the government has failed so badly on its first one that almost anything is an improvement.
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At the end of New Zealand’s first two-year action plan, the New Zealand IRM report finds that the plan did little to advance open government.
“The plan consisted almost entirely of things the government was doing anyway, and most of those things weren’t directly related to open government,” said [IRM researcher Steven] Price. “So it’s not very surprising that it made little concrete difference to transparency, accountability or public participation”.
The report also criticised the way the plan was prepared. “The government fell well short of the sort of public collaboration that it promised when it signed up to the OGP,” said Price.
Update: the full report can be read here.