Tuesday, July 24, 2018



Transparency from the Greens

The Greens today have kept their promise of ministerial transparency, releasing their ministers' diaries for the last quarter:

The Green Party today released its ministerial diaries showing its co-leader met with Gas New Zealand in April to discuss the government's ban on future offshore oil and gas exploration.

The diaries show party co-leader James Shaw met with Gas New Zealand in April to discuss the implications of the ban and today released the quarterly diaries of its ministers and under-secretary as promised earlier this year.

The diaries were released for the party's three ministers, and one under-secretary.

They state who the meeting was with, the date it was held and a very brief description of the reason for the meeting.


If you're interested in trawling through them, you can read them here. If you're curious about a particular meeting, you can request further details under the OIA. I recommend using FYI for this, so everyone can see both the response, and how the request is handled (its a great tool for forcing agencies to behave by automatically publicising bad behaviour).

Of course, this raises an obvious question: when will "the most transparent government ever" follow suit? Or are they going to let themselves be shamed by the Greens on transparency?