Back in 2022, in its Open Government Partnership National Action Plan, the government promised to strengthen scrutiny of Official Information Act exemption clauses in legislation. Since then they've run a secret "consultation" on how to do that, with their preferred outcome being that agencies will consult the Ministry of Justice more when attempting to introduce new secrecy clauses. So how's that working out for them?
Terribly. The latest example is National's Education and Training Amendment Bill, which legalises over-funded, under-regulated, inherently corrupt "charter schools". As part of their crusade against transparency for these corrupt entities, they will be completely exempted from the Official Information Act - robbing parents, children, and the public of vital oversight. You'd think that exempting a new class of organisation from the OIA is the sort of thing that the Ministry of Justice would be consulted on, given the promise of stronger scrutiny. But of course they weren't. So I guess we can conclude that that promise, like everything else said by this government, is just bullshit and hot air.
As for MoJ's claim that they might not have been consulted because the clause was previously in the Education Act under National's last attempt at this corrupt scam, yeah, nah. The clause wasn't mentioned in the 2012 bill's RIS, so it seems that it wasn't scrutinised back then either. Back then the Ombudsman called it "unconstitutional and dangerous"; hopefully they'll mount a similar defence to the current bullshit.
