Secrecy destroys trust: the case of the nuclear waste dump

Something I was not expecting to learn this morning: the government has built a secret nuclear waste dump in rural Manawatu:

A facility for storing all of New Zealand’s radioactive waste has been secretly built near Palmerston North, in a decision neighbouring farmers have called “horrifying” and “deceptive”.

The building, surrounded by a 2.5m-high fence, padlocked gates and CCTV, has been constructed next to New Zealand Defence Force communication dishes in rural Manawatū. The facility sits on Defence Force land – part of which was redesignated by the Health Ministry. The Health Ministry said the facility stores low-level and intermediate-level waste, such as redundant radiation devices for treating cancer patients.

[...]

New Zealand’s national storage facility neighbours prime Manawatū farmland, but residents were not informed of the building plans which were kept secret at the request of government officials.

The story is buried behind the Herald's paywall, but there's also a video version here. The video version carefully blanks out all the addresses, but the site is east of Ohakea, by the corner of Wilson and Ngaio Rd, and you can see it on Google maps here.

Is it safe? I don't see any reason to doubt it. But the government arrogantly didn't want to even make that argument, preferring to hide behind a bogus veil of "national security" to avoid objections. By doing so, they subverted the normal RMA process of having to respond to and mitigate concerns - which in this case would largely mean explaining the inverse square law, their monitoring and risk-management processes. And they prevented the RMA safeguard of having an independent, fair, and transparent appeals process to manage disagreements. I have no doubt that the government would have gained resource consent if they had done this openly.

Instead, they chose to do it in secret. And by doing that, they've made it look like they have something to hide. Because if it is safe, they would have just been open about it, right? It's a perfect example of how secrecy destroys trust, as well as a basic failure of democratic norms. And the government deserves every bit of the suspicion it is now going to get for this.

The lesson here for the government should be obvious: don't do things in secret unless you really, absolutely have to. Sadly, they'll probably take the opposite one, double down on secrecy, and try to punish its exposure. And then they'll wonder why trust in government is declining...