Sometimes you win

I'm a regular submitter on legislation, and one of my pet topics is transparency. A lot of recent laws propose secrecy clauses - excluding particular information from the scope of the Official Information Act, or creating new, bespoke statutory barriers to release, usually after whining from some industry lobby shocked at the existence of a constitutional law that has been on the books for 40 years. But there are also cases where some body, whether unintentionally or by design, is excluded from the OIA.

One of these bodies was the Valuers Registration Board, the body which is meant to register and discipline valuers (the people who decide how much land is worth, for example if you're a Prime Minister who wants your holiday home valued at a lower level so you can pay less rates). It was created by a 1948 law, and viewed as a mostly private institution, so its absence from the Act wasn't surprising. But the law is being updated by the new Valuers Bill, which weirdly had failed to add it in. So I did a quick submission, copying the boilerplate from the last time I'd done this, pointing out that attitudes to transparency had significantly shifted since 1982 (when presumably someone made a decision not to include it), and in particular it seemed odd that a publicly-owned and funded, ministerially appointed body for registering and disciplining valuers would be treated differently from similar bodies overseeing teachers, builders, architects, plumbers, and security guards. And rather than feeding the submissions to an AI and then saying "fuck off, peasants!", the committee actually listened:

On balance, we consider that the Board plays a public role, given the importance of valuations to property markets and property rights. In our view, the Board meets key criteria for being subject to the OIA. We also heard that applying the OIA would not place an unreasonable administrative burden on the Board.

We recommend amending Schedule 4 of the bill to insert the Valuers Registration Board into Schedule 1, Part 2 of the Ombudsmen Act. We note that an organisation named under Schedule 1, Part 2 of the Act is subject to the Official Information Act.

So that's a win. Now if only they'll listen when it comes to the Commerce Commission or Shane Jones' secrecy shield for fishers...