The Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee has reported back on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The bill makes various changes to competition law, which the National-dominated committee has naturally gutted. It also includes an odious secrecy clause, effectively granting the Commerce Commission a ten year exemption from the OIA, which is renewable, meaning it is really an indefinite exemption. The case for this was exceedingly weak, it was denounced as "unnecessary and excessive" by the Ombudsman, and it seems to have been driven by misunderstanding of and hostility to transparency from senior Commission staff (here are the receipts; if you keep scrolling you'll also see they also admitted that it was completely unnecessary). So what did the committee thing? Rather than standing up for transparency or conducting a first-principles analysis, they simply split the difference, reducing the exemption to five years. But its still renewable, meaning its still effectively indefinite, unless the commission fails to do the paperwork).
In talking about the Fisheries Amendment Bill, which also included a secrecy clause, the Ombudsman noted that:
In circumstances where the OIA already protects the relevant interests, only an extraordinary harm to those interests would justify a permanent exclusion of information from the scope of the OIA.In this case, the OIA also protects the relevant interests, and the Commission (in advice it attempted to keep secret) admits that. There is no extraordinary harm to justify exclusion. Secrecy cannot be justified.
