Open Government: Business-as-usual, as usual

Aotearoa has been a member of the Open Government Partnership since 2013. And it has never taken its core mechanism of co-creation with civil society seriously. Our first national action plan was a hastily cobbled together pile of business-as-usual actions, imposed without any real engagement. The second was a little better, in that they actually pretended to consult civil society and ask for policy proposals, before chucking anything actually ambitious in the bin and (once again) doing what they were planning to do anyway. There were some signs that they were beginning to learn, and the third action plan seemed to have some real consultation, which foundered on the lack of any budget or process to get one for anything civil society proposed. It was quite apparent by this stage that civil society was wasting its time on this, and being used as a PR prop by a state unwilling to listen to them, let alone actually do anything real, and top civil society organisations wrote to then Public Services Minister Chris Hipkins telling him so. Hipkins actually listened, and the fourth action plan actually had some stuff in it suggested by civil society (though watered down by the bureaucracy, of course). Which was then simply chucked in the bin by the current government, who just saw it all as a waste of money (not to mention harmful to their money-laundering, tax-cheating backers).

And so we come to today, when Te Kawa Mataaho has announced a new "consultation" on a new action plan... which will center on their pre-existing action plan to strengthen Public Service integrity. In other words, the outcome is pre-determined, and its pure business-as-usual, as usual.

I will not be wasting my time with this farce. I have better things to do than making suggestions which will be rejected, or engaging with people who are not there in good faith. I recommend others do the same. When the government actually wants to co-create something with civil society, then I might be interested. But I'm not interested in being a PR prop for their bullshit, so they can tick a little box saying "consultation!" and pretend that it means something. Fuck that, and fuck them.

If this is all they're going to do, maybe they should have quit after all. And if they don't quit, I hope the OGP activates its accountability mechanisms and throws us out.

Open Government: The joke ends

Correction: This story is fortunately incorrect. While Te Kawa Mataaho repeatedly advised the government to quit the OGP, Ministers rejected the idea, and it never went to cabinet. For some reason, this fact was not mentioned in the OIA response the post was based on. Its one of those cases where I'm glad to be wrong, and hopefully the government will now commit to using the OGP to push our public service for real change.

The Open Government Partnership is a multilateral organisation committed to advancing open government. Countries which join are supposed to co-create regular action plans with civil society, committing to making verifiable improvements in transparency, accountability, participation, or technology and innovation for the above. And they're held to account through an Independent Reporting Mechanism, to ensure they do what they promise and that it has the effects they want.

New Zealand joined the OGP in 2013. We were a late joiner, and from the start it was treated as a PR scam - "we're good at open government, and this is a free headline, hur hur hur". And this showed: its first "action plan" was developed internally with a mockery of consultation and consisted entirely of lazy, business-as-usual goals which the government was doing anyway. And from the outset, it was criticised heavily by civil society groups and the OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism. Fast-forward a decade, and we're now on our fourth action plan. Over the last four action plans the government has done sweet fuck all, eschewing real change (like beneficial ownership registers, or rewriting the OIA, or requiring real participation in policymaking) in favour of business-as-usual and meaningless "reviews" which are then thrown in the bin. While they've started to do a better pretence of "consultation", there's no real effort at co-creation, priorities are all set by government, for government, and nothing has really changed. Which is why major civil society groups have given up entirely on the process (I gave up after 2016). Our participation was simply a bad joke.

So I'm not entirely surprised to see today that the government has sought advice on withdrawing from the OGP. It hasn't bought them the benefit they wanted (positive headlines), and instead just gets them criticism for failing to meet even the low targets they set themselves. At least by withdrawing they're being honest about their lack of commitment to OGP values, and their preference for the classic Tory values of secrecy, unaccountability, and democratic isolation. (Oh, and naturally they kep the whole idea secret, until it was exposed by an OIA request).

And yet, its disappointing. By requiring formal consideration of open government issues every two years, the OGP could have driven real change in Aotearoa. Instead, the timidity and resistance of officials and a lack of commitment from Ministers buried it, and destroyed any goodwill from civil society for future efforts.

MFAT thinks the risks of OGP withdrawal "can be appropriately managed". I guess its the job of civil society groups now to make those costs as high and severe as possible, to remind the government that it shouldn't cheat wither the international community or the public on transparency.

Open Government: National reneges on beneficial ownership

One of the achievements of the New Zealand’s Open Government Partnership Fourth National Action Plan was a formal commitment from the government to establish a public beneficial ownership register. Such a register would allow the ultimate owners of companies to be identified - a vital measure in preventing corruption, money laundering, and tax-evasion by the rich.

So of course, National has decided to renege on this commitment. A recent Cabinet paper on Modernising the Companies Act 1993 and Making Other Improvements for Business effectively abandoned the idea:

The register would also add a compliance burden to companies (albeit a small one). As such, it does not fit well with the overall scheme of the package. In addition, its complexity would delay the finalisation and introduction of the other reforms. I will work with my Ministerial colleagues in the Justice sector to determine the best way forward for this work.

Which is Minister for "we are throwing this in a deep hole and you should never expect to see it again". Exactly why a government which was funded by the rich to deliver tax cuts and beset by corruption scandals would do that is left as an exercise for the reader.

The problem for National is that this isn't just a previous government's policy - its an international commitment under the Open Government Partnership. The refusal to abide by it will be formally reported on by the OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism. It will also likely cause problems with the Financial Action Task Force, who can actually stick us on a blacklist for failing to meet accepted standard for preventing money laundering and terrorist financing. And that is something which would actually hurt, and stop rich National MPs from moving their money overseas.

Some "scrutiny"!

Back in February I blogged about another secret OIA "consultation" by the Ministry of Justice. This one was on Aotearoa's commitment in its Open Government Partnership Action Plan to "strengthen scrutiny of Official Information Act exemption clauses in legislation" (AKA secrecy clauses). Their consultation paper on the issue focused on strengthening "scrutiny mechanisms" - essentially interdepartmental consultation - without saying what these clauses would be scrutinised against or the circumstances in which they might or might not be justified.

Which invites the question: how well is such scrutiny working at the moment? The Ministry of Justice is responsible for the OIA, so in theory other agencies should be consulting them before messing with it. And if they were a good guardian, they'd couple this with active monitoring of upcoming legislation (a lot of which will cross their desk anyway) to spot cases where this hasn't been noticed. So, I did some poking with the OIA, sending them a list of 37 recent bills which contained secrecy clauses, and asking for their consultation advice on them. That was obviously a lot of work, and the Ministry didn't want to do it. But their background research for their OGP consultation had included a study of eleven bills, and they agreed to release the consultation advice they had produced on those (as well as six more bills later).

And here's the advice. Of the eleven bills in their study with identified secrecy clauses, the Ministry of Justice had been consulted on just two of them. I should note that one of the bills was "owned" by the Ministry of Justice, so shouldn't be included in the total. Which makes it two out of ten - a nice, round 20%. Some "scrutiny"! And we wonder why the government keeps passing these things? Partly, because the agency responsible for the law doesn't even know it is happening.

As for their plans to improve scrutiny, the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties did a recent request on that using FYI. Digging through the documents, a bunch of the agencies Justice wants to be a check against secrecy clauses - the Parliamentary Counsel's Office, DPMC, the Office of the Clerk - are saying "nope, not our problem". Which means their "improved" scrutiny is going to end up looking a lot like the current "scrutiny", only maybe with a little note on a webpage somewhere. Meanwhile, the question again of what can justify departing from our constitutional principle of transparency goes unanswered, and the Ministry redacts any suggestion that these clauses might not be justified. Whether that is an appropriate outcome for an OGP commitment is left as an exercise for the reader.

Open Government: Not achieved

Newsroom reports on the reaction from civil society organisations to Labour's new draft Open Government Partnership National Action Plan, and its pretty scathing:

The Government’s claims to greater openness and transparency have yet again been called into question, with New Zealand’s latest open government plan containing proposals “so weak as to be a joke” according to some.

Civil society groups have lashed officials’ and politicians' failure to properly include their voice and produce an ambitious document, questioning whether it is worth their time to take part.

Transparency International rates it as "not achieved". The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties feels they wasted their time. Amnesty International "had stepped back from involvement in the process due to internal capacity issues" - meaning that they judged it as not worth the effort of participation. Which makes sense: the government has demanded a significant amount of free labour from these very busy organisations, then ignored them. They have basicly used them as a prop for their claims of co-creation, which were really nothing more than a box-ticking exercise, in order to boost their reputations. You can see why people might feel exploited by that, and why they might not be willing to participate in future.

There are countries which actually manage to do this right, which give real power to civil society to tell them "this is what we would like you to do", "this is how you can open government". The New Zealand government has been absolutely uninterested in that. They joined the OGP for the headline, and then focused resolutely on using it as a PR-scam, pretending their business-as-usual policies were change. The problem now is that even if they changed tomorrow, they're fucked. They've burned activists and civil society organisations on this four times now. Do they really think they'll get anyone to contribute again? Instead, it seems that we could get more progress by asking the OGP to throw New Zealand out, because it looks like the government needs that sort of shock to change its approach.

Open Government: Another farce

Yesterday the government released its draft Fourth Open Government Partnership National Action Plan 2023-24 for consultation. Like previous versions, the plan was meant to be "co-created" with civil society. And like previous versions, that obligation seems to have been observed mainly in the breach, with the government conducting a series of sham "consultation" events around the country, then ignoring practically every piece of input they got from them. As for the outcome, the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties is scathing:

In spite of the Minister’s instruction to officials, the ‘draft’ Action Plan launched today for 2 weeks of public consultation is yet another weak action plan stuffed full of pre-existing or already planned programmes of work by government departments.3

Only two of the eight commitments in the plan are pieces of work that would not have taken place without civil society input, and one of these is so weak as to be a joke.

They then go on to describe the plan as full of "tools for officials" which would have happened anyway - a clear violation of the OGP's additionality requirement.

Last year, ten top civil society organisations wrote to Chris Hipkins about the co-creation process, threatening to walk away unless they saw improvements. I'm now wondering if they'll carry out that threat. Because clearly participating in the government's sham "co-creation" process is a waste of time, and a distraction from other things they could be doing. And after four times round, the government is clearly not going to change its stripes on this. They signed up to the OGP solely for the PR value, with no intention of actually opening government, and they've given no indication that that attitude has changed. Its time to end the farce, and instead of collaborating, call for NZ's suspension from the OGP.

Open Government: A warning for Australia

Australia has been formally warned that it is not meeting its commitments to the Open Government Partnership:

The Australian government signed up to the Open Government Partnership in 2015, a 78-country multilateral initiative designed to promote open government, fight corruption and empower citizen participation in policymaking.

But Australia’s efforts since have frustrated the group. It has failed to act on prior promises – including to improve donations transparency and strengthen the nation’s anti-corruption framework – and has missed the deadline to file its latest two-year action plan for 2021-23, which was due in December.

That prompted the OGP chief executive, Sanjay Pradhan, to write to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet last week, warning that if it failed to meet the next deadline, its membership status would be reviewed.

The OGP has previously suspended Azerbaijan and designated several other countries as "inactive" for acting contrary to the OGP's goals or failing to meet commitments. If Australia does not quickly start acting, it is likely to suffer the same fate. And for a country which prides itself on being a democracy, that is simply shameful.

Open Government: Ending the farce?

The government is currently consulting in a new action plan for the Open Government Partnership. These are meant to be co-created with civil society, but in the past they've been anything but, with the entire process directed by the Public Service Commission to rubber-stamp a pre-decided set of business-as-usual "commitments". And now it seems like the NGOs who are being asked to spend their valuable time on this every two years to provide a prop for the government's pre-determined agenda have had enough: they've written to Public Services Minister Chris Hipkins demanding changes:

Last week, TINZ convened a meeting of ten civil society organisations with an interest in open government to discuss a collective response to the consultation, an approach found to be successful in other countries working on their National Action Plans.

Attendees expressed general disappointment with New Zealand’s progress on open government since it joined the OGP in 2014. The feeling was that the first three action plans were unsuccessful in both ambition and delivery. The group agreed that there was a high risk of NAP4 delivering the same inadequate result, unless there were changes in the approach to the development of the plan.

The letter is quite explicit: "without a change to the process, we have serious concerns about the value of engaging with the consultation." In other words, they're threatening to walk. As someone who gave up wasting my time on this long ago, I'm surprised it has taken them so long.

So what do they want in order to stay involved? Essentially, proper co-creation, where civil society ideas are adopted and implementation resourced by the government, rather than the current bullshit where the government decides everything in advance and does as little as possible because "there is no new money for this". In practice, this means extending the co-creation period so it is aligned with the budget cycle, allowing things to be resourced in Budget 2022.

Hopefully Hipkins will agree. If not, the government can look forward to its cheap international PR win going up in smoke.

Open Government: Another farce

The government is currently "consulting" on developing its fourth national Action Plan under the Open Government Partnership. But according to Andrew Ecclestone, they're making the same mistakes they've made in previous years:

First, unlike most government consultation exercises, there has been no ministerial press release inviting people to take part. Nor did the Minister attend the workshop, unlike his predecessor. This absence speaks volumes about the priority given by the Minister, and a lack of understanding about the opportunity these plans provide, to build trust as well as delivering on their agenda.

Neither did the State Services Commissioner issue a release, or ensure the current work to develop the action plan appears on the all-of-government Consultations Listing page.

As of 10 March the government’s OGP twitter account has only published a single tweet about these workshops – on 10 February.

This might explain why less than twenty members of the public and civil society representatives were present at this first workshop in Wellington (excluding members of SSC’s advisory panel).

They're also signalled that any changes to the OIA are off the table, because the Minister is still trying to decide whether to conduct a review. So they're trying to have a conversation about transparency, while specifically excluding our primary transparency tool.

Shit like this is why I refuse to waste my time on this process. People's time is valuable, and there is an opportunity cost to participating in consultations (if only that it precludes participating in a different one). it makes sense to put your efforts towards things where you will be listened to and your views considered, rather than things where you're just a prop so some official can tick a box. Sadly, Labour's entire "open government" platform seems to fall into the latter category. As for how they could change this, the Minister actually showing some leadership and stumping up some money so agencies can offer commitments beyond business-as-usual things they were going to do anyway would be a start.

"More ambitious"?

Newsroom reports on the OGP IRM report into our last Open Government Partnership Action Plan. They highlight the IRM' assessment of progress as "marginal" and their criticism that the "commitments" were chosen so they "would get completed in that time so they would not be recorded as not completed". And then State Services Minister Chris Hipkins tries to pretend that things have changed:

State Services Minister Chris Hipkins, who absorbed Curran’s open government responsibility, told Newsroom he agreed with Booth about the scope of the “utterly unambitious plan” under the last government, saying the follow-up plan for 2018 to 2020 was more ambitious but there was room to do even more.

“Rather than taking the new plan as being the ultimate end state, I’m going to push hard to go even further and faster.”

[...]

“I don’t think anyone’s taken their foot off the accelerator - in fact, quite the opposite.”

Except when you look at their latest OGP Action Plan - completed last year under Labour - its the same problem: business-as-usual commitments, chosen to ensure completion. Most of the commitments were well underway before the plan began, and many have completion dates within six months of announcement, and some announced their completion shortly afterwards. Which tells you that they were existing work shoved under the OGP brand for "quick wins" (even the very welcome proactive release of cabinet material falls into this category: despite saying work would begin in October 2018, it had actually begun back in February). Meanwhile, ideas which would result in transformative change and a real opening of government - like OIA reform, real protection for whistleblowers, and public registers of company beneficial ownership - have been ignored. So you really have to wonder where the Minister is getting his information from, and whether letting the change-averse SSC filter everything on the topic for him is a good idea.

Open Government: Marginal

That's the verdict of the Open Government Partnership's Independent Reporting Mechanism on New Zealand's OGP progress for the last two years:

Although this report reflects high commitment completion, change in government practice stood as marginal overall. Notably, the government’s early efforts to improve access to legislation could provide major efficiencies for lawyers and the public. In future action plans, the government could fully reform the Official Information Act and add open government performance to public sector chief executives’ contracts and to the new well-being indicators.

Which is what you expect when the "commitments" are all business-as-usual tinkering round the edges, rather than anything which might actually change things. And with similarly business-as-usual "commitments" (some of which were already completed before they were announced) in the 2018 - 2020 action plan, it looks like we'll have a similar level of thumb-twiddling in future.

The IRM's full report is here.

Open Government: Business as usual

The SSC has released its draft Third National Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership. The idea of the OGP is that countries make concrete commitments of policies which advance the OGP's values of transparency, participation, and accountability, but New Zealand has always been half-hearted about that, preferring to offer business-as-usual policy or ambitionless pap. And unfortunately, the change of government doesn't seem to have changed this in the slightest.

There are twelve concrete commitments, grouped into three themes: participation in democracy; public participation to develop policy and services; and transparency and accountability. But about ten of those commitments are pretty obviously business as usual, or indistinguishable from it. So in the "participation in democracy" theme, the government wants to "improve engagement with Parliament", which is really just the ongoing work ParliamentTV is doing to expand its coverage. Its important work, and it matters, but its both stuff which is already happening, and not exactly ambitious. Its a similar story with their plans for an improved youth parliament, and for improved accessibility of secondary legislation: something we do anyway, with a few minor tweaks. The "school leaver's toolkit" could be novel, but is basicly a pilot, and we know its going to boil down to giving people an election enrolment form, kiwisaver form, and IRD number form and forgetting about them. Comprehensive civics education as part of the curriculum would have been a real commitment. This is just trivia.

The public participation theme is similarly a pilot, and if the OGP "participation" is anything to go by, all it promises is new ways to waste people's time. Trialing new participation models is all well and good, but at the end of the day there needs to be a willingness to actually set policy based on what the public says. Absent that, it is simply a scam and a waste of everybody's time, which undermines rather than enhances faith in government.

The transparency theme had the most ideas submitted, and the clearest public demand: what people want is reform of the OIA. What we're getting is a "commitment" to "test the merits" of a review (and as we've seen from the material around proactive release, this is going to be focused on covering politicians' arses rather than actually producing more transparency). They've also "committed" to proactively publish Cabinet papers - something they have been working on since February and which they announced on Tuesday, so its not really a commitment at all. There's a review of the government use of algorithms - announced in May, so business as usual; more transparency around government data stewardship (again, an existing process); and an "authoritative dataset" of government organisations and data (which has had a website for ten years, so its hardly new). Oh, and open procurement data, which actually means changing the licence and format on GETS.

There is nothing ambitious here. There is nothing remotely approaching the OGP gold standard of a star commitment. As for the Independent Reporting Mechanism's recommendations, they've pretty much been chucked in the trashcan. Its just the same old business-as-usual bullshit we always get from the government on this. As for the 800 people who participated in this process and submitted ideas to it in good faith, it looks like they wasted their time. Again.

Less than open II

Back in March, I received some OIA'd documents from Clare Curran, the Minister of Open Government. Among other things, they showed that SSC had presented her with an draft open government strategy in November. Naturally, it was kept secret. I was curious about this, so sent in a followup request seeking information about this strategy. Today I received the response. Despite at least four months having passed since it was given to the Minister, the strategy is still being kept secret, supposedly because it is under "active consideration" (as opposed to under a desk somewhere being ignored). One thing that is clear however is that SSC's proposal that the strategy be consulted on at the same time as the Open Government Partnership action plan was rejected - that consultation is currently underway, and there's no mention of the strategy at all.

SSC did release some pretty powerpoint slides, including one of "actions taking place in the open government system". Naturally, this includes something secret. But it also mentions under international actions the idea of "New Zealand taking a leadership role in the Open Government Partnership". Of course, to do that, we'd have to start by developing an action plan which actually displayed some ambition, rather than just being a grab-bag of unambitious business-as-usual policies. And they'd need to walk the talk on consultation, rather than treating it as a box to be ticked. Whether they're actually doing that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Less than open

Remember the Minister for Open Government? Last year she was publicly shamed in the House over her apparent refusal of a fairly standard OIA request (a refusal which it turns out was directed by a Senior Ministerial Advisor in the PM's office). But eventually she started releasing the basic lists of briefings people had been asking for, so I took the opportunity to request her Open Government Partnership briefings to see what she's been doing. The short version:

• SSC is currently planning the engagement process around the 2018-20 OGP National Action Plan. There's an acknowledgement that they need to spend more time on it to better engage with the public, which is good.
  
• Curran took a paper to Cabinet about proactive release of government information. Unfortunately, all the details are secret.
  
• SSC has been thinking about a new "strategic approach" to Open Government. All the details of that are secret too.
  
• Curran was invited to attend the OGP Asia Pacific Leaders Forum 2017 in December. But as there's no mention of it either in her official press releases or Twitter feed, it appears she blew it off and dumped the job on the local NZ ambassador instead.
  

Of course, that's just November. But if she's been doing more open government work since, she's kept it... secret. Which isn't exactly what I'd expect from a Minister of Open Government.

Open Government: A progress report

Back in 2016, the government adopted its second national action plan under the Open Government Partnership, committing to seven specific actions to make our government more open. The OGP requires countries to report regularly on progress, and in addition has an Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) to counteract their natural tendency to spin and bullshit as a substitute for action. The IRM has just released their latest draft report on New Zealand. So, how'd we do?

The good news is: pretty well. The government has actually been doing what it said it would do (which is more than it did last time), and been making clear progress towards meeting its commitments. Looking at some of the specific commitments, they're expecting a lot more information about where our money is going in this year's budget, plans to get all secondary legislation online and in one place (so we can know what the law is) are progressing well, and we now have some basic OIA statistics and a lot more departments are publicising their responses. Work on open data seems to be going less well, due to being moved to a new agency.

At the same time, the IRM notes that we can do more, and has a host of recommendations on how we could be more ambitious in our commitments and how we could take co-creation seriously (these being two real weaknesses: the previous government regarded OGP as a box-ticking exercise, and SSC was unwilling to engage in real consultation, let alone the co-creation required by the OGP). They also criticise the action plan for completely ignoring their past recommendations. The new government might mean we make some progress in those areas.

Finally, they have five key recommendations for the next action plan:

• Expand the Expert Advisory Panel to include greater civil society representation
  
• Reform official information laws and refocus the Open Data and Information Programme to publish social, environmental, and budget expenditure data
  
• Develop standards for public consultation on policy initiatives
  
• Include anti-corruption commitments in the next action plan, covering whistleblower protection and a public register of company beneficial ownership
  
• Introduce citizenship education to increase democratic participation
  

We're supposed to be developing a new action plan this year, covering June 2018 - June 2020, so I guess we'll see whether the new government and new Minister will rise to this challenge. You can comment on the draft report here.

Open Government: Will they get it right this time?

SSC has announced its upcoming public consultation on New Zealand's Open Government partnership Mid-term Self-Assessment Report. There's nothing concrete yet, other than that there will be a whole two weeks consultation at the end of July. Hopefully they'll do a better job than last time, where an overly restrictive online platform attempted to channel and constrain feedback, turning the "consultation" into a terrible self-parody.

They've also posted progress reports on our OGP commitments. This is a massive improvement on last time (where the "commitments" were vague waffle with no targets and no milestones, let alone reporting against them). On the other hand, compare the milestones for commitment 2, improving official information practices, with the progress report, and it is clear that the government is dragging its feet in some areas. For example, there's no progress towards a policy on proactive publication (meant to be done by tomorrow), or towards improving access by publishing responses online (meant to be done by February). What they do have is more secret meetings, in which the government talks to itself about secrecy, without telling us what they're doing. I'll be probing this, as usual, but given that in the past the government has withheld its discussions of the OIA as "free and frank advice" (which tells us that they don't think the public would like what they were saying), I doubt I'll have much luck.

Open Government: How do we measure progress?

The Open Government partnership is about making government more transparent and responsive. But how do we measure that? There's the obvious way of checking whether governments are meeting their commitments, but that assumes that those commitments actually improve things meaningfully. As a way of addressing this, Mexico has developed an all-of-government Open Government Metric:

What is this metric? It is a quantitative instrument that measures the levels of transparency and citizen participation in over 900 federal and local agencies from the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches.The metric answers the following questions both from the governmental and citizen perspectives: how much do agencies publish useful information to account for their decisions and actions, and how much do they implement mechanisms to include citizen opinions or proposals into public matters. Not only were the legal and institutional frameworks evaluated, but a “secret shopper” technique was used to assess citizens’ ability to influence the public agenda.

The full details and weightings of the metric are here. While it will have its limits, the metric will let Mexico establish a baseline, and it can then track whether its OGP commitments are having any effect.

Meanwhile in New Zealand we're still doing stuff on a per-commitment basis, with no real examination of the impact. Though the Expert Advisory Panel is at least publishing minutes now, which is an improvement on having to extract them using the OIA. Still, rather than leading on this, we seem to be well behind - as usual.

Open Government: Failure

How much did the government's first OGP action plan do to advance open government in New Zealand? Sweet fuck-all, according to the OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism:

Today the Open Government Partnership (OGP) released its final report on New Zealand’s progress towards fulfilling its international commitments to transparency, accountability and participation.

[...]

At the end of New Zealand’s first two-year action plan, the New Zealand IRM report finds that the plan did little to advance open government.

“The plan consisted almost entirely of things the government was doing anyway, and most of those things weren’t directly related to open government,” said [IRM researcher Steven] Price. “So it’s not very surprising that it made little concrete difference to transparency, accountability or public participation”.

The report also criticised the way the plan was prepared. “The government fell well short of the sort of public collaboration that it promised when it signed up to the OGP,” said Price.

The good news is that our second action plan looks a bit better, though it still suffers from a lack of ambition. But the government has failed so badly on its first one that almost anything is an improvement.

Update: the full report can be read here.

Open Government: Assessing participation and co-creation

The Open Government Partnership has released new standards for participation and co-creation. So how does New Zealand measure up? Badly. Here's a quick look through the basic requirements for "throughout the OGP cycle":

• National OGP website: Pass. There is one, at http://www.ogp.org.nz/.
  
• Lead agency clearly identified: Fail. There's a buried note that the Minister of State Services is the responsible Minister, but nothing about agencies. Contact details are hidden behind a form and there is no hint at where they go.
  
• Documents published in all administrative languages: Mixed. OGP documents are published only in English, which is normal for the NZ government. But Maori is an official language of New Zealand, and publication in Maori seems to be what is required.
  
• Document repository of OGP documents: Fail. The official site contains nothing beyond the current Action Plan. There is some older material at the SSC's site, but it is far from complete. Old consultation documents and IRM reports are notable by their absence.
  
• Information communication to stakeholders in advance: Fail. The NZ government has extremely poor consultation practices, despite a "commitment" in the previous Action Plan to improve them.
  
• Multi-stakeholder forum: Mixed. There is such a forum - the Expert Advisory Panel - but it does not meet regularly (and indeed, apparently has not met since the Action Plan was developed in the middle of last year).
  
• Multi-stakeholder forum accepts inputs from civil society: Unknown, as it no longer appears to meet. Base don passed practice it is unlikely though.
  
• Remote participation in multi-stakeholder forum: Unknown, as there is no information on whether it even accepts outside input.
  
• Direct communication with stakeholders on NAP process questions? Fail. Based on past Action Plan processes, SSC is not interested in hearing from us.
  
• Outreach and awareness raising? Fail. Other than a passive website, the government does nothing to promote knowledge of the OGP or encourage participation except during Action Plan development.
  
• Multi-stakeholder forum is independent of government: Fail. The EAP is controlled by SSC, meets at its demand, and considers its agenda. It does not set its own agenda, choose its own membership, or meet independently of SSC.
  
• Multi-stakeholder forum includes even balance of government and non-government representatives: Technical fail. In fact, the membership is entirely non-government.
  
• Non-government members are selected via a fair and transparent process: Fail. They're selected in secret by SSC.
  
• Multi-stakeholder forum proactively communicates with public: Fail. Apart from the lack of meetings, they do not issue statements, and minutes are controlled by SSC.
  
• Multi-stakeholder forum includes Minister: Fail.
  

This certainly doesn't look very good. And while its a new standard, its base don best practice, things our government should have been doing anyway. The government is going to have to significantly improve if it wants to avoid further criticism from the OGP Independent Reporting Mechanism on this issue.

Open Government: Disappointing

The Open Government Partnership's Independent Reporting Mechanism has released its draft End-of-Term Assessment Report for New Zealand's first OGP action plan. The overall verdict? Disappointing:

The New Zealand government made some improvements to access to information and civic participation. The government released new datasets and consulted CSOs on public engagement practices. However, the government’s process falls short of OGP’s co-creation guidelines, the commitments lacked clear activities for implementation, and the gains were marginal.

The key problem: all of the OGP commitments were pre-existing policies, and none of them really did very much. Throw in the lack of consultation and its clear that the government was only paying lip-service to its OGP commitments, rather than taking them seriously.

The good news is that the second action plan looks better. Not that it would be hard. There's still a lack of ambition and a desire to not spend any more or change anything substantive, but what they're offering is at least new marginal improvements rather than existing ones. And who knows? Maybe by the third action plan the New Zealand government will finally be ready to catch up to the rest of the world and make some real commitments.