Thursday, April 19, 2018



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.