Tuesday, February 12, 2019



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.