OIA review must get stuck in
MOST people probably don’t give our official information laws much thought. That’s understandable – on the face of it, they’re dry and abstract, and not exactly dinner table conversation.
Yet ready, timely access to such information is not some theoretical nicety, but the oil that makes a democracy work. Finding out the polluted state of the local river, or plans to close local schools, or the hospital mishap that cost a person their life – these are the sorts of things the news media regularly fight to make public.
Many requests meet with stubborn resistance from government agencies. Some take years to bring out, usually after prodding from the Ombudsman, the official information watchdog.
That’s why it’s welcome and overdue that Chief Ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakem has announced a major review of Official Information Act practices.
As Media Freedom Committee chairwoman and Press editor Joanna Norris summed it up last week, ‘‘often the Act is used as a mechanism to delay the release of information rather than facilitate it’’.
That’s not conjecture; Prime Minister John Key confirmed as much in October when he said ministers sometimes waited 20 days to respond to requests because the ‘‘Government might take the view that’s in our best interest to do that’’.
As this suggests, the stonewalling is most acute in the offices of Government ministers, who often have a strong personal interest in suppressing embarrassing information. Sadly, they do not fear the consequences of doing so – the Ombudsman can do little more than tell them to obey the law.
It has been this way across several governments, though Key’s admission was unusually blatant and cynical.
This is the background for outrage over an information request from a toxic blogger before the 2011 election; after years of blanket denials to everyone, the SIS suddenly presented the Government’s helper with a file to embarrass a political opponent.
Wakem notes reports the law is being ‘‘circumvented’’, and says breaches could ‘‘erode public confidence’’. But she will need to be fiercer than that yet. She failed to admonish Key for his provocative admission earlier in the year, and she proposes now only to send a written survey to minister’s offices about their practices.
She should go further and subject them to the same close scrutiny she has in mind for 12 big government agencies.
It’s not that there are never grounds for secrecy, nor that the basic operations of our government are always opaque. In fact, they are mostly transparent and consultative.
It is simply that on sensitive matters, the law is being mocked. Political considerations – not the public interest – are too often dominant, and penalties for ignoring the law are weak.
Governments hate to act on such problems – they are not problems for them. But they are problems for everyone else. They give cover to government cronies and special interests. They eat away at trust and accountability, those qualities so crucial to our whole system of government.