Secret meetings now open
Despite previously holding hundreds of secret meetings, a Waikato council has now opened all workshops to the public.
Waikato District Council has decided to publicly advertise when workshops will be held, as well as the topics covered in them, and one expert says the move shows there is little justification for councils around the country to keep matters behind closed doors.
In 2019, Stuff revealed the council held 161 private meetings across their
2016-2019 term – about once a week on average.
The meetings were not publicly advertised, community board members could attend, but the public and media were not invited.
At the time, Waikato District Mayor Allan Sanson said workshops should remain closed, and communications staff subsequently discouraged councillors from speaking freely to the media about them.
Council chief executive Gavin Ion told Stuff staff recommended workshops be advertised at the end of
2019.
The council wanted to ‘‘clear up confusion around their status’’.
Ion maintained the change was not a ‘‘big shift’’ for the council, workshops were never ‘‘secret’’ or ‘‘closed’’, just not ‘‘publicly advertised’’.
But the decision to advertise the workshops made it clear they were public, Ion said.
Before the change, Sanson said the council’s workshops would remain closed.
‘‘Our position is that we are not opening up our workshops, what don’t you understand about that?’’ Sanson told Stuff in 2019.
‘‘We’re put in there as governors. We’ve got to be able to work and do our jobs without feeling [the media] is sitting there making a judgment on what you think you want to put in the paper.’’
But when Stuff spoke to him this week he reversed his position. He denied the meetings were ever closed, apart from confidential information raised in them.
‘‘They weren’t closed, we just didn’t advertise them. I think the fact is we never thought the public would have been generally interested in these things.’’
Council business would not change now the public and media were invited to attend the workshops, he said.
‘‘It doesn’t worry me who’s in the room, but there’s a time and place where people will not have access to them because of the commercial nature and the sensitivity around that.’’
Ion admitted the council has not always been as open as it could have been. The main driver for advertising workshops was for council to become more ‘‘accountable, open and transparent’’.
‘‘It fits in with council’s vision for thriving, liveable, connected communities.’’
There may be items within the workshops, such as commercially sensitive information, where the public might be asked to leave, he said.
Senior associate at Victoria University’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Max Rashbrooke, previously said the use of workshops deserved ‘‘nationwide scrutiny’’.
He hoped the council’s decision sparked a ‘‘domino effect’’ on other councils to make their workshops open too.
‘‘A lot of the work is being done in these workshops so I think it’s essential the public is able to see what happens in them. Hopefully this can show other councils the justification for doing things in private is pretty weak most of the time.’’
Knowing people could attend workshops was an important encouragement for councils to do things in the right way, regardless of whether people turned up, Rashbrooke said.
‘‘I think our elected representatives should have the courage to air a wide range of views in public and trust the public will understand that is part of democracy.’’
Scrutiny was essential for keeping public bodies on track, he said.
In general, other examples had shown public bodies had misbehaved, or spent money in inappropriate ways, until being exposed by the media, he said.
Rashbrooke said councils should only discuss things in private in ‘‘extremely limited circumstances’’.
Commercial sensitivity was an often overused justification for keeping the public out.
‘‘Councils will say all sorts of things are commercially sensitive when in reality they are not.’’
Topics covering individual privacy or employment status, or weighing up the commerciality of tenders for a contract, might justify confidentiality, Rashbrooke said.