Posts by izogi
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Speaker: Waitara and the perils of…, in reply to Sacha,
Has anyone found an actual published report that can be read? I can't see anything obvious on the Ombudsman's website.
I can see the 7 page project summary, but that's from before it started.
As recently as October 23rd there was also this survey of requesters and government workers, presumably for contributing to this report, but those surveys closed a month ago. On the side if the surveys were held so recently, it seems an untypically short timeframe for producing a report of this nature, if it matches what I was expecting.
It'd be interesting to see some survey result data and compare it with the conclusions in the resulting report. Did she get a whole lot of government workers responding about how they've been pulled from their jobs to answer media fishing expeditions, but very few responses from the public who mightn't even have heard about the survey?
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Hard News: A cog in the Mediaworks machine, in reply to Alfie,
somebody famous for copying others’ reality formats is promoted beyond her capabilities, then mistakenly trusts her gut feeling that intelligent tele is dead
I wish I could find a video edition of this Futurama clip. Ah well.
http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/EpisodeSounds/4ACV06/08.mp3
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Yes, it’s very appropriate. Raiding Nicky Hager’s home and Heather du Plessis-Allan’s home seems questionable enough, but (from GT:)….
we must remind ourselves of the extent in which this case was also quite ordinary. That is to say, of the fact that the Police acted the way they did because it is natural to them; because this is how executive power works, and because – like at Ruatoki in 2007 – it comes with very little cost or likelihood of checks.
…how frequently are Police raiding people’s homes, roughing up and confiscating their stuff, and unnecessarily causing great stress and alienation, for often unjustifiable reasons, which we simply don’t hear about?
There’s evidence of a serious culture issue here. It shouldn’t be okay to stop at questioning how a couple of journalists and their own families have been affected.
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
it seems Hager didn’t get treated fairly, I guess the Police forgot to ring him to warn them of an imminent search
Heh. Different treatment because he wasn't a suspect?
Oh, wait.
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The real danger of what the TRC has done is to ensure that citizens will not make submissions to consents again where costs are threatened.
How common is it for any New Zealand agency to charge for requests under either the the OIA or the LGOIMA?
In other countries (eg Australia) I’ve seen agencies state standard charges for anyone wishing to request anything, but I’m not familiar with it in New Zealand.
Fundamentally I think government agencies should be responding by default, and that charges should only ever be issued if there’s clearly going to be a high cost to the point that it might otherwise be declined due to the substantial collation or research clause, if applied to an agency that could be considered to be handling its records properly.
$461 doesn’t sound at all like substantial collation or research. If it’s not a simple blocking tactic, it sounds more like the agency hasn’t allocated anything for responding to basic requests for information as required under law.
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to linger,
Uhuh. I reckon they did consciously write it, though. A higher management steering committee or similar probably decided exactly what they wanted, and likely commissioned a lawyer or three to go over the wording of the contract to make sure it was airtight in that regard.
Most likely they didn’t think or bother to consult any relevant staff or lawyers on how the law actually required NZ Police to handle information requests, because higher management probably never seriously considered it might be relevant.
An OIA request asking for records detailing how the contract wording originated could be interesting, but it might be thought embarrassing enough that with an agency like NZ Police, it’d end up on the Ombudsman’s desk before getting anywhere.
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According to Stuff and today’s 5pm Radio NZ Bulletin, Police have apparently apologised to Dr Jarrod Gilbert, amended guidelines around vetting of researchers, given him access to the data he requested, and are revising the contracts they issue with data.
Has anyone seen any details of what they're actually changing?
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This morning John Edens has written more generally about contractual constraints and funding-related pressures on academics.
I think one aspect he didn't touch on which could also be of concern is the apparent rise of privately funded research institutions which are engineered to focus their research in a promotion of a particular bias of the benefactor. This alone certainly doesn't make the research itself bad, and sometimes good research wouldn't happen without this model, but it often then gets spun by the benefactors or cherry-pickers to justify more ideological agendas without resources necessarily having been allocated towards any realistic criticism. The phrase "think tank" should always ring alarm bells.
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Has an NZ government employee ever been held liable in this way, except when they’ve engaged in out and out fraud or malpractice?
That’d be interesting. I came away from reading the Cave Creek Platform Commission of Inquiry disappointed that some people at the top of DOC weren’t held more directly accountable. (14 people died with the collapse of a hideously built viewing platform.)
There’s always been an outcry that various low-level DOC employees who built the thing, during an informal working bee, should have been prosecuted. But there’s also plenty of evidence that DOC was being run as a severely disorganised, under-resourced mess in 1995, where completely unrealistic outcomes were being demanded from under-resourced and untrained staff at ground level. The Commissioner made a point of commenting that upper management of DOC at the time "simply did not seem to appreciate the concept of accountability in personal terms". (Then he went on to talk about the private sector as a much better example though, after Pike River, I doubt it's such a great example any more.)
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I also know that senior executives have some legal liability responsibilities that deserve compensation.
This is true, but (like you and other here) I’m having trouble making it stack up. The Prime Minister, at least symbolically, has the ultimate public sector responsibility in the land, yet his salary is only 2/3 of the top public servants.
Exactly what accountability does New Zealand get from Mike Bush for $680,000+ if it’s excusable for the government body most directly responsible for upholding the law to have a culture that pays lip service to laws like the OIA, or which (just one example) doesn’t properly handle cases involving young men raping young women?
Do we need to pay him more for these things to be adequately handled?
I really like the idea of linking highest salaries to the lowest in any organisation. If the boss wants a pay rise she/he needs to figure out a way of paying the lowest more first.
Could this, however, encourage organisations to simply re-structure companies in weird ways, or sub-contract their lower paid work?