Posts by izogi
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I was watching Campbell Live's excellent 20-minute feature on the New Zealand MPs who attended the Destiny Church conference at the weekend
Small aside, but Tim Selwyn noted on Tumeke that this originally aired on Maori TV and Campbell didn't credit it as he perhaps should have.
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Hard News: The Political Lie, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The biggest problem with The Political Lie - and Bart's touched on it - is that the electorate often doesn't reward honesty
Especially in the face of so many others who'll happily contradict honest claims with incompetent claims or claims reliant on incomplete information, or simply lies. It's a hard ask for an entire population to become policy analysts.
The Political Lie is the lowest common denominator. It's what we've ended up with, though it's interesting to see some of the effects of MMP where smaller parties with a large enough support base to stay alive (the Greens come to mind) sometimes have less incentive to tell the entire population everything it wants to hear.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Che Tibby,
not at all. there needs to be:
a) a movement away from naturopathy
b) a reimagining of policy.I'm probably missing things but I just did a quick Google of the Greens' website, and there are very few mentions of the word Naturopathy. Of 11 results total, the only mentions since about 2007 seem to be a small handful of comments on Frogblog and a New Lynne electral candidate who claims a 1st year Dip. Naturopathy. Most of the rest seems to be surrounding Sue Kedgley, but if she's said anything on it lately then the Greens don't appear to be pushing it through their website.
Are you sure this isn't more a widely held perception of what they're saying rather than what they're actually saying? I have a suspicion that when some people hear of crazy-sounding environmental stuff in a political context, they often just presume it's Green Party policy because if it was anyone's then the Greens are probably least far away.
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Hard News: Playing the Man, in reply to vangam,
I guess the point I meant to make (if it wasn't clear) was that the only reason for the NZ government to stay secret about the fact that our military's been in Afghanistan leading operations that kill and maim people, then taking prisoners, is a political one. If people actually knew what the SAS was doing, it might reduce popular support for doing it. Or it might not, but how the hell can we know?
It'll be clear to everyone there, terrorist cells and not alike, that people are being killed and maimed and taken prisoner, and from close up it's probably not far-fetched to figure out New Zealand troops are involved even if it's not being broadcast through the world's media. If it's even plausible that security can come from silence about SAS involvement, a best case scenario could only be to deflect suspicion onto our allies in Afghanistan. At the very least that's disrespectful. If we're over there we should be taking clear responsibility for what we're doing.
Fair enough with keeping silent about the specifics, but we definitely should know what our troops are there to do and why they're doing it, and whether it's being done as it's supposed to. Otherwise there's no way we can reasonably judge the military or the government's ability to be doing what's in our best interests.
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Chances are al Qaeda or some other terrorist cell know a lot more than we do anyway.
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You're welcome to stay in the dark if you want to, but I'd rather know a bit about what these people are doing on my behalf that could provoke people to come here and kill me .. certainly over being lied to by my government. Otherwise how the hell am I supposed to know if what they're doing is worth it?
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Hard News: Playing the Man, in reply to 3410,
Yeah, maybe, or maybe they'll carry on obfuscating where "necessary" and pointing to the above message whenever accused of stonewalling. Who knows yet?
I'd trust this statement more if it actually came from the Ombudsman rather than the NZDF, which is full of [uniformed] staff who are trained to follow a non-civilian hierarchy and unlikely to enjoy being told what to do by civilians. Having a uniformed officer in Ministerial Services might give MS more influence over the organisation, or it could just cripple them. It depends entirely on who it is, their attitude and the instructions they've been given.
Actually you guys are right. Short of the Ombudsman keeping the organisation on a short leash, NZDF's likely still screwed for OIA compliance.
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Hard News: Playing the Man, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's great to see the NZDF has started thinking about process and training, though it'll probably take more than that and also some time to change the culture and thinking around the OIA.
A uniformed officer has been posted to the position of Deputy Director Corporate and Ministerial Services in the Office of the Chief of Defence Force, augmenting the Ministerial Coordinators.
I'd imagine this could be good or bad, depending largely on the person they've appointed.
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Legal Beagle: Adventures in the OIA or:…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
But compliance? That’s more of a curate’s egg. Idiot/Savant’s done some excellent analysis, and I think a fair summary is that compliance continues to be, at best, patchy and too often downright Kalfka-esque.
Yes that's true and there's a hell of a lot of room for improvement, both for tracking compliance internally and for pushing how serious it is. I think some CE's need a slap in the face about the OIA, but then it's not always in the Minister's interests for departments to be compliant or sometimes they just don't care because they don't see it as being a primary part of their role, which is stupid. The top people at Defence (for instance) probably still see the OIA as a big inconvenience rather than a way to gain some trust with the populace, and that needs much more than just enforcing compliance to change.
We had a fairly good internal workflow system and very good staff for tracking compliance (I think), but the whole thing seemed inefficient within government generally. Everyone runs their own independent OIA tracking, and most departments also end up tracking stuff on behalf of ministers and trying to manage complex arrangements where ministers insist on about sending printed paper copies back and forth 50 times for checking and redrafting. I'm sure some ministers are better than others.
Some departments have brilliant systems that'll tell them exactly where every OIA is, who's responsible, when it's due and if it's overdue. Others have crappy systems or maybe just push paper around people's desks in coloured folders (which might be fine in some circumstances), and some have no system at all. Then staff switch around and people are new in jobs and have inconsistent ideas of whether things are working days despite them being defined in the Act, and all kinds of stuff.
Everyone's meant to be following exactly the same rules, and it'd make lots of sense for OIAs to be tracked (and then policed) by someone designated as responsible and external to most departments, who'd take requests directly (allowing for tracking) and then forward them on. Maybe the Ombudsman with proper funding, or another miscellaneous box within Internal Affairs. That way it'd be consistent, departments could use a system from that entity to track what they need to get done rather than have to (50 times) build their own, requestors could be clearly told straight away when to expect a reply, and there could be reliable stats published regularly. Maybe questions could be published as they're submitted (as with the FYI site) to make the OIA process more transparent to everyone, although I'm sure some journalists wouldn't like that. Beyond a certain point it needs a sympathetic government to get it going, though.
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The Official Information Act replaced the Official Secrets Act (Muldoon did something right!) and ushered in a more open system, which I suspect has had an important impact on public decision-making and accountability (mostly for good, some for ill).
Thanks for that interesting piece, Graeme. I think the most positive aspects of the Official Information Act within New Zealand have been in the precedents that were set around interpreting it from the beginning. I read this Sydney Morning Herald article a few years back (I liked it enough to bookmark it) which is very complimentary to the OIA in the face of what Australia ended up with at about the same time. In Australia, the precedents seem to have been for government officials to go to whatever lengths they could find to avoid releasing things. Not sure if that's just a biased journalists' view.
I worked in a non-policy role in a NZ government department until a few months ago, and much of my work was near the records managers and research analysts. It probably varies between departments, but they took their roles very seriously when it came to making information as available as possible, and they were always trying to push their culture through the organisation. I think there are still problems, like responses that get left until the last possible date before responding (and occasionally are overdue). Sometimes because Ministers have been getting involved, and other times just because many people involved in collating and writing OIA responses have other jobs that they'd rather be working on. It's tough to plan ahead if you have no idea whether you'll have to stop on short notice and answer a person's request about something you've not dealt with for several years, or answer 100 people's requests if something external happens and it provokes lots of people asking stuff. Not all departments have figured out how to handle this, and I bet there's lots of room for improvement.
The OIA's definitely impacted the culture internally though. You just have to see how many fishing expeditions come in from members of the media (many of which never see the light of day despite someone spending several hours or more responding), and people treat their jobs as if whatever they're doing might become public knowledge. The flip-side of that is that there's less nervousness when things get released because people have (more often at least) already considered their actions. That's just my take, anyway. Obviously others may vary.