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EXPLANER: Deep in the beltway, in the saddest and most awkward parts of Wellington, people can generally be divided into one of two camps: people who love government information disclosure and people who hate it.
It is a false dichotomy really. Everyone hates the Official Information Act (OIA), which makes releases possible, but each for its own reasons.
I am in deep conflict, of course: The OIA is a professional lifeline, just as it is for concerned students, teachers, lobbyists, and citizens who diligently request and examine thousands of pages of documents every day.
Every month I receive a large amount of documents from the Ministries and Ministerial Offices that I follow. Some of them will have spent months oozing through government pipes before landing in my inbox, many accumulating strong wording on the way.
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Newsrooms are scar tissue for transparency, wounds inflicted by officials and politicians who struggle to keep information potentially damaging to them.
I hate the OIA because its process is so slow, and because of the myriad ways it can block or hinder the disclosure of information.
The other side of the equation, the people who hate the OIA, are the poor officials, many already overworked, who then have to collect snippets of information, write them up, and then authorize their release. While the Government has dedicated teams of staff working on OIA requests, it is still a strain on the time and resources of the people whose information is requested.
You can understand their frustration: Often the requests are just ridiculous; An OIA applicant once asked how much of the RNZ was “owned by foreign interests” (none, obviously) and “how much of the advertising is from foreign interests” (none, either).
The two sides of this coin are the context of the disputes that engulfed the government and the media on Friday afternoon after it made thousands of pages of official information available on the Covid-19 website with little warning.
POOL VISION
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield describe New Zealand’s planned move to level 2.
This is called proactive release. It’s fairly common and is meant to serve everyone’s interests – the media and other official information browsers save you the trouble of requesting documents individually, and overworked officials only have to collect and write documents once .
Proactive releases occur after each budget, when the documents that went into budgeting are released all at once.
Any government that proactively releases information must be applauded: it is efficient and transparent. Credit where it is due, this Government has taken steps in the right direction when it comes to proactive release. Since January 1 of last year, it began publishing cabinet documents, no later than 30 business days after their submission. That is a degree of transparency that most other countries would never contemplate.
But it is also important not to get carried away. Most of the official information that is proactively disclosed would still be disclosed through the OIA.
mark mitchell / Getty-Images
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern defended the government’s decision to bury the release of crucial Covid-19 documents.
The big question is not whether the government would proactively disclose information, that was always a dead certificate, what we really need to know is that since the government would have to disclose most of that information anyway, what is the context and the time of publication? say about it?
And for that reason, the big question is not what was launched, but when and in what context it was launched.
The timing of the launch was quite cynical on two fronts. Most of the government announcements for the coming week are distributed well in advance. This helps media organizations that work with limited resources to code and get reporters where they need to be to cover a particular story.
The dumping of documents was not foreshadowed in the least, which means that many media organizations had to rush staff to dive into the pile of documents.
Friday afternoon is also quite cynical from the audience’s perspective: the many former journalists who are now part of the Beehive communications team know that the public is smaller on a Friday afternoon and remains small until Sunday evening. late. If you have to air your dirty clothes, then Friday afternoon is a time to do it when no one is looking at you.
It also means there is less time for the media to ask the government what the documents contain. This is not just about keeping ministers’ feet on fire (let’s face it, there is also a bit of that), it is also about being able to pick up the phone and speak to a Ministerial Office about what you are reading.
The right of reply is not only an essential principle of journalism, but also a way to ensure that you have the correct data. The Government itself has been a victim of this recently, where a story was published (not published on this website) without comments from the corresponding minister. The story had to be corrected, an embarrassing situation that could have been avoided with a phone call.
As for facing scrutiny on the matter, Ardern did not confront the morning media on Monday, but he did address the media at his post-cabinet press conference. You received a question and a follow-up on the document dump. To his credit, he acknowledged that in the future the Government will publish documents in the morning and will try to mark their publication more clearly.
Ardern received no lengthy questions about the content of the documents: the media used his precious minutes with the Prime Minister to ask about the great story of the day, the move to level 2.
The government may have expected a collective look at the media from the document dump, which is likely to play its part as well.
When thousands of jobs are in the balance, and most of the country is focused directly on regaining their freedoms again, a prolonged period of media outrage is likely to be more poorly reflected in the media than the government.
An email from the government’s communications team, noting that it could rely on its popularity to reject criticism, suggests that it is more than willing to divert criticism to the media.
That is a pity. Documents released on Friday suggest that the government actually had very little to hide. They showed a government making difficult decisions quickly. So far, those decisions have proven to be the right ones. Ironically, the government may have scored a goal on its own, causing outrage to arrogantly pitch the pitch when it may have had little to hide.
