Posts by A S
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Indeed, but when your senior public service leaders seem to be increasingly indistinguishable from political hacks (in behavioural terms, if not in ideology), you have a real problem. That is the crux of the problem as I see it. The OIA issue is a symptom of a wider and deeper-rooted problem.
ETA. That isn’t to say that fixing the OIA isn’t a key mechanism to fix the deeper problem, but that is harder to do if you don’t identify the root cause.
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Speaker: David Fisher: The OIA arms race, in reply to Idiot Savant,
Yep, I agree entirely. My point was that for those who ignored that legal duty, the structure of those requests gave them extra latitude to do so.
You also have to remember that in practice, your average public servant is not permitted to pick up the phone and call media, lobbyists, etc. to seek clarification.
You have to write up what you want clarity on, it then goes to the comms or ministerials team, possibly then onto the ministers office, who then ask the question, and who also often slant the answers to those questions as it comes back down the chain. OIA by Chinese whispers is the result and that just adds to the overall headaches.
Funnily enough, the majority of public servants want to do a good job, and believe that they are genuinely helping the public, but the tenor of leadership over the last decade feels distinctly at odds with why many of us originally went into that line of work.
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Speaking as someone who has had long-term experience on the receiving end of OIA requests, things have definitely changed, and not for the better.
While much of the process remains the same, and any half-way competent official can readily identify and collect in one place all the information that relates to the request, the real changes have been in the way responses are signed out.
You're right that comms staff, and dedicated ministerial servicing teams are much less helpful and more likely to deem information to be 'out of scope' or that it should be with-held.
Partially, it is because they don't have to do the actual donkey work if an Ombudsmens complaint is lodged (which was always a useful tool to motivate junior colleagues to the do the job right the first time), but largely it does come down to not just Ministers but also CEs not wanting anything out there that can make them look bad, or cause bad press.
Another reason, and I suspect this doesn't apply to you, is that so many of the requests I have processed over the years were terribly written, and gave those very same people just the reasons they needed to refuse to supply information.
Of course, the very biggest reason that so many senior public servants and minsters ignore their legal duties, is that the sanction for not complying with the law is all too often less than the impact of supplying information as they are required to by law.
After all, what is being named in a forum no-one listens to (Parliament) compared to being splashed across the front pages of all the major daily papers and on the evening news. When you look at it from the perspective of a CE or minister, it really is a no-brainer.
If the media want to do anything useful to reform the OIA, they really should mount a concerted effort to give real teeth to the Act, by imposing real sanctions for those who abuse it.
Finally, as a former policy official, one of the very first things I was taught 20 odd years ago was that the media was not your friend and anything you said to the media would be mis-quoted and used against you. Sadly the actions of the media over those many years in looking only (or so it felt) at the negative when it came to the public service certainly did give some credence to that view point, and saw far too many promising things killed, while lauding stupid and failed thinking as things that should be advanced.
For me, the most worrying thing is that the treatment of OIAs is only an example of how diminished the public service ethos has become (particularly amongst public sector "leaders") over the last decade or so, particularly when it comes to giving unpopular advice to ministers
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
The whole bloody lot need to address it at least. The Ombudsman seems interested finally, but yes scrutiny in the Public Service , FMA, SFO, etc
The Public Service has been hammered over the last decade or so. The days of free and frank advice are largely gone, replaced by a generation of public sector leaders who do as they are told, and who don't question.
Hardly surprising really when you think about the public servant being hung out to dry by Collins as described in dirty politics and the deafening silence from the State Services Commissioner about it all. If the senior most public servants aren't brave/willing/capable of doing their job, why should we expect it of anyone else?
This culture didn't spring up overnight, and sadly both main political parties get to share some of the blame here, but I will say that things are a damn sight worse under this government and there aren't any signs of improvement on the horizon.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Sacha,
Danyl suggests an enforceable ongoing audit of OIA responsiveness as one answer to Dirty Politics.
It's a nice idea, but ultimately futile. There is already a defacto audit, the Ombudsman tables a report in Parliament each year that names all those who have not complied with their legal requirements under the OIA.
The only way the OIA is ever going to be effective is if the sanction for flouting it is greater than being named in Parliament by the Ombudsman.
Make it carry a maximum prison sentence sufficient to bar them from Parliament, and Ministers will actually have something to lose when they flout the law. Same goes for public sector CEs, who will play their legal requirements with a very straight bat if such a sanction exists.
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Hard News: Time to Vote, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Heh. Could well be truer than we may think.
I agree with Rob S. Once upon a time if the Minister wanted to interfere in an OIA the whole request would be transferred to the Minister. If the Minister then wanted to ignore the law, it was his/her responsibility. Now the pressure seems to be applied from the Minister or their office, to force the public servants to break the law, and in my experience sadly, some senior officials are quite happy to do so.
One other thing I personally noticed in recent years, is that free and frank advice is rarely given to Ministers any more when it is on an unpopular subject. Officials who do speak up, have seemed to find themselves being quietly sidelined. With a public service in a state of almost constant restructure, it becomes very easy to get rid of problem advisers and replace them with people who do as they are told.
Giving open, honest and professional advice is critical to good governance, and I know a lot of people in Wellington are quietly concerned about how things are going, and the yes-minister culture that pervades things at the moment.
As someone who places a lot of value on a transparent, professional, and honest public service, the way things look to be going really concerns me, and I hope this is the start of a much deeper look at what has happened to the public service over the last decade or so.
Sorry about the rant, and hope the clouds clear for everyone on their way to vote tomorrow!
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Rich Lock,
Cardinal Richelieu said: ‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.’ You should look him up sometime – he knew a lot about state surveillance, reigns of terror and consolidation of power within a totalitarian regime.
We don’t have to give six written lines – they’ve already taken everything we’ve ever done. Think about that.
Thank you summing up so well what I've been thinking!
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OnPoint: "Project SPEARGUN underway", in reply to Matt Crawford,
I think it’s highly likely we’d be be getting mates rates on NSA tech, so I’m prepared to believe setup costs for software side wouldn’t be all that insurmountable ( and we might even be comped the first 24 months subscriptions for new malware definitions).
If the info about the large amounts of $US going into the new GCHQ facilities return for the UK 'pulling its weight' (can't remember where I read that yesterday, but it stuck in my head) is true, then it is entirely likely that everything would be provided to the gcsb gratis, on the proviso that NZ does the same.
On the rest, I think you nail it nicely.
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OnPoint: "Project SPEARGUN underway", in reply to Che Tibby,
The paper would probably need to discuss the source of the kit, and note the fiscal savings offered by taking that course of action compared with another option. Really it depends on how tightly the PMs bods are held to the normal cabinet office and treasury cabinet paper standards.
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Matt, I would definitely agree with your thinking. Government agencies are universally creaking under the lack of funding, and there is almost no way that whole new capabilities can be absorbed within baselines, unless they can be piggybacked on an existing functionality.
It is worth noting that those redacted figures look to be in the single millions (normal convention is discuss $millions to at least 1 decimal place), not tens of millions. The redacted sections don’t look to be big enough to suggest $10.0million plus, which reinforces your point even further.