Kiwiblog

The Law Commission has been consulting on possible changes to the Official Information Act.

I’ve become a semi-regular user of the Official Information Act, using it to get background papers and reports on policy areas I am interested in. The OIA was one of the best things the Muldoon Government did.

However it doesn’t work as well as it can. A dedicated government agency can delay releasing information for up to a year. You are meant to get it with 20 working days, but agencies can transfer requests (resetting the clock), give themselves a time extension, and also refuse requests forcing you to go to the Ombudsman. They do a good job, but by the time they have investigated, and made a decision, many months can have gone by.

Very rarely an agency will lie – we saw this with the Labour Department under Labour, when the Immigration Service actually lied to the Ombudsman’s Office over the existence of a report. This is incredibly rare.

Anyway a lot of information about what the Government is considering, never comes out under the OIA – because no one asked for it. And you can not ask for information too generally – such as all reports about primary health or all memos from the Ministry of Education. You need to be quite specific.

I propose that for certain high level official information, the onus on release be reversed – that the Government automatically release the information even if not asked for. Now this could not apply to all official information, as there is too much, but it could apply to information that makes Ministerial level.

My proposal would be:

That all papers and reports considered by Cabinet and/or a Cabinet Committee be automatically placed on the Internet within six months.

The specifics would be:

1. By having the cut off at reports that go to a Cabinet or Cabinet Committee, the DPMC could be made responsible for implementing it.
2. By having a set time period, it gives the Government a bit of breathing space to consider reports and make decisions (such as the Budget) before publication. This would not prevent people from applying under the OIA to gain something earlier.
3. Departmental and Ministerial staff would know that their reports are 100% guaranteed to become public, so would take appropriate care with said papers.
4. Parts of reports could still be blacked out under the OIA, but be appeal-able to the Ombudsman.
5. It would provide a unique look at the entire work programme of the Cabinet and its Committees.
6. If a media organisation asks for information under the OIA, they often try and sensationalise any story based on it, as they have to show something for their effort. If the info is automatically made publicly available, then news worthiness will be the main criteria (I hope)
7. It would result in more transparent and open Government

The Herald reports:

Police have charged a former Government minister with abusing his ex-MP perk of taxpayer-subsidised flights.

Roger McClay is to appear in the Auckland District Court next Friday to face 56 charges of obtaining or using a document to obtain a pecuniary advantage.

Police spokeswoman Noreen Hegarty would not confirm the criminal charges, citing sections of the Official Information Act that protect a person’s right to a fair trial and privacy.

Umm. What nonsense is this. If criminal charges have been laid, they are not a private matter. We have an open justice system. If Roger McClay does not have name suppression (which seems obvious) then the charges should be public.

The Herald has the background to the charges. I don’t know at this stage whether the charges are disputed or not – I imagine we will find out on Friday.

Firstly the unions are back to squabbling with the Minister, and it is unsure how sifnificant the agreement trumpeted yesterday is. I have asked the Minister’s Office whether or not the actions planned to make it difficult for media to report league tables includes any changes to the Official Information Act.

So long as the OIA is unchanged, I don’t see how one can stop people compiling whatever tables they want. Hell, I might even help set up a wiki where parents can report the data for their local schools

So for me I don’t care too much what the Govt does, so long as they do not touch the OIA.

But on the subject of the education unions loathing for any sort of comparison of school achievement, I have to quote this wonderful note placed on Facebook yesterday by Mark Unsworth:

I totally support the teacher unions right to protest against being able to rank schools according to how well they perform. This cuts across the hunt for mediocrity which is so important to some in NZ .How dare some parents who want to know how good an education their children are getting.!! And as for the media having access to the information !Bloody hell what would Stalin have thought about that?

I would like to see this move taken further however.
I would start with Fair-Go, Target and the Consumers Institute and that dreadful Consumer magazine that tells us which products and companies and service providers are dodgy or unreliable. Who needs that useless information?

Magazines that reviewed and ( gasp) rated cars ,electronic goods, and new technology need to be ditched as does LINZ which tells us which suburbs are considered desirable. Imagine what would happen if that information got out? Wine, beer and restaurant reviews and rankings, what a waste of effort .Do we really need to know how good a wine is before we drink it? Doesn’t that take the fun away. The same goes for those silly websites travelers use to check out accommodation. A bed is a bed no matter whether its 1 or 5 star, you still fall asleep.
Next on the bonfire would be rankings of investment returns for Kiwisaver and other super schemes. People who can find out who is performing well poorly will only go and move their money and we don’t want that do we. Best we protect those who are not up to the job just like we do with teachers and schools.

NZ will obviously need to pull out of any agencies such as the UN ,WHO,OECD,ILO etc that rates how we compare with other countries on a wide range of indices. That material would be dangerous in the hands of taxpayers wouldn’t it ?

The media need to have a jolly good look at the way they report sport as well. Do we really need league tables for rugby, football netball etc? Surely it’s the taking part that matters. Who really cares about “Top 4 finishes” and semi-finals? It’s all too elitist .I can imagine the TAB may struggle paying out bets when all horses are deemed to have crossed the line together but they will cope .

Last and not least we need to ensure that some of the dangerous new Apps available on i-phones overseas are permanently banned .They allow phones to scan barcodes and customers can find out how one retailer’s price compares with others around the country. That would cause mayhem and only encourage consumer choice. Who needs that in NZ?

I have huge respect for the hard and often unrewarding job that teachers do. However the blinkered view that the teacher unions have that says neither individual teacher or school performance can be measured can only ever be detrimental to our future .They need to move into the real world .

Bravo.

A good editorial from The Press also.

The Dom Post reports:

After months of disputes, Education Minister Anne Tolley has struck a deal with primary school unions that will see them work together on its controversial national standards policy.

Under the agreement, the Government has confirmed it will make it as difficult as possible for the media to produce league tables that rank schools.

It’s good that the unions will not try and boycott the national standards (as they are important), but I’d like some more details on how exactly the Government plans to make it difficult for the media to produce league tables. I sure hope they are not talking a law change.

It follows a threat from hundreds of primary school principals to boycott the policy unless changes were made to limit public access to performance data.

The peace deal with NZEI, the Principals Federation and the School Trustees Association follows months of disagreements between the groups over the introduction of the policy, which will see pupils from years 1 to 8 assessed in numeracy and literacy against national academic standards from next year.

Mrs Tolley told The Dominion Post the deal was a “a momentous occasion”.

“I can’t stress enough that it took my breath away that we have all for the first time sat round the table and said, ‘Yes, we are going to make this work together.’ That is fantastic.”

She said she told the groups she was prepared to work with them to stop the use of league tables. “We want to make it as difficult for you [media] as possible. It will be too hard and too much work and not worth it in the end. There are a few ideas we will discuss as to how we can do that.”

I’m fascinated as to what these ideas might be, because I can’t see what will stop media requesting achievement info for a school under the OIA, and then using that to compile a league table – should they so wish. Personally league tables have limited value and are overly simplistic, but I don’t believe you stop the media from publishing them, if they decide to.

The Dom Post editorial:

Education Minister Anne Tolley should stick to her guns.

Parents are entitled to know how their children are doing at primary school and, if unimpressed, should be able to march them off to a school that is performing better, taking the state funding attached to him or her with them.

Hear hear.

Regrettably, this Government is not brave enough to go that far. But it should not resile from implementing its “national standards” policy in the teeth of opposition from principals and unionised teachers or buckle to their wish to have such information kept secret. …

What is it exactly that teachers and principals so fear? What is wrong with sharing with taxpayers those who pay to keep state schools operating just which schools do well and which do not? Is it that teachers’ methods might be scrutinised if their pupils are not keeping up with their countrywide cohort? Are they afraid that pay rises might not be forthcoming if it turns out that the youngsters in their class are falling behind?

A fear of accountability I say.

If so, principals and the NZEI would profit from looking across the Tasman to Labor-ruled New South Wales, where a similar row has erupted. There, the Greens and the Coalition equivalent to our National Party have joined forces in the NSW Senate to make it illegal to compile league tables backed by fines of up to $55,000 for organisations such as newspapers from statistics publicly available on a federal website. Labor’s deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, has ridiculed the NSW ban.

While Labour in NZ wants to make school assessment data more secret than the SIS.

The Dom Post reports:

Federation president Ernie Buutveld warned league tables would create a “blame and shame” culture, which could lead to schools being shunned and children feeling inadequate.

Principals wanted the performance data exempt from the OIA. The issue was a bottom line, he said. “This can only impact negatively on our children.”

A bottom line. That’s fighting talk.

The more the education unions demand that school assessment data be made more secret than SIS data, the more I want to see that data.

It is very sad that this is now the unions’ top priority in education – hiding assessment data from parents. I think it explains a lot of the problem we have in the education sector.

Trans-Tasman had a very witty peice on this on Thursday also:

Education Minister Anne Tolley has an intriguing battle on her hands – one which is going to make or break her as Minister, and possibly make or break the Govt. The battle over centralised reporting of school results, and the scare campaign over “league tables” has probably only just begun. The Principals Association, the Post Primary Teachers Association and the primary schools union, the NZEI, all came out bitterly against the proposals, as did the provisional wing of the teacher unions, the Labour Party.

The provisional wing of the teacher unions – that is so damn apt.

The Government should stay absolutely firm on this. Certainly I hope the teacher unions see sense, but if they don’t – then Labour and the teacher unions have just handed National a battleground issue which will be hugely popular. Those on the side of suppressing school information will be amazed at how out of step they are with most New Zealanders on this issue.

What is most disturbing is the profound contempt it shows for parents and the public. Yes a league table can be a dodgy statistic. But hello there are many dodgy statistics out there. The job of Government is not to suppress information because it thinks people are too stupid to understand its limitations. You explain it. You put it into context. You provide further information.

John Key is a nice man, who would rather everyone compromise and stay happy. He doesn’t go picking fights to make himself look good.

In a way, it is a pity. Labour and the teacher unions seem to be auditioning for the role of Mrs Thatcher’s National Union of Mineworkers with their threats of refusing to report information, and that suppression of assessment information is a bottom line.

If I was a political Machiavelli I could think of nothing better than a year long stand-off against the teacher unions, and making the next election a referendum on whether or not teacher unions or the democratically elected Government gets to run the school system.

It is an issue on which you are guaranteed the support of every media outlet in New Zealand – except the education reporter for Radio New Zealand. This suppression of assessment data is primarily aimed at stopping the media accessing it.

Idiot/Savant blogs on the bill promoted by Labour to supress school assessment information:

There are a number of problems with this. In addition to being “class-based” (that is, targeting information based on its content or type rather than the interests its release might prejudice), it also categorically forbids release. And that has never been part of our OIA regime. While the OIA allows information to be withheld if there are good reasons for doing so, it doesn’t make it mandatory, and an organisation can always just release information if they feel like it. This amendment would forbid them from doing that. It effectively recreates the Official Secrets Act specifically for schools. The “justification” for this – that the public might “misunderstand” or “misuse” the information – is decidedly authoritarian.

This is a nasty regression from Labour, and one which undermines a fundamental part of our freedom of information regime.

I made a similiar point yesterday – this proposed law would make school assessment data more secret than security and intelligence data. The Government has the discretion to release security and intelligence data, but Labour want school assessment data to be prohibited from ever being released.

Such a wonderful commitment to open government and accountabilty for the $6 billion we spends on schools.

NZPA reports:

Mr Mallard today suggested a change could be made to the Education Amendment Bill currently before a select committee , or a separate bill could be drafted.

“I see it as a really good way of unblocking a problem that we’ve got,” Mr Mallard said this morning.

Quality information was important, he said, but it did not all need to be made public.

He did not think individual school information needed to be published.

“At the moment privacy reasons means that individual children or individual teachers information can’t be made public but school information could be.

“I think if we restricted that that would mean only national information was published so that we could test the system.”

The school information would be available for the Education Ministry and Education Review Office.

“So if there were major anomalies of schools going off the rails educationally that information would be easily available.”

This is such a wonderful idea by Trevor, I think we should take it further. We spend $6 billion in schools yet the rationale is that only the Education Ministry and ERA need to be able to access information on individual schools.

So lets extend this to the entire Government. It is unfair that the media sometimes publish unhelpful stories about a Government agency based on information released under the OIA. This can lead to undermining confidence in that agency.

So using Labour’s logic, I propose that only national information for the entire Government be published in future. Only Treasury and Ministers need to know individual agencies information.

So if you ask under the OIA how many staff at your agency earn over $100,000 – then the only response will be “The Government in total employs 7,201 staff who earn over $100,000″ rather than listing it for each agency.

There is no need for us, according to Labour’s logic, to know the details of each agency. We can trust Treasury and the Government to take action if there is a problem.

There are other ways Labour’s new principle can be implemented. It is unfair that death rates in hospitals can be compared. This is unfair to larger hospitals that take on the more critical cases. So in future it will be illegal to publish information about deaths in individual hospitals. The Ministry of Health will collect this data and they will act on it if any hospital goes off the rails.

It also seems to me it is unfair that people can compare the levels of rates between different local authorities. A simplistic comparison is bad as different Councils provide different facilities. So again taking Labour’s principle forward, Councils will no longer reveal what their level of rates are. The Department of Internal Affairs will monitor Councils and let us know fi any go off the rails.

There are so many examples. It is also unfair to prison guards at a particular prison that their escape rate can be compared to other prisons. After all it does not take into account different security classifications.  To prevent the public from making an ill informed comparison on a league table, we will not publish individual prison escape levels.

Readers might like to post in the comments more examples of what should be removed from the OIA under Labour’s new principle that the publci are too stupid to know and compare, and that the important thing is the Government Departments have the information for their use.

UPDATE: Someone has emailed me a copy of Labour’s OIA Bill. It only allows schools to share information with the Ministry of Education and the ERO. This means that schools would not be able to give NCEA information to the NZQA!

Also Labour’s bill bans schools from voluntarily releasing their overall achievement data. It is a giant Orwellian step backwards and reminds us all that Labour is concerned about the teachers unions, and not parents or students. The bill says:

Despite any other provision of this Act, organisations including, but not limited to schools, the Ministry of Education and the Education Review Office, must not publicly release school level assessment information.

This makes school level assessment information more secretive than security information held by the SIS. You see the SIS are allowed to decide what information they release. Labour’s bill would see the Government and schools lose any discretion over publishing assessment information.

National should run full page advertisements in every newspaper with copies of Labour’s bill, explaining how Labour wants to ban the publishing of school assessment information. I’m seriously – they should hit some donors up for $100K and it will knock Labour down a good 5% or so. I suppose there is no need when they are 20% ahead, but this is a huge blunder by Labour.

I’m appalled at the attitude from the principals’ union that they may not report results from national standard tests, because shock horror they might be made public.

Even worse Labour is advocating a law change, so that the public can be blocked from being able to obtain this information under the Oficial Information Act.

We (the taxpaying public) spend almost $6 billion a year on the school system. They are meant to be accountable to parents and the community/public. And instead they are demanding a law change to hide what their performance might be, backed by Labour.

I don’t care much one way or another about league tables.  Certainly the Government has better things to do than publish such things.

But there is a massive difference between whether or not the Government should publish something, and whether or not it should prevent members of the public from obtaining information on a school and publishing it in any form they like.

It is appalling arrogance to demand that such information be suppressed because you can’t trust the public to interpret it properly. That is the start of the slippery slope to an Orwellian country.

If someone wants to go to the trouble, they should be able to publish “league tables” on schools on as many criteria as they want.

One organisation could do a league table based on drug offences at school. Another could do a league table based on the level of “voluntary” fees. Another could do a league table based on suspensions for misconduct. And another could do a league table based on the average number of years experience of teachers. And shock horror someone might do a league table based on exam results. And hey someone else might do one based on exam results, but adjusted to take into account socio-economic factors in their home zone. And yet someone else might do a league table based on sporting success.

The answer is not less information, but more. If you don’t like a league table compiled by an organisation, then criticise it, or do your own one. If you think the media’s reporting of local results is sub-standard then blog about it.

But whatever you do, don’t support Labour’s plan to exempt schools from the Official Information Act to keep the teacher unions happy.

UPDATE: No Right Turn has already blogged on this also, and pleased to say he agrees that what Labour is proposing is wrong.

At 10 am I blogged on the candidate expenses and donations summary.

I noted Charles Chauvel spent $5,551 on Internet advertising and said “What did Charles spend $5,551 on?”

At 3.01 pm the Electoral Commission sends me a copy of his expense and donation return. Now that is what you cann great service!

The $5,551.13 all went on Charles’ website. It’s a nice website but that’s a fair bit of money for it. On ther other hand the regulated period was from 1 January 2008, so that cost may include all the updates with new material.

The Chief Ombudsmen has put diplomacy to one side and in the annual report to Parliament has accused some public servants of game playing with the Official Information Act.

This is what people mean when they refer to the politicisation of the public service.

Some public servants playing games with OIA requests

The Office of the Ombudsmen is concerned some parts of the public service have been deliberately delaying responses to Official Information requests.

In the office’s Annual Report to Parliament, Chief Ombudsmen Beverley Wakem says the practice is unacceptable and subverts the purpose of the legislation.

Beverley Wakem says the Office has observed an increasing tendency by a few government departments and Ministerial offices to ignore the provisions of the Official Information Act over the timing of responses to requesters.

They should name and shame Departments and Offices who have been game playing.

Matthew Hooton blogs some disturbing information he has obtained from the Police. It has taken him 18 months to get the information under the Official Information Act, even though it should have taken only 20 days.

It deals with the Police investigation into the Brash or so called Hollow Men e-mails. Key points are:

• The alleged theft was notified to Police in August 2005
• The Police did not begin their investigation until September 2006 – 13 months later!
• The Police did not interview anyone as part of the investigation until June 2007 – 22 months after the complaint
• The Police lied when they said in April 2008 the file was closed, as they now claim it is open but not active.
• It took 18 months to get even this information out of the Police
• The Police are refusing to release the file, even though they say the file is no longer active
• The Officer in charge is the same Officer who decided not to prosecute Labour for their $800.000 of over spending in 2005

Now some will say there is nothing bad or sinister about this. They will claim the e-mails were never stolen. But why did the Police spend 20 months fighting the OIA release?