Friday, March 19, 2021

Open Government: Ending the farce?

The government is currently consulting in a new action plan for the Open Government Partnership. These are meant to be co-created with civil society, but in the past they've been anything but, with the entire process directed by the Public Service Commission to rubber-stamp a pre-decided set of business-as-usual "commitments". And now it seems like the NGOs who are being asked to spend their valuable time on this every two years to provide a prop for the government's pre-determined agenda have had enough: they've written to Public Services Minister Chris Hipkins demanding changes:

Last week, TINZ convened a meeting of ten civil society organisations with an interest in open government to discuss a collective response to the consultation, an approach found to be successful in other countries working on their National Action Plans.

Attendees expressed general disappointment with New Zealand’s progress on open government since it joined the OGP in 2014. The feeling was that the first three action plans were unsuccessful in both ambition and delivery. The group agreed that there was a high risk of NAP4 delivering the same inadequate result, unless there were changes in the approach to the development of the plan.

The letter is quite explicit: "without a change to the process, we have serious concerns about the value of engaging with the consultation." In other words, they're threatening to walk. As someone who gave up wasting my time on this long ago, I'm surprised it has taken them so long.

So what do they want in order to stay involved? Essentially, proper co-creation, where civil society ideas are adopted and implementation resourced by the government, rather than the current bullshit where the government decides everything in advance and does as little as possible because "there is no new money for this". In practice, this means extending the co-creation period so it is aligned with the budget cycle, allowing things to be resourced in Budget 2022.

Hopefully Hipkins will agree. If not, the government can look forward to its cheap international PR win going up in smoke.