Not an easily found balance let alone one that might be generally agreed upon!!

OK, I see your point. But can we at least agree that the pendulum needs an energetic wrench in the direction of openness?

All around you JC if you care to look.
There are currently many “serious” issues to be reported or commented on which are only dealt with by the media (if at all) in a peripheral manner - yet we are still told of (hand)waves becoming salutes, the PM’s wife fashion sense etc
To suggest that the media (or even the serious press) would be particularly interested in issues which you (or perhaps I) may think are newsworthy is simply ingenuous.
Though I am sympathetic to your aims, I am in the broader sense probably in the Andrew Norton camp (at least on this issue!) in that completly open government is essentially status quo government. The key must lie in finding a reasonable balance between transparency of governance and a democratically elected Goverment’s capacity to pursue its policies in a flexible (but non-corrupt)manner.

Not an easily found balance let alone one that might be generally agreed upon!!

Where’s the evidence to say it won’t? Right now political communication is tighter than a cat’s sphincter. So we get stuck talking about people’s hairdos.

Criticism and accountability are unalloyed goods. It’s naive to pretend otherwise.

I think the problem with closed government is worse. When everything is strictly managed, the media will beat up any small thing for a story. If there’s full disclosure they can actually choose to focus on serious stuff.

I mean the problem is in the wetware: management practices, attitudes and dedication.

Sure. That’s why the whole project needs a champion of ministerial level, to stop it being put into tickbox policy hell.

And if you cannot classify a document when you create or edit it (it should take a mere minute or five, cheap compared to the hours you spend writing the darn thing), then you probably shouldn’t be writing it!!! (The “you” is the theoretical author, not you personally).

Checkout “DIRKS” at NAA.gov.au. Agencies (and businesses) are like a paper-based library that acquires books and doesn’t fill in the subject/author/title index cards as they go. I often say “It doesn’t matter if it is clay tablets of optical computing, the real information management issues never change”.

The secret is automation. A proper setup will ensure that the right documents become available in the right way. Overlaid with modern search engine technology it would make the documentary base of government highly transparent.

Such a project would involve two quite separate components: a general technology-and-policy effort to ensure that every document, every email, every spreadsheet, every database, is marked with the metadata to automate its classification and publication.

The second is to progressively bring existing documents and systems into line. That’s going to be slow and expensive, but it’s a once-off expense. Once it’s done, you get all the benefits.

Imagine, for example, being able to do statistical analyses across raw data held by Treasury, the RBA and the ABS. Or being able to do document analyses to track the way policies formed during previous decades. Or for organisations like the CIS to have systems constantly mining government data for instances of waste.

It’s not until you gather and make the cost of access very low that these things could become possible.