Comments on: The secretive inertia of government

By: Richard Green

Richard Green — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:19:16 +0000

I may as well add that the bloody mindedness seemed to come from the PM&C and not from the Finance Department whom I was dealing with directly. The latter (from where I stood) seemed perfectly professional.

Of course, in practical terms it doesn’t matter if the reflexive secrecy is from the political staff or the pure public servants (I’m sure the latter still has it in spades). It’s still holding onto public information unnecessarily.

By: Richard Green

Richard Green — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:16:26 +0000

I made it pretty clear at the beginning that I wasn’t a journalist. As shoddy as journos can be, I think that’s one ethical boudnary they tend to keep to (identifying themselves).

Even after all that, how is this information potentially embarrassing politically? It’s not as if a media outlet is going to run a piece sympathetic to lobbyists, and showcasing the inconsistency of RIS creation isn’t a very sexy topic.

The only reason I made a post is that they were so bloody minded in giving me this information.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:04:37 +0000

I think it’s more likely that they wanted to know if he was a journalist, so they could batten down the hatches.

By: Kiashu

Kiashu — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:03:58 +0000

Sir Humphrey: How are things at the Campaign for the Freedom of Information, by the way?
Sir Arnold: Sorry, I can’t talk about that.

Knowledge is power, it is said. Thus, whoever sits on information and does not share it is very powerful indeed. So it must be the default position of all those involved in authority to withhold information wherever and for as long as possible.

They wanted to know who you were before giving you information because they wanted to know if you could embarrass them with that information, or with the fact of their not giving you it.

Also from Yes, Minister – “If people don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.”

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:31:50 +0000

I think that the RIS are pretty tendentious. My favourite is the RIS to the tax amendments that introduced section 45B. The section allows the Commissioner to make an essentially subjective judgement as to when a (concessionally taxed) capital distribution should be considered in reality a dividend.

The RIS says that the impact would be low, because in essence, the sections would only apply to companies trying to disguise dividends as capital distributions. It is perfectly circular and completely wrong – several millions of dollars are spent on advice with respect to s 45B every year and it is one of the most contentious sections of the tax law, as in fact it is theoretically able to apply to almost any distribution of capital whatsoever.

Back on topic, I agree, that the effort to work out who you were sounds disturbing to me. Who are you? – a citizen, so hurry up already!

By: Tortfeaser

Tortfeaser — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:06:13 +0000

The last dealing I had with the OBPR was to ask if a RIS was required for some regulations I was writing (just in the last few months, not the dark ages). The process is for the regulation-proposer to self assess using a form OBPR supplies (available publicly if you’re keen) and they’ll confirm the assessment.

But one exception is if the regulation was an election committment. So I’m baffled. In the case of the lobbyist register no RIS would be required as it is an election commitment. The question is why couldn’t PMC just tell you this rather than faff about for ages making up the malarky about OBPR making assessments that took a long time.

BTW, OBPR took 3 days for my last reg assessment.

In my experience, departments are just fine with releasing info. But as soon as a department asks the minister’s office about it (which they shouldn’t do anyway, but ministers insist) everything gets sketchy.

By: conrad

conrad — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:29:17 +0000

Good question. One possibility is that no-one has been allocated the particular job of dealing with the the type of thing you are asking for (i.e., the actual physical process of sending the response, so it is no-one’s responsibility to provide it and so no-one sends it). This is a problem with micro-management, which I assume many areas of the public service have, where no-one takes responsibility for anything they don’t have to (i.e., isn’t on their workload). Another possibility is that the person who’s job it is is simply lazy, has 100 emails etc., and simply deletes some they don’t care about. Sorry for yet another anecdote, but one of my friends worked in one area of the public service and constantly put various requests in the shredder. He noted one of the interesting things was that caused essentially no complaints or follow ups. Perhaps in your case, because you did follow things up, you finally got what you wanted (possibly from another person employed to deal with follow-up matters).