Guest Post: The Problem Isn’t the OIA – It’s the bureaucracy behind it

A guest post by Rhys Hurley on Kiwiblog

Taxpayers have a right to know what is being done with their money. The Official Information Act (OIA) is one of the only tools they have to find out.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has, however, asked his officials to review the cost of this system and even floated the idea of restricting access to some of this information.

He is right to acknowledge that the system is under pressure. Requests are up. Complaints into response times continue to rise. The process has become slower, more legalistic, and far more defensive.

But Minister Goldsmith’s potential restrictions are a huge problem. If the question is how to reduce costs, the answer cannot be to shut out the public.

Making it harder for the taxpaying public, journalists and elected politicians to get information will not fix the problem, but will just weaken decision makers’ already-limited accountability.

Instead, reform must start from first principles. The 1978 Danks Committee, set up to review how government information was handled and which ultimately led to the OIA, was clear: official information should be made available unless there is good reason to withhold it. The whole point was to move away from secrecy as the default.

That principle is now being eroded.

The pressure Goldsmith is pointing to is not just requesters with too much time on their hands, but the result of how the system now operates. What should be simple has become slow and bureaucratic.

Even the insiders agree. The Public Service Census 2025 described a culture focused on avoiding OIAs, with processes clogged by multiple approval layers and an approach that treats requests as a risk rather than a duty. That is the real problem.

Why people are having to ask for information in the first place is another question for the review. Too much information that should be routine seems to be locked up until somebody forces it out.

OIA volumes rise as departments are repeatedly asked for the same briefings, the same communications, and the same spending data, with each time seeing the possibility of the four-week process starting again from scratch.

The obvious answer is to publish more of this data up front. Other countries already treat this as standard procedure.

In Canada, agencies must proactively release contracts, grants, expenses, and audit reports on one central portal. Australian agencies publish disclosure logs, so every information request is available to all, and repeated requests are less likely.

The United Kingdom also has mandatory transparency rules around what information must be released by departments. Unlike New Zealand, Brits also have the right to send their questions to Parliament.

By comparison, New Zealand has no consistent approach. Instead, people are forced to rely on the Ombudsman just to get information that has already been deemed in the public interest in previous rulings and guidance. This drags the process out and further drives up cost.

The real issue here is that too much information is still being held back in the first place.

If any findings of the review recommend a cost-recovery exercise and clamping down on requests, the Government will have learnt the wrong lesson. Yes, responding to OIA requests costs time and money, but that is the cost of a healthy democracy.

There is a better approach.

By setting rules on what should be proactively published and following the Ombudsman’s guidelines on what should be considered in the public’s interest, there would be less need for requests in the first place.

Additionally, a streamlined sign-off process so multiple layers of bureaucracy don’t need to approve a response would cut through the layers of management that often lengthen the wait times on responses.

Either of these would reduce pressure on agencies while strengthening transparency and accountability. Both would solve the problem Minister Goldsmith is looking to fix.

When governments feel pressure, the instinct is always the same: release less, control more, and complain about the people asking questions. That would be a mistake.

Open government itself is not the problem. The problem is that every request is being treated like handing over the nuclear codes.

If ministers are tired of taxpayers asking how their money is being spent, the solution is simple: Stop making them ask.

Rhys Hurley is Investigations Coordinator for the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union.