Dr Bryce Edwards: Democracy Briefing - The OIA at the crossroads

The Government is reviewing the Official Information Act behind closed doors. Most readers will immediately grasp the irony.

This review of the OIA wasn’t announced. It wasn’t publicised. It came to light because transparency advocate Andrew Ecclestone happened to be told about it, then revealed it to attendees at a parliamentary forum on democracy last month.

Professor Alexander Gillespie: NZ report card 2025 - how the country fared in 28 key global and domestic rankings

Standardised testing and regular progress assessment became key features of the education system this year, so why not apply those same principles to New Zealand as a whole?

There’s an important difference here, of course. This exercise is about prompting discussion and debate, and should be read with a degree of caution. The metrics tell us only so much – but it’s still possible to trace the nation’s ups and downs.

Mike's Minute: We need more transparency around the Reserve Bank

We should all thank Kelly Eckhold, a some-time participant on this show and most-of-the-time economist at Westpac, for his thinking around the future of the Reserve Bank.

As I have said many times, if one good thing came out of Covid, it put the Reserve Bank, its role, and its influence front and centre for many more of us that may never really have paid attention to its workings and its ability to shape everyday aspects of our lives.

John McLean: My last fandango in an official information act fiasco

A case study in the breakdown of public transparency and accountability in New Zealand

This Substack has its genesis a decade ago. From 2015 to 2017, Fonterra deliberately cooked its financial books in order to hide bad investments and artificially inflate its net worth and share price. These shifty shenanigans, in which Fonterra’s auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers were complicit, meant that dairy farmers who purchased their mandatory Fonterra shares over this period did so at inflated prices. More particularly, the book cooking significantly boosted the already astronomical pay of Dutch Fonterra CEO Theo Spierings, whose bonuses were significantly based on Fonterra’s share price,.

Dr Bryce Edwards: As “the megaphone” for mining, is Shane Jones too lax on lobbying?

As the Minister for Resources, Shanes Jones is happy to declare that he’s on the side of the mining companies, proclaiming that no one “should doubt that I am the megaphone of industry in this government.”

While many will appreciate his dogged championing of such businesses and the economic benefits they bring, there should be some doubts about whether his extreme enthusiasm for assisting mining companies could lead to improper or even corrupted decision-making.

Peter Dunne: Civil liberties

It has not been a good week for civil liberties in New Zealand.

First was the Police’s confirmation that their Tactical Response model launched earlier this year is built around a multi-million dollar programme known as SearchX. This programme is based on data-driven policing. That has been highly controversial in the United States and Britain, where it has been accused of intensifying police racial biases, compounded by a lack of transparency.

Point of Order: How health officials kept quiet (it seems) about secrecy provisions injected into the Therapeutic Products Bill

Malcolm Harbrow has been described on a previous Point of Order post as an admirably dogged campaigner against governmental secrecy on his No Right Turn blog.

This week he has gone into battle again, this time railing against government officials who – when advising members of Parliament of issues raised in submissions to select committees – fail to draw attention to concerns the public have raised but which the officials might prefer were buried.

Guy Hatchard: Dragging Mainstream Media Back to the Real World Step by Step

Yesterday the NZ Herald, our most read legacy media newspaper, published an article, “Australian woman reveals heartbreak as ‘loving’ husband sucked into conspiracies”. The article purported to tell the story of an anonymous woman in Western Australia whose ‘gentle, kind loving husband’ had fallen into an ‘antivaxxer conspiracy cult’.

According to the woman, her hapless husband erroneously believed the vaccine was experimental since no long term studies had been completed. He asserted that it did not provide immunity from infection or prevent transmission. He also warned of adverse effects which might result in death.

Bryce Edwards: Labour’s tax U-turn paints a picture of a dysfunctional Government

Will Labour’s GST U-turn do the Government much damage? Probably not – it’s insignificant in the greater scheme of things. Most likely, the flip-flop will soon be forgotten. What’s more, the details of the ill-fated tax proposal are almost too technocratic to even comprehend or care about.

The problem for Labour, however, is that this latest saga reinforces a number of narratives building up about the Government.

Bryce Edwards: Govt must make healthcare transparent again

The new “Health NZ” centralised government entity, now rebranding as “Te Whatu Ora”, looks like it’s starting life as the epitome of the new public sector model of PR-led public service shielded from full accountability and transparency. The Labour Government needs to force Te Whatu Ora to be transparent and open to scrutiny.

Point of Order: Labour MP may be overwhelmed with correspondence – or perhaps he wasn’t advised of the PM’s transparency pledge

On taking office back in 2017, Jacinda Ardern promised her government would be the most open and transparent New Zealand has seen.

In her first formal speech to Parliament she pledged:

“This government will foster a more open and democratic society. It will strengthen transparency around official information.”

Three years later she laid down a gauntlet for National, saying she wanted to avoid “negative fake news style” campaigns and signing up her party to Facebook’s voluntary political ad transparency tool.

But the transparency message perhaps did not did not get passed down to her back-benchers, as Point of Order’s recent experience suggests.