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OIA book out
By Steven | December 6, 2007
Nicola White has just released her book on the performance of the Official Information Act. She gives it a B. The book is called “Free and Frank: Making the Official Information Act 1982 work better”. It’s indispensible for anyone who wants to understand the workings of the OIA. The fact that Nicola used to work at the Department of Prime Minister and the Cabinet, and is now deputy Auditor-General gives her conclusions and recommendations extra zing.
Nicola’s research is largely based on interviewing 52 people who use the OIA – as requesters, officials, Ministers and their advisers, and Ombudsmen. My research (see the link on the left) was largely based on examining about a thousand OIA requests and responses, but we reach much the same conclusions. The OIA works pretty well for requests for run-of-the-mill information, with the main problem being a lack of understanding of the OIA’s provisions. But try to make a request for a lot of information or for politically sensitive material, and it’s a different story.
“Free and Frank” is particularly valuable for its nuanced treatment of views from inside the public sector, particularly concerning the need to protect the decision-making process by insulating it from publicity that would damage the policy process.
Nicola finds, in essence, that requesters are from Mars and officials are from Venus – and this produces a spiralling lack of trust that undermines both the OIA and the processes of government.
Like almost everyone who cares about freedom of information issues, Nicola is a big fan of pro-active release of much information using a system of early categorisation. She also makes the extraordinarily sensible suggestion that a set of subsidiary rules giving guidance on recurring OIA issues – treatment of drafts, personal diaries, tender documents, names of officials, status of correpondence to ministers from members of the public, etc – should be drawn up and made available. In fact, many of these rules of thumb already exist in various places (casenotes, the Ombudsmen’s annual and quarterly reports, conclusions from investigations, etc), and could easily be compiled to supplement the more general guidance available in the Ombudsmen’s existing OIA practice guidelines.
So, read it.
One quibble: the book could have done with an index.
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