Dead Right by Richard Denniss

Author:Richard Denniss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

Imagine the outcry if a company spent shareholder money training senior staff in how to avoid questions from company board directors. Imagine if senior businesspeople sat in a room practising how to conceal information from their board.

Some argue that without secrecy the public service will be unable to give the government “frank and fearless advice.” But if that is the case, why not simply repeal freedom-of-information laws and explain to the public that democracy works better when the ruled don’t know what the rulers are up to?

Leaving aside the advantages of telling the public the truth and treating them respectfully, the argument that the public service cannot provide good advice to governments if that advice is accessible to the public is contradicted by the fact that other countries manage to do exactly that.

Each January, Australian newspapers fill with stories that flow from the release of twenty-year-old cabinet documents. So secret and so important are the documents on which the Australian cabinet bases its decisions that they must be locked away for decades to preserve the ability of our public servants to provide their much-vaunted frank and fearless advice. But in New Zealand the wait is much, much shorter. Cabinet documents are released soon after decisions have been made, and there is no blanket ban on access to cabinet documents under their equivalent of our freedom-of-information laws. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this, our nearest neighbours managed to lead the world in privatisation and deregulation in the 1990s. Indeed, for many years New Zealand was held up as a paragon of virtue by economic reformers in Australia. When asked why the potential release of cabinet documents didn’t curb his ability to give frank and fearless advice, a Kiwi public servant recently said to me, “Mate, because I know my brief will become public, I know I better make it good. If I cherrypick the data, conceal the problems or ignore viable alternatives, I know it will be me that gets ripped apart. Fear of public scrutiny is what makes me give frank and fearless advice.”

Of course, it is not just our freedom-of-information laws that need to be reformed if Australia’s democracy is to thrive in the age of Twitter. We need to reform our democratic culture. In particular, we need to jettison the idea that it is forgivable for some politicians to behave badly because “the other side is just as bad.” Vibrant democracies thrive on high expectations.

And it is not just the public service and the parliamentarians that need a cultural overhaul. The media and the public must also stand down from their tirade against the trivial. Of course ministers disagree with each other on the best solution to complex problems. Such disagreements aren’t a “damaging split”; they are proof that smart people with different perspectives are doing their job.

Of course ministers disagree with their departments about the best trade-offs and time frames. Revelations of such differences aren’t a “damaging leak”; they are proof that those who face the

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