When the Parliament Bill Committee rejected calls for Parliamentary agencies to be subject to the Official Information Act last month, their excuse was interesting: Parliament didn't need the transparency of the OIA because it already had its own transparency regime! Which came as rather a surprise to everyone working in this area. But they had the Protocol for the release of information from the parliamentary information, communication and security systems to point to, and while being mostly about secrecy and MP's veto power over the release of any information relating to themselves, it did require parliamentary agencies to develop and submit to the Speaker:
detailed guidelines for dealing with requests for information about parliamentary administration that balance openness and transparency, privacy principles, and parliamentary independenceI was curious about these guidelines, so I asked for a copy and for information on how they had been publicised. And it turns out they simply hadn't been. While approved by the Speaker at the same time as the protocol, they had never been placed on the parliamentary website - meaning that Parliament's bespoke "transparency" regime had effectively been kept entirely secret, at least from the public. Which is... somewhat odd. If you want to be open and transparent, surely you'd advertise the fact, rather than hiding it? But clearly, I'm just not sufficiently steeped in Westminster parliamentary traditions...
[I should note that the non-publication of these guidelines for nine years is currently being reviewed, in light of the Parliament Bill Committee's report, so maybe they'll finally be posted...]
As for the guidelines themselves, you can read them here: Guidelines for the release of Parliamentary administration information. They basically replicate the OIA regime, with some twists:
- all withholding grounds are absolute; there is no public interest test;
- all advice to or from the Speaker is confidential and may not be released;
- there is no right of appeal, even when Parliament blatantly ignores its own rules (privilege literally means being above the law).
This clearly does not meet the transparency expectations of modern Aotearoa, and pretending that it does is simply a bad joke. Instead, its just grace and favour and arbitrary secrecy unless someone in power decides otherwise. And that is not the level of transparency we expect in a free and democratic society.
Parliament claims that it accepts transparency and the principles of the OIA. If it is serious about that, it should accept the full OIA regime and be fully subject to the law, just like any other agency. And if they refuse, or drag their feet, we can draw our own conclusions about how open and transparent they really are.