What I learned as an OIA hunter

Published by The Post, 25 August 2024.

What I learned as an OIA hunter | The Post

Emily Makere Broadmore is a director of Heft, a strategic communications and advocacy firm based in Wellington and Queenstown.

OPINION: A report released by the Clark Foundation on Monday considers the growing perception of corruption, including when it comes to political lobbying and access to official information.

Its foreword, by former attorney-general Chris Finlayson, speaks more directly – claiming continued misuse of the Official Information Act by ministers and their departments and a call to critically examine our commitment to transparency.

As a director of a business that works hard to advocate for a diverse range of clients to government, this report is timely and interesting. Much like our constitution, our official information systems have evolved via a set of accepted social norms rather than a set of hard and fast rules. This means an incredible amount of access and flexibility, but it does also mean that we have to be alert to the places where public trust can be undermined – and in an age of dis- and misinformation, trust is more important than ever.

My first job out of university was at a now non-existent government department. One of my responsibilities was to track the Official Information Act (OIA) requests. I was green, naive and eager to nail my first role. So, I inadvertently turned myself into an inhouse Over-Due OIA Hunter.

I purchased a large whiteboard from OfficeMax and began listing all the due dates for the OIAs as they arrived at the ministry, then tracked their progress militantly to ensure they were released on time. I think I even had this listed as an achievement on my CV in my early 20s, which may explain why I was never hired by a government department again.

Instead, I ended up in politics and soon knew the OIA legislation from a different angle. Specifically, the acceptable ways in which to prevent the information being released. The reason for my job, as one public official told me soon after I was appointed as an advisor to a minister, was to ‘make the minister look good’. This meant looking out for them, looking for red flags and managing those flags.

Withholding information was never done out of spite or for ill purposes, but the art of withholding that information was a core part of my job. Many, on both ends of the political spectrum, would call this good political management, but as Chris Finlayson points out, these are the types of gaps through which corruption can slip in the absence of more formal guidelines for how we manage information and influence.

New Zealanders are incredibly informal, and this does extend into government relations work. Any member of the public can simply walk into Parliament and settle themselves comfortably in the café for a coffee, lying in wait for a particular MP or their staff to pass by. It’s this access to parliamentarians and their staff which provides such transparency, but such access does rely upon knowledge.

This means there is somewhat unavoidably a revolving door between the political world and the world of lobbying. Many lobbyists are former parliamentary staffers, some are former parliamentarians themselves. Our relationships, on this tiny island at the bottom of the world, are everything.

As such, there’s a necessary dance at play between all of us in the sector, regardless of whether we are lobbyists or on the receiving end of lobbying. Because we are friends, former colleagues, acquaintances, potentially relations. But these relationships and this dance are important for the very reason that lobbying exists in the first place. It is critical that all types of organisations get the chance to participate in a democracy, and those who understand the system have a role to play in ensuring it is accessible to others or, as the Helen Clark Foundation report endorses, in providing the tools for people to advocate for themselves.

Much of the work of businesses like ours is about supporting groups to access MPs and ministers by sharing knowledge and ensuring that activities are conducted in a professional manner. We are proud of the professionalism and would sign up to a mandatory code of conduct for the sector in the interests of public assurance about the nature of the work we do. We hope our colleagues would too.

However, as the report recommends, there is potentially a more urgent need to address the ability for ministers and MPs themselves to move swiftly from a seat in the debating chamber to the lobbying world without some form of stand-down period. A space to allow relationships to cool and some turnover of staff to occur might provide a little more distance, and even out the inherent opportunism.

A healthy democracy requires politicians to hear from a broad range of sources and a diverse range of voices. And if there is a means to quiet a whisper of potential corruption, then we should. Maybe 20-year-old me and my OfficeMax whiteboard were not too far off the right idea.

*The Clark Foundation, founded by former Prime Minister Helen Clark, published a report into political corruption in New Zealand on August 19. The research identifies five areas most vulnerable to corrupt practices: the practice of political lobbying; political donations and elections funding; access to official information; foreign bribery; and beneficial ownership of corporate entities.