When I was first elected in 1975, the New Zealand Government operated under the Official Secrets Act. The presumption was secrecy. Government information belonged to the state and officials decided what the public could see.
The Official Information Act reversed that principle. It declared that official information should be available unless there was good reason to withhold it.
That was revolutionary.
Ministers and officials suddenly knew their decisions, papers and emails could become public. Inside Government, the question changed from “can we do this?” to “how will this look when it appears on the front page of the Herald?”.
The knowledge that official actions may one day become public protects against the abuse of power.
When Government operates in secret, wrongdoing can persist for years.
Could the electric-shock punishment of children at Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital have continued if an Official Information Act had revealed its use?
When I became a minister, I was shocked to discover what the Government had been doing in secret. One example was a taxpayer guarantee to New Zealand Steel that eventually cost taxpayers at least $1 billion because of litigation.
But the act is now struggling to cope with the volume of requests.
To test how easy the system has become to use, I asked ChatGPT to generate OIA requests about the scale and cost of OIA processing.
Within minutes, it produced the requests and suggested five departments to contact.
Any citizen could do the same.
On January 29, I sent the emails. By law, they must be answered within 20 working days.
The responses confirm the system is under strain. Only two departments – the Ministry of Health and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet – have provided the information.
The Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment has asked for more time. The Ministry of Social Development and the police have yet to respond.
The Ministry of Health reports that Covid produced a surge of requests that overwhelmed its systems and warns that volumes are unlikely to return to pre-Covid levels.
Internal reports from the Prime Minister’s department say official correspondence effectively doubled in a single year and that its “systems, processes and capability did not support the significant increase in volume”.
To cope, the department now employs a manager, a lead adviser, a co-ordinator and four senior advisers dealing largely with OIA requests – costing about $1.2 million a year.
When I drafted my bill, I assumed supplying official information would be a simple clerical task – copying documents and sending them out.
Today, information may sit across email chains, shared drives, drafts and archives, and privacy law requires every response to be carefully reviewed.
Making a request has become extremely easy. Responding has become slow and expensive.
Now the danger is that citizens can overwhelm the system designed to make information available.
New Zealand is not alone. The Australian Government says it is being swamped by requests and has suggested charging hefty fees.
But charging for information cannot be the answer. Citizens have a right to know.
The Ombudsman has repeatedly urged departments to store information in ways that make it recoverable. Departments’ failure to do this is, I suspect, because being accountable and transparent is not a priority.
My suggestion is to use the technology that created the problem to solve it.
AI can generate requests in seconds. It can also search government databases, identify relevant documents and prepare draft responses just as quickly.
AI could also assess whether information should be withheld under the act – for example, to protect privacy, commercially sensitive information or the free and frank advice officials give ministers.
Early tests show AI can search large databases, identify relevant documents and draft responses far faster than human reviewers.
Initially, civil servants should make the final decisions on release or withholding. But in time, OIA processing could become largely automated, producing responses in minutes rather than weeks.
A law written for the age of paper files cannot survive unchanged in the age of AI.
If we fail to adapt it, the growing cost and complexity of the system will become the excuse to weaken it.
And if that happens, New Zealand will drift back to where we were when I first entered Parliament – when the Government was a secret organisation.
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