PAUSE & EFFECT
Transparency can be a murky business.
When a mountainous iceberg arrives on the horizon, what you can see is crystal clear. But what lurks invisible below the surface is unknown, except there’s probably a lot of it.
It’s the same with people, organisations, politics and governments. You see what they want you to see. It’s the “you don’t know what you don’t know” conundrum.
This is what bothers National’s shadow attorney-general, Chris Penk, about the televised and livestreamed afternoon Covid-19 conferences. On the one hand, senior members of the Government, often Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, are talking directly to the public about Covid matters, giving the appearance of transparency and a commitment to open government. On the other, they refuse to release documents and advice on which they have based their wide-reaching decisions, such as alert levels, until time has ticked on and they have become less relevant.
Penk says the early boast of this Government – that it would be “the most open and transparent government ever” – has been a punchline of Beehive jokes since before the resignation of Cabinet minister Clare Curran, whose responsibilities as Associate State Services Minister included open government, after she was caught acting in a nontransparent way. “And things are hardly clearer now.”
Curran’s struggles with the issues of transparency were not the usual ones many face of trying to extract information from officials and ministries. Instead, they led to her downfall as a minister after two contentious meetings – the first with then-RNZ journalist Carol Hirschfeld, which she initially failed to disclose, and the second with entrepreneur Derek Handley over his interest in a public service job, a
