Openness pays for public and pollies

THIS week I was given some pertinent advice during a course for directors of non-for-profit companies.

It was one of several questions directors should ask themselves about making decisions. The question to ask was: “Would the board be embarrassed if its decision and the process employed in arriving at it appeared on the front page of a newspaper?”

Politicians, of course, should ask the same question. I bet a hundred or so British MPs wished they had asked that question before submitting their expense accounts.

They have been up to their necks in ripping off the public purse for manifestly private expenses: porn movies; $45,000 to repair dry rot in a holiday house miles from Westminster or constituency; moat clearing; horse manure and so on.

Some MPs have blamed the press, accusing the Daily Telegraph, which has done a splendid job of dribbling out the material, of a McCarthyist witchhunt. The trouble is there were no witches or communists, but there have been cheating MPs.

What a contrast it has been with the position in Australia.

Here, we have a pathetic scandal of a couple of airfares and a hotel bill – not charged to the public purse for private gain, but supplied by someone else and merely not put on the public register by Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon.

It is not that Australians or Australian politicians are any less venal than their British counterparts. No, they are better behaved because we have a PUBLIC register of interests.

The publication requirement – and primarily that — forces them to be more honest.

Indeed, publication aside, you might argue that the British MPs have the higher standards. They at least had a sense of shame, and shortly after having been caught fell on their swords, wandered into the library with a pistol or found some other characteristically British way of disposing of themselves.

Fitzgibbon, on the other hand, grimly clung to office, blustering excuses, until the latest one looked as if it could never stand up.

The British political establishment fought for years through the courts to prevent the release of the expenses claims. It said it would not be in the public interest for the public to know how its money was being spent by the people the public elected.

In Australia we inherited this British culture of secrecy: everything is secret unless someone authorises its disclose. We started to do something about it with the Freedom of Information Act in 1983, but the culture remained: ask not why I should release this document, instead ask how can I keep it secret.

Australia is half way between Britain on one hand and the US and Scandinavia on the other.

In the US, under its new administration, and Scandinavia there has to be a very good reason not to release material. In Australia, under John Howard, by contrast, the Government went all the way to High Court to prevent the disclosure of some fairly innocuous and straightforward advice on housing grants.

There is no excuse for it. It is cheap and chips to put material on the internet in a searchable form for all to see.

The internet is like turning your filing cabinets around so the draws face the footpath and any passerby can open the draw and take a copy of anything — except they can do it over the internet lines from home at the speed of light. There is virtually no cost.

Indeed, there are huge savings.

The present British experience should tell politicians that a publicity policy is a friend not an enemy. It keeps you honest and it tells your public how difficult the task of government is.

The public and journalists are right suspicious of secrecy. What have you got to hide, they ask.

Not only that, journalists give extra weight to material they have obtained from leaks or obtained exclusively. This is what your government did not want you to know, they splash across the news pages.

The owner of The Times, London, Lord Northcliffe, once famously said, “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.”

He has certainly been proved right in Britain in the past month.

People rightly feel demeaned when the Government says it is in their interests that they do not get to know how decisions are made or that it is in their interests not to have access to information their taxes paid for.

Examples abound. Just this week the Victorian bushfire inquiry unearthed well-thought-out response plans for major disasters which government felt the public should not know about because it might cause panic.

Every year Governments at all levels in Australia make major policy decisions as part of the secret Budget process. But there is little need for Budget secrecy in these days of open markets and free currency trade.

Fewer Budget policies would come unstuck if they had been made in a more open process.

Journalistic culture would change with more open government. More policy debate on the merits would get a run with greater prominence. It would replace the childish triumphalism of: “Look, I got a leaked document. Something must be bad. Let’s splash it over Page 1 anyway, even if it does not in fact amount to much.”

And the bushfire inquiry is revealing how damaging all this media management is. Governments in the past two decades have increasingly required all media comment for the public be made through the minister or some authorised person. So a fire expert is allowed to warn electricity authorities their poles are in danger, but cannot tell the media that the people are in danger.

Governments should start balancing the benefits of open government against the cost of closed government. Secrecy at best delays embarrassing information getting out, and when it does come out it is more damaging than if released routinely.

If the government gets more mature about its information policy, who knows, the media might get more mature in reporting politics.