Information Act hopes too high —Mr Laking

Press, 2 July 1983, Page 8

Information Act hopes too high —Mr Laking

PA Wellington Exaggerated expectations by the public would endanger thfe success of the Official Information Act, said the Chief Ofnbudsman, |Vfr George Laking, yesterday. Speaking at the- Society of Accountants convention in Wellington yesterday on public sector accounting, Mr Laking said this hazard particularly , related to the speed with Which the progressive freeing-up of access to information would Occur. The Official Information Act. which came into effect yesterday relates directly to the Chief Ombudsman’s office. Mr Laking described the act as an imaginative and

important development which had the potential to exercise a material and healthy influence on the processes of government. He emphasised that the extent to which the act achieved its objectives lay in the hands of Government Ministers rather than the public servants. He foresaw some interesting exchanges between information seekers and Government agencies if the decision to withhold information was made on the grounds of a constitutional convention. He cited the accepted constitution conventions as being: ® A doctrine and practice of collective Ministerial responsibility usually ex-

pressed in the phrase, “Cabinet solidarity.” ® A doctrine of individual Ministerial responsibility. © The Government of the day is served by a Public Service which remains politically neutral and in no way involved in partisan controversies. ® The members of the Public Service remain as far as possible personally anonymous. “One of the more significant repercussions of the act will be to require us to examine what precisely these constitutional conventions mean in a theoretical sense, how they operate in practice, and how they are affected by the operation of the new act,” he said.