Senator Lundy was invited to speak about her experiences and understanding of Open Government and the Australian Gov 2.0 agenda at the New Zealand Labour Open Government policy consultation on the 28th August 2010. The Senator gave a pre-recorded video presentation with her thoughts.
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Senator Kate Lundy. Thank you very much for the invitation to share my thoughts at you Open Government policy consultation.
We’re of course in a bit of an interesting place here in Australia having had our Federal Election but still awaiting negotiations to see if Labor is in a position to form Government, with the support of the Independents. So not withstanding all of that, I’m really happy to run through how we got to where we are in Australia with regards to Open Government and Gov 2.0.
I’ll start by saying that it’s been a fantastic journey so far. I won’t define Gov 2.0 because I know you can go to my website, katelundy.com.au and see the definitions that I’ve described, but rather I thought I’d focus on the practical realities of implementing a more open government using the tools of the Internet, in my presentation today.
So first of all I’d like to talk about leadership.
In all of the work we’ve done, leadership and the need for leadership, whether it’s political, structurally, organisationally and within the public service, it’s critical. And I should start by saying that we got to where we are because a huge amount of groundwork was put in through a series of reports. And I’ll come to those.
But the leadership that comes from the political level, I think culminated in our Declaration of Open Government. Our former Minister for Finance, Lindsay Tanner, and Special Minister of State, Joe Ludwig, put together the Declaration of Open Government on the back of a recommendation from our Gov 2.0 Taskforce, and that Declaration really articulated the highest level political commitment to achieving a more open and transparent government in Australia.
I was very proud of it, it was actually released literally days before the Federal Election campaign was called so I was very pleased to have it formally on the books as a statement of the commitment of the Labor Government.
The structural leadership comes in the form of legislation creating a new office for an Information Commissioner.
The legislation that passed the Parliament, again just in this last year, set up two major reforms. One in relation to Freedom of Information and how we have a legislative framework for the release of information into the public domain, but the second part – and I think it probably attracted less attention in the public debate and discussion – was the creation of the Office of the Information Commissioner.
Within that office our Privacy Commissioner, our Freedom of Information Commissioner and so forth will exist.
But the Office of the Information Commissioner will oversee what those open information policies will look like, and how they’re implemented across the Commonwealth Government, across Australia’s Federal Government.
I think the policy leadership that will emanate from the Office of the Information Commissioner is a very key reform.
Finally our workforce. The Commonwealth Public Sector is an incredibly efficient and proud workforce and one of the key themes of many of the reports we’ve done into Gov 2.0 reform and open government point to is the level of leadership that is required within our agencies and departments. Without that commitment at the Secretary level within agencies, presuming quite rightly in our case that the political commitment is there, change isn’t going to happen.
It needs to be celebrated and encouraged, and I think rewarded when it occurs. So the leadership that is required within agencies and departments is quite profound if we are going to progress the open government agenda.
The second area I want to discuss in the practical tasks of implementing Government 2.0 is a plan.
What does a plan look like for the public sector and government. And I’ve mentioned already a couple of reports. The first one that really set up on our way is titled “Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0“. This is the report of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce. It was chaired by Dr Nicholas Gruen, and had a fantastic group of people from the private and public sector. The vast majority of its recommendations were accepted by the Government and I have described it as a definitive blueprint for implementing Gov 2.0 and aspects of open government for Australia.
So this was quite a critical step in getting to where we are. We couldn’t have achieved what we’ve achieved or even gotten to the stage of the Declaration of Open Government without the hard work that was put in by committee members in compiling this report in a very short space of time.
It’s been internationally commended for its detail and its practical ideas and it’s something I’m immensely proud of.
The other quite important report towards reform is the “Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of the Australian Government Administration“, so what happens next with the Australian Public Service. This was prepared by an advisory group that was chaired by Dr Terry Moran, who is the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
So very much a whole of government analysis of what’s happening in the Australian Public Sector. Importantly, this report also dwelt on the need for cultural and attitudinal change within the Public Service and I’ll come back to that one shortly.
So both of these reports received effectively endorsement across the board in government. Both reports emphasised the need for cultural and attitudinal change across the Public Sector to more effectively use, deploy and actively engage with citizens via the Internet.
Both reports acknowledge that social media, and very specifically public servants interacting with the citizens they serve via the Internet – there is a key shift that needs to occur if we are going to leverage the service benefits and the engagement benefits that I think the Internet offers.
And they both come back to that point about needing that cultural and attitudinal change to embrace those technologies in the day to day business of government.
The other important thing about both of these reports is they fit together nicely.
The Gov 2.0 Taskforce report looks at the nuts and bolts of achieving greater transparency in government, with a particular emphasis on cultural and attitudinal change, but also the release of public sector information into the public domain. So that was a key theme of that Taskforce report which distinguishes it I think from Ahead of the Game, which looks more closely – as you’d expect – at the workforce issues and the types of skillsets and the level of innovation that we will need in our future public service if we are going to adapt to the challenges of the future.
So together, they form a very comprehensive plan for the future of how we achieve more open government and the uniting message of them both is the culture change so it’s important to see them as a collective group of documents that provide the path forward.
A consultative public service responding to changing needs, to me, is a very important issue. Both reports picked this up, but how do we create a public sector that is more citizen-centric, more responsive to both the individual needs and also recognising the differences in communities.
Federal Government policy making tends to err towards one size fits all, whereas what we know about the challenges of our different communities right around the country is that each one is quite unique. Some share characteristics – they’re fast growth corridors, or they’re sea change environments with a huge tourist season explosion of population, or they’re out of suburban metropolis with all of the challenges of transport corridors, so they share attributes in some respects but they’re all unique in their own right.
How do we construct Federal policies which are responsive to those circumstances? And I really believe that both of these reports and the way of the future is being able to deploy the sophisticated tools of the Internet, and indeed clever software to be able to adapt our policies to be fully accountable, fully transparent, but much more responsive to those individual community needs.
If you translate that to the citizen-centric approach, the same can be said for government services to families, to citizens, in however they live their lives.
For citizens to be able to navigate the different spheres of government – here in Australia it’s Local, State/Territory and Federal, so three usually – through citizen-centric centric service delivery is I think already achievable and I’m really proud of our australia.gov.au domain that is going a long way to pull in that range of services across government in a central place where citizens can give as much information as they would like and get feedback about what is available in their community, as individuals, what services they are able to access at whatever point in life they find themselves.
So citizen-centric services but community centric policy as well I think is one of the exciting prospects that Government 2.0 offers us.
Finally, open public information, and PSI in the public domain is a key platform. It’s about making sure what information is collected at taxpayers expense, by the government, is made available to tax payers, to the citizens.
So it’s kind of a crude way of articulating it but it is a principle that I think sits at the heart of open and transparent government. Information collected that may seem useless in one capacity could be mashed up and made immensely useful for communities to help explore their own characteristics, perhaps fuelling exciting new policy ideas of the future.
So PSI and releasing that Public Sector Information into the public domain will allow it to be mashed up, to be applied to innovative new uses and I think this is an important part of it.
It presents a particular challenge though, from a human resource and workforce perspective what needs to change within the public sector to make the availability of that information the default, the norm, rather than the exception. And this is where I think our FOI reforms play a role.
We as a Government firmly believe that the default position of information should be that it is public unless there is a very good reason for it not to be.
Structurally and I guess practically that is a huge challenge within the public service, because it means publishing information in advance of a period of time than it otherwise would have been. So we need to address what the systems of government look like behind the scenes to try and achieve this goal.
I’ve been a member of the Australian Archive Advisory Council for this last term, and that’s been instructive as to what is a Commonwealth record at that next step when you’re looking at archiving and storing those records. But I think the experience in the Archive as to what constitutes a record and what its conditions are of making it publicly available through the formal Archiving Act, is illustrative and instructive about the approach we need to take to making information public well in advance of their sentencing under the Archive Act and I think that’s an exciting area that we’re exploring and I certainly recommend those recommendations adopted from the Gov 2.0 Taskforce to go down that path.
It’s a very practical area, but one that I think we’re determined to pursue.
Finally the enabling policies that underpin all of this. In Australia we’ve done a number of really big things that I think are enabling of what we talk about as open government, and one of them is the National Broadband Network.
Because the tools of openness in the 21st Century are on the Internet. It is a digital environment, and how can you have genuinely open government if you don’t also have a strategy for universal Internet access that is both affordable, and high bandwidth.
Well we do, and we do because we’re investing in a National Broadband Network. So for me, that is an enabling policy for open and transparent government, and it provides a prerequisite for open and transparent government to be genuinely democratic.
Without that policy, our investments in open and transparent government would be the purview of the privileged few. The socio-economic demographic that can afford high bandwidth, high quality Internet access. Well, the NBN resolves that problem for us and I’m incredibly proud of that. That way, the NBN is not just economic infrastructure for the future, it’s certainly that, but it’s also social infrastructure for the future that will forever underpin democratic engagement and involvement and participation by citizens in this country.
There are a few other enabling policies I’d like to mention. Certainly our investment in computers for schools and our investment in research and development through our public university system all form a part of it, and I’d like to also fly a flag that I think we can do better in investing in our public library system to make sure we have those public places where citizens can come in in a supported environment and learn about the array of government services that are online or what opportunities exist for them to participate in our democracy, engage with perhaps their local member, or indeed other citizens.
And a supported environment to do that, those public access points I think will be a critical part of the mix. For me personally I see our public library network, which is phenomenal here in Australia, I think we could strengthen it more and provide additional resources to make sure they can fulfil their charter in that regard.
After all librarians are information professionals and they have an extraordinary skillset that I think we could tap into more effectively as a government.
Finally I’d like to turn to a brief example about how we have experimented with this in our office. I should have acknowledged Pia at the beginning of my talk. She’s here with me now helping me record this presentation but of course Pia and I collaborated in the development of our Public Sphere events.
In essence we felt the need to demonstrate that it was possible to have a policy consultation that used the tools that exist within the cloud, the social networking environments, to enhance that policy conversation and make it more inclusive, more transparent, more accountable in that regard, but I think more inclusive most of all.
The Public Sphere did that. It was an event that extended over a couple of months all up, where we used the digital environment including a WordPress blog, various social media environments including Twitter, Flickr, a live feed, and live streaming on the day to capture and share the thoughts of a given policy topic.
It probably won’t surprise you that one of the topics we had for our Public Spheres was Gov 2.0, and I was very pleased, in fact Pia and I were both thrilled that the Government chose to launch their Government 2.0 Taskforce at our Gov 2.0 Public Sphere back in mid last year, so we’re very proud about that.
But the Gov 2.0 Public Sphere that we held showed that when you put people who are enthusiastic about policy ideas in the same place, deploy a whole range of social networking tools for the applied purpose of capturing the thoughts and inspirations and ideas around a given topic that is becomes a marvellous way to consolidate all of that and draw out of that conversation very specific policy ideas.
And I won’t go into too much more detail about a Public Sphere other that we were able to use the environment of a wiki, and then more software that applied a rating system to some of the ideas that came out it, an endorsement system, we were able to come out with a very specific document that encapsulated recommendations on where we could go forward in that particular area of policy.
Pia and I are very proud of Public Sphere, we’ve not only got the policy outcomes of the three different Public Spheres, but we did an event brief as well, so you can explore the methodology in full, all of the participation statistics and the outcomes again on my website, so just search on “Public Sphere” on katelundy.com.au.
The benefits of the Public Sphere show that there is nothing to be afraid of in going into a completely open environment. We didn’t require any prior registration, we used the good will and had a great deal of faith in the community who were passionate about open government in Australia not to abuse that environment, and they didn’t.
It self regulated into a very sophisticated and I think relevant conversation around the topic at hand. And was I think a credit not only to everyone who participated, but also how you can use the tools that already exist.
Pia and I have often contemplated what it would be to have a budget to do these things with, but we were able to demonstrate with Public Sphere that with a, I have to say, very talented volunteer community combined with the tools that already exist in the cloud, the citizens who are already occupying those social networking environments of their choice and then applying that to a conversation was a really effective way of doing it on an extremely low budget.
So it’s not about reinventing anything, it’s about clever use of what’s already out there.
The other really important feature of Public Sphere is it’s inclusive nature. It was actually possible to participate in Public Sphere and not have any digital technology at all and still have your voice heard. If people emailed us, or wrote us letters, or just turned up on the day to the seminar part of the Public Sphere and said their piece, they were an equal contributor to people who were blogging, or contributing via the Twitter feed, or presenting, or commenting on the wiki later.
So the idea is that it’s leveraging the benefits of the technology, but not being exclusive about the technology, or exclusive about people who are not comfortable with the technology if you know what I mean.
So the great strength of it is that it enhanced what we think are the very strengths of the digital environment without accidentally enhancing the weaknesses of the old system.
Our democracy has evolved in a way that we like to have conversations in rooms about topics and have the chance to think about them afterwards, Public Sphere builds on all of those strengths of a traditional consultation.
And reaching out to known experts in the field and extending a hand of invitation to participate is a key part of it. The nice thing about Public Sphere, you don’t have to be a known expert to participate. You could be a very clever enthusiastic member of the public, who would never otherwise have an opportunity to share their idea. Well Public Sphere gives you the opportunity to share your idea on equal status with known experts in the field, and we think that is a marvellous application of a Public Sphere policy consultation environment.
So, I’m running out of time. The impact of the Public Sphere I think is it demonstrated that it can work in a completely open in a completely open environment. Governments need not be afraid of doing things in a completely open and transparent way. The goodwill that exists within the hearts and minds of the vast majority of citizens only needs to be tapped into, because most people want to make a difference for the better of their communities.
I think we can do a lot better using the digital tools that already exist in the Internet to bring those people into the conversation and I really commend the spirit of open government to all of you in that regard.
I’m really proud of the fact that the Public Sphere events stand out there as an exemplar. I think they compliment the amazing work of the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce, the Ahead of the Game Report, as I said the enabling investments of the National Broadband Network, the Digital Education Revolution.
All of these things fit together and point to a future which is very exciting, very open, transparent to the point where the default principle is openness and availability of information, and this can only enhance our system of government and people’s confidence in our democracy.
So good luck with all of your deliberations. I’m sorry I can’t be there with you in person, but I hope you get something from my presentation today and you are inspired to take whatever the next steps are for New Zealand.
Thanks very much.
