Transcript
DM: There's a long-standing feeling that the public service hasn't been outwardly focused for a long time in its existence and it's a sentiment that's shared between politicians and members of the general public alike. So I think that's where the motivation comes from where we set some expectations about what government should be doing in terms of communicating with the people who ultimately are paying its bills.
SR: And what does it mean to you as a media practitioner? How difficult has it been in the past to get information?
DM: Well, I've written several times about how we work and live in an information-poor environment. Probably the most egregious example of that is a bit of a mea culpa. I made a mistake to the amount of one billion Vatu in interpreting the 2017 budget and that's about $US10 million and nobody caught it. I actually published an error and I was the person who caught it about a week-and-a-half, two weeks later. This is how widespread the lack of access to fundamental information is, that even people who have a vested interest in tripping up the media, weren't able to catch fairly obvious howlers. It's a really important legislative step. The real question though is how it's going to be implemented. Just this week I asked every single one of my staff to prepare a couple of RTI requests and the real proof of the legislation is going to be how it's going to be implemented. So if you ask me this question again in six months I might be able to give you a clearer answer about how useful it's been and how effective it's been.
SR: And it is a free service, when you apply you don't have to pay anything, but there is a reproduction fee of about US$600.
DM: Yes, that's right. They're reasonable fees for the most part. This isn't the first time that this sort of thing happens. We accept any kind of reasonable fees. The interesting aspect to that part of it is that there is a 50,000 Vatu cap, about US$500, and on top of that the government can't charge us for the hours it spends. So we're not paying salaries in other words. That's a notable thing because it means that this kind of work is expected of civil servants in their normal duties.
SR: And in other respects is the bill pretty much as someone like you would want it to be?
DM: Yeah, it's mostly what we want. We were consulted quite extensively actually. The team that put this together were really, really quite good. I did present them with a couple of questions late in the drafting process. They responded to me by saying, 'you know, well that's probably not going to happen'. You know I'm a little more jaded, maybe a little more cynical than most people. The one fear that I have is there are some mandatory timelines put into place, mandatory deadlines and my fear is that people will draw out the process to the maximum length of time knowing that they've got the law backing them, if you will, and the response that I got to that was that 'well you know the RTI is actually only for extraordinary circumstances' but it never actually says that the RTI bill only applies in extraordinary circumstances, you know. So there's a little bit of grey area. If the bureaucrat wanted to be a bit cagey about how they release information, they could play a bit of a rope-a-dope strategy with the media by slowing down the process to the maximum allowable under the law. So it really does remain to be seen how it gets implemented. I think there's some room for abuse that might be tightened up in the future, but by in large, as a piece of legislation it's a really, really significant piece of policy for the government and we do applaud it.