New Zealand’s democratic system operates through a culture and commitment to openness, freedom of information and public accountability. New Zealand’s commitment to the OGP solidifies these principles and values. New Zealand’s first action plan sought to reflect its strong record of openness, transparency and citizen engagement in government by highlighting existing and developing initiatives and by targeting ambitious and transformational programmes for further progress.
New Zealand’s first action plan committed to the following initiatives:
Better Public Services Results programme
Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan to 2017
Responding to the 2013 Transparency International New Zealand National Integrity System Assessment report
Review progress of the Kia Tūtahi (Standing Together) Relationship Accord.
The following table, published in 2014, showed how the plan’s commitments contributed to OGP principles and its ‘grand challenges’:
Open Government Partnership principles
Commitment
Transparency
Accountability
Participation
Technology & innovation
Report on progress towards Better Public Services results
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan to 2017
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
National Integrity System assessment report
Yes
Yes
Yes
The Kia Tūtahi (Standing Together) Relationship Accord
Yes
Open Government Partnership grand challenges
Commitment
Improving public services
Increasing public integrity
More effectively managing public resources
Report on progress towards Better Public Services results
Yes
Yes
Yes
Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan to 2017
Yes
Yes
Yes
National Integrity System assessment report
Yes
Yes
Yes
The Kia Tūtahi (Standing Together) Relationship Accord
Yes
Commitments 1 and 2 of New Zealand’s first action plan comprised ongoing and comprehensive programmes of work across the New Zealand government. Commitment 3, the response to the Transparency International Integrity Plus 2013 National Integrity System Assessment Report (NIS Assessment Report), has required an assessment of progress across a range of governmental and non-governmental actions and agencies.
The OGP recognises that, for many countries, including existing projects and programmes such as Commitments 1 and 2 may be appropriate. The expectation accompanying this is that where existing projects or programmes are included they will be ambitious in terms of expediting outcomes and stretching existing government activities beyond baseline and demonstrate measurable year-on-year advancement against the OGP's grand challenges. While pre-existing, both the Better Public Services (BPS) Results programme and the Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan to 2017 (ICT Strategy and Action Plan) are focussed on achieving system-wide transformational change.
In all cases, there is an obvious additional benefit from including existing work in the action plan – namely the transparency and accountability arising from greater public and international exposure of the Government’s intentions in each of these programme areas, as well as the annual reporting on progress for each programme in an international forum.
In mid-2015, the State Services Commissioner appointed a Stakeholder Advisory Group to provide feedback on the 2014-16 action plan and to help develop New Zealand’s next action plan. The group provided an opportunity for officials working directly on the programmes and stakeholder representatives to consider the nature of reform, and to discuss progress in detail.
1 Following publication of the 2014 OGP Action Plan the environment has continually evolved and Programmes have adapted to reflect this. Particularly, the Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan to 2017 has included one refresh of the Strategy and two refreshes to the Action Plan. The Open by Default commitments under Action 13 of the original Government ICT Action Plan were carried forward into Action Area 4 of the refreshed Government ICT Action Plan in 2014. This change is now reflected in the body of this report.
These pages are the OGPNZ Draft End Term Self-assessment Report. The original document is also provided in MS Word format (.doc 287KB) and portable document format (.pdf 674KB). The content is the same in all versions. These documents were updated on 15 September 2016.