Australia’s ambitious action plan for open government

The Australian government will soon be launching a wide-ranging review of its laws and processes for data sharing and public release, with the timetable for setting up a forum to oversee this work and related projects expected to be announced within days.

Recent controversies have highlighted problems with how the government currently runs data sharing and publication, or at least aspects of those processes that citizens don’t like.

Witness the public outcry over Centrelink’s debt recovery program, and the widespread privacy concerns over plans to give the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) access to data from other government departments to cross-match it with its Census data.

When it was revealed that supposedly anonymous health data could easily be re-identified, hastily written amendments to the Privacy Act were rushed through Parliament. Some data practitioners believe those laws are overly broad, or even unworkable.

This review was already in the pipeline, however.

In December 2016, the government released its Open Government National Action Plan for 2016-2018, the first document of its kind. It’s the road map for Australia‘s participation in the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international forum for reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens.

The action plan covers areas including business transparency and accountability; open data and digital transformation projects, such as the release of high-value datasets to drive innovation, and building public trust in these projects; increasing access to government data; improving the integrity of the public sector, with projects looking at the electoral system and political parties, and setting up an open contracting system; and enhancing public participation in government decision-making.

Three of the plan’s 15 commitments are relevant here:

That dialogue mechanism will include a “multi-stakeholder forum”, with transparent reporting and accountability mechanisms. The first steps will be deciding how that forum will work, and then recruiting members.

The timetable for these tasks is “imminent”, according to Katherine Szuminska, co-founder of the OpenAustralia Foundation and a member of the interim working group currently coordinating the action plan’s implementation.