In defence of communications staff (Patreon)

Yesterday Andrea Vance burst into the Twitter NZPOL limelight with a column about the opacity of the current Government.

She opened with a quote from Jacinda Ardern in 2017.

“This government will foster a more open and democratic society. It will strengthen transparency around official information.”

Then, in a dramatic counterpoint, Andrea said:

Since then the number of faceless communications specialists has skyrocketed. The Government’s iron grip on the control of information has tightened.

Later on in the piece Andrea complains about the increased number of communications staff hired by Government Departments.

It’s now very difficult for journalists to get to the heart and the truth of a story. We are up against an army of well-paid spin doctors.

Since the current Government took office, the number of communications specialists has ballooned. Each minister has at least two press secretaries. (Ardern has four).

In the year Labour took office, the Ministry for the Environment had 10 PR staff. It now has 18. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade more than doubled its staff – up to 25.

MBIE blew out from 48 staff to 64. None of those five dozen specialists could give me those figures for many weeks – and again I was forced to ask the Ombudsman to intervene.

The super ministry – and its colleagues uptown at the Health Ministry – are notorious for stymieing even the simplest requests. Health’s information gatekeepers are so allergic to journalists they refuse to take phone calls, responding only (and sporadically) to emails.

But it is the New Zealand Transport Agency that take the cake: employing a staggering 72 staff to keep its message, if not its road-building, on track – up from 26 over five years.

There are a few things that don't fly with this piece.

First off, as many people have said, communications staff and "spin doctors" are not the same thing. There are huge numbers of people who focus on internal communications, people that might do outward facing newsletters or other such comms, social media folk, website managers; these are all roles that get caught up by the "communications" word but have nothing to do with media.

Also, Andrea talks about how this year she's made more complaints to the ombudsman about OIAs than in any year. She said that every complaint had been held up; first off, we don't know if these OIA complaints were for OIAs to government departments, or to Ministers. I think that's an important distinction. Because I've worked in OIA response teams before. And I can assure you that we agitated for releasing as much information as possible. And we'd hustle to get them done in the 20 working day timeframe.

But the thing is we were often understaffed. And we were understaffed because the departments were desperate to avoid the perception that they had too many communications staff. Ironic, isn't it? The two main things that media complain about - too many comms staff, and OIAs not being responded to properly - could be helped if we hired more staff.

A journalist took to Twitter to debunk the argument that not every communications person was a "spin doctor", by arguing that every person who was releasing communications on behalf of a government department was engaged in a form of propaganda. Which is rubbish.

Our world leading Covid response was down to amazing communications. Not just from the Prime Minister, but the social media campaign - Unite against Covid! - the dubstep remix of Dr Bloomfield's Covid message was developed by a government department communications team.

I saw information the other day that said trust in our elections was increasing. This is due to the excellent communications work that the Electoral Commission does.

It's a super duper long stretch to claim that either of these are "propaganda". Instead they're communicating for the public good. It's not all about journalists.

That's not to say there isn't a problem with OIAs and the Government's lack of transparency. Andrea cites some quite legitimate gripes in her column with specific Ministers. And I am 100% sure that the Government does try to release information in a way that favours them. This isn't new. It's not good, but it's not new.

Yes, this Government may be worse than others in regard to abusing the release of information. The grandparent of this is Helen Clark's Government introducing a "no surprises" policy, where government departments had to flag with Ministers' offices when potentially embarrassing information was going to be released.

Clark's Government abused this, Key's Government made it worse again, and I'm led to believe that Ardern's Government is worse again. It's the law of diminishing commitments to transparency.

So while Andrea does have some real and viable complaints, she undermines her own argument by having an unnecessary swipe at public servants, and also complains that one of the solutions to her complaints is a bad thing.

I have long argued that Government Department CEOs - and maybe even Minister's - should have their pay tied to OIA compliance. Make it a key KPI of theirs. If the ombudsman finds their offices/departments has been breaching the OIA in bad faith, then punish them in their pocket. Rich people care about losing money a lot.

There's probably an entire rewrite of the OIA that needs to happen, and the ombudsman probably needs some actual teeth to enforce, but until that happens, I expect to see the same column time after time, no matter the government.