This week I want to introduce For Your Information – fyi.org.nz a website that lets you make requests under the Official Information Act.

What is Official Information?

Official Information is any information held by the Government, including:

• Ministers of the Crown in their official capacity;
• Government departments and organisations;
• Local authorities, territorial and regional councils and community boards;
• State-owned enterprises;
• Educational institutions, including Boards of Trustees;
• Public hospitals.

You can read more about the Official Information Act (OIA) and how to make requests at this government web page: Official Information: Your Right To Know.

What sort of questions can I ask?

Anything really – how much your MP spends on entertaining, how much the crown might make from mining,  what the drinks budget for the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand might be. etc.

You can ask for:

• access to any specified official information;
• reasons for decisions made about you;
• internal policies, principles, rules or guidelines; and
• meeting agendas and minutes of public bodies, including those not open to the public.

However before you make an OIA request you should bear in mind that the information may be available already – there is a lot of stuff already published on government and other organisation websites that a well known search engine might be able to find.

A good tip when using Google is to restrict the domain of your search to specific addresses for example adding  site:govt.nz searches only government websites.

How do I make a request?

The govt website says: Contact the Minister, department, organisation or local authority (Mayor, councillor or council staff ) concerned and ask for the information. Its simple just write them a letter, emails work to.

However it can be tricky finding who to make the request of, and tracking their replies. You might also be interested in finding out whether other people have already made the request and obtained the information.  Your community might be interested in whether some organisations are slow at responding or good at avoiding the question.

Introducing For Your Information

The FYI website is another open source project from the MySociety team in the UK. There it is called http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/ and in 2009 nearly 10% of all official information act requests went through the website.  The New Zealand version is just getting started.  I’ll now walk you through making a request.

The question

I noticed in the Local Board meeting that after all the kerfuffle about having to make decisions urgently as to the chair and other roles that the next actual local board meeting was not scheduled until December.   Surely I thought the board would be wanting to ‘hit the ground running’ as some members frequently said.  But of course that is just the next official meeting. Before then they will be getting up to speed with training sessions, workshops, reading documents, planning and so on.

So my test question is simply to ask for a list of activities the local board is involved in prior to the December meeting.

Signing Up and Signing In.

To make a request you have to be registered on the site.  To do so click on the sign up link top right:

fill in contact details and click sign up.

You will be sent a confirmation email (to deter spammers), click on the link in the confirmation email and then you can sign into the site to make your first official information request.

Finding the Authority

The next step is to choose who you want to make the request to. Click on the Authority link and you will see a very long list – alphabetically sorted, of different organisations.

These are grouped on the right hand side into categories which might make it easier.

We are looking for Waiheke Local Board. Its not in the list so I select City Councils as the category and find Auckland City Council Listed instead.

Click on the council link and then click on the button to make a new request. At this stage you could browse through existing requests to see if something similar has already been asked.  In this case it looks like I’m the first.

Making the request

Now all I have to do is fill in my question:

Click on the preview button and review your posting, you can go back and make further changes if it doesn’t look right.

Note this message at the bottom of the preview:

By default the requests you make and the answers received are placed into the public forum. Thats the point to make information gathered more readily available. However if you have asked for information about yourself you might not want that. In that case follow the privacy link.

We are just about done. Click on the Send Request button and your message will be posted.

You should now be able to see the request in the list on the home page and also under the Auckland City link.

At the bottom of the request you will see the following links. You can update the status when you get a response from the council to inform everyone else of the result. Typically council organisations respond with pdf or word .doc attachments rather than emails and these can be uploaded and attached to the request.

Of course in this example I could have just used our online contact form and asked the local board members themselves.  I’ve done just that and we shall see from whence the best answers arrive.

Conclusion

So there you have it, a straightforward way of making and tracking an Official Information Request.  Of course there is nothing to stop you writing directly to the organisation involved – but the website makes it easier as it has everyone’s contact details and you can share the results of your requests with others.

The site is still in Beta test mode – there are a couple of bugs I found. For example the request I made in the example still doesn’t show up in the my Requests page.  But it works this morning I received an email from Auckland City to say they had received my request and had passed it onto the democracy services group and that I should get a response in 5 days.

I’ll post the results here.

If you make an OIA request relevant to Waiheke consider using FYI and post a link in a comment here so we can all join in.

here is a link to My Request

Usually we just moan about the council and do nothing. So no one knows about the problem until it has been annoying for some considerable time. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily let someone know?

FixMyStreet.org.nz is a great new website designed to do just that. With a very simple easy-to-use interface you can add a new report, mark where the problem is on a map, maybe upload a photo too. The site will then deliver the report to the correct authority that should be able to deal with it.

This idea first originated in the UK with FixMyStreet.com. and thanks to the wonders of open source software and some cool volunteers we now have a NZ version.

So how does it work? Lets say the steps down to my local public footpath have been washed away. I go to the site, click on Report an Issue and enter a postcode, street name or area. This uses Google maps so if you know how to search for places there its just the same. You can view existing issues in that area so you can see if someone has already reported your problem. You can then click on the map at the location of the issue and press go.

On the next page you enter details about the issue. The category e.g car parking, glass, public toilets, refuse etc. and then a description of the issue along with your name and email address. You can also upload a photo if you have one. When you click ‘save’ the site sends you an email containing a link, click that to confirm the issue and the message is sent to the council.

So the council gets the email – they’ve been warned what to expect. They can then resolve the issue the way they normally would. They may or may not reply to you to say what they plan to do.

You and others can discuss the issue on the website. Add updates, maybe together lobby the council to fix it, or fix it directly yourselves. Hopefully the problem gets fixed and you can mark the issue closed.

In the UK today they have :
915 reports in past week, 1,699 fixed in past month, 107,825 updates on reports

In NZ they have… um, 7 reports so far. But then they only just started a few hours ago.

Its not glamorous, it is clever and I commend it to the island. FixMyStreet gets a permanent link on the sidebar.

And now some food for thought from the originators of this idea and some others…
Us Now is a movie that inspires me to do projects like OneWaiheke.

Which of these projects would you like to see going on Waiheke?

Anyway I was a bit concerned that the same would be happening when it comes to the super city and the new local board so I asked our Councillor Denise Roche for some further information.  Here is her reply.

Who can vote?

From what I’ve read the third bill is pretty much the same as it has been under the Local Government Act and what happened last elections. (There might be a change about long term commercial renters – but I’m still finding out about that.)

So what happens is:

All people on the electoral role can vote whether they are renters or landowners.  You do get to vote for your councillor and your local board. – so long as you have remembered to register on the electoral roll.

[ you can check whether you are registered at https://secure.elections.org.nz/app/enrol/ ed]

The issue gets confusing where voters own more than one property in the area or in another area in the Local Authority area.

So scenario A is where Ms X owns two properties on Waiheke and lives on Waiheke: She gets ONE vote for councillor and also for the Local Board for Waiheke.

Scenario B is where Mr Y owns a property on Waiheke and one on the North Shore and his electoral roll address is the North Shore. Mr X gets to vote for the North Shore councillor and the North shore local board AND the Waiheke Local Board. Mr X’s tenant on Waiheke (as long as he’s on the electoral roll) gets to vote for the Waiheke ward councillor and the Waiheke Local Board as well.

Scenario C is where Mrs Z owns three properties – one on Waiheke, one in Papakura and one in Massey. She lives on Waiheke. – The same rule applies: she gets to ONE vote for councillor but can vote for all the Local Boards in the area where she owns properties.

So yes, in a nutshell – it is more than one vote one person for the election of Local Boards.

Clear as mud?

Kind regards. Denise

Now we have a chance to make our voices heard.

If less than 10% of the islanders take up the offer of wheelie bins then there will be no wheelies.

This is crucial – wheelie bins are a fundamental part of the TPI plan.  All recycling has to go to the MRP at Visy – even though this type of processing plant is being seen to be increasingly ineffective.  It is important because once the city is locked into trucks and bins there is no easy way back out to a more effective form of recycling.  This is what we call ‘vendor  lock in’.

You can be sure that once wheelies are on the island – the next tender will not offer any alternatives as so much investment has been made in the equipment.  No other waste provider would be able to complete with TPI as they would not have the equipment to do so.  TPI thus gain a monopoly over the city either squeezing out or simply buying out smaller waste management companies.

Recyclables taken to the Transfer station and sorted by hand do not go to Visy. Instead they go direct to merchants as before.   This is what we want. plastics and glass will actually be recycled into new plastics and glass instead of downcycled into aggregate and dirty fuels, or sent to China – at great transport costs.

So what will happen to our kerbside recyclables?  If we continue to carefully sort and bag separately our recyclables TPI have a problem – they cannot send the material to Visy because the automated system cannot cope with closed bags. So they will have to consider hand sorting or the waste will go to landfill. We will be watching TPI to see if this is what happens

So should we accept bins or bags?

There are two schools of thought here as to the best approach for the island:

1.  That some people do have bins say 15% while the rest do not. This causes TPI to have to provide both services and appropriate trucks at extra cost to themselves, This would be particularly ironic if the bins were placed with the most inaccessible households. However they will use this wedge to push bins onto everyone as time goes by.

2.  That we push hard for everyone to say no to wheelies.  By keeping below the 10% mark we keep them completely off the island.

While the former might make us feel good by hurting TPI. At the end of the day we want what is best for the environment.  We started this fight on the underlying issues of wheelies and perhaps should finish it.

When thinking about this there are some important points to remember.

1.  Wheelies are difficult for Waiheke territory, – the steep driveways, narrow roads, absent households etc.

2.  Wheelies enforce co-mingling of recyclables, resulting in a lower value recycled product at the end of the day.  For example paper contaminated with broken glass cannot be recycled.  Mixed coloured glass cannot be recycled as glass instead being useful only for aggregate.

This isn’t just a cost issue – energy is wasted at each point where the quality of the material becomes degraded.

3.  Wheelies are large – the extra capacity has been shown to encourage more stuff to be thrown away.

4.  Wheelies are part of the commercialisation and corporatisation of waste, although it is better to have some sort of recycling than none, it has been turned into a business where by companies get paid for the amount of waste they manage rather than being paid to minimise waste before it even gets to the bin.

5.  If we can achieve this goal we will act as an example for other communities that think the same way.

Taking these points together we would suggest that the island continues to reject any suggestion of wheelie bins and aims for a zero take up.

So when the council send you a letter asking whether you want bags or bins

… ignore the letter and recycle it.

for more information see this report from WRAP – the waste resources action program on choosing the right recycling collections system.pdf

1. Submissions will close 26 June
2. Hearings will start 6 July and run intensively (possibly 6 days a week, and long days) through to 1 August
3. Select committee will report back to the House on 4 September
4. Hearings will be in Auckland, and will move around different parts of the city, as well as meeting on marae.

source: James Kennelly
Executive Assistant to Phil Twyford, MP

Background 

Waiheke & Hauraki Gulf community members made up nearly 30%  of the 3500 submissions to the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, and were heard by the Commission at the Conference Centre in Claris Great Barrier on Friday June 27, and on Waiheke at an all day  hearing held on Piritahi Marae on Thursday July 10 2008.

The Waiheke community especially supported the ARC Option 5 proposal for a 2-tier system of governance. Under this option all assets would be owned in common by one organisation, and local communities would be granted more devolved powers to build on local strengths and to respond to local priorities.

Subsequently the Royal Commission ( which reported on March 27 2009 ) found in favour of Waiheke and Great Barrier being granted wider delegated powers than they currently receive, in  recognition of their unique character which was not well recognised or understood by the ACC.

The report went on to recognise the special nature of the Hauraki Gulf which has its own legislation.  Subsequently the government introduced the herein referred to Bill on May 13 2009, as the second of a three Bill Auckland Governance Legislation programme.

Although the bill specifically states in section 19.3g that a local board area is constituted for the Waiheke Island community. There is no indication that the board will have the delegated powers to act effectively in the interests of the Island.  

The small number of council members elected by ward will mean that Waiheke does not have its own councillor. We do not know which part of the city we might be bundled together with.  Imagine if it was Auckland Central.