Open Government Partnership New Zealand National Action Plan 2016-2018
Date: June to August 2017
Commitment 1 progress report: June to August 2017
Commitment 1: Open Budget
Lead agency: The Treasury
To promote public discussion/debate and participation through accessibility of the budget and include relevant groups outside of government in the formative phase of the Budget, ensuring they are informed about the process and issues.
What have we been doing?
- Milestone 1 of the Open Budget was passed with the completion of Stakeholder research by 31 May. The Research was published online on 26 July (see link below). As noted in the research New Zealand's fiscal reporting is considered one of the most transparent in the world, however potential improvements can still be explored. The research includes a number of recommendations (e.g. providing more historical data) which will be an important component of Budget design in the future.
- Work on providing open source budget data has continued. The Treasury met with Statistics New Zealand to ensure the work we are doing is in line with open data standards.
- We received some helpful feedback from the PSA, CTU and Transparency International on mid-term assessment. Common areas of interest were making budget information more accessible (e.g. publishing a Citizen’s Budget that is understandable) and increasing the transparency and participation in the decision making process.
Links
What’s next
- Design for Budget 2018 continues, with the OGP stakeholder research and mid-term assessment feedback informing that process. Any resulting changes will be discussed and agreed with the post-election government.
- Work on open source data is also progressing with IT working on productionising the source information to ensure we develop a repository of data. Beyond that, we are looking create a roadmap to enable us to release the data in an open source format (the “how”), defining an operational Data Management workflow, which is going to be key to “when’ the data is released, and creating a Treasury wide model specifying “what” data is released.