11/20/2009 10:44:00 AM
Opening up government is vital for democracy
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 | Stuart Hayward
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Public Access to Information (PATI) is a fundamental aspect of democracy. The principle is that no one in a position of leadership, whether inherited as a Monarch, appointed as a Governor or Senator, employed as a Civil Servant or elected as an MP, Minister or Premier, should be able to hide his or her actions while on duty from public scrutiny.
Accountability for one's actions is a core ingredient of trust, and in an atmosphere such as we now have in Bermuda where the public has high suspicions and little trust in the actions of its leaders, a robust PATI legislation would go a long way toward starting the healing process. Unfortunately, even in the process of designing this legislation, our leaders seem to be looking more to cover their tracks than to really come clean.
Our leaders have chosen to restrict the public's right of access to information created after the law comes into force. In the words used by Human Rights watchdog Article 19, "That is a very serious and extensive limitation on the right of access... the vast majority of other right-to-information laws apply to all information held, regardless of the date of creation. [To] limit the right in this way is simply not legitimate."
It would appear that our leaders chose to model and justify their draft after the most restrictive of examples, for example, Ireland, rather than by the most open, such as New Zealand. And for all the approbation they will seek from bringing this draft to the discussion table, it will be difficult to believe this leopard has changed its spots; difficult to feel more trusting.
We have been through an era when leaders of all stripes have treated the citizenry with disdain. We had white leaders who from their heights on the political plantation refused to answer questions that called them to account. We now have black leaders who invoke the image of the plantation to fend off questions calling them to account. While their positions relative to history are different, the result is the same: citizens are kept in the dark about affairs of state.
However, in the same way we have been taking pains to highlight the racial evils of the near and far past, we must see the importance of exposing policy and process misdeeds, whenever they took place, by whomever.
An argument posed to justify calling attention to past racial ills is that much of the current dysfunction in the black community is a legacy from past ill treatment. Similarly, whether as a satellite of
the U.K. or as an independent country, recovery from near-and far-past political mistreatment is more assured by exposing the ill deeds of leaders present and past.
This is where our concept of citizenship needs strengthening. We the citizens must see ourselves as deserving of openness and honesty, going forward for sure, but also looking backward.
We have to believe that we deserve leaders who are honest,
politically savvy but not devious, discreet but not secretive, willing to be held responsible and accountable for their actions. And
we need "whistleblower" protection for those citizens who have the courage to speak out about wrong-doings.
We citizens have an important role to play in what PATI turns out to be.
We have to feel entitled to know what our leaders are doing, and why. We have to move beyond the attitude of the past that if the government is doing it then it must be right. We must go beyond taking it for granted that leaders will automatically do right. In short, we need to demand that our PATI legislation is comparable to or surpasses, in its progressiveness and openness, the Freedom of Information legislation that is the 'standard' elsewhere. We deserve no less.
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