---

"I only read the papers for the obituaries, to see if I'm still alive."

How many times have you heard that lame joke? It's true, though: The stories that aren't in the paper are just as important as the stories that are.

People read newspapers largely to find out what HASN'T happened.

Has the stock market crashed? Have your children been arrested? Has your next-door neighbour been murdered in his sleep? Is a deadly disease sweeping the island?

Good news is often the absence of bad news.

That's something the government needs to think about as it mulls over the final details of its Public Access To Information bill.

Judging by the omissions so far - the exclusion of past information being the most obvious - the government is petrified that giving people access to information will produce "bad news".

I'm sure there will some unpleasant discoveries.

But on balance, "freedom of information" is likely to reassure citizens that bad things AREN'T happening. That the good people are in the majority, and win in the end. Citizens will end up trusting their government more, not less.

Freedom of information laws are some of the most effective tools for exposing corruption and incompetence.

The government needs to remember that this power also makes them powerful tools for showing that corruption and incompetence is NOT taking place - as long as they are not watered down with exceptions.

When sceptical citizens are allowed to poke through the government's closets and filing cabinets, they'll usually walk away bored and empty-handed. It's the ultimate "good news" story.

But as long as significant parts of government records remain out of bounds, the government will always be suspect, no matter how squeaky clean it really is.

How many times have you heard government leaders complain that they are wrongly accused or suspected, of wrong they never have done.

It drives them nuts. It frustrates and confuses the electorate, inflames political rhetoric, and deepens divisions.

Secrecy breeds suspicion

Secrecy allows our island's fears and suspicions to fester and multiply. Where information is missing, prejudice and assumptions fill in the gaps. Political and racial divisions get worse, not better.

Indeed, it is hard to see how we can ever emerge from Bermuda's tense political and social quagmire without (as the PLP so ironically put it in its winning 1998 election platform) "the sunshine of public scrutiny."

Freedom of information will require an historic attitude adjustment by authorities.

Politicians traditionally boast about their accomplishments, and hide, deny or dismiss any blunders or misjudgments.

It is very difficult for a government to correct problems, under this traditional system, because any correction will be seen as an admission that the problem existed in the first place.

In the wake of the Bermuda Housing Corporation scandal, for example, the government did nothing - no stricter code of conduct for ministers or tougher anti-corruption laws - because it officially denied the problem existed. And for decades, Bermuda governments were slow in addressing a public education crisis that they could not admit existed - but that publicly accessible education data would have made impossible to deny.

So freedom of information is likely to force our leaders to be open about problems that emerge, and forthright about dealing with the consequences - the embarrassment, the personnel changes, the resignations and dismissals, and most importantly the need to fix things.

Governments that know they can't hide things will be far less likely to do things they need to hide. If our government starts acting openly, the rest of us - the public and the media - will have to act more maturely too.

We'll have to accept that every government runs into problems, and it's not necessarily a scandal or an outrage if they address the problems squarely and honestly.

We might even start judging our governments, and our politicians, on what they actually do and fail to do, and not on our assumptions or the rumours we have heard.

That's when Public Access To Information will be working its finest work, spreading the good news that there's no bad news to be found.

It'll be almost as good as looking in the morning paper and finding out you're not dead yet.[[In-content Ad]]

---