Opening the door on council workshops

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier is calling on councils to open workshops to the public by default, to reduce the perception that decisions are being made behind closed doors.
This follows an investigation of eight councils (not including Gisborne or Wairoa District Councils) — selected for reasons including complaints data, media profile and size — to test concerns that councils were using workshops and other informal meetings to make decisions. He also looked at the way they were excluding the public from meetings.
The findings, released on Tuesday, set out his expectations “that aim to increase transparency and accountability in the way councils use meetings and workshops”.
Boshier found no evidence actual decisions were made in workshops but noted “some degree of straw-polling”, which could be perceived that way. He did find “some practices that were counter to the principles of openness and could contribute to a perception that workshops are not being used in the right way”.
Some councils were effectively closing all workshops to the public by default.
“In my view, that is unreasonable,” Boshier said in a statement.
“Secrecy inevitably breeds suspicion . . . as a matter of good practice, workshops should be closed only where it is reasonable.”
Gisborne District Council holds regular workshops, which are not open to the public, to help get councillors across the detail of the issues they need to make decisions on at upcoming council meetings.
The Herald’s perception for some years has been that free and frank debate takes place at these workshops, and less frequently in open meetings.
In the statement about his findings, Boshier said he did not consider “controversy, complexity, or the potential for embarrassment” to be good reasons to exclude the public.
“Elected members should be resilient enough to withstand reasonable public scrutiny. It is the job they are elected to do.”
Boshier highlighted the Local Government Act’s requirement that local authorities should conduct business in an “open, transparent, and democratically accountable manner”.
As such, all workshops should be open by default with their time and location advertised in advance and a full and accurate record kept, he said.
Boshier said he was “pleased to see a willingness from all eight councils to change practices so that meetings and workshops are more transparent”.
Our Local Democracy Reporter has questions in with Gisborne District Council seeking its response to the Ombudsman’s findings and expectations, and will be able to report on this in tomorrow’s paper.