KEY POINTS:
Commissions of inquiry normally hold public hearings and go out of their way to engage the public in discussion of the subject under inquiry.
The exercise is so public that it can be dismaying to be reminded it is designed to produce advice for the Government. Aucklanders have been given that reminder about "their" royal commission on the city's governance.
After a meeting with mayors and chief executives of most of Greater Auckland's cities last Thursday, the Prime Minister said his Government had not decided whether to release the commission's report as soon as it received it or hold it for release with "our perspective".
Act Party leader and Local Government Minister Rodney Hide was also at the meeting and said he would be recommending the Cabinet sit on the report for a couple of weeks, then release it with the Government's response.
That is the usual practice in this country and it has been accepted too meekly. There is seldom a good reason that advice to ministers needs to be kept out of the public eye until decisions are made on it.
There can never be a good reason when the advice has been largely gathered in public from public representatives. The motive can only be to minimise any political hardship the report might present for those who commissioned it.
By delaying its release until decisions have been made on it, the Government is able to upstage the report. Any recommendations not adopted become academic; public attention naturally concentrates on what is going to happen.
Better that, from the Government's point of view, than arousing possible public consternation over proposals it has not endorsed and has no intention of carrying out.
From the point of view of public interest there is every reason to release reports of inquiries before decisions are made, not after. The conclusions of a conscientious independent panel carry far more weight than the compromises made by people in politics. The panel's proposals deserve to be aired and discussed as serious possibilities. Politicians might be surprised at the reception for propositions they might presume to be unpalatable.
More worrying, a declared intention to withhold a report until decisions are made could influence the commission's conclusions. It might settle for recommendations likely to be politically acceptable for fear that a stronger prescription would leave the commission looking ineffectual.
This risk becomes particularly acute when the commission sees the Government talking directly to interested parties while the inquiry is under way.
In their meeting with mayors last week, John Key, Rodney Hide and Associate Local Government Minister John Carter will have heard fierce opposition to any reorganisation scheme that does away with the existing councils. Both sides said the commission had been the "hot topic" of their meeting.
What is the commission to do? Knowing what the ministers have probably heard, and knowing its report may be kept under wraps while the Government decides what to do with it, the commission might not be as daring as it might otherwise be.
My Key was careful after the meeting to say that he was "not going to pre-suppose what the royal commission should suggest", but he would have been wiser not to have entertained the subject at all.
The commission's report is due in two months and there will be time enough to hear from the mayors then. Mr Key should release the report as soon as he receives it, and let citizens consider it seriously. It is Auckland that should make the final decisions.
