[LINK] Online Consultation with Australian Government

[Tom Worthington]

At 02:54 AM 12/07/2008, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
>Tom writes,
>
> > The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO)
> > have released the report, "Consulting with Government - online":
> > <www.finance.gov.au/publications/consulting-with-government-online/>. ...
>
>... Personally one would hope for some legislative muscle behind the 
>initiative ...
>timely and appropriate Ministerial responses to public comments ...

Writing responses to letters to the minister (called "Ministerials" 
in public service jargon) is a time consuming and mostly useless 
process. As a public servant I had to prepare some of these.

The object of the exercise for the online public comments proposed by 
AGIMO is to help formulate policy. It is not intended for a sort of 
online complaints department. So it is not useful to have the 
individual replies to every comment the public posts, even if that 
was feasible. Replying to each comment would not inform the debate, 
would be a waste of resources and tempt the government to tell each 
person what they wanted to hear.

What is needed is a collective reply which shows how the different 
comments were taken into account in coming to a decision. This is 
what is usually done with parliamentary enquiries: the various 
submissions are summarized, options outlined and the a recommendation 
put. The recommendation does not necessarily match what the majority 
of submissions said, but at least you can see what was done.

There is a danger that if individual replies were provided, the 
government would be tempted to use the same manipulative techniques 
of political parties. The parties keep track of the views of voters 
on subjects so they can write to each voter telling them what they 
want to hear. Different voters get different replies on the same topic.

This could be applied to a government comment system and automated: 
the system would carry out an analysis of the comment to see what it 
was about and what view it expressed, then standard paragraphs 
expressing sympathy with that view would be selected to form the 
reply. If you were in favour of something the reply would indicate 
the government supports your view, if you are against whatever it is, 
the reply would suggest the government is with you also. The system 
would also summarize the views expressed and tabulate the depth of 
feeling on different viewpoints, but that would not be made public as 
it may result in an informed debate.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University