Let us be clear about what transparency actually means, by Nick Mann

Openness. Transparency. Accountability.

Nice words – always found in manifestos and government documents.

But too often, just that, words.

Cast your mind back to May 2011 – a new States, a new hope for an era when the public would not be left in the dark.

There was a deliberate move to distance this States from the last – the Sarnia Spring and all that.

Fast-forward to now and we have sadly found out just what was meant by transparency.

It is not given – it has to be forced – and the echoes of bad times gone past ring out loud and clear.

Last week was dominated by revelations about the failure of the Cadastre computer system – something civil servants kept from their board, and then the board, having rebuked them for that, decided to keep from the public.

Why, after all, would the public care about a failure in the public service?

Then, as the story unfolded, those at the top spent time trying to downplay it, and at worst mislead. A classic political trick of creating a fog of information, perhaps?

Treasury and Resources minister Gavin St Pier retweeted a comment made by another Twitter user stating that the back-up systems had worked following a failure with the server.

Not just that, he favourited it, a clear sign of endorsement.

But the back-up did not work – something Deputy St Pier knew.

Worse still, it had not been working for months and no one had noticed – something he also knew.

'The back-ups did not work fully, that was why some data had been lost,' he said.

'I was not seeking to be misleading but the point is all the key data was restored over that weekend.'

When asked why the board had not made the server failure public when it was told about the situation, Deputy St Pier said members wanted to understand the implications of what they had been told and decided to wait for a senior officer to prepare a report on what had been lost.

'We received that report and discussed it in early June,' he said.

He added that once they had the report they understood the implications and it was regarded as an operational failure that 'probably wasn't worthy of making further comment'.

'A number of changes have been made to the systems and processes to make sure something like this doesn't happen again,' he said.

What this teaches us is that where the threshold for publication is – before politicians will routinely release information about problems – is much higher than the taxpayer would expect.

Of course, at the time Treasury and Resources was already flailing around trying to get on top of a story about SAP – the new States computer system that has caused it so much embarrassment recently.

Unable to let a comment go in the States by former board member Garry Collins that suggested that there were secret reports into the system, Deputy St Pier rushed out a brief statement the same day and then a more detailed one the Monday after.

We are told there are no secret reports, just confidential ones. Not a distinction that really washes well with the public.

But no worries, the board decided early last week that one of these confidential reports could now be released.

And we all cheered.

Except we didn't, because the whole saga just reinforced the feeling that it all had to be forcibly extracted, that we were being 'treated' to this one report, after the event again, but not to be trusted with any others.

But this muddled approach to openness is not just the preserve of Treasury.

The Policy Council is also struggling.

Yesterday we ran the story about Deputy Peter Gillson finally getting answers to his rule six questions about the cost and amount of 'golden handshakes' to former States employees.

He had been declined the first time around because it was too much trouble to find the information, but thankfully he persisted and the chief minister answered – which, basically, he had to do without a ruling from the presiding officer that it was not in the public interest.

Sadly, the story does not end there, because we now find out that the Policy Council, the supposed beacon of transparency and the ones leading that culture change in the States, decided to miss out some of the payments.

All this at a time when the new information code has been passed and with it a presumption of publication.

It is not just the media that can struggle to get straight answers, but politicians too – either from their colleagues or their staff.

There are other examples – just think how long it took Health and Social Services to go public with its budget problems last year, or the furore over Home's handling of the AFR saga, for example.

It is the non-information, misinformation and the not-so-slick sidestepping of answering questions until backed into a corner that is doing nothing to build trust in this government.

And everyone in it will get tainted by association.