The Policy and Memory Vortex

When you start doing research into transport and urban topics and policies, one thing you realise is how messy and chaotic many government websites are. Given that these are (in theory) the most accessible version of the official archive, that’s a challenge.

Anyone who has tried to look something up won’t be surprised to hear that it’s common to hit a dead link, or a missing page.

Trying to access what should be publicly available information can become a mission in itself. And it often feels like the systems that are set up to provide us, the public, with transparent and accessible information are not up to scratch.

Now, let’s be clear, this is a universal issue and not inherently the fault of the public services. Web architecture is a whole thing; and there’s a whole host of technical and background work that needs real and continued investment in order to provide people with intuitive, accessible, and easily updated ways to look up information about what’s going on.

However: it’s also true that when a new government comes in, they will decide to change a bunch of policies and scrap others.

So what happens to the public record when projects are scrapped? The easiest thing – and the most prudent and transparent, bearing in mind that even superseded material constitutes a record of publicly funded work – is to update the front pages, while leaving the rest of the archive intact.

That way, the history of what’s been researched and delivered is still there in the “stacks”, as it were.

This is important not just for purposes of comparison and continuity, but also because people and governments do build on each other’s work over time. They’re also occasionally known to adjust their approach when faced with the evidence on, say, climate impacts, or the rising road toll, or the success of various programmes.

As John Maynard Keynes said,  “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

In a fast-moving world, when it comes to matters of critical public importance – whether it’s safety programmes like Road to Zero, or climate projects like the transport choices projects funded by CERF (some of which are being delivered, and others of which were canned after the election), we need to retain access to plans and policies from our recent past.

With this in mind, I recently requested via the OIA a list of all the NZTA website pages that have been archived or changed on certain topics since the election. Click here for the spreadsheet version; see screenshot of the first page below.

In the first page of the spreadsheet, you’ll see a list of all climate and safety-related pages that have been changed or archived at nzta.govt.nz since October 2023.

The second page of the spreadsheet lists all the webpages that have been archived since October 2023.

This is an interesting set of information, deserving of some further investigation. I warmly invite anyone to have a look though – you could maybe even put some of these URLs into archive.org to check which pages have kept their core information, and what has vanished. And please do share your findings in the comments below.

For example and for comparison purposes, here’s what the “Safe speeds around schools” page looks like now; versus what it used to look like.

21 August 2024 version

9 June 2023 version (1/2)

9 June 2023 version (2/2)

I have questions about this, and no doubt you will too. Starting with…

Why is this material being archived at all?

Why are our records being removed from public view?  Sure, if the government has removed or cancelled a policy, update the page to note that – but why shouldn’t we have intuitive and accessible information about what’s been changed or cancelled? Things just shouldn’t be this messy or this hidden from view.

Why remove timely information on safety and climate?

These are two key factors against which transport investment is measured. Sure, the current government has moved away from requiring emissions impacts to be part of the transport investment picture, and is re-defining or ignored the evidence base for safety outcomes too. But this is all the more reason for the rest of us to have an uninterrupted overview of what has previously been tried and what’s been delivered.

Also, for some communities, these changes and cancellations are still just sinking in. They’re entitled to see what’s been taken off the table.

Why does the archiving seem haphazard?

Work through the spreadsheet list, and you’ll find many links gone altogether, while other pages that relate to the topic remain readily findable if you do a quick internet search. This raises questions like, were some of these pages missed – i.e. was the intention to remove whole bodies of work done under a previous government? Or, just a quick tidy up around the edges? And either way, to what end and at whose request?

What to make of the timing here?

In particular, why were Safety and Climate programmes so quickly removed from public view at the end of last year? Some of this work – e.g. CERF projects that got under way before the election – will be ongoing. What’s the hurry?

Why does it feel like some subjects in particular are being “memory-holed”?

Or is there really “nothing to see here”?

Whatever the case, we need to tackle what appears to be a memory vortex in our agencies and intuitions. It’s just not good for us, as a democratic country, to have our access to information be stuck behind inoperable websites, or having to OIA what should instead be open and frank information.

There needs to be a concerted effort, and actual investment, into developing the digital infrastructure to preserve our policy history. Good, transparent information is vital for us to be able to understand what, and how, policies are being enacted, and remember what we have done in the past.

And one last thought: if everyone involved is confident in their policy-making, then there’s nothing to be afraid of in keeping the archive alive and viewable. By seeing where we’ve come from, we can put what we are doing now into context, compare current results with previous research, test how any changes working to deliver as promised, and ensure accountability for the outcomes.

Any government – and any publicly funded department – should be happy to show its workings.

Otherwise nobody’s work is worth the paper it’s (not) written on.

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