This report presents findings from an Information Management (IM) survey conducted over a 6 month period with 254 New Zealand public sector organisations, including 176 public offices and 78 local authorities.

This pape argues that while public trust in government generally has been falling, trust in governments to manage personal information has remained steady and strong, in comparison to other organisations.

While there are still a small number of commitments delayed in this first National Action Plan, Australia has taken great strides to improve transparency, accountability and public engagement over the course of this action plan cycle, with the majority of the plan’s commitments either on track or now completed.

This review was aimed at identifying improvements that could be made to the classification system. The system is a set of policies and rules for identifying, marking, handling and controlling access to sensitive official information. The review also recommends a new approach to systematic declassification of historic classified records, focused on topics of interest.

The 'lost filing cabinet' incident that triggered this review would have been very serious for any public service agency, but was especially so for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), given its position at the apex of Commonwealth agencies.