That's an excellent question.
I agree with the carrot and the stick. I'm a big fan of carrots and I've used them with this government, but I'm also a believer in sticks. So the question is how do you manage both.
And the question of culture is enormously important. It doesn't actually matter how many rules you have in place. What I'm most interested in is how you create incentives for public servants to want to share more. And I think there are a couple of things that we have at our disposal on how to make that happen.
First, most public servants have grown up in an era where ministerial orders or deputy ministerial orders have been to not share anything because there's only risk involved in sharing. And how do we begin to crack that? How do we begin to change that culture?
The first one is there are lots of examples around how transparency can advance a policy agenda. But my most favourite example, and the one I always give in talks, is around restaurant inspection data. It turns out in L.A. they decided they were going to publish restaurant inspection results on the front doors of restaurants. The moment they started doing that, you had more people going to restaurants that had better results and fewer people going to restaurants that had worse results.
And wouldn't you know it, but it turns out that as a result, you also had fewer people ending up in the emergency room with food-borne related illnesses, which is the most expensive point of contact in the health care system.
So if you want to drive a policy outcome of reducing health care costs, it turns out publishing restaurant inspection results in a useful manner is a great way of driving that. So we have a whole bunch of examples where transparency and sharing data actually advances policy agendas. So driving those stories through the public service and causing public servants to think about where transparency is actually strategically in your interests would, I think, cause people to begin to re-evaluate why they should be sharing.
And then if we could get them to be thinking about that, we might begin to crack the door open a little bit more where they see that actually the risks of sharing this other information doesn't quite feel as high as it did before. Now they see that there are actually benefits in these policy areas where sharing created these outcomes they liked.
So that's probably the direction I'd try to go.