I spend a lot of time searching for stats and facts to build the case for policy submissions to government or to add value to my weekly articles.

These can range from data on how many firearms do primary producers hold, how many psychologists are working in regional WA, to how many fatal shootings occur outside of the metropolitan area? All information that can help build the case for farmers to have access to a reasonable number of firearms without undue restrictions.

Try finding most the above information on any government web site. Mind you, such data should have been produced by the government as part of a comprehensive discussion paper to build its case or the redraft of the 1973 Firearms Act.

As an avid reader of departmental annual reports and budget papers, I find there is a staggering lack of information available to the public or even government which can be used to help build the case for or against a new policy position.

Try finding detail on how many trucks and tonnes are travelling on the ex-Tier 3 rail routes such as the Corrigin Brookton Highway, where is that road sitting on the priority list for upgrading, what are the specifications Main Roads Western Australia uses for incremental upgrades, or even something as basic and important as how many deaths and where they occurred on that 100km route.

None of this information is readily available, but such information must be sitting on some computer somewhere in government. However, it is impossible for someone like me to find it when I need to build an argument for more grain freight road funding for key grain freight routes.

Not that I’m surprised by the dearth of information. In a past life working for the Minister for Mines I was staggered to find that there was no central database for every flora, fauna and Aboriginal heritage survey that was being undertaken by the mining sector.

Detailed reports costing tens of thousands of dollars each, undertaken by consultant biologists, botanists and anthropologists were being submitted to the Department of Mines as part of the approvals process, ticked off and then filed and forgotten, only to be repeated by the next explorer who stomped over the same ground years later simply because they could not access past reports.

It was madness unless you were one of the consultants or indigenous elders who was being remunerated for doing the same survey on the same bit of dirt over and over.

We live in a digital era where vast amounts of information are collected by government. It is easy to store and retrieve so why is access to this information stuck in the Dark Ages?

What we need is for government departments’ data to be made far more accessible. We need them to post all the most obvious metrics that we, as taxpayers and consumers of government services, need to hold them to account.

Something as basic as individual school attendance rates, schoolteacher turnover per school, class sizes, academic performance and school violence which is essential for parents and the community to assess if their school is performing.

What about the country’s health system, waiting lists, ED waiting times, staffing levels, beds turnover, flying doctor call outs, access to specialists, age of medical imaging equipment?

Without this information, government ends up throwing good money after bad building expensive tertiary hospitals when maybe they need more nurses or specialists or day operating theatres or country aged care beds.

The State Government continues to maintain a veneer of secrecy across the 40 different government departments which are spending their way through the $40 billion of taxpayer’s money by only publishing high level budgetary information rather than the detailed metrics of actual services delivered.

It’s time for the Opposition to commit to delivering a far more open and accountable government which starts with better access to the government’s own data.