In principle, there is nothing wrong with doing this. Chief Minister Andrew Barr told the Legislative Assembly it was "simply a recording and accountability measure. Generally speaking, people are in favour of more data being publicly available."

Yet behind this decision is a clear belief that parliamentary questions and related attempts to scrutinise government (such as freedom of information requests) are often wasteful and more about political point-scoring than improving government.

Unfortunately, that view often holds true. One need only look to the Federal Parliament, where, in recent years, Labor and Coalition oppositions clogged up questions on notice with ridiculous demands for every detail of government spending on, for example, office plants and coffee machines. Those questions created thousands of hours of work, yielding no obvious public benefit.

As the official who explained the ACT government's decision to Liberal MLA Vicki Dunne wrote, it is "intended to transparently communicate the level of resourcing needed to respond to each question on notice and, by extension, support an understanding of why some questions may not be answered due to an assessment of when there would be an unreasonable diversion of resources".

Nonetheless, blaming those who ask the questions misses the crucial point: the problem of "wasteful" transparency only exists where the government lacks transparency to start with.

Much of the information that parliamentarians, journalists and members of the public seek could be published routinely online, before anyone requested it specifically. This is particularly true for data on spending. It was usual, in years past, for budget and financial statements to show exactly what governments intended to buy and what they actually bought. These days, such papers regularly say only that x million dollars was spent pursuing a vaguely worded "outcome".

The same is true for the advice governments receive. Here, these documents are largely excluded from public view; governments say publishing them would damage the trust between ministers and public servants. In other countries, such as New Zealand and in northern Europe, they are made public by default – the idea being that poor advice could be scrutinised and its weaknesses corrected, before poor decisions are made.

This policy of "proactive disclosure" was introduced in federal law in 2010 – and was an utter failure. Federal bureaucrats simply refused to implement it, publishing no more than they did previously.

The ACT's new FOI laws, enacted this year, also mandate proactive disclosure. We hope ACT public servants show their federal counterparts how to make it work. As Barr says, being more open is the new norm. It may even end the Assembly's "wasteful" transparency games.