School of Emergent Priorities researchers track six classes of statutory declaration and find that removing the witnessing requirement from one of them moved the rate of materially incorrect declarations by an amount indistinguishable from zero, while the volunteer scheme that supplies the witnesses read its own drop in throughput as unmet demand.
Six classes of statutory declaration at one state agency, across 72 months and 1.34 million lodgements, one of which lost its witnessing requirement partway through
Nothing happened, and that is the result. Witnessed, and Otherwise Unchanged, released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, follows six classes of statutory declaration handled by one state administrative agency across 72 months and 1.34 million lodgements. Partway through that window one of the six lost its witnessing requirement; the other five kept theirs, and became the comparison.
The team set the agency’s own record of declarations later found to be materially incorrect against the date the requirement came off the form, holding everything else steady against the classes that retained it. The estimated movement is 0.14 per 10,000 lodged, which the paper reports as equivalent to no change at the threshold the agency’s own review process works to.
An absence takes more care to put on the record than a difference does, and we thought this one was worth the trouble of putting there properly.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
A second series runs alongside it. At nine signing stations staffed by the state’s honorary Justices of the Peace, documents witnessed per session fell by more than 40 per cent while the roster stayed exactly as it was, and the scheme’s next annual return described that fall as a shortfall in accessible capacity. Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, called that half of the work “the part our students tend to recognise first”, adding that “an institution hears a number that moves, and the hearing is its own subject”.
The University regards a well-made null as among the harder contributions to bring to the record, and the paper sits within the School’s continuing work on the distance between what an instrument registers and what it is read as registering. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.zjm0s2.