Just how often are official information requests to ministers unscrupulously denied, ruled out of scope, for sheer, naked, political expediency?

Few words have haunted the sixth Labour government quite like those uttered by Clare Curran, then minister for open government, in November 2017, when she pledged “the most open, most transparent government that New Zealand has ever had”.

A few years down the track, the boxset scandal that is Stuart Nash has provided another reminder that it is anything but. The email that finally did him in – a disinterred note from 2020 in which he shared confidential details about cabinet proceedings with a pair of highly wealthy men who donated to his campaigns – had been ruled out of scope by his office when an official information request was lodged in 2021. 

Out of scope, they had determined, because it was not written in his ministerial responsibility. Which is mysterious – or, to put it another way, outrageous – given that the email in question directly, expressly, explicitly, definitively was written by the minister based on his dealings as a minister. The OIA request was unambiguous: it sought communications between Nash and a list of donors, listing among them precisely the people to whom that email was sent, Troy Bowker and Greg Loveridge. 

On the face of it, this is a flagrant breach of the Official Information Act, an act of dissembling at best, straight out deceit at worst. It is made worse by the knowledge, confirmed today, that the prime minister’s office was involved in the official information request – not once, not twice, but on three occasions. It never reached the desk of then prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, nor her chief of staff, the prime minister’s office said today, but two staffers, including the deputy chief of staff, were involved. 

The pair today apologised via a prime minister’s office spokesperson for their “error of judgment” in failing to escalate the memo. Hipkins called it an “unacceptable” mistake. It bears repeating, however: this was not some arcane aside, buried on the third page of a PDF; Nash, in his singularly unvarnished style, came right out and said it in that June 2020 email: “I am as annoyed (and surprised) about the final outcome of the ‘commercial rent relief package’ as you are,” he told his mates. A stark, unambiguous, obvious breach of cabinet confidentiality, irrespective of the recipient. But those reading it a year later must surely have known that, even more egregiously, the recipients were donors – the OIA was specifically about correspondence with those who had donated to Campaign Nash.

Christopher Luxon’s suggestion of a “cover-up” on the ninth floor of the Beehive suddenly seem more than quotidian politicking. At minimum, the saga leaves us asking: just how often are OIA requests unscrupulously denied, stonewalled, ruled out of scope, for sheer, naked, political expediency? How often is official information withheld in defiance of the law, in affront to public scrutiny? 

As no less than Chris Hipkins observed in 2019, when state services minister, the Official Information Act has shortcomings. “The reality is I do think there does need to be something more in the act to give it a bit more teeth,” Hipkins said. A review of the legislation, and its manifold gaps, insufficiencies and lack of resourcing, has been pledged and shelved by the current government. 

Hipkins has been focused in his first months as prime minister on pruning the work programme, but this is something that surely needs to be added to the in-tray. What often looks like an esoteric subject of interest to few has suddenly emerged as emblematic of something much bigger, going to the heart of the probity, integrity and basic honesty of government. 

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