"It seems extraordinarily high and very difficult to justify," Mr Strachan, of Waitati, said of the central charging level yesterday.
"It crystallises all the doubts we've had from the beginning."
A recent report by Dr Don Gilling, a former professor of accounting and finance at Waikato University, said that "only one dollar in three" in the Archives New Zealand budget was allocated to "direct archives activity".
The remaining money was spent on Internal Affairs-imposed central costs,
Dr Gilling wrote.
By contrast, the amount spent on depreciation, central costs and capital charge by the Ombudsman was 37.1% of total expenditure, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade it was 15.1%, and for the New Zealand Defence Force 30.8%, he wrote.
Between 2013 and 2018, archives overhead costs had risen 279%, and the budget allocation for management of public archives had fallen 29.6%, he said.
Mr Strachan, who is a former Archives and Records Association (ARANZ) president, had been seriously concerned when Archives New Zealand lost its separate departmental status and was merged into Internal Affairs in 2011.
Promises had been made that costs would be shared, efficiencies gained and that IT and digitisation benefits would flow, but the claimed merger benefits had not been achieved.
Mr Strachan, who is also a former Hocken librarian, said the 67% figure Dr Gilling provided had further highlighted the need for the current Government review of Archives New Zealand, and showed the need to remove archives from Internal Affairs.
Dunedin resident Peter Miller is a former ARANZ president and former regional archivist at Archives New Zealand's Otago-Southland regional office in Dunedin.
Mr Miller said the 67% central charge was "huge", and showed that earlier promises made about wider benefits, and protecting the budget of National Archives, had not been kept.
The chief archivist should be an independent officer of Parliament, like the Privacy Commissioner, and not just a third-tier official within Internal Affairs, he said.
