Everyone makes mistakes: it is what one does next which matters. This week, the chief ombudsman stated, with no equivocation, that the Office of the Prime Minister had failed egregiously in its management of a briefing note prepared by Fonterra and Z Energy and presented by them to the then chief policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office, in 2024. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Photo: RNZ / Calvin Samuel Had ordinary procedure been followed, the documents would have been filed and ultimately available for release under the Official Information Act, subject to the restrictions on release of confidential and/or sensitive material required by that legislation. Except, when the Environmental Law Initiative (ELI) lodged an OIA request in 2025, which should have captured this briefing note, it was not provided. The existence of the document only came to light later as part of court proceedings and it was later revealed that it had been emailed to a private account. Five weeks ago, the ELI lodged a complaint and the ombudsman undertook to carry out a rapid investigation, one which resulted in this week’s damning findings. The chief ombudsman paints a picture of an office where, at least in this instance, material provided in hard copy form did not make it into the electronic records system. This is a vital step for many reasons. Quite apart from OIA requirements, if a decision-making process comes under scrutiny, it needs to be able to be demonstrated that all reasonable information was considered. Also, for the benefit of history, these documents will eventually become part of the archival record. The ultimate decision-maker on the release of material, the prime minister’s chief of staff, did not know the document even existed, so could not fulfil their obligations. The office’s response to the chief ombudsman ascribes this sorry situation to human error and accepted that the handling of the briefing note did not meet the standards expected of staff ‘‘in this or any ministerial office’’ and the situation was being treated ‘‘with the seriousness it deserves’’. And so it should. These are basic requirements on every floor of the Beehive, and most especially the ninth floor. It is somewhat concerning that the long since departed policy adviser told the inquiry he did not recall any training, guidance or support from the Department of Internal Affairs on how files must be managed — something which DIA does actually provide. How many other staff might have slipped through without that grounding in governmental basics? More alarming, so far as the ombudsman was concerned, was the policy adviser’s statement that it was ‘‘well documented’’ that the DIA’s IT system was inadequate to deal with the many files generated by the government and that personal email was often used for government business. Whether that is true or not was beyond the scope of the inquiry, but the ombudsman undertook to follow up on it as anyone doing such a thing significantly raised the risk of a document not being identified in response to an OIA requests — as happened in this case. Having said that, the report’s observation that even if personal addresses were being used, simply cc’ing in an official email addresses would ensure a record would likely be kept in the right place and was a simple way that present and future requirements could be met. The prime minister, to his credit, has not tried to obfuscate on this incident. From the start he has acknowledged that correct procedures did not seem to have been followed, and, having received the report, Christopher Luxon immediately accepted its findings and all of its recommendations. Those included a review by all his staff of their personal records to ensure there were no more documents in places that they should not be, and that another extant document from Z Energy be released. The former is being done now, the latter will be once its contents have been reviewed. A mistake has been made and it has been owned up to. The Prime Minister’s Office must now demonstrate that the suspicions of the Opposition that something is rotten in the state of Denmark are misguided and that it fully and properly meets its obligations.
