NRT: More OIA skullduggery from National
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- Date published:
2:50 pm, September 1st, 2014 - 8 comments
Categories: accountability, Judith Collins, Politics -
Tags: #dirtypolitics, cameron slater, dirty politics, no right turn, oia
Another day, and more evidence the National government is manipulating the OIA process:
Judith Collins’ office processed an Official Information Act request in just two days to release an email embarrassing then Serious Fraud Office head Adam Feeley in 2011.
[…]On October 17 Collins disclosed Feeley had emailed her an apology, but she expected him to travel to Wellington to deliver it in person.
An OIA request by the National Business Review for the email was processed and the email released the following day.
The problem here isn’t that someone got their response within two days – its that other people didn’t. The law requires that requests be answered “as soon as reasonably practicable” (and in any case within 20 working days), but its increasingly clear that what is “reasonably practicable” varies significantly depending on whether you are a critic or ally of the government, and indeed on whether a Minister wants to deniably smear their own staff while being protected from legal consequences.
Meanwhile, OIAs seeking information which might be damaging to the electoral chances of the government are inexplicably delayed…
Which makes that upcoming Ombudsman’s investigation even more urgent, and even more necessary. Ministers should not be manipulating the process like this, and those that do should be named, shamed, and sacked.
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The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
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Have had my own problems getting the factual basis for English’s crowing about how nats policies have lowered teen mothers on benefits.
http://thestandard.org.nz/guest-post-tracey-blinglish-single-handedly-reduces-teenage-pregnancies/#comment-877463
Turns out they have been running a dating/marriage service.
Oh gawd, National’s Princess Parties for Paupers and Lapsed Catholics.
And David Fisher has apparently received some more emails from Rawshark that shows Collins and Slater communicating about the release of an OIA re the Goff briefing in 2011 re the Israeli backpackers.
Unfortunately parliamentary services cant be OIA
It would be cool to find out the average time for release of SIS related OIAs and Cameron Slaters average time
I hope david fisher sent them to the prime ministers office because otherwise we just cant trust them.
Yesterday DC was calling for a royal commission.
Today Key is minimal damage control. Narrow ToR Gov’t Q+A
Can’t we have opposition now rush in a case for Royal Commission with wide ToR “in the public interests of fear of Civic corruption” and crime Act under Section 116 & 105 as Penny Bright has just laid charges against Collins today?
Penny Bright 13
1 September 2014 at 8:27 pm
FYI today I have emailed the Auckland District Commander, Michael Clement, making a formal complaint to Police against former Minister of Justice Judith Collins for alleged violations of s. 116 and s. 105 of the NZ Crimes Act 1961.
The evidence upon which I am relying to support this complaint is the same evidence upon which Prime Minister John Key was purportedly relying to remove Judith Collins from her Ministerial responsibilities.
Penny Bright
Another thing that seekers of information under the OIA notice apparently, is that when the information is released, it isn’t just released to them. So a journalist trying to get background on an interesting topic and build a story on it will have important background material disseminated to them and to other journalists, spiking the novelty of their own original effort and alerting others to the possibility of a story.