A guest post by Rhys Hurley, Investigations Co-ordinator for the Taxpayers’ Union:

Taxpayers have a right to know what is being done with their money. The Official Information Act (OIA) is one of the only tools they have to find out. 

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has, however, asked his officials to review the cost of this system and even floated the idea of restricting access to some of this information.

He is right to acknowledge that the system is under pressure. Requests are up. Complaints into response times continue to rise. The process has become slower, more legalistic, and far more defensive.

But Minister Goldsmith’s potential restrictions are a huge problem. If the question is how to reduce costs, the answer cannot be to shut out the public.

Making it harder for the taxpaying public, journalists and elected politicians to get information will not fix the problem, but will just weaken decision makers’ already-limited accountability.

Instead, reform must start from first principles. The 1978 Danks Committee, set up to review how government information was handled and which ultimately led to the OIA, was clear: official information should be made available unless there is good reason to withhold it. The whole point was to move away from secrecy as the default.

That principle is now being eroded.

The pressure Goldsmith is pointing to is not just requesters with too much time on their hands, but the result of how the system now operates. What should be simple has become slow and bureaucratic.

Even the insiders agree. The Public Service Census 2025 described a culture focused on avoiding OIAs, with processes clogged by multiple approval layers and an approach that treats requests as a risk rather than a duty. That is the real problem.

Why people are having to ask for information in the first place is another question for the review. Too much information that should be routine seems to be locked up until somebody forces it out.

OIA volumes rise as departments are repeatedly asked for the same briefings, the same communications, and the same spending data, with each time seeing the possibility of the four-week process starting again from scratch. 

The obvious answer is to publish more of this data up front. Other countries already treat this as standard procedure.

In Canada, agencies must proactively release contracts, grants, expenses, and audit reports on one central portal. Australian agencies publish disclosure logs, so every information request is available to all, and repeated requests are less likely.

The United Kingdom also has mandatory transparency rules around what information must be released by departments. Unlike New Zealand, Brits also have the right to send their questions to Parliament.

By comparison, New Zealand has no consistent approach. Instead, people are forced to rely on the Ombudsman just to get information that has already been deemed in the public interest in previous rulings and guidance. This drags the process out and further drives up cost.

The real issue here is that too much information is still being held back in the first place. 

If any findings of the review recommend a cost-recovery exercise and clamping down on requests, the Government will have learnt the wrong lesson. Yes, responding to OIA requests costs time and money, but that is the cost of a healthy democracy.

There is a better approach. 

By setting rules on what should be proactively published and following the Ombudsman’s guidelines on what should be considered in the public’s interest, there would be less need for requests in the first place. 

Additionally, a streamlined sign-off process so multiple layers of bureaucracy don’t need to approve a response would cut through the layers of management that often lengthen the wait times on responses. 

Either of these would reduce pressure on agencies while strengthening transparency and accountability. Both would solve the problem Minister Goldsmith is looking to fix.

When governments feel pressure, the instinct is always the same: release less, control more, and complain about the people asking questions. That would be a mistake. 

Open government itself is not the problem. The problem is that every request is being treated like handing over the nuclear codes.

If ministers are tired of taxpayers asking how their money is being spent, the solution is simple: Stop making them ask.

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The Judicial Conduct Panel’s report is scathing of Judge Aitken, but concludes her behaviour doesn’t meet the threshold for removal as she is such a junior judge, and due to retire soon anyway.

Some of their findings were:

• the Judge’s actions were a serious breach of comity
• the Judge had a poor understanding of the constraints upon a serving judge, and hence a significant lack of appreciation of the seriousness of her actions
• find as a fact that the Judge spoke loudly and called out or shouted into the Wintergarden thereby causing a disturbance during Mr Peters’ speech
• the Judge did not appear to have any comprehension about how her conduct might be perceived
• the Panel rejects the proposition that the Judge’s conduct was in her personal or private capacity
• the Judge did not respect the role of the parliamentary process on this matter and risked undermining public confidence in her impartiality on the proper role of tikanga in the law in a matter that could come before the court.
• We have no doubt that the Judge’s conduct would have likely affected the perceptions of other members of the executive and at least some of the general public as to the Judge’s ability to silo her own political views when dealing with matters of political sensitivity
• the Judge understated the nature of her conduct, in particular portraying the incident as “trivial” and telling her head of bench that a “brief comment” had been blown out of all proportion
• The Judge failed to comprehend that her revulsion at a view expressed on a political issue and her own self-conviction on the point do not provide a justification for her speaking out in a context where the principle of comity applies.
• It gave the Panel no confidence in the Judge’s understanding of the restrictions that apply to a Judge speaking on political matters
• Certainly aspects of the Judge’s subsequent conduct and some of the justifications advanced for it in this inquiry have given the Panel pause

So pretty damning stuff. But in the end they say it does not meet the threshold for removal because:

Ultimately however we have concluded that, although the conduct in its entirety came reasonably close to the line, the case falls short of the high bar warranting removal. Having regard to the jurisdiction in which the Judge sits, her previously unblemished record, and her better understanding of her judicial obligations as explained in these reasons, we do not consider that there is a realistic possibility that an order for removal of the Judge would be made.

They also noted her warrant expires in February.

The Post reports:

Wellington City’s residential rates have more than doubled since 2012, making them among the highest and least affordable in the country, a new council-commissioned report says.

Including the levy for the new $511 million Moa Point sludge-minimisation plant, median Wellington City residential rates soared from $1985 in 2012 to $5177 last year – far outpacing the 56% rise in median household wages over the same period, according to an Infometrics rates-affordability report commissioned for the council’s next long-term plan.

That’s 160% increase in a decade. Staggering. And it hasn’t been core infrastructure. It has been a series of political projects and white elephants.

The Spinoff becomes an unlikely fiscal conservative:

Tourism minister Louise Upston was excited when she announced that Robbie Williams will play two shows in Auckland and Christchurch later this year. “It’s fantastic to welcome a showstopper act like Robbie, giving fans the chance to see him entertaining us,” she said in a press release.

The Robbie Williams concerts will receive funding from the government’s $70m major events and tourism package. Upston was definitive that the government funding was essential in securing the concerts: “Without government investment, New Zealand would not have been part of the global tour,” she said.

The fund was in part a response to the public perception that a number of high-profile international acts had skipped New Zealand in recent years, including Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish. But does Robbie Williams really fall into that category?

The two concerts this year will be the 13th and 14th times that Robbie Williams has performed in New Zealand. In 28 years, Williams has never toured Australia without including New Zealand.

Excellent point.

Linkin Park were among the first recipients of the government fund, announced in December. They performed to a packed crowd at Spark Arena last week. It was their fifth show in Auckland and their fourth at the same venue. Auckland is far from the most obscure city the band is visiting on their 100-stop From Zero tour – the upcoming leg features Nürburg, Germany, Donington Park, England, and Werchter, Belgium.

So the fund is really just corporate welfare for bands.

You can make a case for film production subsidies because films can only be made in one location, and there is a globally competitive market.

But subsidies for major events are not needed, in my opinion. Bands will come to NZ if they think the revenue they will gain from doing so is greater than the marginal cost of adding us onto an Australian tour.

Investing in infrastructure such as Eden Park, so they can perform at a large venue can be worthwhile. But simply paying them money to come over, is not.

An Auckland Councillor has revealed the Council has spent $5 million on catering over the last four years. This is staggering.

In 2022 they spent “just” $750k and in 2025 they spent $1.4m. Wasn’t Wayne Brown going to cut costs?

The Herald reports:

A cowboy-inspired bar in Wellington has been caught selling alcohol to a 16-year-old twice in one year. 

Now, Dakota Bar could be riding the mechanical bull to an alcohol licensing ban as it has a 100% fail rate for serving those underage in police operations. …

They served alcohol underage in Sep 24 and Oct 25. It is highly highly highly unlikely that this was the only times. Let’s say they serve 100 people a night so around 40,000 times a year. The chance this was the only time they didn’t check is 1 in 40,000 x 1 in 40,000 or 1 in around 1.6 billion.

This is not rocket science. If they look under 30, you ask for ID. This doesn’t require weeks or training. It is a simple requirement.

Ubiaga said he’d welcome a system where every venue gets tested regularly by police, so no one felt singled out and the venues “genuinely cutting corners” would be caught out.

“I just wish they’d work with us more. To be a fair test they need to test every venue at least once every two years, not just a handful of venues.”

I don’t understand why it is not more regular. It would take one police officer and one teenager a few hours to do say all of Courtney place. They could do it monthly.

For many years I have regards the term aspirational as polite code for “No actual chance of this happening in reality”.

I now wonder whether the term ambitious is heading the same way. The Post reports:

A scathing report into the $1.3 billion project to allow bank cards and phones as payment on public transport has found the delayed launch dates are still “ambitious” despite ongoing cost risks.

The National Ticketing Solution (NTS) was first signed off 16 years ago and is designed to replace all of the country’s public transport cards and make one contactless payment system for all travelling via bus, train or ferry.

I still regard this as a solution looking for a problem. Certainly each major city needs an app or smart card solution for integrated public transport use. But I don’t need my Wellington snapper card to work on Auckland buses.

The official Washington DC crime data shows that when Joe Biden was President, there was an average of 19 homicides a month in Washington DC.

So far in 2026 there have been 11 homicide in three months, so under four homicides a month.

Coincidence?

I was hoping that the conflict in Iran would end with Iran’s nuclear stockpile removed or destroyed. Most optimistically I hoped the Iranian people would finally be free of their despotic regime that so recently killed 30,000 peaceful protesters. I hoped Iran would no longer have the capacity to threaten outside their borders and support terror networks throughout the Middle East.

I was alarmed when Trump threatened to blow up all the bridges and power stations in Iran. I’m not one of those saying that it would automatically be a war crime, as some may be dual use. But a blanket destruction of civilian infrastructure would be.

When Trump then threatened to end a civilisation, that didn’t just jump across the line, it went 1,000 kms past it. A nuclear power threatening to destroy a civilisation is 25th amendment territory.

Now you could argue that Trump’s deranged rhetoric would have been justified if it had scared Iran into some sort of major concession such as handing over the uranium. But instead he got basically worse than nothing. He agreed to use the Iranian 10 point peace plan as the basis for negotiations during a 14 day ceasefire. They are:

• Strait of Hormuz to be reopened “under the co-ordination of the armed forces of Iran”
• Establishment of a “secure transit protocol” in the Strait of Hormuz
• The war against “all components” of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance to end
• US forces to withdraw from “all bases and points of deployment within the region”
• Full payment of compensation to Iran 
• Lifting of all primary sanctions 
• Lifting of all secondary sanctions 
• Termination of all UN Security Council resolutions
• Termination of all IAEA resolutions on Iran’s nuclear programme 
• Release of all frozen Iranian assets and properties abroad

I am glad Trump did a mega TACO, as destroying Iran’s civilian infrastructure would just make the Iranian people more pro-regime.

But you can’t hide it is a humiliating backdown. Iran has lost much of its missile capability, which is good. But it can build more. But it has shown the US that it can close the Strait of Hormuz unless you are prepared to risk naval assets in defending ships there (like Reagan did).

Last week I posted on how problematic the size of NZ government is.

Duncan Garner picked up on it here – and also interviewed David Seymour on it. Seymour seemed unusually tepid on bringing about smaller government – even going with the “at least we are not Labour” type statement.

I mentioned that the Public Sector is “crowding-out” the Private Sector and making genuine economic growth extremenely difficult. Treasury notes this:

“Government spending in New Zealand has significantly expanded, with some estimates noting the expenditure-to-GDP ratio has doubled from roughly 20% to 40% since 1960, signaling substantial expansion. Concerns exist that high public spending, particularly post-2023, is absorbing resources and potentially slowing private sector growth, with some estimates attributing roughly 20% to 25% of recent economic underperformance to public sector consumption and investment.”

To add to this; a large government sector does nothing to help productivity. How many of the bureaucracies could be regarded as efficient?

Labour productivity in 2023

Copy link to Figure 4.6. Labour productivity in 2023

GDP per hour worked in current prices and current PPPs

Note 1: Maybe we are only ahead of Mexico and Columbia because some of their “horticulture” doesn’t get counted.

Note 2: Our Tax/GDP is 34%. Examples of those ahead of us on productivity are: Australia 29.4%, Switzerland 27.1% USA 25.2%, Ireland 21.9%.

As noted on the first post. Which political parties will run on shrinking the size of the State and – if going into co-alition – make it a genuine bottom line?

In $US Australia’s GDP per capita in 2025 was $65,946 to NZ’s $49,383 (a gap of $16,563).

In $US Austalia’s GDP per capita projected for 2030 is $79,623 to NZ’s $58,552 (a gap of $21,071).

As Duncan Garner noted – this government has broken significant promises to shrink themselves and bring down spending and borrowing. We don’t need/want a change in government – but we NEED this government to change their approach quickly.

[email protected]

The Post reports:

The head of an investment fund which is being shut down by the Government has been on an annual salary of nearly $1 million paid by the public purse, which the climate change minister says is “hard to justify”.

Green Investment Finance was established under the previous government to support investments in emissions-reducing ventures, but in April last year it was announced it would be wound up in April last yearafter anger among ministers over the fund’s failed investment in rooftop solar installer SolarZero.

That is an obscene salary for the role.

The GIF is very different to say the NZ Super Fund or the role overseeing ACC investments. Their job is to get the best return for their organisations, and their performance can easily be judged by the return on investment they get. Good decisions by them can make tens or hundreds of millions more money. So I have no problem with those roles getting paid seven figure salaries.

But the GIF was a form of corporate welfare. It was to take taxpayer money and invest it in approved decarbonisation industries. They failed and lost $116 million in the last year.

CTV reports:

The head of Canada’s largest airline has been summoned to Ottawa to explain why he spoke only in English when he offered his condolences to the families of those killed or hurt in the collision between a plane and a fire truck at a New York City airport on Sunday.

The Official Languages ​​Committee voted on Tuesday afternoon to call Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau to the capital to answer for a four-minute online video in which he spoke only two words in French.

I could see this occurring in NZ in 20 years or so (or less).

Radio NZ reports:

The Greens have launched their housing policy for the election, promising legislation to limit rent rises at 2 percent a year.

A poll of NZ economists found only 6% of them think rent controls are a good thing. This is not an issue on which experts disagree. It is a proven failure.

Co-leader Marama Davidson said with rental costs increasing from 19 percent of incomes in 1988 to 30 percent in 2022, 

Interesting she stops there. Because the policies of the current Government (stop loading costs on landlords) has seen rents remain static. The median rent in December 2023 was $600 and today it is still $600. So she ignores the policy that has worked for one that never works.

The Taxpayers’ Union released:

The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union can reveal through an Official Information Act request that the Ministry for Ethnic Communities funded $30,000 for Asturlab Cultural Centre to run a nationwide advocacy campaign, using taxpayer funds to promote pro-Palestinian narratives on the conflict in Gaza.

The campaign was a political lobbying campaign encouraging people to lobby the PM and MPs on this issue. I’m all for NGOs lobbying using their own money, but here we have bureaucrats handing out money to NGOs to lobby the Government on a highly contested political issue.

“The fund’s own rules say it does not support political objectives, yet this application was approved within days, with a Ministry advisor even helping tweak it to get over the line.”

But it doesn’t stop there.

So this political lobbying campaign got $110,000 from taxpayers from two different government entities.

Bryce Edwards writes:

In Dunedin, a charity called Te Kāika has been receiving tens of millions of dollars in government funding to provide health and social services to some of the city’s most vulnerable people. Over the past year, the Otago Daily Times has been methodically pulling back the curtain on what is going on inside this organisation. The picture is not pretty: nepotistic governance, unexplained payments to the leadership, staff fleeing in droves, government contracts unfulfilled, a youth facility shut down over abuse allegations, and a senior manager convicted of domestic violence. The Department of Internal Affairs is now investigating.

And yet, almost nobody else in New Zealand media or politics has said a word about it.

I had never heard of Te Kaika until Bryce wrote on them. I’m glad he did.

But the governance was flimsy. For nearly five years, the board consisted of just two people: chairwoman Donna Matahaere-Atariki and Matapura Ellison – a breach of the charity’s own constitution, which requires a minimum of three. The University of Otago, which had been involved early on, withdrew its shares in 2020, and all the outside voices on the board departed.

Then in June 2022, founding CEO Albie Laurence was abruptly replaced by Matt Matahaere (the chairwoman’s son). Her daughter, Winnie Matahaere, manages social services. When the board was eventually expanded to three members in 2023, the new addition was an accountant who had previously been suspended from practice for two years for breaching the chartered accountants’ ethical code.

Ask yourself the obvious governance question: how could the chief executive be independently held to account by the board, when the board chair is his mother?

They can’t. A good start would be the Government to set a rule that no social service provider will be funded that doesn’t have a minimum of five board members, none of whom are related to senior staff.

Over the weekend the ODT reported that Te Kāika’s main site appeared to have just one part-time GP serving thousands of enrolled patients. The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners recommends a ratio of about 1,000 patients per GP; Te Kāika’s Caversham hub reportedly has one doctor working four days a week for 5,000 to 6,000 patients.

Clinical consultations plummeted by nearly two-thirds in a single year (from 44,939 to 15,874), while patient registrations (and the government capitation payments that come with them) kept climbing. That matters because capitation funding follows enrolled patients, not the number of times they are actually seen.

The capitation rate per patient varies but on average is at least $300. So they would have got $1.8 million from the taxpayer, for one GP!

The tempting response to all this is to write Te Kāika off as an outlier: one rogue charity, exceptional in its dysfunction. 

It’s not. Bryce notes very similar issues with the Waipareira Trust and the Manukau Urban Māori Authority.

Health New Zealand, the Ministry of Social Development, and Oranga Tamariki were all channelling millions to Te Kāika. None of them had adequate oversight mechanisms in place.

This goes beyond Te Kāika. It reflects the way the system now works. This is close to what some scholars call the “shadow state”: charities and NGOs taking over public functions, but without the same transparency or discipline expected of government. The state has outsourced enormous amounts of social provision to NGOs, and has simultaneously failed to build the monitoring, auditing, and evaluation capacity necessary to ensure that outsourcing serves the public interest.

So, the state has become very efficient at shovelling money out the door. It has been far less effective at proving what that money achieves. And in a culture where questioning the kaupapa of Māori service providers has become politically sensitive, the space for honest scrutiny has narrowed further.

This is spot on. Now the answer isn’t for the state to provide all social services itself. If the state can’t even contract properly, what faith could we have in them being able to run them themselves.

This is not just an issue for NZ. Followers of US politics will know about Minnesota daycare centres and California hospices, which have become huge rorts.

Because governments are not spending their own money (they spend ours) they are less concerned with actual outcomes and value for money.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we take 2% from the budget we have for contracting social services and use it to hire firms whose sole job is to scrutinise providers and contracts. They could scrutinise governance arrangements, finances, outcomes. They could do site visits to see if what they promise actually occurs.

Fitch Ratings released:

Fitch Ratings has revised the Outlook on New Zealand’s Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) to Negative from Stable and affirmed the IDR at ‘AA+’.

The Outlook revision reflects our view that a substantial debt reduction is becoming more difficult to envisage, as fiscal consolidation has been delayed in the past few years. The general government debt-GDP ratio has increased substantially over the past six years as the economy has been buffeted by a number of shocks.

In other words, we can’t wait much longer to start repaying debt.

The main change based on the election outcome could be the composition of the consolidation. The incumbent National Party-led coalition focuses on expenditure constraint, while a Labour Party coalition would emphasise revenue measures.

Labour will increase taxes rather than restrain spending.

The Guardian reported:

Zack Polanski’s claim to have immediately apologised for offering hypnosis intended to increase a woman’s breast size has been cast into doubt by the emergence of a 2013 interview with the Green party leader.

In 2013, before he entered politics, Polanski was approached by a Sun journalist to see if a hypnotherapy session could make her breasts bigger. This experience was then written up as an article.

He claimed he could increase breast size with hypnosis. He’s perfect for the UK Green Party.