Government Information Withholding

NZI Insurance. Peace of mind for New Zealand business. Let today be a warning to public servants considering trying to get one over Erica Stanford that they may want to rethink that approach and play with a straight bat instead. Because Erica Stanford is not one to be trifled with. She has today thrown her officials, uh her immigration officials in particular, under the bus, by revealing that they wasted more than $30 million on a biometrics data system that never actually happened. What's worse, though, than wasting taxpayer money is the dark arts that they practiced and trying to hide what was going on. They withheld information from ministers, they deliberately fudged numbers to keep the project cost down, and then under the amount that would require it to go to cabinet for spending sign off. They removed people from the project if those people raised concerns about it. And there was plenty to raise concern about. There were cost overruns, there were delays in the go live date, there were problems with what this tech upgrade could actually do. Now we do have to acknowledge that these are Erica Stanford's allegations and the allegations that are laid out in a report that she has made public today. We haven't heard and we probably will never hear an official response denying anything of what she said. But this is believable, isn't it? The idea that public servants try to hide things from their things from their ministers and frustrate what the elected government might want to do. It is believable because we see it around the world. It is a huge problem over in the UK in what they call the blob, their public service. And we've seen it here. We've seen it playing out over the last two and a half years in particular, most notably when the government made it clear that race-based uh treatment, special treatment was to stop.