At the moment, I'm running a project to compile performance statistics for Ministers' and government departments' handling of Official Information Act requests. As some of you may recall, when I ran this project last year, I had an absolutely unbelievable response from the office of Environment Minister Nick Smith. I requested their tracking spreadsheet, it was crap, I asked them to go through their filed correspondence, and they responded by claiming they didn't keep any. Or, in English, "we are violating the Public Records Act". Oddly, the "nonexistent" records miraculously appeared after I complained to the Ombudsman and the Chief Archivist.
So, guess what's happening this year...?
That's right: their spreadsheet is still crap, so I've asked them to go through their filed correspondence, and they're claiming not to have any. You'd think the Senior Private Secretary in question (and its the same one) would have learned by now, but no.
I'm currently giving them a little bit of time to grow a brain and be reasonable. Otherwise, I go to the Ombudsman, and they lose. I wonder how many times that has to happen before they start looking incompetent?
