This week's amusing OIA request: is David Seymour a hologram? He's denied it, even offered to let people feel him (at "$5 a feel", of course - ACT members don't give it away for free), but this proves nothing: while he doesn't have an "H" on his forehead, he still has that uncanny resemblance to Arnold Rimmer, and he could be hard-light.
And seriously, how do you respond to this sort of OIA? While it could be dismissed as frivolous (because no reasonable person could actually believe that David Seymour was an Arnold Rimmer clone, could they?), that's hassle. The Prime Minister's office has been here before, when they were asked whether John Key was a shapeshifting reptilian alien ushering humanity towards enslavement. And they took the easy way out: a refusal under s18(e) as "the document alleged to contain the information requested does not exist or cannot be found".
"Silly" OIA requests are a fact of life. There will always be some, the difference is that now with the internet we get to hear about them. And we get to see how the government (and David Seymour) responds.
