Chris Hipkins is the Minister for the Public Service. In this role, he's responsible for overseeing the whole public service and ensuring that it meets its obligations under the Public Service Act 2020 to be politically neutral, provide free and frank advice, and so on. One of those obligations is "to foster a culture of open government". But there's a problem: the Minister pretty obviously doesn't believe in that, and prefers secret, closed government. How do we know? Just look at the way he answers OIA requests.
Here's an example: an anti-vaxxer used FYI, the public OIA request system, to lodge a request seeking affidavits prepared for the purposes of any judicial review relating to any COVID-19 Order. Hipkins, as the Minister named in those proceedings, would naturally be presumed to hold that information in his capacity as a Minister. But rather than responding properly, Hipkins refused the request, with the rather novel claim that since it had been before a court, it was "court information":
The affidavits you have requested are "court information" for the purposes of section 173 of the Senior Courts Act 2016... Accordingly, I must refuse your request under section 18(c)(i) of the Act, as making the information you have requested available would be contrary to the provisions of the Senior Courts Act 2016 and the Senior Courts (Access to Court Documents) Rules 2017.Which would be a fine response if the requester had actually requested court records (and you see responses like that all the time where people have done that from the Ministry of Justice). But they hadn't. Instead, they had requested information prepared for a court case but still held by the Minister. And that means it is not "court information" (which, from the definition in the Senior Courts Act, is strictly information forming part of the court record, in its custody or control, or held on its behalf by the Ministry of Justice), but "official information", and fully subject to the Act. As an additional data point, such information was subject to the OIA prior to the passage of the Senior Courts Act (see for example Ombudsman's ruling 405640), and there's no reason to think the Act changed that position. Instead, it seems that the Minister (or his staff, for whom he is completely responsible) has adopted a tendentious interpretation of the law to shut down a request he simply did not want to answer, from someone he did not want to talk to (and honestly, I'm Done With Antivaxxers too, but the OIA works for them just like everyone else).
This would be simply another case of ordinary bad ministerial behaviour, another sad example of a tribal politician viewing information as a weapon and abusing his powers to deny it to someone he viewed as an "enemy", except that Hipkins is Minister for the Public Service. And as noted above, that carries additional responsibilities. Former Ombudsman Beverley Wakem made the point back in 2014 that the leadership of Ministers on the OIA matters, that their attitude to requests matters, that if they set a poor example, they undermine the Act. She was talking about the Prime Minister, but the same applies now to the Minister for the Public Service. Hipkins has a responsibility to be better than this. If he does not want to meet that responsibility, he should resign so that someone better and more committed to open government can take his place.
