Back in March, Newsroom's Sam Sachdeva reported that the regime was planning to use high costs as an excuse to limit access to the Official Information Act, and had commissioned consultants to build them a case. Obviously, I was quite curious about this, so I fired off a series of OIA requests to government agencies. Some were about costs, and revealed (unsurprisingly) that no-one (at least, no-one in the sample of core government agencies I checked) had any idea how much the OIA cost them, and that no-one was counting. Some, aimed at understanding recent large increases, were about the types of requests received, and when they had started being counted in statistics, and they were quite illuminating. And of course there was a request for the policy advice underlying the regime's plans. A request for Te Kawa Mataaho's advice got bounced to Ministry of Justice - saving me the effort of asking them directly - where it was delayed, and then delayed, and then delayed again. They finally responded yesterday, having illegally delayed the response until a related proactive release was signed off.
The response letter, with links to the released documents, is here. There's a lot of emails (some of which are significant), a couple of contracts, and notes from a meeting with the Ombudsman which suggests the regime's intent is to use this as an excuse to declare requesters "vexatious" - something both the Law Commission and the Ombudsman have opposed in the past. The Ombudsman is clear, both there and elsewhere, that one of the drivers of costs is increasingly convoluted agency review and sign-off procedures, where every response is scrutinised by multiple layers of management for arse-covering and "no surprises" reasons. This frequently results in delays, and it has been a frequent topic of the Ombudsman's practice reviews.
As for the costs themselves, they're in the proactively released Tregaskis Brown report and accompanying briefing. You hire consultants to deliver the answers you want, and TBL has delivered in spades, with a headline cost estimate of
$183.6 million for the 2024/25 financial year, within a possible range of $175 million – $250 million depending on estimated complexity of OIA requests.They've calculated this by (roughly) taking the number of requests, estimating the proportion per agency which are complex (expensive) vs routine (cheap), and multiplied by the relevant cost per request, based on Australian data. They correctly highlight that 77% of requests come from 6 agencies (Police, Natural Hazards Commission (EQC), Department of Corrections, NZ Defence Force, Fire and Emergency NZ, and NZ Customs Service), and (sensibly) recommend further work to understand both actual costs, and what is driving them, as well as strengthening proactive release. Those bits are fine, but the cost estimate is absolutely absurd. How? The accompanying A3 (p10 of the proactive release) estimates the police's annual OIA costs at $50 million. But the police are actually one of the few agencies we have good OIA cost data for! A November 2025 request made on FYI, the public OIA request site, included both the numbers of requests processed, and the staff numbers and costs for both the police Ministerial Services OIA group, and the Information Requests Service Group (IRSG), for exactly the time period TBL is looking at. Ministerial services processed 1014 requests in the second half of 2024, and 832 in the first half of 2025, for a total of 1846 in 2024-25. IRSG processed 28921 and 25280 respectively, for a total of 54201. (Yes, there's a discrepancy between these numbers and those published by TKM. The reason for that is speed cameras and media requests, which are handled by other groups).
As for costs,
Police advises that there are 13 people in Ministerial Services who process OIA requests. As at 1 November 2025, the annual total for their salaries is $1,547,991.This gives a cost-per-request for police ministerial services (which handles the most complex requests) of $838.57, and for IRSG as $82.83. While there's no cost-estimate for speed cameras and media requests, both are likely to be at the lower end (the former because they are routine, the latter because anything non-routine gets kicked into the formal OIA process and handled by Ministerial Services). These are obviously far lower than TBL's estimates of $3530 for complex requests and $353 for routine ones. Even allowing for overheads (which TBL estimates at 66%), TBL's costs are inflated by a factor of 2.5.There are 53 people who work in the Information Request Service Group and the annual total for their salaries is $4,489,296.
You would hope that TBL's followup work will reveal that. In the interim, though, Goldsmith has got what he paid for: a big, scary number for costs, which he can decry as "waste", plus the inevitable line-go-up graph, showing those costs will increase into the future. Which he will probably consider to be a case for action.
The proactively-released briefing notes that the OIA is of constitutional significance, and that any change will attract significant interest. It recommends 10-12 weeks of public consultation on any proposal. That's clearly not happening on the original proposed timeline of "before July", so it may have been kicked back until after the election. Alternatively, Goldsmith being Goldsmith, he may just not bother with proper process. This regime has established a terrible reputation for ignoring advice and enacting radical, anti-democratic, even constitutional vibe-based policy under urgency. Sadly, we can't rule out them acting as they have in the past, and wrecking the OIA in the same manner. The only way to stop them is to throw them out of office as quickly as possible.
