Pāpango

The Andrew Little situation strongly implies he just confidently assumed he could manage Chung fine, and put zero thought into it beyond that.

Which means he also just assumed Tory Whanau was doing a bad job when he could cruise through.

And that's disrespectful/racist/sexist as shit. #nzpol

If you have any interest in trans rights, this is a pretty incredible documentary. It’s about Chase Strangio, the trans man who has been arguing before the Supreme Court. And about the ways the news media can misunderstand and misrepresent trans people.

gathr.com/vod/9320a621...

Our entire team had to stop working. Nothing could be sent until it was resolved. So, for sure info managers talk a big game. But I'll wait and see.

It should. And I want to believe. But someone in that area decided to swap Adobe for Nitro (it comes for free, I don't know why everyone isn't already using it!) and rolled that out only to discover it can't work on docs imported from Adobe or Kofax and it has sub par redaction tools.

We have SharePoint. But its not the main doc management tool. As far as im aware no one had moved their doc archives to SharePoint and you can't use it to search the email system.

This excludes sign out managers, comms teams and Minister's offices. I couldn't comment on how they see the role of an OIA team.

The Act literally requires us to be helpful and as long as your editor hasn't tried to threaten my job to get immediate responses, and your request doesn't contain threats or slurs, we will.

I have bad news, we cannot. But I also have good news, most people actually pulling the info want to find what you're looking for and if you approach them as people who want to help and will do what they can, you will get a better result than trying to guess at system and info.

Looking at this conversation it kind of reflects the difficulty here. There is a big gap between what people outside agencies think is happening in them with document management. If you're understanding is that we can slap a keyword into a search bar and give you a comprehensive list of relevant doc

SharePoint is used. But I don't think its anyone's main doc management system. Not for archives and emails. Its fine for day to day stuff, although it has PDF issues (Nitro is terrible and it doesn't always work well with other apps).

Could be 'project XX' was actually 'project XY' until recently, and you're missing important docs on the topic.

That's why I'd be suspicious. If you ask for 'everything that contains the phrase "XX"' and get anything other than a request to refine or rescope, something is missing. Could be emails, could be meeting notes, could be docs not filed.

The main issue is that pulling a list of every document that contains a specific phrase is a huge job. I would be very suspicious of any agency who answered that question. Their filing might not be that good. Beyond which, people working on policy will use jargon and acronyms which change.

Opinion: If The Herald's political staff wants to sneer about a "C-grade scandalette" let's go there. There's a lot of material in the archives of a newspaper, let's not forget, that waged an obsessive, and increasingly petty and bizarre, campaign to slut-shame an elected Mayor out of office.

This is a tangent, I had some very free comments in an email set for release, told the person that it could be free and frank if he affirmed it would inhibit future opinions. And he was clear it would not, if anyone tried anything so daft again he'd say it to them too. So it stayed in.

And if you put the closing off of ways for people to just talk to public servants and engage, it amounts to very little actual transparency. Even though we're all following the Act.

You will find people who believe 'active consideration' is a ground and that the Govt can't conduct its business if people know about decisions before they are made. I don't know if that's what Danks envisioned, but that's where we are

I agree. My concern is that the Act became the path for this, rather than a last resort when information isn't released. It shouldn't be the only channel for citizens to engage. It was a start, but it became the destination.

His version of transparency is that citizens can have information after that, but not during when it is most useful to them.

Yes. That is the intent. However, the Act only covers information that already exists and it's timeframe is too long for proper transparency. When it came in, it was a huge step forward, but I'm not sure even Danks was ready to give citizens information while decisions were being made.

Journalists still need to work sources, citizens still need to engage with departments even as those channels are being closed or funneled into the OIA workstream.

I've signed the Code of Conduct, so I can't openly endorse that. But, the OIA is a specific tool that was brought in to address a specific circumstance (the Official Secrets Act). It was never intended to be the only tool to get information from the Govt and its not set up to be.

Its OIA New Year's Eve. 🥳 And yes, everything takes longer now because the govt cut the number of civil servants so there's no depth and no contingency. Theres usually one, maybe two people who have the knowledge for a consult and if they're away nothing can happen. Everyone lost records people, too

The OIA is not the best tool for this. Requests would have to go to the Minister and the response time is too long.

Key words are also a bad request parameter because they often aren't used.

As a person who works in the OIA this is not a good strategy. If you get a response, it won't be everything for your 'shopping list'. The process is too onerous. You're getting a selected list and letting departs select like that means stuff gets missed.

Geoffrey Palmer: The McSkimming scandal shows we need a whole new Policing Act Democracy requires a trusted system to uphold the rule of law. In this instance, the rule of law has been polluted at its source.

Geoffrey Palmer: The McSkimming scandal shows we need a whole new Policing Act - https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/18-11-2025/geoffrey-palmer-the-mcskimming-scandal-shows-we-need-a-whole-new-policing-act - Details and more news at: https://nzccl.org.nz/news

New weapons: the money will be found.

Who on Earth thinks you 1) you haven't seen it and 2) you would want to.

If a woman isn't a 'smol bean', men can do what they like to her and it's fine actually.