Chief Ombudsman John Allen has ruled that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade was not entitled to double its Official Information Act response time on a request seeking legal advice about the government’s two hundred million dollar gas co-investment fund, and that the ministry’s internal approval process appeared disproportionate and not reasonably necessary.
The decision, first reported by RNZ this week, concerns a request the broadcaster lodged for any advice MFAT had provided to the government on whether co-investment in projects looking for new gas reserves would breach New Zealand’s international trade obligations. The advice still has not been released. The Cabinet paper that authorised the fund and a related collection of five briefings have been published, but the sections dealing with risks, international relations and international obligations remain redacted.
RNZ asked MFAT for any advice the ministry had given about the two hundred million dollar fund set aside for co-investment in new gas fields as part of the 2025 Budget. After the usual twenty working days the ministry told the broadcaster it was extending the deadline by another twenty working days, doubling the maximum timeframe. MFAT said the additional time was needed for scoping the request, locating and verifying information, and external consultation.
When RNZ complained, the Ombudsman found that the six relevant emails between MFAT and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment had already been reviewed by the time the extension was issued, and that proposed redactions had already been drafted. In other words, the work the extension was supposed to cover was already largely done.
In his final opinion, Chief Ombudsman John Allen wrote that the multiple internal approval phases MFAT built into its process did not appear to be a reasonable period in the circumstances and appeared disproportionate. He said it was not clear that the multilayer approval was reasonably necessary for decision-making on the request. “In practice, MFAT included another multilayer approval phase after MBIE did not provide any changes or feedback to the proposed redactions, prior to emailing the Minister about the decision,” he wrote.
Allen added a warning that will apply across the public service. “If agencies wish to build in multilayer approval phases, this needs to be done in a manner that does not interfere with the timeliness of responses. The extended deadline is the maximum timeframe; the decision still needs to be made as soon as reasonably practicable.”
The Ombudsman also took issue with the time MFAT spent consulting the climate change minister, finding it unreasonably added to the extension period. “In our view, it is insufficient to generally assert relevance to a Minister’s portfolio to show that the consultation was necessary,” he wrote. He also found MFAT would have known at the time of the extension that it would need to consult MBIE, so that step should not have been used to justify the additional time.
The information at the centre of the dispute matters because the government’s own lawyers have looked at whether the gas co-investment scheme might cut across the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability, the plurilateral pact New Zealand signed alongside Costa Rica, Iceland, Switzerland and a handful of other countries that commits parties to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. Ministers argue the co-investment fund is not a subsidy within the meaning of the agreement and therefore does not breach it. The legal reasoning that backs that conclusion has been kept from the public.
The two hundred million dollar fund was confirmed by Resources Minister Shane Jones earlier this year as part of a wider government push to encourage exploration after years of declining domestic gas production. Finance Minister Nicola Willis followed up this week with a one point two billion dollar government-backed bank lending facility to help businesses cut gas use, after officials warned twelve of the country’s seventeen producing gas fields are at risk of closure inside the next decade.
The accountability questions sit alongside broader concerns about declining transparency in central government. The Public Service Association has argued that Public Service Minister Simeon Brown is blaming officials for slow OIA responses when his own government’s cuts to public service headcount have reduced the staff available to handle them. That argument is now sharpened by the Ombudsman’s finding that, in this case, the delay was not a resourcing problem but a process problem of MFAT’s own making.
The Green Party and Labour have repeatedly called for the gas fund advice to be released in full. The redacted briefings and the Cabinet paper are available on the MBIE proactive release page for readers who want to compare what has been published with what is still being withheld.
For Newswire readers planning to vote in the 2026 general election, the broader pattern of how the current coalition handles official information requests is worth weighing alongside its policy platform. Our interactive voting tool matches your views to each party’s positions on energy, transparency and climate policy.
What do you think? Should the government’s legal advice on whether the gas co-investment fund breaches the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability be released in full? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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