Labour has asked the Auditor-General to run a formal audit of the Prime Minister’s office, arguing that two existing investigations into how the office handles records and official information requests do not go far enough. The move turns a months-long row over a single buried briefing note into a broader question about whether the country can trust the way decisions are recorded at the very top of government.
Labour’s justice spokesperson Camilla Belich wrote to the Auditor-General on 12 June requesting a performance audit. She wants the office’s systems, controls, training and assurance arrangements examined to see whether they reliably capture meetings and communications with outside parties, including briefings that are hand-delivered on paper and messages sent through private accounts. The request also asks whether the office complies with the Public Records Act 2005, and whether its record-keeping is good enough to meet the standards Parliament and the public are entitled to expect from an office at the apex of executive government.
“Trust in government depends on New Zealanders being able to see how decisions are made and who is influencing them,” Belich said.
To understand why a record-keeping complaint has reached the Auditor-General, it helps to go back to the document at the centre of it. The long-running climate case brought by activist Mike Smith against Fonterra and other large emitters has run alongside a separate government plan to limit when companies can be sued over their emissions. In June 2024, Fonterra government affairs staff printed a briefing note that lobbied for changes to climate legislation and delivered it by hand to Matt Burgess, who was then the Prime Minister’s chief policy adviser. The same note was also sent to Burgess’s private email account. Energy company Z Energy confirmed it had provided a document to the government in the same period.
None of that surfaced when it should have. In March 2025 the Environmental Law Initiative’s Matt Hall filed a wide Official Information Act request covering any documents, discussions or meetings about the Smith v Fonterra case. The Prime Minister’s office replied in May 2025, after taking an extension for consultation, and the response made no mention of the 2024 meetings and did not include the hand-delivered note. The note only came to light this year, surfacing through the discovery process in the High Court, where the companies had been ordered to release records of their lobbying.
The fact that a document sent to a senior official’s private email did not appear in an official information response is exactly the kind of gap that worries transparency advocates. A briefing that lives on a personal account, rather than in a government system, can quietly fall outside the searches an office runs when it answers a request, whether by accident or by design. That is the heart of what is now being examined.
The Chief Ombudsman, John Allen, has already launched his own investigation after a complaint was lodged on 26 May about the apparent withholding of information. Allen set out his focus on 10 June. “I will consider under the OIA how and where official information is held within the Prime Minister’s Office, and what searches were undertaken to make sure its response to the original request complied with the legislation,” he said.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has announced that the Department of Internal Affairs will review the former staff member’s IT account to check whether any further undisclosed documents exist. A spokesperson for the Prime Minister has said the office was made aware of the meetings and briefing notes through the media and has no record of either on file. The Green Party has called for a wider look at the use of private email accounts inside the office.
Belich’s argument is that those steps, useful as they are, deal with one document and one staff member rather than the system that allowed the note to slip through. The Ombudsman is looking at whether a specific request was handled properly, and the Internal Affairs review is checking one account. An Auditor-General performance audit would instead test whether the machinery of record-keeping in the office is fit for purpose, and whether outside parties who lobby government can expect their contact to be logged in a way the public can later see.
The stakes go beyond one climate case. The Official Information Act rests on a simple promise, that information held by government belongs to the public unless there is a good reason to withhold it. That promise only works if the records exist in the first place, and if they can be found when someone asks. When briefings arrive on paper or land in private inboxes, the trail can vanish, and the public is left relying on a court discovery process to learn what its government was told. The questions Labour is raising are not about which party is in power so much as how openly any government, of any colour, conducts its business.
The dispute also lands in an election year, with New Zealanders due to vote on 7 November. Transparency and trust in institutions tend to sharpen as a campaign nears, and how the office responds to these reviews will feed into that wider debate. If you want to compare where the parties stand before you cast your vote, our voting tool lets you line up your own priorities against the policies on offer.
For now the office faces two reviews and a request for a third. None has reported, and the underlying climate case continues in the High Court. What started as a single missing note has become a test of whether the systems meant to keep government honest are doing their job.
What do you think? Should the Auditor-General audit how the Prime Minister’s office keeps its records? Leave a comment below and join the conversation.
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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