The Ministry of Defence has confirmed it paid consultants to examine the fuel supply chain that keeps the Air Force in the air, and has decided nobody outside government gets to see what they found.
RNZ’s Phil Pennington reported on Tuesday morning that the ministry engaged consultants Morrison Low in October last year to assess the supply chain, and that a summary of the work went to Defence Minister Chris Penk. The ministry would not release that summary, saying it could prejudice security, defence or international relations, which are among the grounds an agency can use to withhold official information.
The ministry told RNZ it would look at running a follow-up progress assessment in 2027. “The minister of defence will be provided with an update upon the conclusion of this work,” it said.
That leaves an assessment commissioned nearly ten months ago sitting inside the building, with the only public signal about its contents being the decision not to publish it. The next scheduled look at the same question falls after the 2026 general election and, on the ministry’s own timetable, some time next year.
The request that produced the refusal came out of a construction project that has been late for a long time. RNZ asked for documents relating to the fuel precinct upgrade at Ohakea, the Air Force base near Palmerston North, a job worth more than $70 million that is running about 18 months behind schedule.
The detail on that delay came in an RNZ story on 22 July. Dialog Fitzroy Limited won the $74 million contract in late 2023 and the work was originally due to finish in October 2024. Defence blamed international freight delays, bad weather and other construction problems. The precinct reached what the industry calls practical completion in March 2026, but still needs six to nine weeks of checks and certification, a process known as wet commissioning in which aviation fuel is gradually introduced, followed by further checks by the Air Force. Defence said the facility would be fully operational in the first quarter of 2027, which would be nine years after the project first came to Cabinet’s attention in 2018.
The upgrade was meant to increase how much fuel Ohakea can hold and to add a defuelling capability needed for the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, which arrived two to three years ago.
Ohakea matters beyond the Air Force. Along with Whenuapai in west Auckland it holds a large share of the Air Force’s fuel, and a 2023 Cabinet committee paper described it as a coordination and logistics fuelling hub for all-of-government responses to civil emergencies such as natural disasters, and as a “national strategic fuel reserve”. The same paper said the fuel precinct had reached the point of posing “significant and increasing risks”. It did not spell out what those risks were.
The New Zealand Defence Force has consistently declined to say how much fuel it holds. “For security reasons, NZDF does not disclose details of its fuel holdings or how they are managed,” it told RNZ in July. When RNZ asked Penk whether he had sought assurances that Defence had enough fuel for a conflict or a disaster, his office said it was an operational matter and that he had nothing to add.
None of this is happening in a quiet year for fuel. Global supply chains have been badly disrupted by the Iran war, and in March the Government released an updated Fuel Response Plan setting out four phases of escalating action. New Zealand moved into the first of those phases on 27 March and has stayed there, with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment describing supply as stable and stocks as sufficient, and publishing an update on stocks and shipping every Wednesday. Defence and lifeline utilities sit in the top priority band for uncapped supply if things get worse.
The reason a defence fuel assessment carries weight in that setting is that the country’s civilian buffer is thinner than the headline numbers suggest. Analysis published in The Conversation in May found New Zealand meets its International Energy Agency obligation to hold 90 days of net petroleum imports almost entirely through ticket contracts, which are contractual claims on oil stored in other countries rather than fuel sitting in New Zealand tanks. New Zealand is the only IEA member whose public oil reserves are held entirely offshore. In January the country held about 38 days of onshore petroleum stocks. The Government’s purchase of 90 million litres of diesel at Marsden Point adds roughly nine days.
Against that background, the Defence Force is one of the few users guaranteed fuel in a serious shortage, and the agency responsible for its infrastructure has now confirmed it studied the supply chain and will not say what it learned.
The withholding grounds the ministry has used are lawful and routinely applied to military logistics. The practical effect is still that voters heading into an election cannot test whether the assurances stack up, and the next review is scheduled for the far side of polling day. Anyone weighing up how the parties differ on defence spending and infrastructure can compare their positions using our voting tool.
What do you think? Should the Ministry of Defence release a summary of its fuel supply chain assessment, or is secrecy the right call for military logistics? Leave a comment 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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