Two of New Zealand’s most senior public servants have been found in contempt of Parliament, after the Privileges Committee ruled that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment deliberately misled MPs about a border technology project that had already been scrapped.
The committee published its findings on Wednesday, ending a saga that has run since March. It found that when MBIE chief executive Nic Blakeley and the then head of Immigration New Zealand, Alison McDonald, were asked by the Education and Workforce Committee about the progress of the Biometric Capability Update, they gave answers they must have known would leave MPs with a false impression. The project had been cancelled four months earlier.
“The limited manner in which the ministry answered questions… was intentional,” the committee said, according to RNZ, which reported the findings just after 11am. “We find that the ministry deliberately misled the Education and Workforce Committee and, in doing so, committed a contempt.”
The language in the report is unusually blunt for a committee that normally goes out of its way to give officials the benefit of the doubt. It said public servants who appear before select committees have “an absolute obligation to tell the truth”, and that being truthful, responsible and acting in good faith is “the very essence of public service”. Failing to meet those obligations, the committee said, “is an insult to the entire public service”.
The committee also found it “alarming” that neither Blakeley nor McDonald appeared to know they could have asked to give their evidence in private or in secret, an option that exists precisely so that officials are not forced to choose between commercial confidentiality and telling MPs the truth.
Despite the finding, the committee recommended no further punishment. Both officials had already apologised publicly, and the committee said it intended that its findings “will be of sufficient consequence on their own”. In practical terms that means no reprimand at the bar of the House and no fine, but a formal record that a government department was found to have misled Parliament on purpose.
The project at the centre of the case started inside Immigration New Zealand in 2018 and was meant to modernise the systems used to check the identity of people crossing the border. It ran for roughly seven years through repeated delays and cost increases before being terminated in November 2025, by which point it had absorbed about $35 million, with a related piece of work adding a further $8.5 million. Officials have indicated most of that will be written off with little to show for it.
None of that came up when officials sat in front of MPs in March. They were told there was no public review of the project’s progress, when in fact an independent report on what had gone wrong was close to finished. Labour’s Phil Twyford, who had been asking about the project and had filed Official Information Act requests on it, took the matter to the Speaker, as did the Education and Workforce Committee itself, chaired by National MP Katie Nimon. In late June, Speaker Gerry Brownlee found that a question of privilege arose, saying the conduct complained of “could amount to deliberately attempting to mislead a committee, which is a contempt of Parliament”, and sent it to the Privileges Committee.
Both officials denied any intention to deceive when they gave evidence in July. Blakeley told the committee, “I agree. We got it wrong. I accept that and we should have said differently,” while arguing that budget confidentiality and continuing negotiations with the Japanese technology company NEC over a final payment had limited what he felt able to say. He also said, “At the time, I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”
McDonald, who has since retired and gave evidence by video link from the United Kingdom, told MPs, “I had no intention whatsoever to mislead the select committee and I find the suggestion that I might have acted deliberately to mislead Parliament extremely distressing.”
Blakeley took over as chief executive of MBIE in January this year, so the March hearing came only weeks into his tenure at the top of the country’s largest government department. His own salary has not yet been published. RNZ reported that his predecessor was paid more than $600,000 a year, and that the ministry had been approached for comment on the findings.
A second investigation is still running. Former Solicitor-General Michael Heron KC is examining, at the request of the Public Service Commission, whether MBIE was fully upfront with ministers across the seven years of the project and whether it engaged in what has been described as creative accounting. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford has already referred two conflicting internal reports to that inquiry.
To see how unusual Wednesday’s outcome is, it helps to look at the last high profile case. In 2023 the same committee examined then Education Minister Jan Tinetti over a statement to the House she took 14 sitting days to correct. It found she had made and sustained an erroneous judgement that caused the House to be misled, but specifically did not find a contempt, recommending an apology instead. This time the committee went the other way and used the word deliberately.
The reason that matters has little to do with the money. Select committees are the main way the public finds out what is happening inside government departments between elections, and they have no investigators of their own. When a department answers narrowly, MPs usually have no way of knowing what has been left out. The whole system rests on officials volunteering the inconvenient part, which is why the rules treat a deliberate omission as a contempt rather than an oversight.
It also lands with a general election due on 7 November, with public service size, government technology failures and departmental accountability all live arguments on the campaign trail. If you want to compare where the parties actually stand on public spending and accountability, you can check their positions with our voting tool.
Is a finding of contempt with no penalty attached enough of a consequence when a department misleads Parliament on purpose, or should there have been more? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
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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