Senior officials from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment are heading to one of Parliament’s most serious forums after the Speaker referred their conduct to the Privileges Committee, which examines whether the House and its committees have been deliberately misled.
Speaker Gerry Brownlee made the referral on Wednesday last week, acting on two separate complaints about what MBIE officials told a select committee in March about a failed government technology project. The complaints came from Labour MP Phil Twyford and from National MP Katie Nimon, who chairs the Education and Workforce Committee that heard the evidence.
At the centre of the case is the Biometric Capability Update, a project that ran inside Immigration New Zealand from 2018 and was meant to modernise the systems used to verify the identities of people crossing the border. After about seven years of delays and cost blowouts, the project was quietly terminated late last year. By then it had absorbed more than $30 million, and officials have indicated at least $32 million will be written off with little to show for it.
The question for the Privileges Committee is narrow but significant. When MBIE chief executive Nic Blakeley and Alison McDonald, the former head of Immigration New Zealand who has since retired, appeared before the Education and Workforce Committee at its annual review hearing on 4 March, MPs asked about the risks facing the programme. The officials did not tell the committee that the project had already been cancelled in November the year before.
Instead, according to the accounts published by RNZ, McDonald spoke about the fast pace of technological change and pointed to continuing work to make sure the country’s identity management system was fit for purpose, while Blakeley described the ministry as still working out what the programme would look like. Twyford, who put the original questions, later described the response as “a long answer that, in my view, was dissembling” rather than a straight account of where the money had gone.
In referring the matter, Brownlee was careful to set out the limits of his own role. “The Speaker does not enquire into the veracity of the evidence presented, or conduct an inquiry into the allegations,” he said. His job was only to decide whether the complaints raised a question worth investigating, and he found that the conduct described could amount to deliberately attempting to mislead a committee, which is a contempt of Parliament.
That phrase carries weight. Select committees rely on officials to give frank and complete answers, because MPs use that evidence to hold the spending of public money to account. Withholding the fact that a project no longer exists, if that is what happened, strikes at the basic bargain between Parliament and the public service. The Privileges Committee, which is chaired by the Attorney-General and includes senior MPs from across the House, can recommend penalties ranging from a formal finding of contempt to an apology at the bar of the House.
It is worth being clear about what has and has not been decided. No finding has been made against either official. The referral simply means the committee will now look at whether the March evidence crossed the line, and the officials will have the chance to explain themselves. Brownlee himself stressed that he was not ruling on the truth of the claims.
The parliamentary process is running alongside a second investigation that covers similar ground from a different angle. The Public Service Commission has commissioned Michael Heron KC to examine what advice MBIE gave to ministers as the project unravelled, and whether information was kept from the government as well as from Parliament. That inquiry leans on the Public Service Code of Conduct and its expectations of honesty and accountability. Its findings are expected as soon as practicable, although officials have signalled the work could stretch past the election recess.
Ministers have not hidden their frustration. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford, who inherited the troubled programme, has said the paper trail shows ministers were left in the dark for years. “The first paper that I can find that had been delivered to Ministers to alert them to anything was in November 2021, two years after the original business case,” she said. She has also pointed out that the project had blown through its original budget of about $19.5 million by the middle of 2020, yet papers a year later still listed the cost at $30 million.
For the Greens, the episode has raised a wider question about how a project can run for the better part of a decade, soak up tens of millions of dollars, and still reach the point of cancellation without ministers or MPs being told plainly what was going on. The party has asked what would have happened if the spending had simply continued.
The timing is awkward for the public service as the country moves towards the general election later this year. Trust in officials to give straight answers is one of the quiet foundations of how Parliament works, and a contempt finding against a department chief executive would be a rare and serious outcome. Whatever the committee concludes, the case is a reminder that the people who appear at the witness table are accountable for what they say there.
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What do you make of the way this failed project was handled, and should officials face real consequences if they are found to have misled MPs? Share 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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