The chief executive of the country’s largest government department has told Parliament’s Privileges Committee that his ministry got it wrong when it failed to tell MPs a $35 million immigration technology project had already been scrapped, while rejecting any suggestion the omission was deliberate.
Nic Blakeley, chief executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, appeared before the committee on Tuesday evening over what officials told the Education and Workforce Committee in March about the Biometric Capability Update, a long running attempt to modernise the systems used to check the identity of people crossing the New Zealand border.
Asked why he had not simply said the project was finished, Blakeley told the committee, according to RNZ, “I agree. We got it wrong. I accept that and we should have said differently.” He also said, “In hindsight, we should have taken a different approach.”
The project at the centre of the case began inside Immigration New Zealand in 2018 and was meant to replace ageing biometric checking systems. It ran for about seven years through a series of delays and cost increases before being terminated in November 2025. Current estimates put the cost of the work at roughly $35 million, with officials indicating that a large share of that will be written off with little to show for it. A related piece of work added a further $8.5 million.
None of that was mentioned when senior officials sat in front of the Education and Workforce Committee in March this year. MPs were told there was no public review of the project’s progress. In fact the project had been cancelled four months earlier and an independent report on what went wrong was close to finished.
Labour’s Phil Twyford, who had been asking about the project, raised the matter with the Speaker. So 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 did arise and sent the matter to the Privileges Committee, saying the conduct complained of “could amount to deliberately attempting to mislead a committee, which is a contempt of Parliament”.
That is a serious finding to face. Deliberately misleading a select committee is one of the clearest forms of contempt in New Zealand’s parliamentary rules, because select committees rely almost entirely on officials answering questions honestly. The committee has not made any findings yet, and both officials deny any intention to mislead.
At Tuesday’s hearing Blakeley said budget confidentiality and commercial sensitivity had limited what he felt able to say in March, pointing to continuing negotiations with the Japanese technology company NEC over final payments. He also accepted that the ministry had turned up to the March hearing poorly prepared, telling MPs it was surprising there was no written material on the project among the briefing papers.
National’s Chris Bishop pressed him on why he could not simply have told MPs the project had been terminated, and on the wider failure of the public service to explain how the money went. National’s Scott Simpson pointed out that Twyford had been filing Official Information Act requests about the project beforehand, which he suggested should have been enough warning that the topic would come up.
Alison McDonald, who led Immigration New Zealand at the time and has since retired, gave evidence by video link from the United Kingdom. She told the committee, “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.”
McDonald said the biometric work was one strand inside a much larger programme, and accepted she should have paused when Twyford asked her about specific milestones rather than answering in general terms. Blakeley made a similar point about his own state of mind on the day, saying, “At the time, I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”
The Privileges Committee will now consider what it heard and report back to the House. It can recommend a range of responses if it finds a contempt occurred, from a formal reprimand to more serious censure, though the committee has historically been cautious about punishing public servants for what turns out to be poor judgement rather than deception.
Running alongside the parliamentary process is a separate inquiry commissioned by the Public Service Commission and led by Michael Heron KC, looking at what advice ministers received about the project as it deteriorated and what the ministry knew and when. Blakeley declined to answer media questions on Tuesday while both processes are running.
The case matters beyond the accounting. 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 gives an incomplete answer, MPs generally have no way of knowing. That is why the rules treat misleading a committee as a contempt rather than a mistake, and why this hearing has drawn attention from MPs across the House.
It also lands in an election year, with public service spending, government technology failures and the size of the bureaucracy all live campaign arguments. If you want to see where the parties actually sit on issues like public spending and accountability, you can compare their positions using our voting tool.
Do you think officials should face real consequences when Parliament is given an incomplete answer, or is this a storm over a genuine misjudgement? 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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