Debates — Ministry of Education—Official Information Act

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to raise this issue of importance. I think it’s important to note, for those people who aren’t aware of what has been conveyed in the media this morning, that a senior education official working on the Government’s curriculum update has told staff within the Ministry of Education not to put their work in writing that they were discussing on the curriculum changes with the Minister of Education’s office so that it couldn’t be uncovered by the Official Information Act. This is an issue of serious importance for New Zealand’s democracy, for the neutrality of our Public Service, and for accountability within Government. It also goes to the heart of people having trust and confidence in our Government institutions and encouraging people to be engaged with democracy.

The person in question, the senior official, said, “This is them helping us.” Those are the words that were used. “This is them helping us. What we do not need is anything in response in writing that shows that this stuff has gone backwards and forwards between them and us.” The senior official in question said that she would present feedback as, “just some feedback from me.”, implying that it was actually from the Minister or her office, and the official was saying that it would be from her instead.

Now, this is a clear attempt to avoid transparency, and it is a clear attempt to hide the Minister’s involvement in determining the exact content of what our children learn in the school curriculum. It is absolutely inconceivable that this Minister of Education, Erica Stanford, had no knowledge of this, as she tried to point out today. What this tells us is something very important, and while the Minister may want to say this is just about officials and this is something that an official did and it’s not to do with her—it’s not. It is about the culture that she has led from the top. It is about a culture of cover-ups not only within the Ministry of Education but wider in Government as well. This should be deeply concerning for New Zealanders because it goes to the heart of our democracy, it goes to the heart of having a Public Service that is neutral, and it goes to the heart of transparency and accountability, all of those strong facets of what we should be upholding as democracy in New Zealand.

What this has told us today is that it is clear that, for those officials who were working on the curriculum, there was a culture of cover-ups, and that there was a clear culture that they were operating to avoid accountability. That was the culture in which they were operating in, and that video that has been available via New Zealand Herald today demonstrates clearly what that culture was. Officials working on the curriculum considered that this was to be a “political exercise”. Those are the words that were used in that video—a “political exercise” with the Minister; not our children, not our education system, not the things that will actually strengthen teaching and learning in New Zealand, but instead a political exercise that the Minister was intricately involved with and was using officials as a cover to be able to do that, and that is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable. Rather than setting high standards herself—this Minister often talks about setting high standards—for accountability, for democracy, for transparency, instead, that Ministry has bred a culture of cover-ups, that she has led herself, and she is accountable for that ministry.

There is a clear pattern of behaviour with this Minister—there is a clear pattern of behaviour. And today in the House, in question time, we heard that the Minister stated that she always complies with the Official Information Act. Well, I went back—since she said that—and I checked. From 1 July 2025 to 31 December 2025, which is a period of six months, and in that period of six months, there are four separate occasions where the Ombudsman has ruled that decisions made by that Minister, in relation to the Official Information Act, required remedial correction. So in a six month period, there were four times that the Official Information Act had not been applied appropriately according to the Ombudsman.

Let us remember, also, the recent history of Erica Stanford and her emails. The Minister of Education herself, in the past, has been caught using private email to conduct ministerial business. This, in the past, included budget details, policy changes, and communications with schools and with members of their ministerial advisory group. It was used hundreds and hundreds of times, and it only stopped when it was called out publicly. It was only stopped when that was captured publicly.

But it’s not just this Minister; the rot starts at the top. There was also clear information that a former staffer in the Prime Minister’s office, that Christopher Luxon received a lobbying document from Fonterra. The document was sent to, again, his private email inbox, also suggesting an attempt to circumvent the same Act—the Official Information Act—especially, given those documents were not released in response to an Official Information Act request, when they should have been. The staffer was a former chief policy adviser to the Prime Minister.

There is a clear pattern of behaviour, not only with this Minister but with this Government, to circumvent democracy, to circumvent transparency, and to do that in a way that actually makes New Zealand a less strong country, in terms of transparency. And that is absolutely unacceptable. It is important that New Zealanders know that this is the integrity, which is zero, and the calibre of this Government, going into a general election. We have a Public Service that should be based on integrity, that should be neutral, and should be accountable—and those are fundamental parts of why we have those in place.

That is exactly why Labour is proposing to remediate this mess by establishing an independent council for curriculum and assessment. We believe that that is what is required to stop the sort of political interference in the day-to-day operations of what should be happening in the Ministry of Education. I think it is important that we speak up for those public servants who don’t have a voice; those public servants that aren’t allowed to speak back; those public servants that time and time again, like an abusive relationship, get thrown under the bus when this Government makes mistakes. It is absolutely unacceptable that they take advantage of those who can’t fight back. And we say that is not acceptable; that those who are voted in with ministerial warrants, they hold the accountability, and they should stand up and take responsibility for the actions that have caused so much trouble within our Public Service.

This erodes democracy, this puts public servants in absolutely impossible situations—when they lose their jobs, when they lose their reputations, when they lose their ability to hold their heads up in Wellington because of the politicisation that this Government has put them under. It is absolutely unacceptable in New Zealand. We should be world leading at being transparent and enabling people to interact with their democracy without fear, without favour.

Ultimately, it is the Minister of Education who should be responsible for this. And while we are about to hear, no doubt, while there is an internal review, while someone else will be blamed about what has happened here, at the end of the day, the buck stops with her. She has got a person clearly now broadcast on platforms showing that there was a process and a culture in place designed to undermine democracy, designed to hide information from public eyes, and designed to circumvent the Official Information Act. That is wrong. That Act is in place for a good reason, and New Zealanders deserve to have the truth. They deserve to have clear answers, and they deserve a Government that does not hide facts from them, and that is exactly what this Government is. It is deceitful and it is corrupt in the way it is operating, and we should vote them out.

Mr Speaker, as I have already raised in this House today in answer to questions that were raised by the Opposition, my political office and myself always comply with the Official Information Act (OIA) to the very best of our ability.

Now, people should have trust and confidence, and it was very disappointing to see that Ministry of Education officials were making comments that were reported in the New Zealand Herald today. I want to be very clear and put on the record in Hansard that not myself or anybody else in my office has ever directed or even suggested that anyone should not comply with the OIA, or do anything other than fully comply with it, or should not be subverting it in anyway. This is a very serious matter, which is why, yesterday, I called in the Secretary of Education to reiterate my expectations that the OIA is always fully complied with.

I am confident that the Secretary of Education has got the issue in hand. Yesterday, she alerted immediately the Public Service Commissioner, the Ombudsman, and she’s now undertaking an internal review and an employment process because this did not meet either my expectations or hers. I want to also be very clear about the meeting that was recorded in relation to this issue. This meeting was in relation to the 74 senior secondary curriculum documents that have not been given to me or my political office to review or to sign out. I’ve not seen them as of yet.

The process that was talked about in this meeting was between the Ministry of Education and their secondee, the private secretary in my office, who reviews these documents, and who checks them before they come to me. She asks a number of questions back and forward with the Ministry before they come to me to make sure that they are in order. This is an entirely normal process that happens with every single document that comes to my office, and it is my expectation that this process that they were talking about in this meeting, like every single process, is subject to the OIA. I’ve made this very clear to the Secretary of Education; and yes, I am responsible for the Ministry of Education, which is why I called them in, which is why I’ve reiterated my expectations and made sure that the correct processes are underway.

I’m also responsible for the results of the Ministry of Education, and I am extraordinarily proud in the last three years of the results that we have gained. We have put out an English and maths curriculum that has been in place for two years. The results are phenomenal. For the first time in decades, finally, we are seeing an improvement in results. Phonics last year between term 1 and term 3 from 36 to 58 percent of young 5-year-olds at expectations for their early reading or phonics ability. The maths curriculum has seen an improvement in year 6, a statistically significant improvement of 6 percent, and it was up every year—year 3, year 6, year 8—the curriculum insights saw. The same thing in writing: a 5 percent increase, the first time we’ve seen an increase of this statistical significance in years in writing at year 6 after years of decline and stagnation. The same thing we’ve seen with the Programme for International Student Assessment as well, where the bottom quartile of the most disadvantaged kids are improving significantly, closing for the first time that equity gap that I talked so much about.

Now, it was really interesting that the member before me spoke about her idea that the unions gave her for an independent curriculum committee. This is exactly why we need an hour of reading every day and a focus on comprehension and oral language, because while Ginny Andersen has taken this union policy on for herself, she confirmed on TVNZ when asked how this independent committee would be selected, she said, without any expression on her face at all, “Oh, by the Minister.” Now, the definition of “independent” is not that the Minister of Education will be the person who selects the people that go on the independent committee.

Let’s not forget that this is just a reheated policy by Labour, because, in 2020, they also thought about having a curriculum group. They spent tens of millions—in fact, more than $100 million creating this idea of some kind of committee. It was called the “Curriculum Centre” inside the Ministry of Education. Then they spent six years putting together a whole lot of other groups, going around the country, thinking about it, having a think, and then did not deliver a single curriculum document to the sector—not a single one.

But the one that they did, where they did start to talk about with the curriculum—let’s have a look at this. The 2023 leaked draft—this is after six years of having a think about it and spending tens of millions of dollars; the leaked science curriculum that had no mention of physics, chemistry, or biology, which worried the sector so much that they leaked it in advance. Some of the comments that they made—just remembering this is what we’re going to get with these guys—were that they had grave concerns; it was embarrassing; it will lead to appalling declines in student achievement; it was likely to leave pupils bored with science. They were shocked at the lack of physics, chemistry, and earth and space sciences—they were very surprised about that. They warned that the draft was heavy on philosophy and light on actual science, and they asked where the actual science was. That is what you are going to get with an independent, delivered by the Minister of Education Curriculum Centre, which actually delivers philosophy but not actual science. Let’s not forget that that’s what happened for six long years: hundreds of millions spent, and not a single curriculum that was delivered.

I want to say one final thing in relation to the previous speaker Ginny Andersen’s comments. The reason that my Gmails were all were all out in public was because I complied fully with the OIA. Every single one of those emails was captured and put out in the OIA—the Official Information Act—because by myself and everyone in my office, the expectation is clear that we always comply with the Official Information Act to the very best of our abilities. My expectation is that the Ministry of Education do exactly the same, which is why I’ve reiterated those expectations with the Secretary for Education and made sure that all of the appropriate steps are being undertaken. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is an egregious breach of our democratic process. It is an egregious breach of our transparency that is expected of any Government, but, to be honest, we don’t expect anything less. I’m interested to hear the fact that you have a Minister who says that “I have called the Secretary for Education to relay my expectations.” The thing is, what is on the New Zealand public’s mind is: what is the content of that conversation? Could the content of that conversation be, “I expect you to hide it better next time.”? I think that is going to be the question that people are going to be thinking about.

I think this is something that we actually need to tie to the Wai 3553 report that was just released last week. It is important for us to know that in the Waitangi Tribunal’s finding, they have found that this Government has been lobbied by external providers—Australian providers such as Learning First, with a complete conflict of interest—over experts here from Aotearoa New Zealand, over our obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We have seen under this Government an unprecedented and significant increase in the usage of non-disclosure agreements. It should be a concern for every parent, for every teacher, for every student, for every school in Aotearoa New Zealand that you have a Government that is not being transparent with you, as the public, on how they conduct their affairs and how they are drafting their curriculum.

In Wai 3553, and in the speech by that Minister, we’re seeing a Government that continues to try and gaslight the New Zealand public and gaslight our experts into thinking that they are the ones in the wrong, that they are the minority. Whereas we have seen in today’s breach that clearly the Government has a political agenda and an ideology that has been imported from overseas, in how our students should be learning. We have seen by this Government a complete centralisation of power and allowing the Ministers to make decisions around the appointment of the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, among other things.

Now, when it comes to the proposal—this is the thing about this Government: when we’re looking the proposal of the independent curriculum and the assessment council, that is proposed and endorsed by quite a few political parties, including New Zealand First, but that is proposed by an independently elected New Zealand Principals’ Federation. It might be that this Government and the Minister is foreign to the idea of what good governance looks like and what it means to actually listen to the sector. Maybe it’s a Government that is foreign to the idea that maybe, just maybe, we should listen to the many and not the few—that we should listen to the teachers and the education experts, but not do it in a way that is like The Emperor’s New Clothes, where the Government is surrounding themselves only with people that they like.

This is something that requires the serious attention of this House, but beyond what the ministry themselves will conduct, beyond what the Public Service Commissioner will conduct, we also think that the Ombudsman needs to be involved as an independent analysis of what has happened and what has transpired here. For the Greens, we absolutely do think that transparency is important. We think that we need a quality public education system where everyone should be involved and that is founded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We can do that by having that independent curriculum assessment council and restoring independence to the Teaching Council.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. For the second time today, the Minister of Education has outlined her expectations in relation to the Official Information Act (OIA) and what transpired in relation to a Ministry of Education official. Members of the Opposition, I’m afraid, are the ones who are going off on a tangent here, talking about things well outside the scope of this debate.

The Minister has outlined that she expects that the OIA is completely complied with and has asked the Ministry of Education to look into these issues, and we in ACT also expect the OIA to be taken seriously. What I do not take seriously is being lectured to by members of the Opposition when we know a former Labour Cabinet Minister told her caucus colleagues to avoid OIA of all communications. Here we have a Minister who twice today has now outlined what she is doing and the action she is taking—a very responsible Minister. What I’m looking forward to is actually getting back to the business of this House and getting on with the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill.

Yeah, thanks, Mr Speaker. Look, New Zealand is regarded as one of the most open, transparent, and uncorrupt countries in the world, and we take that very, very seriously. We treasure it, and when something goes wrong, we do something about it. I was just having a quick look before this debate, and I looked at a number of examples. Look up corruption in New Zealand; you’ll see what happens. There are a number of examples of that, where it’s been alleged and it has been responded to, and that is exactly the right thing to do there.

This seems to all come from an article in the New Zealand Herald—at least that’s what it’s highlighted; that’s what the Hon Ginny Andersen was talking about—and what you see shot through that also is the response. So something was done, and there is a response to that. If I can just look at a couple of the things which I said in there, the ministry said it’s inconsistent with the behaviour it’s expected. They emphasised adherence to Official Information Act (OIA) obligations. They’ve launched an internal review, and the Minister of Education has met with the secretary and the secretary has already met with or talked with the Ombudsman and the Public Service Commission. So, shot through that same article, there is an issue here and there is a response to that issue, and that is what we should expect. That, I think, is the most important thing here, that this is being taken seriously by the Minister and by the ministry, and it is not what they anticipate to happen.

Look, can I just finish off by saying, because this assertion has come from the Hon Ginny Andersen, she talked about the Minister’s track record, but if you look at her own track record of the things that she has alleged, the things that she has said are facts and then has had to backtrack on them—so, not that long ago, it was around how road maintenance was funded. Oh, it wasn’t done through the national road transport fund; she was berating the Hon Mark Mitchell in a radio programme, and she was 100 percent wrong. This is the pattern that we get from that member over there, that she has time and time again been 100 percent wrong. There is something that I usually refer to, and I think others do as well: they’re called “Ginny facts”, and those are facts which are undoubtedly wrong.

I think we should conclude this debate as quickly as possible. There is action being taken in response to this OIA issue, and that is the right thing to do to protect the transparency and honesty and integrity of this country.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The programme lead for the curriculum development, Catherine Law, essentially, directed her staff to keep secret information. Her words were “What we do not need is anything … in writing that shows that this stuff has gone backwards and forwards between them and us.” They’re talking about the Minister’s office and the department, so they’re covering their tracks. I was astounded to hear Erica Stanford say, “Yes, my private secretary gets information and, essentially, curates it and sends it back.”—“The Minister won’t like that.”; “Reword that.” That is exactly the kind of behaviour that should not be going on, and I could not believe that she said that in the House with a straight face.

What we have is a Minister who is developing a culture of secrecy, who is treating the Official Information Act (OIA) with disdain and contempt. For her to say out of one side of her mouth, “Oh, I’ve told my staff what my expectations are.” and at the very same time running an operation where her private secretary is curating information to make sure it doesn’t quite get to her is, frankly, despicable. The whole principle of the Official Information Act is the free availability of information, and if Erica Stanford is managing her department in a way to circumvent those rules, it is despicable. It’s contemptible. The idea of a transparent Government is what this country rests upon. The Official Information Act has two basic principles: transparency and freedom of information for citizens, and accountability of Ministers, and that is what she is seeking to do away with.

You know what? One of the things we need is for the Official Information Act to be given more teeth, because behaviour like that should be punished. There is a dusty old section in the Crimes Act, section 107, which is wilfully contravening a statute. I must say it looks to me very much like this senior official has looked at the Official Information Act and simply said, “I don’t want to do that. It might be my legal obligation to keep good records”—in the Public Records Act as well, of course, to make sure that Government business is on the record and is archived correctly. This senior official seems to have looked at her obligations and said, “I don’t want to do that.” or “The Minister wouldn’t like me to do that, so I won’t do it.”—a wilful contravention of law. There is in fact a provision which could deal with that. Section 107 of the Crimes Act, wilful contravention of the statute. You cannot blatantly disregard your obligations, particularly in the Public Service.

So what we have here is a Minister who is guiding and politicising the Public Service. The Public Service has never been under attack as much as it is now, not only through job cuts but through being instructed to pursue their tasks in a political way. Now, we all know that the Government of the day can progress their agendas, but to engage in a political dialogue—and Catherine Law also said that this is political; she was taking the politics of the situation into account when she was making decisions about the OIA. “We’ve got to be really mindful”, she said, “that this process comes before we start the formal process, which is the one through bags”—that is, ministerial information bags—“and that is all formal, public, and transparent.” They were running parallel processes: the real process and the formal process. That is duplicitous, and it’s under this Minister’s watch. Erica Stanford is presiding under a duplicitous process which is not transparent, it’s not honest, and she’s saying out of one side of her mouth, “I expect transparency.” and on the other side of her mouth she’s doing the opposite. It’s despicable. It should stop.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As the Minister of Education has already said, she’s made her expectations very clear to the Secretary for Education about ministry servants following the Official Information Act (OIA). She’s also noted that no instructions regarding avoiding the OIA have been passed on to the Ministry of Education. With two days left of Parliament, this is just a cynical attempt by the Government to try and upset what has been a tremendous three years of education reform. They’ve done more in three years than that previous Government did in the last six.

I concur with the previous speaker, Ryan Hamilton: this is a cynical move by the Government to attempt to limit participation rights of ordinary New Zealanders, because the Official Information Act has been part of New Zealanders’ public and constitutional law arrangements since 1982, and the rights of public participation are something that we are proud to protect. New Zealand was one of the first countries to adopt these sorts of official information powers in the way that they’re formulated here, and like countries like South Africa and the UK and others who have adopted these process rights formally, they make up not only the ability of ordinary New Zealanders to meet with their parliamentarians, to petition them, to put their point of view forward like everyone else, but they also ensure that public servants are also accountable to the ordinary working New Zealanders who are trying to just get ahead in life and to make sure that, in this case, their education system responds to the needs of their children and their communities.

Section 4 of that Act was pretty world leading for countries that we compare ourselves to. It says that access to information enables people to participate more effectively in making and administering laws and policies and promotes the accountability of Ministers and officials. It’s that accountability that is at issue today. This is something that New Zealand should be able to pride itself on, and we have heard from members of Government parties that New Zealand is a country well known for its accountability and transparency around the world. That’s what’s at stake here. When New Zealand is falling in the accountability and transparency indexes, we should all be concerned in this House about not only what it says internationally but what it says to the people in New Zealand who we represent.

Section 5 sets the basic rule out that “information should be made available unless there is [a] good reason for withholding it.” It used to be in New Zealand that information like this was secret. It is good that New Zealanders can expect that information won’t be secret in the future, and that should be something which Ministers uphold. That participation right matters particularly in education, because parents entrust their children to the education system, and teachers have to implement the curriculum. They need the confidence that consultation is genuine, that professional advice is professional advice, and when Ministers make political choices, those transparent choices are on the public record.

But this is not the first public law concern raised about how this Government has handled the curriculum.

National curriculum statements are secondary legislation. They are law. Anyone who is a professional working in the education system has to do what the Minister says, because the curriculum is the law which this Parliament announces to them that they must follow. Parliament has a specialist committee—the Regulations Review Committee—which scrutinises whether instruments like these have been made fairly and consistently, and on 2 June this year, the committee formally took up a complaint about the curriculum statements. I chaired that committee, and that complaint demonstrates something important: the curriculum is not simply a political document belonging to the Minister.

She accounted to this House, in question time today, that she had managed this process like any other Minister in her Government would, but she is accountable for a law which is the secondary legislation, which is the curriculum statements. Those are an exercise of public power, which she has a ministerial warrant to carry out, subject to the public law requirements and parliamentary scrutiny afforded to her as Minister when exercising that public power. Avoiding emails does not avoid the Official Information Act. Official information can include information known to officials but never written down and to the Minister. What’s the problem here? The problem is that the Minister has created a culture and intimated, at all steps along the way, that this would be perfectly acceptable practice under her watch. It’s not. The Public Records Act separately requires public offices to create and maintain full and accurate records, which has not happened here.

The former Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier specifically addressed officials avoiding records because they might be subject to a request under the Official Information Act, and what has happened here is in direct contravention to his findings. He called it “deeply troubling”, and said, “Deliberately keeping information off the written record to avoid discovery can be fundamentally unlawful.”, and it is. This Government has already been warned about exactly what provenance and record-keeping matters, and associate health Minister Casey Costello supplied officials with tobacco policy notes, but neither she nor her office could establish who had written them. The notes were used for ministerial purposes and contributed to the policy adopted by the Government. Casey Costello inevitably released the document, but only after denying that it even existed at all.

This Government cannot be trusted with the official information under which it is operating, but in education, it is special. It is not only the exercise of public confidence but the exercise of public law which the curriculum fits into. It brings this debate back to the Minister’s conduct. These were communications going backwards and forwards with her office. What did she know about them, has she knowledge, or was she reckless about its effect?

I think I’ll be the fifth person to reinforce what the Minister has said—most importantly that she’s made her expectations very clear to the Secretary for Education and that there have been no instructions from her office to avoid the Official Information Act. The most important point here is actually the very significant work that has been done in the education portfolio in the last three years—the parts that the parents very much care about when I’m out on the door. Just to name a few: an hour a day of reading, writing, and maths; expanded maths and pāngarau support; and actually delivered a major increase to the teaching workforce, 1,800 teachers in 2024; and, of course, structured literacy and structured numeracy; adding to that expanded classroom infrastructure. Just the other week, I was at Taradale Primary School, which had gone back to single-cell classrooms.

These things are significant in education, and to make a mountain out of a mole hill in such occasion where the Minister has made very, very clear her expectations and reinforced her position, I’d sooner get back to debating the issues that very much matter to Kiwis, like the resource management reform. Thank you.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.