Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was given a rap over the knuckles over the way he responded to an Official Information Act (OIA) request relating to communications between former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan.
After Ardern and her office were surprised last year by her inclusion in a Harry and Meghan-fronted documentary series, the Herald requested correspondence between the then-prime minister and the royals.
Hipkins’ office, which dealt with the request after Ardern’s resignation, released communications between Ardern’s office and the royals’ staff, but withheld “additional communications” from release.
The Herald can reveal that there were text messages between Ardern and the royals, which Hipkins did not release. These were not processed with the original request and only discovered later.
The Herald appealed the decision to withhold those “communications” to the Ombudsman.
The Ombudsman found that there were a number of text messages between Ardern and Harry and Meghan. He said some were personal and between “friends”, while others were official information.
The Ombudsman’s investigation found that neither Hipkins nor anyone in his office had reviewed these text messages between Ardern and the royals before making a decision on the OIA request.
“Instead the Prime Minister had relied on comment provided by Dame Jacinda as to what she thought should happen with the request,” Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier said.
The Ombudsman found that Hipkins’ “omission to assess all of the official information within scope of your request against the criteria in the OIA before making a decision on the requests was unreasonable and contrary to law”, according to a decision by Boshier given to the Herald.
The Ombudsman said the messages “[f]or the most part... were largely of a personal nature - Dame Jacinda messaging with her friends Harry and Meghan”.
“This category of messages are not official information as the messages were clearly not sent or received in Dame Jacinda’s capacity as Prime Minister,” he said.
However, the Ombudsman also found a “relatively small number of messages” that did fall into the category of official information as specified under the OIA.
“[T]here are a relatively small number of messages that indicate Dame Jacinda was messaging the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in her then capacity as the Prime Minister of New Zealand.
“These are messages where Dame Jacinda’s former role of Prime Minister is inextricably tied to the subject of discussion. These messages are official information,” Boshier said.
Despite these messages being determined “official information” and therefore subject to the OIA, the Ombudsman decided not to release them.
One way to withhold official information from being released under the act is if it were subject to an “obligation of confidence... where the making available of the information would be likely otherwise to damage the public interest”.
The Herald argued that the Duke’s position in the line of succession and the pair’s role in New Zealand’s royal family meant there was a significant public interest in the official information.
The Ombudsman took a different view, saying that “in the right circumstances I would be perfectly prepared to say that the public interest in release of such otherwise confidential messages outweighs the need to withhold them”.
“These are not those circumstances however. The content and context of the texts that are official information was innocuous.
“I cannot say that there is sufficient public interest in these messages to outweigh the need to withhold,” he said.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.