Labour leader Chris Hipkins says it is “absolutely feasible” Police Minister Mark Mitchell wasn’t aware of emails about former Deputy Police Commissioner Jevon McSkimming.
He said usual escalation processes to ensure correspondence is seen by the minister or their advisers can be circumvented and “nothing is ever completely foolproof”.
It follows comments from former Police Commissioner Andrew Coster that “there’s no way in the world” police employees stationed in Mitchell’s Beehive office could have prevented the minister or his political staff from seeing the emails.
Last month, after an Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) report finding significant failures by police in their handling of complaints about McSkimming, the Herald revealed Mitchell had received 36 emails since December 2023 making allegations against the former senior officer.
Mitchell said these emails were never raised with him, telling the Herald at the time that the “then-Police Commissioner directed” police staff based in his ministerial office to “refer emails relating to McSkimming directly to his office and not share or discuss them with anyone else in the office”.
Coster has denied knowledge of this email process prior to then, but said he “can’t validate whether that was in fact a protocol that was in place”.
A memo, seen by the Herald, from the police’s ministerial services team to the Police Minister’s office last month outlined the process, including that police staff were to treat correspondence about McSkimming “in confidence and not circulate to it others [sic] in the minister’s office or police generally”.
Instead, it would be referred to the director of Coster’s office and then managed with then-Deputy Commissioner Tania Kura, the memo said.
Police’s chief operating officer Andrea Conlan said on Sunday, the director of Coster’s office had spoken with ministerial services in January 2024 about how to process emails.
Hipkins, a former Police Minister, Public Service Minister, and Prime Minister, on Tuesday explained how his ministerial office had worked in terms of dealing with correspondence.
He said an administrative staff member controlled his inbox, would read incoming emails to identify what topic they related to, and would forward them to the appropriate private secretary. A private secretary is a staff member from an agency seconded to the Beehive, like a police employee.
“They would make decisions about who in police should prepare responses and so on,” Hipkins said.
“If it was political in nature, it generally would also be sent to my political adviser so that they were aware of the issue that was being raised there.”
But he said there is a challenge with police in that it has operational independence.
“So even if there are things that are political in nature, if they are clearly matters of a police investigation, you do have to have trust in the police to brief the minister at the appropriate time. You’ll find most ministers of police will try and stay out of that.”
For example, if someone had emailed him making a complaint against a police officer, the sender would be given information about how to make a complaint with the IPCA, Hipkins said, but that wouldn’t always trigger a “please explain” from police.
Hipkins said that considering the scale of the correspondence Mitchell received – 36 emails about McSkimming – he would have hoped if that had been in his office, “that would have triggered some escalation to my political adviser and therefore to me”.
“But again, in perhaps defence of Mark Mitchell, I also want to say that as a minister, you have to be able to place a degree of trust in the process here.
“Ministers get hundreds of emails. There has to be a system of triaging them and getting the agencies and departments who are responsible to prepare briefings or responses to those.
“That’s why you’ll find on that particular topic, I’ve been quite cautious in my comments because every minister will look at this and go, ‘could this happen to me?’. The answer, if they’re being real honest, is in most cases, the answer could be ‘yes’.”
He said ministers aren’t sitting in front of their computers vetting their own emails.
Coster rejected that police staff could have prevented the minister from seeing the emails.
“The role of the agency’s staff is to have emails given to them by the minister’s own staff to prepare responses for the minister through the agency. There’s just no way that police staff in the minister’s office could somehow intercept and prevent those emails.”
But Hipkins said it is “absolutely feasible” Mitchell hadn’t been aware.
“As much as you can do everything you can to try and put in place systems of escalation and so on, nothing is ever completely foolproof if someone wanted to circumvent that.”
Mitchell on Sunday said Coster’s claim that “he was not aware about the system instituted to redirect emails is unfathomable”.
“The protocol around the emails has been repeatedly verified by several police employees who were given the instruction by Coster’s office.
“It came from his office and most senior direct reports and, as he already accepts, as commissioner, all things ultimately fell to his responsibility.”
The minister’s explanation for what had happened and the process in his office resembles how Hipkins had described it in his own.
Mitchell said a receptionist categorised emails into portfolios - such as police or Corrections – then forwarded them to staff in his office with responsibility for that area.
The office receives a “massive amount of correspondence”, he said, and the receptionist wouldn’t have read through the emails, other than to identify where they should be forwarded.
Once received by the private secretary, in this case the police staff member, emails about McSkimming would have been sent off to police headquarters without anyone else in the office becoming aware, Mitchell said.
He said that put the police staff member in an “awful situation”, but the staffer would have believed the allegations were being investigated as they were being sent to the Police Commissioner’s office.
Jamie Ensor is a senior political reporter in the NZ Herald press gallery team based at Parliament. He was previously a TV reporter and digital producer in the Newshub press gallery office. He was a finalist this year for Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards.