Two civilians have died in the Los Angeles wildfires and Parliament is set to discuss an extended deadline for the Treaty Principles Bill submissions. Video / NZ Herald
Parliament’s website issues prevented submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill, causing frustration and outrage.
Tech experts blame cost-cutting and inadequate server capacity for the website’s failure.
People have expressed frustration and outrage this week, after persistenttechnical issues stopped them from giving online feedback before the midnight Wednesday deadline.
MPs will meet this morning to discuss allowing late submissions, though bigger questions about the state of Parliament’s tech infrastructure remain.
Consultant Louisa Taylor has about two decades of experience in the tech field and said the errors she observed on the website could be caused by two things.
“One is that there’s high traffic on their website which has taken it out of action because they haven’t prepared enough server capacity. That’s the negligent part of it.
“The second part was that the same sort of error might come from an attack. If a nefarious actor sent a lot of traffic to the site they could actually take it down.”
Tech experts say problems with Parliament’s website that stopped people from submitting on the Treaty Principles Bill may come down to cost-cutting measures. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Taylor said whatever the cause, Parliament’s tech infrastructure clearly wasn’t up to scratch and it could be down to the coalition’s cost-cutting measures.
“It was highly foreseeable that there would be a large number of submissions so the server needed to be sized. They just needed to get more machinery, more kit, ready.”
Another tech expert, Sam Sehnert, said it was “mind-boggling” Parliament’s website wasn’t up to handling high volumes of traffic and any investment made would be worthwhile.
“It does take some time to set up but as you can see the value of doing that is well worth it and usually it’s a result of cutting corners or trying to save a buck.
“If you do that sort of thing, you cut those corners, then outages like this can happen.”
It’s not clear how many people were affected by technical problems but RNZ has seen evidence they could date back to late November 2024.
Back then, a submitter emailed their feedback to Parliament, flagging they had experienced problems with the official submissions portal.
RNZ approached both the Government and the Clerk of the House to ask what went wrong with the website and if it was connected to the coalition’s cost-cutting measures.
The Government referred RNZ to a statement provided by the Clerk, David Wilson, who said Parliament did attempt to prepare for the busy period.
“The Office of the Clerk is aware that the unprecedented volume of submissions being made simultaneously caused issues for the Parliament website and submission portal.
“While we anticipated a high volume of submissions, and had made improvements to deal with them within the constraints of the current architecture, the amount of traffic was even greater than expected.”
Wilson said his office was not required to make any savings from its baseline during Budget 2024.
‘There’s a trust issue now with it’
Among those affected by the technical issues was Wellingtonian Peter McKenzie, who filled out all the fields before the vital second part of his submission disappeared when he submitted it.
“It basically contradicted what I’d said in the first part which was why I didn’t think the bill was appropriate given the way Māori have been treated.”
He called the helpline but had no luck.
“The message said basically they were effectively out of the office at that time of day so I left them a message saying can somebody please call me back because I’m not happy at what’s happened.
“And I’ll give you until 11.59pm which is when the thing closes and then I’ll go to the news.”
“There’s a trust issue now with it. Was this deliberately slanted so it would support the bill? That was the thinking I went through on Tuesday night which is why I was so angry with them.
“Thinking you’re misrepresenting my views deliberately with the system you’re using.”
Te Pāti Māori, Labour, the Greens and the Act Party all support extending the submissions deadline to allow for give those who missed out on giving feedback another chance.
MPs on the justice committee will meet via Zoom at 9am today to discuss next steps for the Treaty Principles Bill.
“In light of the technical issues receiving submissions online, the meeting will include decisions about how we treat emailed submissions [which aren’t normally accepted], whether we re-open submissions and for how long, and how we treat late submissions from people who could not submit due to the website issues,” committee chair James Meager said.
“I would expect that anybody who tried to make a submission before the deadline, but was unable to do so due to technical reasons, will be given the opportunity to do so.
“This has happened in the past when other technical issues have prevented submissions being made. We are treating this as we would any other bill so I don’t see why it would be any different here.”
