Jay Kuten: Does Ombudsman serve public interest?

Jay Kuten

IN April 2016 I duly reported here of my travails in trying to get Vodafone to set up my fibre-optic internet connection while leaving my landline as copper.

As a description of the multiple frustrations encountered, I called the whole thing The Telephone Torture Game. I had undertaken the entire venture to join Whanganui's "smart city", and shared my story as a cautionary tale to provide a measure of solace to others preparing their own journeys to the digital future.

But even before that misadventure I had been gob-smacked by the announcement in January 2016 - nine months before a district council election - that a settlement had been reached between council and the MHW company over the failed wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). The announcement stipulated that council spent $864,000 of ratepayer money on legal costs and received in return somewhere between zero and $10 million, excluding recovery of $6727 in costs. In addition, the exact settlement was confidential. It was later explained that the settlement's confidentiality was at the request of MHW.

That the history of the WWTP was steeped in politics, with issues of responsibility and accountability going back several councils, was clearly at the forefront and explicitly a focus of the election of the coming September. A new WWTP would have to be decided, and the clouds cast by the old one meant that a greater transparency over the council's superintendence of ratepayers' money was a necessity towards citizens' informed participation in the election of September 2016.

After a refusal by council to address my OIA request as to the settlement terms, I applied to the Office of the Ombudsman for relief. My request that the Ombudsman overturn council's refusal rested on my position that the public interest in having full information for its electoral choices outweighed the demand of MHW to keep that information a secret.

I stressed that whereas council's relationship to MHW was evanescent and transactional, its relationship to citizenry was enduring, resting on trust. I asked for a clear definition of "the public interest" in this matter.

With the election five months away, I duly submitted my request to the Office of the Ombudsman on April 19, 2016, and received acknowledgment of its receipt on April 20, 2016, including a promise of a case number to be assigned within 10 days.

Then they promptly lost it. When I didn't hear anything for two months, I wrote again and was asked to resubmit my request. This time I got a case number, 43114.

I wrote again stressing that the lack of settlement data compromises the safety of our September election. No answer.

My "saved" folder contains a lengthy email chain that is itself an expression of mounting frustration, of repeated automatic replies assuring me that if this were a new complaint it would soon receive a case number.

The election came and went, but without any significant response from the Ombudsman. Finally, 17 months after submission, on September 25, 2017, the Ombudsman, Leo Donnelly, wrote that he had provisionally decided that the council's need to keep its settlement secret outweighed the public interest in accountability. His letter gave me 14 days to respond.

As the Ombudsman's office, which had lost my original complaint, misstated the issues I raised when they finally took up my submission, then failed to address several of the issues including the necessity for timeliness in terms of our election, I wrote back that the sudden urgency of a deadline made it impossible for me to do other than disagree with the decision reached on different terms than on my original request.

I don't like to lose - especially on issues effecting electoral democracy - but better to lose on substance, not because the ref's either blind or too busy. It's a lot like the phone company, only worse. In the case of the Ombudsman, who can you complain to?

■Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.