Jamie Ensor

So at the moment we don't have a finalised deal that's very much being kept behind closed doors.

But what we do know is there's been months of discussions and negotiations with the US between the New Zealand officials, mostly from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and

the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, and people from Washington DC over what could be a relatively significant deal for New Zealand.

We don't have that finalised deal, but a draft agreement that we've seen parts of included things like supplying raw and processed critical minerals to help the commercial and defence industries of both countries.

That's right.

We didn't hear about this discussion until late January.

But what some of these documents that we've obtained show is that there were months of discussions that officials had gone into what appeared to be quite intense negotiations over specific details of a potential deal.

We hadn't heard of those discussions up until late January, and the Prime Minister has been very deliberate about trying to hush down that talk.

Why is that, Jamie?

I think there are a lot of concerns from some parts of New Zealand about the potential environmental impacts of increased mining.

But also one of the really interesting things in these documents was officials identified the risk of there being concerns from the public about, I guess, the nature or the use of critical mineral.

Here in New Zealand, the government speaks about their use in the clean energy transition, so for things like renewable energy technology.

However, they highlighted that globally, the discussion is more turning to how they can be used in defence technologies.

And there could be some concern that these critical minerals could be sent offshore to be used in the likes of missiles.

And therefore, I think they're wanting to get this framework in a good place before they go out and market it to the public.

Yeah, that's right.

So I sent a Official Information Act request in to a number of agencies and ministers asking for their briefings or their engagements with the US on critical minerals and this potential deal.

And I was sent a big bundle back from various places, including the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

A few days after I received that response, I was contacted by someone there saying that they had since identified that some of the information should have been withheld.

Most importantly, there was one reason that they gave, and that if this information was released, or part of this information was released, it could prejudice the security, defence, or international relations of New Zealand.