Sir Peter Bowsher

Staff were getting increasingly concerned about the non-response of Te Whata Ora.

And that's the only time that I had to engage with the Chief Executive to say, unless your agency complies, I'm going to ask the Solicitor-General to prosecute you.

I was at the end of my tether, and I thought that with the threat of that, it would produce a result.

This is at the end of the day, people wanting information about loved ones, either deceased or alive.

It's wrong that I couldn't help those people achieve information that they were entitled to.

because of non-compliance in a number of respects.

First of all, delay, then non-compliance with non-provision of material, and then when finally Te Whare Ora said it would supply the information, it didn't do so.

So really that, for me, was the lowest point.

I just think it was so uncoordinated and not synchronised as to who held what information.

where to find it and who was responsible for supplying it.

It really was a fraught era.

The trick for me talking to you, Sharon, is to crystallise this so that I present it simply.

One could talk around the subject and is in debt for a long time.

So I'll attempt to be succinct and helpful.

There used to be the Official Secrets Act, and that meant that if you gave information belonging to the state, you were in deep trouble.

It was replaced by the Official Information Act, which had three main purposes.

One,

To make information increasingly more available so that people could participate in democracy.

And secondly, to hold those who made decisions and policy accountable.

The third purpose of the OIA was to protect clearly information when the need arose to do so.