The Government Just Backed Down on Housing. Good Luck Getting the Data on Why.
While ministers announce policy U-turns on Auckland housing, the agencies meant to explain those decisions refuse to answer public questions. Treasury's OIA success rate? Zero percent.
Key Figures
The government just reversed course on Auckland's housing intensification rules. Major policy shift. Plenty of headlines. But here's what you won't read in those stories: if you want to know what advice ministers got before making that call, you're out of luck.
Because The Treasury, the agency that advises government on nearly every major decision, has a 0% success rate on Official Information Act requests tracked by FYI.org.nz. Not 5%. Not 10%. Zero. (Source: FYI.org.nz (OIA tracker), oia-agency-transparency)
And they're not alone. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment? Also 0%. Ministry of Social Development? Zero. Across 24 major government agencies, the average success rate for OIA requests sits at just 19%. One in five.
Think about that. The Official Information Act exists specifically so New Zealanders can see what their government is doing. It's meant to be the default. Transparency unless there's a good reason to refuse. But when four out of five requests get stonewalled, deflected, or simply ignored, something's broken.
Meanwhile, Inland Revenue, the agency everyone loves to complain about, answers requests successfully 48% of the time. The GCSB, our actual spy agency, hits 40%. New Zealand Police manages 36%. Even the Ministry of Defence, not exactly known for openness, clears the same rate.
So why can't Treasury? Why can't MBIE? These aren't intelligence agencies protecting operational secrets. They're policy ministries. Their job is to explain how government works. Yet they're less transparent than the people who literally run surveillance operations.
The pattern is clear: the closer an agency sits to political decision-making, the less likely it is to answer questions. Kainga Ora, which just watched the government gut its housing rules, succeeds on just 4% of requests. NZSIS, the Security Intelligence Service, also sits at zero.
None of these agencies show requests marked as refused in the data. They're not saying no. They're just not saying yes. The requests disappear into bureaucratic limbo: too sensitive, too complex, still being considered, transferred to another agency, withdrawn by the requester.
This matters more than it sounds. When the government announces a housing policy U-turn, you should be able to ask: what analysis supported this? What were the alternatives? Who lobbied for it? Those questions aren't radical. They're basic accountability.
But if Treasury won't answer, and MBIE won't answer, and Kainga Ora won't answer, then policy gets made in a black box. Politicians point to "advice" without showing it. Decisions get justified by reports you can't read. And the public is left guessing why things change.
Inland Revenue proves it's possible to be both functional and transparent. The gap between 48% and 0% isn't about capability. It's about willingness. Some agencies have decided that answering questions is part of their job. Others have decided it isn't.
So next time there's a policy backflip, remember: getting the actual story behind it just got a lot harder. And the agencies who should explain aren't even pretending to try.
This story was generated by AI from publicly available government data. Verify figures from the original source before citing.