Kiwi households are putting spending on ice as bills soar, according to RNZ this week. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been busy: they released nine Official Information Act responses in recent days.

Except they didn't really release nine responses. They released the same answers multiple times.

Two separate OIA requests about "Overseas Military and Aid Expenditure" got identical responses. So did two requests about "International Obligations Relating to NZ Support for Ukraine." That's four duplicates among nine releases. (Source: FYI.org.nz (OIA tracker), oia-recent-responses)

The pattern raises a question: when agencies publish the same OIA response twice, are they gaming their transparency metrics? Each release counts as a "response" on FYI.org.nz, the public platform where New Zealanders track government transparency. But answering the same question twice doesn't make government more open. It just makes the numbers look better.

MFAT also released details of David Seymour's official visit to Argentina. One actual new piece of information among the duplicates.

This matters because OIA responses are how New Zealanders find out what their government is doing with their money. When MSD plans to claw back payments from state abuse survivors, OIA requests reveal the policy. When agencies spend on overseas trips, OIA requests show the bills. When you want to know where your taxes go, you file an OIA request.

But if agencies pad their response counts with duplicates, the system breaks down. Transparency becomes performance art. The appearance of openness without the substance.

MFAT isn't alone in this. Scroll through recent OIA releases on FYI.org.nz and you'll find other agencies doing the same thing: publishing near-identical responses to similar requests, each one counted separately. It's technically legal. The requests might have slightly different wording. But it's not what transparency is supposed to look like.

Here's what would actually help: a single, comprehensive response that answers related questions together. Publish it once. Update it when new information comes in. Make it searchable. Let New Zealanders find what they need without filing redundant requests.

Instead, we get nine releases that are really five releases. And somewhere, an official ticks a box that says MFAT is being transparent.

At a time when household budgets are stretched so thin that spending has frozen, New Zealanders deserve to know exactly where government money goes. They deserve answers that don't require decoding which OIA response is actually new. They deserve transparency that's real, not just counted.