Labour MP Ginny Andersen received a complaint about Police Commissioner Richard Chambers while she was serving as Minister of Police, RNZ reports. The complaint was received last year — during the final period of the Labour-led government before the October 2023 election.

RNZ also revealed that an investigation is currently underway in relation to complaints about Chambers. The nature of the investigation has not been disclosed publicly, nor has the substance of the complaint Andersen received.

Andersen, the MP for Hutt South, was appointed to the Police portfolio by Prime Minister Chris Hipkins in March 2023, taking over a brief she had some background to carry — she spent nine years working for New Zealand Police before entering Parliament. She was first elected in 2017 and has sat in the 52nd, 53rd and 54th Parliaments. In the Labour government she also held the Justice and Associate Justice portfolios.

The ministerial relationship with the Commissioner sits at the intersection of operational independence and political accountability — one of the more consequential accountability lines in the public sector. Ministers of Police are constitutionally barred from directing the Commissioner on operational matters, but complaints about the Commissioner's conduct are a different category entirely: they can and do land on a minister's desk, and how they are handled carries real weight.

What remains unclear from the reporting is what Andersen did with the complaint — whether it was referred to an appropriate body, held pending further information, or otherwise actioned before the change of government in October 2023. The current government, which took office under Christopher Luxon after the 2023 election, now holds the Police portfolio; the existence of an active investigation suggests the matter carried forward across the handover.

Andersen has previous form as a vocal presence on policing issues from Opposition. In February 2024 she made claims in the House that the then Police Minister had been paid to kill people while working in private security overseas — allegations that drew significant attention at the time. That episode illustrated both her willingness to use parliamentary privilege aggressively and the intensity with which she tracks the Police portfolio from the Opposition benches.

The disclosure that she received a complaint about the Commissioner while in office adds a layer of retrospective scrutiny to her tenure. The key questions — when the complaint was made, by whom, what it alleged, and what Andersen did with it — are not yet answered by the available reporting. Whether those details emerge through the ongoing investigation, or through parliamentary questions to the current minister, will shape how significant this episode ultimately proves to be.

For the Press Gallery, this is also a story about institutional process: how complaints about the head of New Zealand's largest law enforcement agency are received, recorded and acted on across a change of government. That process sits largely outside public view, and the RNZ reporting suggests it is now drawing scrutiny it hasn't previously attracted.