Top government officials found in contempt of Parliament for hiding cancelled IT project from MPs

Parliament has found two senior government officials misled a group of MPs about a cancelled computer project, and ruled that doing so was a contempt of Parliament. The officials are MBIE chief executive Nic Blakeley and former Immigration New Zealand head Alison McDonald. Both had already publicly apologised, so the committee did not recommend any further punishment. (RNZ)

The problem started in March, when Blakeley and McDonald appeared before a select committee. Select committees are small groups of MPs who check on what government departments are doing. The MPs asked about a planned upgrade to biometric technology, which uses things like fingerprints or facial recognition to identify people. Blakeley and McDonald answered questions about the project, but neither told the committee the project had already been cancelled. (RNZ)

The Privileges Committee, which investigates when Parliament's rules are broken, looked into what happened. It found that MBIE answered questions in a narrow way on purpose. The officials would have known their incomplete answers would leave MPs thinking the project was still going. (Parliamentary Practice in New Zealand; Privileges Committee guidance; Parliamentary Practice)

When Blakeley gave evidence to the Privileges Committee in July, he admitted the ministry got it wrong. But he said officials did not deliberately try to mislead anyone. He said they believed they could not reveal the cancellation because MBIE was still negotiating a final payment with NEC, the Japanese technology company involved. The committee did not accept this. It found the limited answers were deliberate and that the officials would have understood the false impression created. (RNZ)

McDonald is the now-retired head of Immigration New Zealand, which is part of MBIE. Blakeley took over as MBIE chief executive in January 2026. His predecessor was paid more than $600,000 a year. (RNZ)

The committee chose not to recommend further punishment because the officials had already apologised in public. But the finding of contempt stands as the committee's formal verdict. (RNZ)

Separately, MBIE's conduct around the failed project is being investigated by former Solicitor-General Michael Heron KC. The Public Service Commission asked him to look into whether MBIE was fully honest with its own ministers over the project's seven-year timeline, and whether it used what has been described as "creative accounting." (RNZ)

The broader context here is that two different accountability processes are running at the same time. The Privileges Committee only deals with how officials behave toward Parliament and its committees. It does not look at whether a ministry was honest with its minister, or whether its financial reporting was sound. Those questions are for the Heron KC investigation, which runs under the Public Service Commission and covers areas the Privileges Committee was never designed to reach.

For officials and their legal advisers, the ruling reinforces something tested in New Zealand parliamentary practice before. The standard has long been that giving a committee information that is inaccurate on an important point can amount to contempt. The committee itself decides whether a delay in correcting wrong information crosses that line. What this case makes clear is that answering questions selectively, even when officials think they have commercial or contractual reasons to hold back, can be contempt if it leaves MPs with a false impression. (Parliamentary Practice)

The NEC argument was the one that failed to convince the committee. Blakeley said the ongoing commercial sensitivity around a final payment justified not telling the committee the project had been cancelled. The committee's finding that the limited answers were intentional means it rejected that reasoning. It was not a good enough reason to leave MPs in the dark about whether a project even existed anymore. The ruling does not settle in principle whether a contract dispute can ever override the duty to be open with a select committee. But the practical message to chief executives is that the committee will look at the effect on Parliament's ability to do its job, not just at why officials stayed quiet.

The fact that no punishment was recommended beyond the contempt finding itself fits with how the Privileges Committee usually works when someone has already apologised. But the finding stays on the record, and it will matter in future when officials have to decide how to handle sensitive or commercially constrained information in front of a committee.