Goff’s e-mails

The Herald reports:

Emails apparently sent and received by Auckland mayor Phil Goff over a 12-year period have been offered with a $20,000 price tag and appear to contain deeply personal information alongside council and Parliamentary work.

The person trying to sell them is a criminal. The Herald should have gone straight to the Police and tried to get him identified and arrested. They could have done this by pretending to agree to pay him, and using the payment to track him or her down.

In 2011, Goff weighed into public debate over the use of a private email account by then-Foreign affairs minister Murray McCully, which had been hacked. Goff called it a “wake-up call” and was quoted saying: “Anything (of) an official nature should be going through protected channels.”

So this shows Goff is a total hypocrite. Not a huge surprise.

Among the emails provided were two dealing with campaign financing. One began with the line: “Team all emails should be on personal addresses or those that cannot be subject to an official information request”.

Goff appears to have received the email in his Xtra account and sent it to his executive assistant’s email account at Parliament.

This e-mail shows that Goff broke the law around the OIA. Any e-mails on personal addresses sent by Ministers or their staff are subject to the Official Information Act, and Goff would know this.

What Goff really means is that using personal accounts means they can simply deny the information exists, as unlike their official accounts there are no central servers with archives.

So Goff has contempt for the OIA we now know.