Government refusing legitimate OIA requests for three years

Stuff reports:

It’s about four journalists trying to do something worthwhile – to identify areas of New Zealand with low vaccination rates, and to investigate the reasons behind that.

The Ministry officials decided that releasing immunisation rates by suburb would not be useful in their view, so they denied the requests for three years.

One of their excuses was that the had the data at meshblock level (which is so small, it could potentially identify individuals) and that it would be a huge project to convert it to suburb level.

This is unadulterated crap.

Something I do a lot of is use meshblock level data and group it at a higher level such as area units, suburbs, territorial authorities, electorates etc.

It takes me less than an hour. Sometimes less than 30 minutes. It is in fact very simple to do just in Excel using a formula.

So the Ministry of Health saying this would take significant collation and research is bullshit.

Read the whole article to see how appalling the Ministry of Health’s compliance with the OIA was.