Mahvash Ikram
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has been found in contempt of Parliament for deliberately misleading a select committee when its most senior officials were answering questions about Immigration NZ’s failed Biometric Capability Upgrade (BCU) project earlier this year, Parliament’s Privileges Committee has found.
The project was terminated on 9 December 2025, three months before an Education and Workforce Select Committee hearing in March this year, when progress was discussed with MBIE officials. But nothing was said about the project being cancelled and the committee did not discover this until 16 June 2026, when Immigration Minister Erica Stanford tabled a review and disclosed that $31.2 million of Budget 2026 funding would need to be used to write-off the project.
The Privileges Committee found that MBIE knew its answers were incomplete and officials would have been certain that the Education and Workforce Committee had been misled about the project’s status, which was a contempt under Standing Order 418(b).
However, it accepted MBIE chief executive Nic Blakeley’s evidence that there was “no active or deliberate decision not to share information about the status of the project”.
Former Immigration NZ head Alison McDonald, who answered the questions alongside Blakeley at the select committee hearing, told the Privileges Committee that “commercial sensitivity” around the project had been repeatedly stressed to her and that she could not discuss it with anyone beyond the Minister of Immigration and those within the ministry who were already in the loop.
Negotiations about final payments to the vendor did not conclude until 15 June 2026.
The Privileges Committee accepted that constraints might be imposed because a matter was subject to a Cabinet decision or would be better addressed by a minister, and committees generally accept these limits.
But the obligation to raise such issues sits with officials, and MBIE failed to flag them orally on 4 March or in writing in April, when it told the select committee that extensive work had caused them to change their approach to upgrading the identity management technology.
That “change in approach” was, in fact, to cancel the project.
MBIE held three preparatory sessions in front of the select committee. Blakeley told the Privileges Committee that, as best as the participants could recall, the BCU project did not come up in any of them. He called that an oversight and said the ministry was “clearly not adequately prepared”.
But the Privileges Committee found that extremely surprising. MBIE had already received several Official Information Act (OIA) requests about the project, had commissioned a review, was being pursued by media and had drawn up a list of anticipated questions – one of which was why the BCU project had been delayed.
Labour’s immigration spokesperson Phil Twyford, who raised the matter with the Speaker, had made three OIA requests about the project between 2024 and 2026. He described McDonald’s answers as “obfuscation and omission” and told the Privileges Committee the situation was “not terribly complicated” and he asked specific questions, which the ministry did not answer.
Neither Blakeley nor McDonald was aware that evidence could be given to a select committee in private. The Privileges Committee said that was alarming and described senior public servants who failed to familiarise themselves with the available guidance as “negligent”.
The ministry has accepted the finding and apologised to both committees.
The Privileges Committee recommended no sanction beyond the finding itself, saying it intended its findings to be of sufficient consequence on their own. The committee recommends only that the House takes note of its report.
Blakeley said, “As chief executive, I accept responsibility for this failure. Accountability rests with me. Parliament, ministers and the public are entitled to expect better from MBIE.
“My focus I now is on making sure failure of this nature does not happen again. Parliament must be able to trust that public service agencies will provide accurate, complete and frank information. In this case, MBIE failed to meet that standard.”
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