this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Any thoughts on this? I tend to think anyone that asks for all correspondence relating to them is kinda being a dick unless they have a good reason, and we only get one side of the story here. And it probably depends on the person but I don't find the language used here to be particularly strong, as in I interpret this as meaning she's being annoying, but I would acknowledge not everyone would see it that way.
Plus it tends to be SovCits or similar that request everything held about themselves, and it's a bitch to collate because no one has a system that you just click a button and all emails, chats, comments, and notes from everywhere all come together in one place.
However, I think the staff have it wrong. The information is about herself, so it's a Privacy Act request and not an Official Information Act request. Goverment agencies can't charge for Privacy Act Requests (Unless something changed in the new Act, it's been over a decade since I was near this stuff).
She did the request for her own info because she suspected staff were dragging their heels with her other requests, and the request for her own info proved her suspicions were well-founded.
Asking for information on how a section of government operates should be commended, not discouraged. The government works for the people and their operations should be transparent. Doubly so when they act like they have something to hide.
But, Ive been a staff member who had a bad day and found a customer's legitimate request frustrating - "this is the last thing I needed" - so I have some level of sympathy for the staffers too.
Yeah, I fully support government transparency and see the need for it. I guess I've only seen this from one side, which is the side where you're being ask for this info but you're unable to correct the media because you can't give out personal information, so the media gets a one sided story.
I guess my main feeling was that the headline "Ministry of Justice workers call researcher a 'bitch' in online conversation" sounds really bad, but the sentence it's used it to me feels a lot softer.
On the other hand, there's really no excuse for a staff member whose job it is to respond to OIA and Privacy Act requests to not recognise that these chat conversations would be part of what is returned to her.
Part of their job is to respond to OIA requests.
That those requests might take effort is irrelevant, or at least considered by higher-ups before directing staff to assemble the OIA material.
The PhD had among the strongest reasons for her principal requests: research. That she felt that something was slightly off is relevant: if her requests have been responded to without proper care then her research is flawed.
She likey was looking for evidence that some of her requests were not properly responded to... instead she found a personal attack.
On thinking about this, this is relevant for another reason: they know that the chat information will be provided, so they have no excuse for their comments regardless of context.
I don't think I quite got this on my first reading. But on scanning through the article again, I think you're right. My bias is that people ask for all information about themselves as a sort of punishment for staff not doing what they want. I have this bias because it happens all the time. But this case is different, it's about a feeling that the information provided may not be correct, which is important when it's for research.
This is possibly a mismanagement problem.
"You must deliver this project in this timeframe, no matter what additional requests come through"
So workers see these requests as an impediment to their progress.
This doesn't excuse the staffers behavior, but I imagine they were under some sort of pressure.
My thoughts are that there are no villains here.
a) being annoyed at being overworked is understandable. (Writing what you really think/personal opinions in an institutional email is crazy though - save it for ftf).
b) wanting access to information for a major research project is also understandable and it's not her fault they are overworked.
c) she's an ex journalist and filmmaker and her current research seems to be about the web of lies and ommissions surrounding historical closed adoptions.
The only way anyone has ever got any traction on institutional "secrets" - everything from baby theft adoptions of the 1960s, child abuse in boarding schools in the 70s, the "Unfortunate Experiment" killing women at National Womens in the 80s, etc etc has been by being a "bitch" and pushing the authorities for information they don't want to part with.
OTOH as an ex journo she knows talking to the media about this will create a bit of buzz around her forthcoming research.
Wow, I didn't see this in the article but that provides some much needed context!
Yeah this is probably what's happening here. With the above context I can definitely see why she made the request. It was dumb for the staff to put that in writing, but I don't think they should lose their job over it. Her making such a big deal seemed on the surface to be just someone making a big deal, but you're probably right that as an author and ex journalist she is probably trying to get in the media to build some buzz and recognition for when her research is released.
It got me interested in her other work! Turns out I've actually seen one of her documentaries, it's this thing about a Maori family who breed horses in the Ruakines, plays on Maori TV sometimes.
Relevant to OP article though, found this in a review of her book:
If that was her experience, then going forward, feeling like you were being obstructed in an OIA process would reopen a few old wounds. Especially when now here she is at uni and trying to undertake academic research.
I think many people don't realise these days how bad adoption in NZ was, you sort of have to hear about it from the old timers. Teenage"unmarried mothers" were taken to special facilities and when they gave birth their babies were taken, even against their will/without consent in some cases, and never allowed to know who their parents were or why they were adopted or even what their own ethnicity was.
No, that's what she's trying to make you do!
Sorry, gotta break up the seriousness. Back to serious face.
I've got some limited knowledge on adoption stuff, and yeah, some pretty awful processes. I'm tempted to say it was a different time, but I'm pretty convinced we* will find out in 50 years about terrible things happening today that would horrify future generations and probably horrify current generations.
* Well maybe not us specifically, 50 years is a long time in the future
I mean I mentioned it because it's working on me!
Wait why aren't you going to be around in 50 years? Live to 100 go on I dare you.
I have no desire to live to 100! But maybe now I know about anticholinergic burden I might be able to be a sprightly 100 year old.
I used to know a sprightly 100 year old who still lived alone in their own home. Their longevity advice was "don't eat too many takeaways"! Bet they had a low anticholinergic burden though 😃
You've got to be careful with single data points. There are also 100 years olds saying the secret to longevity is a whiskey before breakfast, and a pack of cigarettes a day to keep the bugs away.
Yeah I'm not going to let it get between me and takeaways ha ha.
Seriously though as well as being a single data point it was self-reported and I noticed it changed depending on the interlocuter - from memory they told the local paper that the secret is going to church.
I'm pretty sure the real secret behind living a really long time is some combination of genetics and statistics (as in, if you have a 0.0001% chance of living that long, if you apply this to 8B people then you get 8,000 of these people).
Definitely. Something like 2/3 of cancer is luck for example.
Our immune system is constantly euthanising cancerous cells because they happen all the time. To "get" cancer, it has to miss the cell and let it grow to be noticeable. Lots of (bad) luck involved!
However, I'd be carefully putting numbers on it. There's not really a difference between cancer appearing to be luck vs we don't understand the risk factors. I'd guess that 2/3 luck would become 1/3 over the next 50 or 100 years as we understand risk factors better. Also I'm not really sure how you quantify the amount of luck when risk factors increase the chances, rather that directly causing it. In that sense you could say cancer is 100% luck.
A doctor once pointed out to me that every time there is cell replenishment, there's a possibility of cancer. 😶
I'm recuperating from a journey at the moment and too lazy to battle the newly terible search engine capabilities to find the articles I got the number from but as I understand it cancer scientists were pointing out that around 60- something percent of cancers in the body cannot be accounted for by environmental factors (diet, pollutants etc) once you control for those risk factors. Obviously it varies by cancer type, but this was the general estimate.
I think you're right that knowledge will increase but I think chance is worth bearing in mind because I think knowledge of external risks (and internal ones, like a bunch of missing immune cells) tends to be overstated in our thinking. Someone I knew with leukemia was the healthiest most clean living person I've ever met and I got so tired of people asking me what he had done to get it.
Maybe in 100 years cancer drugs will be the new paracetamol.
"Take this drug, it prevents cancer"
"How does it work?"
"We have some theories, but really we have no idea. It just does."
That's a cool idea!
There are so many drugs sort of like that rn. They get approved for one thing and then end up being approved for something totally different because it turns out they seem to do this other thing because reasons.
Found out the other day people are using low dose lithium of all things for cardiovascular health.
It kinda makes sense, since studies are more often "some people are getting better and we think it might be X, maybe, lets give it to 1000 people and measure against a control to see if it works" than they are "we understand the interactions in detail and based on how they interact it's certain to cure it".
Definitely, there's also what I think of as the Listerine factor.
(The people who invented Listerine had no idea what to do with it. They wanted doctors to wash their hands in it, then they tried to market it as a floor cleaner. Finally they worked out they could sell it as a cure for bad breath if they called bad breath a scarier name, "halitosis").
Haha yes. More generalised, everyone assumes that others know what they are doing but really everyone is just making it up as they go along.
Not everyone though surely. At the other end of the scale there's stuff like scientists trying to create a compound that will cause a very specific molecular behaviour in a particular set of blood vessels.
I bet it is everyone 😆. I bet if you ask those scientists, they would say they have a general idea of what should work but within that scope they are just trying things too see if they work.
I don't mean everyone has no idea what they are doing, but that there's a bit of "I have no idea what I'm doing" in everyone (whether they realise it or not).
I get what you mean now. Totally agree. There's an element of creativity in STEM and creativity itself has an element of chaos.
On a related tangent there's the idea of vocation - the people who most seem to know what they are doing tend to be doing it because they are "driven" or it "comes naturally" and both those things are essentially black box.
I'll counter that with the Peter Principle 😆
Fair point, we have all met plenty of those!