It’s your right to get official information from the government - so why is it so hard?
“A former chief ombudsman says many agencies are ‘making a mountain out of a molehill’ in their responses – or lack of response – to official information requests, and it’s time the Act sees reform.” Newsroom
Sir Peter Boshier’s frustration with Te Whatu Ora’s non-compliance is entirely legitimate. His description of people unable to access information about loved ones is, for one group of over 100,000 people, not an exceptional circumstance.
For adopted adults, it is the designed and permanent condition of our lives.
While the Official Information Act, for all its failings, at least carries the presumption that information should be released, for adopted people seeking their own records, it operates under a different regime entirely. One where a raft of other legislation actively prohibits access, regardless of what the OIA says or what the Ombudsman can do about it.
An original birth certificate is the first and most basic opportunity the state has to tell the truth about its citizens. It is the foundational record of who you are and where you came from. For adopted people, that record is held by the state. While the Adult Adoption Information Act 1985 appeared to offer a pathway to this most basic of human rights, it was conditional on the birth mother’s consent, and it could be vetoed entirely. So not, in reality, a human right.
Meanwhile, all other adoption records remain permanently sealed except by court order, itself an avenue so narrow as to be nearly theoretical. These are not delays or bureaucratic failures that the non-adopted may experience. They are, instead, the law working exactly as intended.
If there were any doubt about the depth of that intention, the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021, passed by the Ardern Labour Government, makes it explicit.
Other than by a court order, an adopted person’s birth records can be accessed only when the adopted person, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents are all confirmed dead. The single alternative threshold is 120 years from the adopted person’s birth.
The law does not trust adopted people with the facts of their own birth within any foreseeable human lifetime.
This means adopted people cannot access their own medical history, their genetic background, the circumstances of their birth, or enjoy the intrinsic right to the identities of their biological family.
This is not because an agency is slow or under-resourced, but because legislation explicitly excludes them. The OIA cannot help them. The Ombudsman cannot help them. There is no complaint pathway, because no one is breaking the rules.
Sir Peter describes non-compliance with the OIA as wrong. He is right. But at least those people had a right to be breached. Adopted people were never granted the right in the first place.
When we talk about transparency and the right to information, we should be honest about who that right has never extended to, and why.
Dr Barbara Sumner is the author of On Human Adoption and the Manufacture of Identity and writes the weekly Substack publication Adoptology - Adoption Deconstructed.
To understand the structures, functions, purpose and social impacts of adoption in Aotearoa New Zealand -
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