Researcher Barbara Sumner discovered the "deeply disturbing" conversation through an Official Information Act request.

Two Ministry of Justice workers are in hot water for describing a researcher as a “bitch” in an online conversation.

Academic and author Barbara Sumner made a number of Official Information Act requests as part of her PhD research into the systems around adoption. Then, in October last year, she asked for all correspondence mentioning her by name.

“Because I had felt all along that there was a resistance to everything I sent in and you know, just the sort of snottiness, I guess, of some of the responses that came in that request. I wanted to understand how they were treating me throughout the process.”

One page of the response stood out among more than 100 others. A November 2022 Teams conversation between two staffers, whose names were redacted, complained about Sumner’s latest request.

They described it as “a waste of time” and said it “should have been refused on the ground of substantial collation” or that the ministry should “charge her for it and get a contractor”.

“our ministerial services team sucks cuz they wouldnt let us refuse, and helen didnt push back hard [sic],” one worker wrote.

"but also shes a bitch for wanting everything. does she think govt just has unlimited resources for this type of crap lol.

“like theres no public interest in our emails back and forward.”

  • Ilovethebomb
    163·
    2 days ago

    She sounds like a massive pain in the ass, and the story is written to be sympathetic to her. I don’t blame the employees for getting annoyed, but putting something like this in writing is just dumb.

    What’s so important about a PhD that justifies this level of access, anyway? How does it benefit NZ?

    • liv
      5·
      20 hours ago

      I looked it up, it’s this research here so depending on how it’s written up I can definitely see it potentially benefiting a subset of society.

      That said, the bar for PhD research is it has to make an original contribution of new material to its field - that’s for the universities to gatekeep. PhDs only have to be “of benefit to NZ” above and beyond that if they are getting direct funding from the Government (or other funding body with that requirement).

      But either way a PhD is literally a piece of research so anyone undertaking one has to, well, research all the relevant info to the very best of their ability.

      I think the issue here is whether their staff are funded to the level to meet these OIAs and if not, their manager should have requested her to apply for funding to cover it. Which is hard to know without knowing what the level of access actually was.

      There’s a wikipedia article on her and she seems to mainly be a film maker/journalist not an academic, and is now involved in adoption activism around people who weren’t allowed to know who their real parents are. So the request about her name kind of makes more sense to me in that context.

    • Venator
      5·
      1 day ago

      The fact she put in an OIA request for all correspondence mentioning her by name kinda shows that she’s probably doing a lot of unnecessary requests, but it also shows that her suspicions were kinda correct.

      Maybe she had to put in a lot of extra requests due to people filling the requests not supplying all the relevant info the first time, or denying her requests more frequently once people started to recognise her name… 🤔

      That said, reaction of info can be extremely tedious(speaking from what I’ve heard from friends who have to redact videos of software testing), and will drive almost anyone a bit up the wall… 😅

    • stellargmite@lemmy.world
      81·
      2 days ago

      How do you know what is or isn’t of benefit to NZ unless it is disclosed? If that takes effort, then thats one of the many costs of having a (always tenuous) democracy.