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.”

  • liv
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    3 days 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.

    • Ilovethebomb
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      1 day ago

      Hmm. The PhD study does sound like it’s more to benefit her career as an author and her activism than NZ as a whole, but I can see why, in theory at least, a PhD is worthwhile for public interest.