David Farrar: Why has the Parole Board stopped publishing decisions?

The Parole Board has not published a single decision since May 2025. They used to publish once or twice a week, yet for over a year they have not published once.

This is appalling. We are meant to have an open justice system. The Minister should send them a rocket, and not reappoint anyone who was party to the decision to stop publishing their decisions.

Also of interest is they have made their decisions less useful over time. They used to explicitly include the Roc*Rol assessment which is the risk of conviction and imprisonment. By hiding this data, it frustrates independent analysis of their decisions. But now they have gone even further and decided the public should not have access to any of their decisions at all.

UPDATE: The Parole Board has sent me this statement:

Up until May 2025, the Parole Board did publish hearing decisions that had been requested by the media on its website. After a review, the Board made the decision to stop publishing those decisions on the website while it investigated some matters that needed to be addressed.

It did not, however, stop providing those decisions to media. Since 1 May 2025, the Board has provided more than 350 hearing decisions to the media. We do also make a note of how often these releases – or media attendance at hearings – result in media coverage, although it’s all done manually so it would be very approximate.

And a statement attributable to the Chair:

“We are unable to discuss matters under investigation, but it is our intention to resolve them as soon as possible. In the meantime, anyone is welcome to apply for hearing decisions under the Official Information Act. Since 1 May 2025, the Board has provided more than 350 decisions to the media through the OIA.”

I’m grateful the Parole Board has responded to my story. I would note though that there is a huge difference between media access and public access. As someone who has spent 25+_ years researching law and order issues, I don’t want to reply on the media to choose for me what information is made public, and to what detail. I want to read the full decisions of the Parole Board, just as I like to read full court sentencing notes rather than the media stories.

The ability to request something under the OIA is not a substitute for proactive release. One may not even know there is a decision to OIA it.

My firm belief is all criminal offending documents should be in the public domain (with redactions as needed for name suppression etc) in searchable and machine readable formats. This would be all district and high court judgments and all Parole Board decisions.

Reading between the lines, it looks like there was some unknown reason the Parole Board stopped publishing them, and it may do so again in future. I hope so, and IMO it shouldn’t take 15 months to resolve.

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders