The New Zealand Taxpayers' Union can reveal through an Official Information Act request that over the last six months, the Ministry of Māori Development has recorded 217 instances of staff accessing explicit material blocked by their web-filters.

Commenting on this, Taxpayers’ Union Policy and Public Affairs Manager, James Ross, said:

“Taxpayers don’t pay bureaucrats to sit watching adult videos, so why does it keep happening?”

“When bureaucrats in your department keep being disciplined for wasting taxpayers’ time getting distracted at the office, something’s gone wrong.”

“Our investigations so far reveal this is an embarrassingly common problem government-wide, but when one department has recorded this happening a couple of hundred times there’s only so often this can be called an accident.”

“After the agency’s significant staffing increases over the last six years, is it just that staff have too much time on their hands? Maybe it’s time to roll back the bloat and start scrapping those departments who seem not to have enough work to do.”

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