Headquarters
New Zealand Defence Force
Defence House
Private Bag 39997
Wellington Mail Centre
Lower Hutt 5045
New Zealand
OIA-2019-3637.1
26 March 2020
Mahrukh Sarwar
[FYI request #11216 email]
Dear Ms Sarwar
I refer to your further correspondence of 27 February 2020, regarding your previous request
made under the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA) for information for the purpose of
participating in the Royal Commission inquiry into the attack on Christchurch Mosques.
Practical approaches and proper consideration are given to all requests for information
received by the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF). As per the OIA, the response of 3
October 2019 requested further refinement of your request at question 1. As noted in that
response, the key words you identified would likely include collections of open source
media items. There is limited capability to electronically filter correspondence created by
the NZDF from correspondence that may be generated by third parties. In those
circumstances a manual search is required.
This approach is informed by previous experience with requests such as yours. That
experience has proven that the ability of the NZDF to collate relevant
correspondence/documentation is limited to approximately 300 items. This takes at least 3
months to manually review in order for a decision to be made on the request. There are
likely thousands of results within each of the time periods you noted. A refinement of this
part of your request, for example, to particular documents or shorter timeframes, may
facilitate the research and collation process.
You may have noted that the response of 11 July 2019 (Enclosure 1 to your response),
addresses a request that covers any culture and religion training. By definition this also
includes training regarding Muslims and Islam. It is explained in that response that cultural
and language training is provided by third parties and specific information contained in
those courses is withheld in accordance with section 9(2)(ba)(i) of the OIA. A summary of
NZDF training specific to cultural lessons on training the Iraqi Army is included as well as an
explanation for why additional material from that training is withheld. Apologies for not
including the material from the NZDF training on religions in the South Pacific. These are
included with this reply.
An explanation for why material regarding the training of D Squadron (Commando) is
withheld was provided in the response to you. To reiterate, the release of training material
2
would necessarily provide information on the capability and training of that squadron. This
decision was based on advice from Special operations Command that reviewed the
information in scope. It is not, as you suggest, a “blanket” approach with no consideration of
the information itself.
Yours sincerely
AJ WOODS
Air Commodore
Chief of Staff HQNZDF
Enclosures:
1.
Religions in the South Pacific training script
2.
Religions in the South Pacific PowerPoint presentation regarding diversity