The “cockup or conspiracy” debate was vividly explored yesterday in RNZ’s weekly Nine-to-Noon Politics show, with a clash between rightwing commentator Matthew Hooton putting forward the “conspiracy” arguments, against leftwing commentator Stephen Mills arguing for a “cockup”.

Hooton put the case that the Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, had been complicit in dirty politics, and explained why he might take such a risk: “Because he was extremely angry… He thought ‘I’ve got an opportunity to attack the National Party using the Police and false allegations of hacking and I can turn the story around’. And it worked.”

According to Hooton’s theory, the conspiracy involves many in the Beehive: “This involves the Office of the Prime Minister, the Office of the Finance Minister, the office of the head of the spy agencies, Andrew Little, and the Treasury secretary – who have told lies to the public”.

In contrast, although Mills agreed that a conspiracy is always a possible explanation, he replied to Hooton: “I know that you’re psychologically kind of framed to believe it’s a conspiracy, but I think that the evidence is almost always that it’s a cock-up”. Hooton hit back, saying “I think that you’re part of the cover-up Stephen because you’re deeply involved in the Labour Party, and you’re close friends with all the people in this who are in fact telling lies”. It’s a fascinating piece of political debate – listen (from about the ten-minute mark) here: Political commentators Mills and Hooton.

Hooton’s theory is explained at length in his Herald column from Friday, in which he paints what has happened as “the sort of thing that might happen in a quasi-democracy like Russia, or in House of Cards” because “making up a false allegation about the Opposition and calling in the police” is what we normally associate with despotic governments rather than our own – see: Truth gets lost in hacking claims (paywalled).

The idea that Treasury Secretary Gabriel Makhlouf was acting alone and without the complicity of at least some in the Beehive is scoffed at by Hooton: “the Beehive’s story of a suddenly rogue Treasury Secretary doesn’t ring true. Treasury Secretaries simply don’t, of their own accord, recklessly use inflammatory words like ‘hack’ to describe searches of their own websites, or call in the police to investigate matters involving the Opposition, especially when already advised by the GCSB there had in fact been no breach of security.”

According to Hooton, Makhlouf appears to be taking the hit, when it is “deeply implausible” that the Government had no knowledge of his actions until afterwards. For example, Hooton says: “Wellington’s infamous ‘no surprises’ rule in practice operates as a “prior approval” rule. More importantly, Beehive staffers are in almost constant real-time contact with people in departments, including through private communication channels like WhatsApp and SnapChat in an effort to thwart the Official Information Act.”

In Hooton’s favour, the Herald’s Derek Cheng also broke the story on Friday that the head of the GCSB had contacted the Beehive on the Tuesday when the scandal was first unfolding, to communicate that no hacking had in fact taken place – see: Budget Bungle: the Govt was told there was no hacking but kept tight-lipped (paywalled).

According to Cheng, “Andrew Hampton, head of the Government Communications Security Bureau, made an urgent call to GCSB Minister Andrew Little in an attempt to stop Treasury Secretary Gabriel Makhlouf from publicly saying that his department had been hacked”. And he reports “National deputy leader Paula Bennett said it was inconceivable that Little didn’t pass that information on to Robertson and Ardern straight away, and they should have immediately revealed the advice that there had been no hacking.”

The exact timing and details of this GCSB communication to the Beehive informing them that Treasury was wrong to suggest any hacking is now vital to working out whether there was a cockup or a conspiracy, and who was responsible.

Robertson went on TVNZ’s Q+A last night to defend his handling of the scandal, and explained why he got it wrong in his own public statement about the Budget leak: “We were relying on the advice that we had at the time. We didn’t know what had happened. That’s what the police were looking into” – see 1News’ ‘The advice we had’ – Grant Robertson defends his initial description of pre-Budget release as hacking.

In his interview with Jack Tame, Robertson was asked about whether he sufficiently challenged the advice from Treasury about the “hack”, and he replied “I’m on record as saying that Mr Makhlouf was very clear in his description to me of what he described as 2000 or so attempts to hack into the Treasury system”.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has until now been reluctant to comment on the crucial timings involved, with the justification that the whole issue is now the subject of the State Services Commission investigation. However she has now come out to say that the GCSB contact with the Beehive came after Robertson and the Treasury made their public statements about the “hack” – see Derek Cheng’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: Ministers didn’t know GCSB advice when they said Treasury was ‘hacked’.

Nonetheless, questions remain as to why the Government didn’t correct the record the next day. Cheng reports: “The following day, neither Ardern or Robertson revealed the GCSB advice despite being questioned repeatedly in the House about the so-called hack and despite National leader Simon Bridges calling Robertson a ‘liar’ for saying that the Treasury had been ‘hacked’.”

Commentators continue to question why Robertson or even the Prime Minister failed to act. According to Fran O’Sullivan, the Government could have saved everyone a lot of hassle by being up front: “Once Little, Hampton, Robertson and Makhlouf knew an error had been committed — and that there was no substance to the hacking claims — they should have simply ‘fessed up all round: issued a correction (accompanied by an apology by Makhlouf) and pulled back from the politicking. There would have been political embarrassment. But that would have been transitory. Instead, they allowed a wrongful claim to persist, for 36 hours, that National had hacked Budget information” – see: Pomp and trying circumstances for a Gabriel Makhlouf farewell (paywalled).

Gordon Campbell writes that, when the truth became apparent in the Beehive, this “should have galvanized Robertson to go on the front foot and (a) publically clarify the likely nature of the leak (b) re-assure the public of its limited nature and thereby (c) begin to distance the government from Treasury’s overcooked initial “explanation” as to what had happened. As we now know, Robertson did none of the above. As a result, the government now remains ensnared with Treasury’s mishandling of its information” – see: On how the Treasury debacle reflects New Zealand’s wider security problems.

Similarly, Herald political editor Audrey Young says that Robertson is now vulnerable on this question, and today’s Parliamentary Question Time might allow some clarification on this – see: GCSB advice shifts focus from Makhlouf to ministers (paywalled).

Young thinks, however, that clarity is unlikely to be forthcoming today: “Unfortunately for National, the rules of the debating chamber mean that any minister, including the Prime Minister, is able to decline to answer a question if he or she believes it is the public interest not to do so. Ministers need simply say that because it is the subject of an SSC investigation, they do not believe it is in the public interest to answer. Speaker Trevor Mallard may indirectly criticise such judgment calls but he cannot override them.” See also, Barry Soper’s Jacinda Ardern will need her flak jacket over Budget debacle during question time.

Andrew Little is one of the ministers who could help clarify what happened, but he’s currently overseas. And according to Richard Harman, “the Prime Minister will be in Hamilton at the Field Days on Wednesday and the deputy Prime Minister, Winston Peters will substitute for her. That is unlikely to make anything any clearer” – see: Budget leak spotlight turns on the spies.

According to Harman, there are also still questions about whether GCSB acted fast enough in the scandal, when they could have possibly corrected the public’s misinformation: “There are questions about why the GCSB kept the information about what had happened at Treasury to itself and did not see fit to advise its own Minister about what had happened even though the issue was dominating news headlines all through Tuesday. If it was a straightforward human error, as National sources are saying, then why wasn’t the GCSB able to say so?”

The whole episode has shown “politics at its ugliest, most naked, worst” according to Tracy Watkins who also says the official State Services Commission inquiry “seems designed to shut down questions” – see: Farewell speeches for outgoing Treasury boss likely to be short.

Watkins wonders if the scandal might end up damaging Ardern, because “Labour’s danger is it starts to wash up against ‘brand Jacinda’, which is supposed to be above all this. Why do politicians never seem to learn that the cover up is almost always worse than the crime?”

She also points out that it appears that the leaking to the media of details of the GCSB call to the Beehive is also dodgy: “there can only have been one purpose in leaking details of that phone call – to hang Makhlouf out to dry. The higher the stakes, the dirtier and more desperate the tactics look.”

This is something that Fran O’Sullivan has also commented on: “The Beehive did not wait for Ombler’s inquiry to be finalised before briefing a journalist over the GCSB’s urgent warning. This made for a great Herald scoop and revealed material that should have been in the public domain earlier. But in my view, it has the capacity to taint the inquiry as Makhlouf is under an obligation of confidence while Ombler’s probe continues.”

Of course, it’s still possible that the whole scandal could be both a cockup and a conspiracy – which is nicely conveyed in Steve Braunias’ Secret diary of the Budget hack (paywalled).

Finally, for anyone who still thinks that the Government’s handling of the “Budget hack” is a non-story, Danyl Mclauchlan thinks this is probably because you’re a partisan hack yourself, and he implores the left to take seriously issues of accountability and ethics, rather than mindlessly cheering on your own side – see: Why calling the Treasury data scandal a ‘beltway issue’ is basically bollocks.

I made the case yesterday in my column, The Budget ‘hack’ scandal reveals big accountability problems, that there are some vitally important issues at stake involving the integrity of the political system. These boil down to the idea that we need a properly functioning democracy in which manipulation and deception are kept to a minimum, and government departments don’t become the politicised attack weapons of the Beehive used to undermine dissent or opposition.

Others feel the “Budget hack” saga is more of a distraction from the bread and butter issues that voters really care about. As John Key used to say in the storm of controversies about the GCSB misusing their powers, the Saudi Sheep scandal, or even Nicky Hager’s revelations about dirty politics, he was “relaxed” about these problems because his government focused instead on the “issues that matter” to ordinary people.

Some media and Government-partisans are now making the same sort of arguments about the difficulties that the Government is in over their handling of the so-called “Budget hack”. After all, the issues are rather abstract, high-level, and murky, in contrast to more “substantial” policy issues that have a more direct impact on peoples’ lives.

For the best argument in favour of ignoring the “Budget hack” story, see Bernard Hickey’s Newsroom column, in which he argues that “the ‘scandal’ is symptomatic of an accelerating and more extremist form of politics in a social media-driven age of snap judgments and tribal barracking” – see: Our political metabolic rate is way, way too fast.

Hickey’s column is a plea for people – including his own colleagues in the media – to focus less on the latest controversial “drama of ‘he said, he said’ and who was right and wrong, and who should resign” and instead concentrate on the substantial issues that are of immediate interest to voters. In this case, he wants less attention on the “Budget hack” and more on the details of housing, transport, and incomes in Grant Robertson’s Budget.

He makes the case that “news and commentary have ramped up into a blur of headlines, memes, click-bait, extreme views, abuse and a desperate game of trying to grab the attention of a distracted media and whip their own social media bubbles into a frenzy”.

This has been bad for democracy: “The end result is a disengaged public, policy paralysis, a lot of noise and not much light. I understand how it happened and I’ve been living in it now for a decade. A political firmament driven by social media, sound bites, cheap shots and one-day-wonder stories is not going to solve the problems of South Auckland or Tamaki. Everyone should take a chill pill, stop jumping to conclusions for a quick political hit and instead think beyond the beltway to the real world and long term concerns of citizens.”

Hickey’s column has identified valid concerns. There’s certainly an argument to be made that an “increased metabolic rate of politics has warped the public debate”. This point was also made by the new Sunday Star Times editor Tracy Watkins in her feature story, Madness on Molesworth Street – has politics reached peak crazy?

Watkins, who has just stepped down as Stuff’s political editor, describes the increased pace that she has observed working from Parliament: “Chaos is the new normal. Politics has turned into a crazy, churning roller coaster that no one seems to know how to stop. When press gallery journalists and others try to trace back the start of the madness, there is disagreement on the exact turning point. Was it the Kim Dotcom showdown, the teapot tapes election? Or was it when former prime minister John Key up-ended convention and everything we thought we knew about politics when he suddenly announced his intention to retire, while still at the height of his powers?”

I’m also referred to in her story, in terms of the difficulties the rapid churn of political news poses in putting together this Political Roundup column, the fact that the sheer volume of information makes it harder for the public to engage deeply with stories, and the danger of the “Budget hack” scandal appearing as just another example of deception, manipulation and game playing on both sides that will drive voters to be further alienated from the political process.

Similarly, Massey University political commentator Claire Robinson says: “It’s that gotcha politics that amuses people in Wellington but it doesn’t necessarily go beyond that.”

In a blog post, former Cabinet Minister Wyatt Creech declared that “The debate over Budgets in Wellington is the ultimate in beltway-ness” and the leak/hack story would get “little cut through to sentient beings outside the political realm” – see: Treasury troubles, strike money & growing grains of salt for polls. He says “The beltway game is of little importance to Joe or Jane Citizen waiting for an operation.”

Reportage of the scandal is also critiqued by RNZ’s Mediawatch specialist Colin Peacock who complains that “political reporters were making hyped-up claims of their own” to match those of the intensity of the politicians involved – see: Budget leak draws media away from our wellbeing.

For the must-read rejoinder to all of this – and particularly to Bernard Hickey’s piece – see Liam Hehir’s argument for taking the Budget “hack” and other such “beltway” scandals seriously: Sometimes with politics, you should sweat the small stuff.

Hehir begins by acknowledging the merits of the idea that Government scandals don’t necessarily make a big difference, and that some of the same points could have been made during the last National Government’s term: “For years during the Key era, I wrote about the way the dozens of little contretemps touted as ‘game changers’ were anything but since they didn’t really touch on people’s overall confidence in the government’s economic management. Those pieces were never heralded for their wisdom, quite naturally, since they argued against the always prophesied Watergating of John Key.”

But Hehir is careful to point out that just because something might seem “beltway” and not directly important to the average voter doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be covered. He draws a parallel with much of the opposition to Donald Trump’s integrity and governance in the US, and suggests that the likes of the Washington Post shouldn’t just “call off scrutinising the potential administrative sins of the Trump administration” because many in wider America aren’t interested in “Attorney-General William Barr’s refusal to release the full, unredacted Mueller report to Congress”.

Instead, Hehir argues, we need the media to focus on the minutiae of governance in order to keep the system clean: “Those who engage with political minutiae are a bit like the timberwolves of the political eco-system. Few people in the town think about what happens in the wooded hills on a day-to-day basis and when they do pay attention, pack-hunting might not be the prettiest thing to watch. Take the wolves out the food-chain, however, and the cascading effects will be felt soon enough. It won’t be long before you have deer stripping the bark from the trees in your backyard. If the smaller fiascos and debacles (over which reporters and commentators actually have some influence) are set to one side to allow more focus on the big, substantive issues (over which they really have none) then an invitation to vice into the country will occur.”

Similarly, for Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan this issue is an important one in determining whether Jacinda Ardern’s Government really is “the most open and transparent government in the history of New Zealand” – see: Jacinda Ardern’s Govt as brutal as any (paywalled).

Today’s Dominion Post editorial also makes the case for the importance of the issue, pointing out that the whole scandal involved Finance Minister Grant Robertson issuing “one of the most remarkable statements in recent New Zealand politics” when he backed up Treasury’s statement about “deliberately and systematically hacked” and linked his to National – see: Time for truth in the ‘hacking’ saga.

Most of the above debate is about how the Government and Treasury have handled the “Budget hack”. However, there are still questions about whether National should have even released the Budget information that it obtained in the first place.

For one of the best challenges to National’s decision, see Mark Longley’s Budget leak shows how shamefully out of touch modern politicians are. Here’s his main point: “While the Budget leak saga played out like a schoolyard argument over who kicked the ball through the window, did any of the taxpayer-paid politicians involved wonder what was best for New Zealand? Did Simon Bridges, who had details on Labour’s landmark Wellbeing Budget in his excited little hands, wonder if leaking those details was best for the voters who elected him? Or did he just spot the opportunity to land one on the opposition and screw the consequences?”

Not surprisingly, Government-aligned blog, The Standard also disapproved, saying “We see arguably the most important day of the year for the Government and thus for the public being hijacked and overshadowed by slanderous accusation and wild speculation, a Government in apparent disarray, and overall chaos that turns off most people from showing any interest in politics whatsoever. What is worse, the turmoil most likely will cause people to distrust politicians even more than before. A sad day for democracy in New Zealand and thank you again, National” – see: Same old dirty National.

For a similar critique, see Oscar Kightley’s Urban Dictionary’s apt noun to sum up National’s actions. He says “I can’t see what National really gained from it. They would have had a bigger hit, and held the moral high ground, if they’d just exposed the weakness in the Treasury security systems, but not released the information they had.”

But such “pontifications” don’t carry much weight with political journalist Stacey Kirk, who says: “The Treasury website is a public website. It exists for transparency’s sake, so to claim as the Government has, that National’s information on it was ‘unauthorised’ is grasping at straws. Whether it was a good move politically is a valid question and will likely be decided by a voter’s personal politics, but a few points bear considering. Budget day is notoriously difficult for any Opposition to be heard, and whether coverage of National in the days leading up to it was negative or positive, their strategy served them extremely well on the day” – see: Smartest men in the room? Pffft! Treasury stands alone on Budget bungle.

Finally, there are still some experts who maintain that National taking Budget secrets from the Treasury website was indeed still a “hack”, and for the best of these accounts, see Keith Ng’s Treasury hacking: The time I hacked WINZ, Lyndon Hood’s J’Hackuse, and Alexander Stronach’s The 2019 NZ Budget Leak: what actually happened.

New Zealanders will be right to feel extremely suspicious that they were deceived last week by authorities. The whole scandal is a big deal, and the announcement last night of an independent investigation is welcome. The issues at stake go to the heart of integrity in public life.

The main problem is that Treasury boss Gabriel Makhlouf, followed by Minister of Finance Grant Robertson, informed the public there had been a “deliberate and systematic hack” of Treasury’s website, when we now know that this account was untrue.

The second problem is that Government politicians then used this claim to suggest the Opposition were somehow involved in criminal activity.

A lot of this is well explained today in Tim Watkin’s blog post, Gabriel Makhlouf’s already had three strikes. Can he really avoid being ‘out’? According to Watkin, “Makhlouf is in serious trouble. A new inquiry will have to uncover something yet unknown to excuse the three strikes he committed last week”. He says that Grant Robertson also has some big questions to answer, as there is a chance that “Makhlouf is covering for Robertson”, in which case “both are toast”.

For more details on how the whole scandal could have so easily been avoided, see Richard Harman’s How the Treasury leak could have been contained. He reports that “From what we now know, it is clear that the whole question of the Budget ‘leak’ could have been resolved last Tuesday afternoon. This is it when it appears the GCSB, National Cyber Security team concluded that Treasury had not been hacked by the National Party.”

According to Harman, the story about the “hack” could have been clarified early on: “The GCSB could have cleared that up on Tuesday, and either the Prime Minister or Robertson should have insisted they made a public statement and at the same time”.

For more on how the whole episode unfolded, see Stacey Kirk’s article, Smartest men in the room? Pffft! Treasury stands alone on Budget bungle. Her conclusion is this: “How Gabriel Makhlouf is still in a job is beyond me.” She says the actions of Treasury over the “hack” were “a total waste of police resources and an example of extreme arse-covering.” She argues “All signs suggest Makhlouf knew what had happened, and went ahead with his own version anyway.”

On the political right, there’s been outrage over the “hack” scaremongering. David Farrar, for example, says: “If these reports from within Treasury are true, we should expect resignations or sackings. Making false accusations of criminal activity to police to deflect from one’s organisation’s own basic incompetence is not acceptable” – see: No Dorothy, using a search engine is not a hack.

Farrar suggests the Government is essential guilty of incompetence at best or of dirty politics at worst: “Both Grant Robertson and Winston Peters have smeared National. Jacinda Ardern claims to lead a Government of kindness. Does smearing your political opponents as criminals because they used a search engine, fit with that? Robertson may claim he acted on Treasury advice, but he didn’t. He explicitly linked National’s material to an illegal hack, which goes beyond what Treasury said. But regardless a competent Minister should push back when an agency says ‘hey boss, we were hacked, it wasn’t incompetence’ and ask for at least some basic details of what is alleged.”

In contrast, the political left have mostly been inclined to respond to the scandal with silence or defend the Government. According to one leftwing blogger, this isn’t good enough. Martyn Bradbury challenges his own side to take the issue more seriously: “Comrades of the Left. If Treasury had just pulled a hacking manipulation this audacious while National was in power, we would be screaming for heads to roll, yet the majority of the Left are ignoring what Treasury did out of a misplaced loyalty to Jacinda & Grant. It’s infantile” – see: I think almost everyone on the Left who are trying to underplay what Treasury did hasn’t read this….

Bradbury concludes: “Shouldn’t we be incandescent with rage at such a manufactured deception by one of the most powerful Government Departments? If Grant doesn’t sack him, Grant should be sacked. It’s as simple as that.”

However some on the left have strongly condemned what has occurred. The best example is No Right Turn, who says: “I’m surprised they didn’t charge Treasury with wasting police time. Meanwhile, Treasury secretary Gabriel Makhlouf has presided over incompetence and smeared the opposition. We pay public sector CEOs the big bucks supposedly to take responsibility. We pay Makhlouf over $600,000 a year on that basis. So how about we get what we paid for? By running a muppet show, Makhlouf has f**ked up his agency’s biggest event of the year” – see: What a muppet show.

Other political commentators have taken a hard-line stance on the issue. For example, veteran political journalist John Armstrong makes the case that Makhlouf has now spoilt Treasury’s important neutral image, and should resign – see: Grant Robertson and Treasury boss should resign over Budget data leak.

Armstrong also makes the case for the Minister of Finance to go, but concedes that simply won’t happen: “Robertson is exempt from having to fall on his sword. That exemption is by Labour Party decree. He is just too darned valuable. Both he and the Prime Minister have made it very clear that they will move mountains to ensure Robertson emerges from this episode as untarnished as possible by placing responsibility for the breach fairly and squarely in the Treasury’s lap.”

The focus is increasingly on Robertson now. Many suspect he was likely to have been fully aware that he and Treasury were unfairly smearing his National Party opponents with criminal allegations, or at least allowing such insinuations to continue. Therefore, questions will be asked about what he knew about the so-called “hack”.

Richard Harman explains that the public needs to know what happened in the Minister’s office: “This whole affair now centres on one critical meeting or conversation; between Makhlouf, Robertson and Ardern’s Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Press Secretary around 7.00pm last Tuesday night. After that meeting, Makhlouf issued a statement saying that Treasury had been subject to a systematic and deliberate hack and then 17 minutes later, Robertson went one step further and linked the National Party to the hack” – see: What did Makhlouf say to Robertson.

David Farrar asks some difficult questions: “What was said in this meeting. Did Robertson and the PMO really ask no questions about the basis for the claim of being hacked? And when did Ministers learn there was no hack? It almost certainly was well before 5 am Thursday. It may have even been Tuesday evening. Yet they said nothing” – see: SSC launches investigation of Treasury Secretary.

He also asks why the Government or the GCSB didn’t make any sort of statement to correct the incorrect perception last week that a “hacking” had occurred: “We now know that the GCSB did not regard Treasury as having been hacked. When Treasury then put out a release saying they had been hacked, surely GCSB informed one or more Ministers (or at least DPMC) that this information was incorrect. Could you imagine the GCSB saying nothing for 48 hours while stories around the world were proclaiming the NZ Treasury had been hacked? Treasury did not correct the record until 5 am Thursday. But when did Ministers get informed the statement was incorrect, and why did they allow the misinformation to persist?”

There are obviously some major issues of public accountability at issue. Some are wondering why the Treasury boss has neither resigned nor been fired. Economist Eric Crampton suggests the whole episode “extends the stench of Wellington unaccountability” and asks: “Just how bad does a public sector Chief Executive’s performance have to be before accountability kicks in?” – see: Protecting the privileged (paywalled).

Crampton argues that “when a resignation is not offered for performance this far off the norm, and the appointee continues in the position, something is manifestly wrong – either employment law as it relates to senior executives, or the government’s willingness to put up with exceptionally poor performance.”

But it could be, Crampton argues, that the Government is worried about a legal challenge from Makhlouf, especially if the State Services Commission review results in the departing Treasury Secretary also losing his new position at the Central Bank of Ireland.

Problems of accountability are also examined by former Reserve Bank economist Michael Reddell who sums up the hack debate as being “an extraordinary couple of days, and an extraordinary display of poor judgement by one of our most senior public servants” – see: On Makhlouf and standards in public office.

Reddell is trenchant in his criticism of the Treasury boss: “of things that have come to public view, it is hard to think of any (departmental chief executive) episodes that plumb the low standards on display by Makhlouf in the last week (not just a single choice, word, or act) but the accumulation of words, actions, choices over several days, each compounding the other, with no sign or act of any contrition). He should go, and if he won’t resign, he should have been dismissed (yesterday’s Cabinet would have been the opportunity).”

But Reddell isn’t convinced the State Services Commission inquiry will be adequate: “I have little confidence in this inquiry. For one, the inquiry is supposed to look into Makhlouf’s handling of last week’s events, but recall that the SSC made themselves an active player in those events when they agreed to a coordinated statement with Treasury on Thursday morning. They are, at least in part, inquiring into themselves.”

He then concludes with a picture of a cosy situation: “the State Services Commissioner is fully part of that same self-protecting establishment –  appointed by them, from among them, and now supposedly reporting independently on actions of another member that he himself was part of as recently as last Thursday morning. This must not be the standard we settle for.”

And, so should the public have confidence that everything is under control? Not according to technology writer, David Court, who can’t believe that politicians and officials have misunderstood and mishandled so much – see: Politicians and technology are a bad mix.

Here’s his main point: “The Treasury and Peters’ should be deeply embarrassed and apologetic. The rest of us should be worried. Having politicians with Luddite qualities is sometimes amusing and bemusing. It’s also dangerous. We have a Government that thought it was hacked. By Google. And reported it to the police. Give me strength. These are the same politicians that will be making decisions on important technology-related matters. Do you have confidence that these ministers will make the right decision on 5G and/or cyber security? Or is it more likely they’ll make an ill-informed, but politically motivated, decision? This week’s embarrassing display suggests the latter.”

Finally, for humour on the hack, see Steve Braunias’ Secret diary of Treasury Secretary Gabriel Makhlouf, and Andrew Gunn’s Budget leak more than a train-wreck.