The Ministry of Education Charlatans Ain't Got Nuthin' on Massey's Director of 'Governance and Assurance'

The public service has been in a fierce state of self-flagellation following the explosive Ministry of Education leaks. New Zealand has watched in wide-eyed wonder as officials were caught on tape coaching staff to scrub paper trails and dodge the watchful eye of the Official Information Act (OIA).
It’s generated urgent House debates, Ombudsman investigations, and breathless media cycles across RNZ and 1News.
Bless their hearts. It’s cute watching amateur hour play out in the capital.
Because while the Ministry of Education bureaucrats are out here sweating over leaked video footage and clumsy instructions to avoid a paper trail, they are absolute amateurs compared to the undisputed heavyweight champion of institutional stonewalling: Massey University’s Director of Governance and Assurance, Jodie Banner.
If the Ministry really wants to master the art of state-sanctioned information suppression, they should be subcontracting Massey’s executive suite as their personal coaches.
Think about it. Ministry officials get caught because they leave digital footprints or get grassed out by whistleblowers who lack true dedication to the craft.
Not Jodie. Under Banner's visionary stewardship, Massey has turned OIA and Privacy Act evasion into a fine art form - judiciously funded, of course, by cheerfully spending donors' money and student tuition fees on high-priced lawyers, including specialist privacy law firms, to teach them all the latest tricks of the evasion trade.
When faced with awkward statutory requests - say, enquiries into the real legal expenditure spent defending the indefensible practices of the Companion Animal "Hospital" and the "veterinarians" and "teachers" at risk of being revealed if the paper trails behind how private family pets are repurposed as unauthorised live teaching stock - does Banner panic? Does she issue clumsy verbal reminders that get caught on tape?
Certainly not. She executes manoeuvres of breathtaking legal gymnastics and extraordinary practiced cunning. She reclassifies OIA requests as Privacy Act applications with the flick of a pen. Simple. She discovers that invoices, fee notes, and billing statements simply do not exist in the parallel universe where Massey operates. And when the statutory clocks run out, she meets the deadline with a masterclass in profound, echoing silence.
It's a comprehensive, institutional-grade masterclass in giving the polite, unbothered middle finger to New Zealand's statutory transparency laws.
And she times it to perfection, too. Why dump your meticulously scrubbed, heavily redacted, or intentionally nonsensical "responses" during standard business hours when you can fire them off into an unsuspecting client's inbox at midnight for theatrical flair?
Of course, the administrative cover-up of awkward paperwork is merely the polite, corporate side of the coin at Massey. If you want to see what happens when the institutional machinery moves from dodging OIA requests to actively sanitising a literal crime scene, you have to look deeper inside the walls of the Companion Animal Hospital.
While we can't pin every stroke of the keyboard directly on Jodie without peeking behind the redacted curtain, the systemic whitewashing that followed their intentional and dastardly killing of my precious and deeply loved little papillon, Harry, puts Ministry of Education amateurism to absolute shame.
We aren't just talking about missing emails or scrubbed sticky notes. We are talking about the manual falsification of clinical and financial records, the sudden scrubbing of digital field-level audit logs two days after a pet’s death (read: intentional, planned killling), and a formal criminal report under the Crimes Act 1961 landing squarely on the desk of the New Zealand Police (OR-2484821N).
To add insult to profound injury, Massey has formally admitted to taking at least eight videos of my precious, defenceless little Harry as they tortured him for "student education" and commercial content creation. Yet, under the banner of their Orwellian privacy policies - backed by those expensive legal guns paid for out of student fees - they flatly refuse to release six of those videos - of my own dog.
"That is all you are entitled to," this cunning bitch of a woman had the gall and audacity to write to me, OF MY OWN PERFECTLY VIABLE LITTLE DOG that "Dr" Steffi Jalava, "Dr" Anita Shea and co. repurposed for their "students'" "education" (neatly prepped for them the night before by ICU staff who began slamming him repeatedly - including some slams just 26 minutes apart - with massive overdoses of KNOWN CONTRAINDICATED SEDATIVES the minute his pesky owner left the premises).
When a "teaching hospital" to which you have entrusted your beloved private family pet uses them as disposable live film props, subjects them to repeated 750% over-sedation cocktails that they never needed for any reason related to any "treatment" whatsoever, cruelly cuts off their basic rehydration fluids (that they needed to try to survive the catastrophic levels of repeated convenience sedation) while continuing to bill for hours after they had ensured his termination, and then manufactures a fake "neurological decline" narrative to cover up the lethal reality, falsifying "clinical summaries", standard bureaucratic stonewalling simply won't cut it.
You need a dedicated governance apparatus capable of turning field-level audit logs into a ghost town, withholding footage of a pet being repeatedly tortured for filming and education, and treating police complaints like minor administrative inconveniences.
So let’s give credit where credit is due. The Ministry of Education might be dominating this week's news feeds for trying to ghost the Ombudsman, but they are mere padawans in the presence of the Dark Lords (and Ladies) of Documentation Dastardliness.
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