Official Information Act Request
Requester’s details
Date: 15 November 2022
Name: Amber Craig
Email: [FYI request #20881 email]
Reference number: ENQ-44902-Q4H6M2
Dear Amber
I refer to your request received on 17 October 2022.
“I would please like a copy of all correspondence between Environmental Protection
Agency staf , including Dr. Wayne Temple, and Monsanto employees and contractors
from 1 January 2015 to 30 September 2016.”
This letter is a partial response to your request. We are able to release some of the
information you have requested, namely correspondence with Monsanto about glyphosate,
which we believed might be of particular interest to you, given your specific reference to Dr
Temple.
This information may be downloaded from the following OneDrive link:
ENQ-44902-Q4H6M2 Craig to release - OneDrive (sharepoint.com), which will be valid until
15 December 2022.
Please note we previously released this information for an Official Information Act (OIA)
request in 2016. Some of this information has been redacted under section 9(2)(a) of the OIA
to protect the privacy of natural persons. This includes private information about individuals
outside the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), and some information has been
redacted under section 9(2)(b)(i) of the OIA where the making the information available
would disclose trade secrets. Redacting this information is not outweighed by other
considerations that would make it desirable in the public interest to make this information
available.
However, names of some EPA staff were also redacted under section 9(2)(a) of the OIA, as
this was our standard practice back in 2016. Although it is not our usual practice today, we
wanted to provide you with information sooner rather than later and providing you with this
release from 2016 has enabled us to do so; to supply you with the same information but with
these staff names included would have taken us considerably longer. If do require this extra
level of detail, please advise. However, this could take us some time, as we would have to
collate and assess this information all over again.
With regard to other information that may be within the scope of your request, the Of icial
Information Act 1982 (OIA) requires that we advise you of our decision on your request no
later than 20 working days after the day we received your request. Unfortunately, it is not
possible for us to meet that time limit for the balance of your request, and we therefore must
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notify you of an extension until 20 December 2022 of the time to make our final decision on
your request. However, we wil respond as soon as is practicable.
The extension is necessary because your request requires a search through a large quantity
of information and meeting the original time limit would unreasonably interfere with our
operations.
In this regard, we emailed you on Thursday 10 November seeking to clarify the scope of the
information you have requested. In this email, we asked whether you were seeking copies of
all correspondence between EPA staff (including Dr Temple when contracted to us) and
Monsanto, or correspondence between EPA staf (including Dr Temple when contracted to
us) and Monsanto about a particular subject, such as glyphosate. If you only require
information about specific subjects, it should make it possible to provide a final response in
shorter timeframe.
I hope this information is helpful. You have the right to seek an investigation and review by
the Ombudsman of this decision. You can contact the Ombudsman on 0800 802 602, or by
email at [email address]
If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us via
[email address].
We may publish your request and our response on our website,
www.epa.govt.nz. We make
OIA responses available so others can read more about the work we do and the questions
we are asked. Any information that might identify you wil be removed to protect your privacy.
Yours sincerely
Dr Christopher Hill
General Manager, Hazardous Substances and New Organisms
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Document Outline
