22 December 2025
Spencer Jones
By email: [FYI request #31857 email]
Tēnā koe Spencer
Your request
Thank you for your request, received on 9 November, under the Official Information Act 1982 (Act)
for the following information:
•
2012 Correspondence with ESR / PHF Science – Please confirm whether any copies,
drafts, or attachments of the 2012 email exchanges between the former ESR National
Radiation Laboratory and the Electricity Authority—regarding updates to the smart-meter
FAQ and RF/EMF exposure statements—are still held within your systems. – If no such
records are retained, please identify when and under what circumstances they were
removed or transferred.
•
Record-Keeping Systems and Repositories – Identify the record-keeping system(s) or
repositories searched for these materials, including any content-management or document-
approval systems used to publish or revise the Authority’s “Smart Meter” webpages
between 2010 and 2025. – If searches did not extend to those systems, please advise
whether a further search can be conducted.
•
Disposition and Public Records Act Compliance – If any relevant records have been
lawfully destroyed or disposed of, please specify the applicable disposal authority or
retention schedule under the Public Records Act 2005. – If no disposal authority exists,
please confirm that the Authority is meeting its duty to maintain “full and accurate records of
its affairs” as required by sections 17 and 18 of that Act.
Our response
For sake of clarity, we will respond to each part of your request in part.
•
2012 Correspondence with ESR / PHF Science – Please confirm whether any copies,
drafts, or attachments of the 2012 email exchanges between the former ESR National
Radiation Laboratory and the Electricity Authority—regarding updates to the smart-meter
FAQ and RF/EMF exposure statements—are still held within your systems. – If no such
records are retained, please identify when and under what circumstances they were
removed or transferred.
The Electricity Authority Te Mana Hiko (Authority) confirms we hold copies of the 2012 email
exchanges referenced in your request.
In our previous response to you (OIA-25-0026), we stated that the only copies we held were those
provided to us by PHF Science when consulting with us on an OIA request. We have since
managed to locate these emails from 2012 in our own systems. Our initial search looked through
our current email system, for any historic content. This did not bring up any results as the historic
email accounts had been removed when we moved online in 2018. We have since broadened the
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search to include all files from our old document management system, which brought up saved
copies of these emails. In order to fulfil our duty to assist, we have rechecked whether there was
any further correspondence between the Authority and ESR (PHF Science) on these email chains
and did not find anything in scope.
•
Record-Keeping Systems and Repositories – Identify the record-keeping system(s) or
repositories searched for these materials, including any content-management or document-
approval systems used to publish or revise the Authority’s “Smart Meter” webpages
between 2010 and 2025. – If searches did not extend to those systems, please advise
whether a further search can be conducted.
The Authority stores data in Microsoft Exchange online and SharePoint online. SharePoint
superseded our old document management system in 2024 (and all documents within the system
were migrated). We have some historic data that was on an attached file system – this data was
copied over to SharePoint as part of the migration. Exchange Online was implemented around
2021.
Prior to these dates, the email was managed from an on-premise server, and our document
management was also hosted in house.
The scope of the search that was carried out across all of our Exchange Online and SharePoint
online used the following search strings as parameters:
Query text
((smartmeter) OR (smart-meter) OR (smart meter)) AND (Participants:esr.cri.nz)
((smart-meter RF/EMF health risk) OR (smart meter exposure) OR (smart-meter exposure) OR
(smart meter threshold) OR (smart-meter threshold) OR (smart meter RF/EMF health risk) OR
(smart-meter RF) OR (smart meter RF) OR (smart meter FAQ) OR (smart-meter FAQ) OR
(smartmeter RF/EMF health risk) OR (smartmeter exposure) OR (smartmeter threshold) OR
(smartmeter FAQ)) AND (((Participants:phfscience.nz) OR (Participants:health.govt.nz) OR
(Participants:mbie.govt.nz) OR (Participants:worksafe.govt.nz)))
((smart-meter) OR (smart meter) OR (exposure) OR (threshold) OR (RF/EMF health risk) OR
(RF health) OR (EMF health) OR (FAQ) OR (smartmeter)) AND (((Participants:phfscience.nz)
OR (Participants:health.govt.nz) OR (Participants:mbie.govt.nz) OR
(Participants:worksafe.govt.nz)))
Please note, your initial request regarding correspondence about smart-meter FAQs between the
Authority and ESR/PHF Science, MoH, MBIE, or WorkSafe included the date range 2012-present.
If you would like us to conduct a further search from 2010-present, we would be open to doing this
via a new OIA request.
•
Disposition and Public Records Act Compliance – If any relevant records have been
lawfully destroyed or disposed of, please specify the applicable disposal authority or
retention schedule under the Public Records Act 2005. – If no disposal authority exists,
please confirm that the Authority is meeting its duty to maintain “full and accurate records of
its affairs” as required by sections 17 and 18 of that Act.
The Authority has a Retention and Disposal Authority, authorised by the Chief Archivist, which
gives us legal authority to dispose of records not covered by Archives New Zealand’s general
disposal authorities (GDA6 and GDA7). This is publicly available, here:
https://collections.archives.govt.nz/en/web/arena/search/#/entity/aims-archive/DA587/da587.
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You have the right to seek an investigation and review by the Ombudsman of this decision.
Information about how to make a complaint is available at www.ombudsman.parliament.nz or
freephone 0800 802 602.
As this information may be of interest to other members of the public, the Authority may proactively
release a copy of this response on our website. All personal data, including your name and contact
details, will be removed before publication.
If you’d like to discuss this response with us, please feel free to contact us by emailing
[Electricity Authority request email].
Nāku noa, nā,
Airihi Mahuika
GM Legal, Monitoring and Compliance
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