Cabinet minister Erica Stanford says her practice of forwarding Government correspondence to a personal Gmail account, including a pre-Budget announcement, was “untidy” behaviour, but the issue is now “sorted”.
She spoke after 1News revealed yesterday that she sent pre-Budget announcements to her personal email last year and used her Gmail for ministerial business over the course of her time as a minister.
The emails showed Stanford putting her MP business signature on emails from her Gmail while communicating with her staff, school principals and various organisations.
The senior minister, who holds the education and immigration portfolios, said today she was “not a perfect human” after she yesterday put the practice down to printing issues.
But Stanford said she had “taken lots of steps” to avoid the issue from arising further.
“I get 8000 pieces of correspondence through to multiple emails. The job is extraordinarily demanding, but in saying that, I acknowledge it hasn’t been tidy. So I’ve taken steps to fix it,” she told media at Parliament.
Education and Immigration minister has put her MP business signature on personal emails to staff, school principals and various organisations. (Source: 1News)
“I’ve sorted out the issue. I think [the Prime Minister’s] already said that he’s relatively relaxed, but I hold myself to very high standards, and my office as well. So we always change our practice as soon as something comes up.”
She added: “I’m not a perfect human being, but now we have taken lots of steps. I’ve finally got a network printer installed in my office, and we’ve got an automatic reply.”
Stanford said yesterday she sometimes forwarded emails to herself so she can print briefings while working away from Parliament, but that Parliamentary Service has now installed her electorate office printer on the Parliamentary network.
Labour: A ‘great big welcome sign’ to hackers
Labour leader Chris Hipkins told Breakfast this morning that he thought the PM’s comment that he was “very relaxed” about Stanford’s practice was wrong.
Watch the full interview with Chris Hipkins on TVNZ+
“The Prime Minister shouldn’t be laid back about this. Cabinet rules are very clear,” he said. “The Government’s own security agencies have said that there are people, particularly from overseas, trying to hack into our systems all of the time.
“Using personal email accounts like Gmail, which aren’t secure, are like hanging up a great big welcome sign to them. I think the Prime Minister needs to do a lot more.”
Questioned about a 2018 incident where then-Labour minister Clare Curran was also found to have sent emails to a personal email account, Hipkins said the rules had changed while he was prime minister.
“The rules have all changed, and the technology has all been updated since then,” he said. “Claire ultimately lost her job because of the way that she had used her personal email accounts, and so on. The fact that the Prime Minister is now brushing it off … there seems to be a lower standard for his ministers in every regard.”
‘Don’t think it’s the biggest sin in the world’
Other ministers were also queried about their use of personal email accounts.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis said she had searched her mailboxes and found one instance where she used a personal email account for printing in a hotel room.
“We were having printing challenges using my normal ministerial account,” she said.
Meanwhile, senior minister Chris Bishop, who is the Leader of the House, said people “need to keep a bit of perspective on things”.
“You shouldn’t be sending Budget-sensitive information to private email addresses, but I don’t think it’s the biggest sin in the world.”
Bishop conceded he had forwarded Parliamentary emails to a Gmail account, but added that his staff managed his ministerial email, which he said he didn’t have access to.
“MPs are on the road a lot. There are printing problems often. I can’t print at my Parliament office, for example,” he said. “Obviously, we just need to keep a bit of perspective on things, right? Sending a random email from a constituent, so you can read it properly, to your Gmail address is not the worst thing in the world.
“As long as it’s all held within the system and everything’s appropriately triaged and appropriately filed and sent on to the appropriate people for OIAs, which I’m very careful to do.”
‘Raises security questions’
Stanford’s use of personal email appeared to be a potential breach of the Cabinet manual, which all ministers are obliged to follow and opened the door to a risk of confidential government information getting into the wrong hands.
Otago University professor and legal expert Andrew Geddis said yesterday: “Putting that sort of information out onto an external email source raises security questions because we all know that email is hackable, and outside of government accounts are more easily hacked than government ones are.”
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said he was “very relaxed” about the situation and that Stanford had got IT support to fix issues like printing problems.
