Sugar tax advice

Ministry of Health Chief Science Advisor John Potter's advice to the Prime Minister about sugar taxes, a two-page set of unreferenced bullet points, ignored the comprehensive review commissioned by the Ministry and released only a few days before Potter's advice. NZIER's report was released 31 January 2018; Potter's memo was dated 16 February.

I was curious whether Prof Potter had seen the NZIER work prior to writing his bullet points. So I asked the Ministry.

Potter was provided a copy of the report on 15 August, 2017, in an email from the Ministry's Chief Economist.

The Ministry holds no records showing feedback from Potter, so he might have missed it. But the report did draw a fair bit of media attention - and not just from me here on the blog.

The Herald covered it on 2 February.

Newsroom had it on 7 February.

It even made the Toronto Globe & Mail on 12 February. 

And it surely would have come up in discussions within the Ministry between August and February.

What's particularly interesting in Croxson's email is the suggestion that it be put on the Ministry website after getting it to the Minister and presenting it to ELT. The email is dated 15 August. It did not make it onto any Ministry website. Instead, it showed up on NZIER's website, rather a while after I made OIA request that it be released, and more than five months after the Ministry received it.