Mounting difficulties getting hold of critical historical documents at the national Archive are sparking government infighting and threats of legal action.
A high court Justice has noted cases are being severely impeded.
To make matters worse, the $9 million IT system used to search the country's history files has had to be shut down over a security breach of restricted documents.
Phil Pennington reports.
The Internal Affairs Minister says she's heard from the public about their frustrations since February.
Jan Tinetti says in a statement she is monitoring it closely but this is an operational matter for Archives to sort out with the system supplier - and they are working extremely hard.
The Chief Archivist Anahera Morehu acknowledged the outages, and says her staff discovered the "potential" security breach a week ago and immediately closed the search system.
Morehu says they are aware of the frustration among historians and others.
