Submissions deadline for Treaty Principles Bill extended after website woes

The public will now have until next week to submit on the Treaty Principles Bill.

Parliament's justice select committee has agreed to re-open submissions from 1pm Thursday to 1pm Tuesday 14 January after technical issues.

RNZ understands there were more than 300,000 online submissions, roughly half of which were received on the last day.

It easily surpasses the previous record of about 107,000 on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill in 2021.

Submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill that were emailed between Monday and Thursday morning will also be accepted.

Those who were unable to submit would now be able to do so over the next few days.

Problems with the website meant people were not able to make a submission by the original deadline of 11.59pm on Tuesday, 7 January.

RNZ was contacted by dozens of people who couldn't get their submission in and one case where the feedback was altered.

The committee met on Thursday to decide whether an extension was merited.

Tech consultant Louisa Taylor said the errors she observed on the website could be caused by low server capacity or an attack.

"If a nefarious actor sent a lot of traffic to the site they could actually take it down," she said.

It's not clear how many people were affected by technical problems but RNZ has seen evidence they could date back to late November 2024.

Back then, a submitter emailed their feedback to Parliament, flagging they had experienced problems with the official submissions portal.

This article was first published by RNZ.