Official Information Act 2008
law in the Cook Islands
The Official Information Act 2008 is a Cook Islands law passed to "make official information more freely available, [and] to establish procedures for the achievement of those purposes." The Act also repealed the Official Secrets Act 1951, which the Cook Islands had inherited from New Zealand.
The law was introduced into the Cook Islands Parliament on 12 February 2008, and passed two days later. It came into force on 11 February 2009.
Summary of the Act
The law is heavily based on the New Zealand Official Information Act 1982. As in New Zealand, the definition of "official information" is extremely broad, covering any information held by a Ministry, a Minister in their official capacity, or a scheduled organisation. Information held by the courts, tribunals, commissions of inquiry, or investigative material held by the Ombudsman's office is excluded. Unlike New Zealand, the law applies to "any companies in which 50% or more of the shares are owned by the Crown," allowing the operations of crown-owned assets to be effectively monitored.
The scheme for deciding whether information is released or withheld also follows that of New Zealand. Decisions are governed by an overarching "principle of availability": "that... information shall be made available unless there is good reason for withholding it".
“Official Information Act 2008” enters the record as law in the Cook Islands. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Official, Information and Cook can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Official Information Act 2008” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Official, Information and Cook provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 7, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7079524. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 1951, 2009 and 1982.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Official Information Act 2008”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Official Information Act 2008 primary sources, Official Information Act 2008 archive and Official research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Official Information Act 2008”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Official Information Act 2008” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.