Climate Change: We need this to happen more often

Farmers are outraged over approval being granted to Dryland Carbon - a dedicated New Zealand offsetting firm - to buy 1065 hectares of farmland on the east coast. It's taking land out of production, they say. People will never farm there again!

Yes, and that's the point. Farming is our biggest polluter, and if we want to cut greenhouse gas emissions, we need to do less of it. Which isn't really a problem, because we export 95% of what we produce, so we can do this without any impact on our food supplies. Add on to that that the mass clearance of native bush for farmland is one of the reasons we are in this mess in the first place.

Also, in this case the land in question is east coast hill country, which really shouldn't be farmed anyway. Turning it into a mix of native forest and pine takes it out of production and draws down some of the carbon we've spewed - in this case, about 750,000 tons. Which is quite a lot. Do it a hundred more times, and we've soaked up a year's worth of emissions.

The good news is that we don't need to do much to make this happen. Hill country sheep and beef farming is a marginal economic activity, and thanks to the ETS, its now less profitable than planting trees (and if carbon prices rise much higher, the value of averted farm emissions will be higher than the flow-on local business). Tough for those sorts of farmers, but good for all of us who don't want to burn down or drown. So, the quicker carbon prices rise to further incentivise this, the better.

Climate Change: Planning for failure again

Last night the government introduced its latest proposals for the Emissions Trading Scheme. While the Zero Carbon Act has established a process for setting long-term carbon budgets, the government still needs to set an interim one. In addition, it needs to set volumes for planned ETS auctions and the prices for the "cost containment reserve". Unfortunately, looking at the details, its just another plan for failure.

We'll start with the process: the government has set its budget by requiring emissions to hold steady at 2020 levels for two years, then decreasing them linearly towards the net-zero-for-everything-but-our-largest-polluters 2050 target. This gives them a provision budget of 354 million tons. They then deduct off everything that isn't covered by the ETS (agriculture), and the expected level of free allocation (big polluters), and an allowance for using up stockpiled Russian fraud (about a third of it). And this leaves them with an auction budget of 80 million tons for 2021 - 2025, as depicted below:


So far, so good. It seems sensible, even if there are uncertainties over free allocation volumes, or how many more credits will be stockpiled next year due to using the fixed-price option, or whether their new one will just make the whole budget a joke again. But there's a bigger problem, and that is that their chosen pathway is absolutely inconsistent with our 2030 Paris target. And they admit this explicitly:

The domestic emissions pathway proposed by the provisional emissions budget will mean that unless there are significant reductions in the second half of the 10-year period, we will need to find additional emissions abatement to meet our Paris Agreement Contribution over the period 2021–30. For example, if the emissions budget continued on the straight-line pathway towards the Zero Carbon Act 2050 target, an additional 63 Mt CO2-e of abatement would be required to meet the Paris Agreement Contribution budget of 601 Mt CO2-e between 2021–30. This difference in volume could potentially be achieved through international cooperation.

[Emphasis added]

So, they're planning to fail, and planning to hide that failure with more Russian fraud, just like they did with Kyoto. And even if you accept that this is legitimate, we're currently locked out of international carbon markets, and negotiations on reopening them fell over messily at the Madrid COP over some countries wanting to double-count and include bullshit and open loopholes for even more fraud, and those problems seem insurmountable. So its a hell of a gamble. Effectively, by committing to inadequate domestic action, they're going for hope as a policy again - and specifically, hope that someone else will do something, so we don't have to. This is neither sensible, nor moral.

Additional: I should note: we are in this situation because National set a target and then did absolutely nothing to achieve it. In fact, they did their best to increase emissions with pollution subsidies and Russian fraud (plus mega-roads, irrigation subsidies, and more oil drilling). But regardless: we have a target, and we have to meet it. And the government's response is basicly "nah, fuck that, too hard". And that is simply not good enough.

A victory for democracy in Catalonia - and in Europe

Back in May, jailed Catalan politician Oriol Junqueras ran in the European parliamentary elections as head of the Ahora Repúblicas. AR won 5.6% of the Spanish vote, enough for three MEPs. But Junqueras was not allowed to take his seat, after Spanish authorities refused to release him temporarily from pre-trial detention to complete the post-election formalities. In effect, like the British government before it, the Spanish government was claiming a right of veto over who the people could elect. And now, the European Court of Justice has said that that is not allowed.

The EU Court of Justice has ruled that jailed Catalan politician Oriol Junqueras had immunity from the moment he was officially elected to the European Parliament on June 13th, after Spain's electoral commission proclaimed the final election results. Thus, the European Court states that he should have been able to leave jail at that time and travel to Brussels to take office.

In a hearing of the Luxembourg court this Thursday morning, it was also ruled that if the Spanish Supreme Court believed that pro-independence leader Junqueras should have been kept in jail, it had to tell the European Parliament and ask for the suspension of his immunity.

The ruling is clear in its assessment of the facts at the time that they occurred and represents a slap in the face for Spanish justice whose correct course of action in the spring was to have either allowed Junqueras to travel to take up his office or to have asked for the removal of his immunity. But the EU court does not clarify in its ruling if the decision can be applied now, that is, if Junqueras should now be able to go free to perform his duties as an MEP in the European Parliament.

The question now is whether Spain will respect the ruling, or whether it will try and impede an elected MEP from going about his business. And if they want to do the latter, then the Socialists can kiss goodbye to any hope of Catalan cooperation in their attempt to form a government.

Meanwhile, Spain also blocked two other Catalan politicians, Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín, from taking office. The ruling will also apply to them, and should allow them to immediately take their seats. Because it is voters, not governments, who choose MEPs, and if governments don't like the choices voters make, tough shit for them.

Impeached!

The US House of representatives has just voted to impeach Donald Trump, making him only the third US president to earn that dubiou distinction. But before anyone gets their hopes up, this isn't any return to constitutional normalcy. Once the House votes for impeachment, the Senate is supposed to conduct a trial. And the Republicans who dominate that body have shown no indication that they will do that properly, let alone vote to convict by the required two-thirds majority. So, the constitutional checks and balances fail because they ultimately rely on some measure of honesty and good faith from politicians. And where the US is concerned, that simply cannot be relied upon.

Meanwhile, its worth noting: Nixon - the man who provides the benchmark for a criminal US president - had enough decency and shame to resign before he got to this stage. Trump doesn't. Which is horrifying in a way.

Climate Change: The scale of failure

The government released its Fourth Biennial Report under the UNFCCC today, setting out our emissions reduction targets, policies, and emissions projections. The projections paint a dismal picture of failure: we are not on track to meet our 2030 target, and we will meet our 2020 one only by relying on laundered fraudulent "credits". James Shaw is trying to be upbeat about it, calling it a starting point and a baseline for assessing the impact of his Zero Carbon Act. Which is true, but at the same time a huge chunk of that failure is his fault, for selling out to the dairy industry, delaying their entry into the ETS and then giving them a 95% pollution subsidy - removing any incentive for them to cut emissions.

Helpfully, the report quantifies the scale of that failure for us, with a table estimate the emissions impact of each policy measure:


So, the ETS, which covers the non-agricultural half of our emissions, is expected to reduce emissions by ~9.5 million tons a year in 2030. Meanwhile, agriculture, the other half, is expected to reduce emissions by 95 kT / year - about 0.27% of their total, or about 1% as much as the rest of us. To compare it with other policies, EECA's Efficient Products Programme, which promotes LED lightbulbs and puts energy-star stickers on fridges (so, taking a small amount off the ~8% of emissions which result from electricity use) is expected to save 234 kT/yr in 2030 - or about two and a half times as much as our most polluting industry. So, farmers are expected to do less to help than you buying an LED lightbulb.

And its worse when you consider that that 50% of emissions is produced by, as National keeps saying, 23,000 farming families. Who are expected to do a hundred times less than the rest of us, while being subsidised by us forever.

As I've said before, you cannot compromise with physics. If we are to achieve meaningful emissions reductions, let alone the ones necessary for human survival, farmers must do their part. And that means not just ending dairy growth, but a massive reduction in the herd. Anything less, and we are simply not going to be able to solve this.

Climate Change: Compromised

The Climate Change Commission is going to be a key body in determining future climate change policy. Under the Zero Carbon Act, it will effectively be responsible for setting long-term carbon budgets and emissions reductions plans, setting a long-term downward pathway for emissions, as well as reviewing the agricultural target ("effectively" because while formally they only advise the Minister, the clear intention of the Act is that this advice is always going to be followed).

Obviously, it would make no sense for someone like a fossil fuel executive to be appointed to the Commission. It would be a clear conflict of interest and undermine it from the outset. And yet, when the members were appointed on Tuesday, they included Nicola Shadbolt, a farmer and former Fonterra director. In other words, an advocate for New Zealand's most climate polluting industry, dairy farming.

This compromises the Commission from the beginning. They might as well have put someone from OMV on there. And because of this appointment, we can't have any confidence that the Commission will do what is required to control agricultural emissions, or recommend a strong target when the agricultural target is reviewed. And given that agriculture is our biggest source of greenhouse gases, and that we can't meet any credible target without massively reducing it, that is a problem.

The one thing the government is delivering on

Last year the government gave us the biggest ever increase in the minimum wage, from $15.50 to $17.70 an hour. This year, they're doing it again:

New Zealand's minimum wage will rise to $18.90 an hour from April 1, the Government has confirmed.

Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Iain Lees-Galloway said it would mean a quarter of a million workers were better off next year.

"The new $18.90 rate will mean an extra $48 per week before tax for Kiwis who work for 40 hours on the current minimum wage," he said.

Which means they're on track for another increase to $20 an hour in April 2021, as promised in their confidence and supply agreement with the Greens. Which will mean that they will have increased the minimum wage by 20% in their first term - which should deliver a significant benefit to workers, both directly for those on the minimum wage, and indirectly by ratcheting up other wages in response.

This is the one thing the government is delivering on. They've failed on child poverty, on KiwiBuild, and on climate change; on banning mining on conservation land, on public media, and on transparency. But they've succeeded on this. Its something, but its nowhere near enough.

What is Archives New Zealand scared of?

What is Archives New Zealand scared of? We're not allowed to know.

All government agencies should be maintaining risk registers of threats to their operations and what they do. Its simply good planning: by knowing about a threat - like the potential for earthquakes, or fires, or corrupt staff - you can take precautions against it, limit the damage it can do, and keep providing services to the public. Someone was interested in whether Archives New Zealand was properly taking care of our taonga and protecting it against the many risks it faces, so they used FYI, the public OIA request site, to ask for copies of their risk register. This request should have been unproblematic: its a formal document, containing factual information, with only limited scope for withholding. But Archives refused the request in its entirety as "free and frank opinion".

That's bad enough - given the nature of a risk register, the "free and frank" clause simply shouldn't apply here, and obviously fully withholding them rather than releasing with limited redactions contravenes the OIA. But then it got worse: someone purporting to be a whistleblower from Archives posted a comment under the request saying that the stated reason for withholding the information was "not entirely true":

What happened is that there is a situation that exists in one of our other buildings. Some of the staff there were really worried about it and went to outsiders for help. One thing led to another and there were some newsmedia articles about it. The ELT found it really embarrassing.

The same kind of situation exists here at archives and has for as long as any of us remember. Its of enough concern that its in our risk register. The ELT are worried that if the register is released the media will pick up on it and there will be more newsmedia articles. Thats why you got fobbed off.

Which seems to be referring to the report that Archives has a problem with superstitious staff. But this is simply illegal. As the Danks Committee said,

The fact that the release of certain information may give rise to criticism or embarrassment of the government is not an adequate reason for withholding it from the public.

(I'd go further: it seems to be a positive reason for release, since it suggests they need to be held accountable for something, and that they fear that accountability).

Archives New Zealand seems to have violated the OIA here, and hopefully the requester will appeal to the Ombudsman. But also, it seems that a meta-request for their records of how they considered this request could be fruitful. Except no doubt they'll consider that to be "free and frank opinion" as well. Which simply shows that the primary purpose of that clause is to protect unprofessional or illegal behaviour.

Judicially review the OMV decision

Today the Environmental Protection Authority granted consent to Austrian oil-giant OMV to drill for oil and gas in the Great South Basin. Its a decision which makes no sense, given our need to reduce emissions: we can't burn the oil and gas we already have and stay within the planet's carbon budget, so there's simply no point looking for more. But the EPA was statutorily forbidden from considering that, so they just rubberstamped it instead.

Which may have been a mistake. Because while the EPA was considering the application, Parliament passed the Zero Carbon Act. Which included a clause allowing any decision making body to take the climate change targets, budgets, and reduction plans into account in any decision. The EPA didn't do that, and they weren't required to in terms of the Act. But given the subject matter of the application, it may have been irrational for them not to do so. Because pretty obviously, if they find oil or gas, its going to pose problems for meeting our 2050 target (sadly, there's no emissions budgets or reduction plan in place yet, but it'd obviously pose a problem for them too).

What about the statutory ban on considering climate change? Well, it only forbids the EPA from considering "the effects on climate change of discharging greenhouse gases into the air". Effects on targets, budgets and reduction plans are different from that, so s5ZN CCRA consideration is not barred by s59(5)(b) of the EEZ Act.

In other words, judicial review is on the table. It would be weak, without budgets and reduction plans, and isn't the ideal test case. There will be later opportunities - for example, if they find oil, then they will need a resource consent for any extraction operation, and there should be a budget and reduction plan in place by then as well. But Parliament deliberately modified this clause to "allow the common law to develop" - that is, to encourage challenges. It might be worth doing it, simply to get a ruling on the interaction of s5ZV and the EEZ Act and RMA bans on climate change consideration, and to see the circumstances where the courts believe decision makers should consider climate change issues.

Daily secrecy

Another day, another secrecy clause from this secretive government. This time its in the seemingly boring looking Financial Market Infrastructures Bill, which is about stock exchange and bank settlement regulation. It uses existing bodies subject to the OIA as regulators, and gives them powers to require information both from each other and from market participants. And it adds the now-standard secrecy clause forbidding disclosure of any information acquired in such a manner. As I noted last week, these clauses oust the jurisdiction of the OIA, and exist primarily because public sector agencies do not trust the Act or each other to protect information. Again, public sector dysfunction is being used to undermine the public's right to know, and we should not tolerate it.

The HRC on hate speech

The Human Rights Commission has published a paper today on Kōrero Whakamauāhara: Hate Speech - An overview of the current legal framework. It examines the principles behind hate speech regulation, as well as current New Zealand and international law. While it draws no formal conclusions, it is clear from that examination that New Zealand law is lagging.

The principles section makes clear that the purpose of hate speech laws is not to prevent offence, but to prevent incitement, discrimination, and the undermining of shared membership in society. They are fundamentally about protecting public order, and people's right to participate in society and be themselves. While there are obvious freedom of expression arguments against restricting hate speech, there is also a right - recognised in New Zealand and international law - to be free from discrimination. Proper regulation requires balancing those rights (just as electoral advertising restrictions involve balancing freedom of speech and the right to free and fair elections).

The international law section reviews those competing rights, both in treaty texts and interpretive rulings. Its worth noting here that in international law, freedom of expression - protected by article 19 ICCPR - is bound by both the general limits of public order, public health, and public morals (whatever those are), and explicit restrictions against war propaganda and "advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence". Those provisions were an explicit response to Naziism, and are now interpreted more widely to also protect sex, religion, political opinion, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability and refugee status - basicly anything ordinarily protected under anti-discrimination law. New Zealand has a reservation against that article, but that doesn't mean its not an international standard that we are failing to comply with. And if we're going to move in this area, then removing that reservation seems like a good idea.

Finally, there's a review of laws from other countries, including Australia, Canada and the UK - at least two of which have similar human rights regimes to ours. So we have models to draw on, and caselaw that can be examined to determine their practical effects in deciding what to adopt here.

I've previously been highly suspicious of hate speech laws, misunderstanding them as being about offence rather than protecting participation, and being cautious about potential abuses (both by future governments, and private groups - the religious fanatics who have tried to bring private prosecutions for "blasphemous libel" would probably try and use them to victimise people). I'm still cautious about the abuses, but its clear that we have not balanced the rights to freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination correctly. We need to act on this. The HRC's paper is a good start in deciding what to do.

Gun nuts say they're criminals

The government gun buyback ends this week. One problem with the buyback is that, thanks to our previously lax gun laws, the police have no idea how many soon-to-be-illegal guns are actually out there. And the gun-nuts are keen to paint it as a failure by claiming that most of them haven't been turned over:

Gun rights advocates claim around two-thirds of banned firearms are still circulating and they worry the weapons could end up in the hands of criminals.

[...]

The council's national secretary Nicole McKee said the process had been very rushed and believed there could still be at least 170,000 prohibited firearms in circulation.

The police and the government "have left it really late to define a lot of those rules. From October the 25th a new list of prohibited firearms were brought in," she said adding that that was far too late and too little notice for people to respond.

"Once people realise they are going to go to jail for possession of these firearms they won't want to be holding them. So it will be really unfortunate if these firearms make their way to the black market because they're too afraid to hand them in."

They won't need to be sold on the black market, because after Friday they will already be in the hands of criminals, in that possessing a previously legal semi-automatic firearm will be a crime puishable by five years in jail. So when COLFO and other gun nut organisations say "gun nuts aren't turning over their guns", what urban New Zealand hears is "our supporters are criminals". And given what these weapons do, and the more than fair chance that has been provided to dispose of them lawfully, there will be little sympathy when they face the consequences of their pre-meditated criminality.

New Fisk

There is another election the world should be paying attention to this week – in Algeria
Sabra and Chatila taught me all massacres become 'alleged massacres' if we don't pay attention

Climate Change: Wasting our time again

For the past two weeks delegates were meeting at the UN climate change talks in Madrid. The meeting finally ended, having achieved... nothing. The IPCC has made it clear that we need to halve emissions by 2030 if we are to avoid making the planet uninhabitable, so countries needed to pledge deeper emissions cuts and back them up with policy. Instead, they wasted their time - and ours - bickering over carbon trading. Faced with the biggest crisis humanity has ever seen, they were worried about how to financialise it so the rich people who caused it can make even more money off it (and preferably while doing nothing to reduce pollution, or even polluting more). Oh, and how they could avoid legal liability for the damage they have already caused. Meanwhile, they threw out civil society representatives, while letting polluter lobbyists roam the halls. And then they wonder why we have no faith in them, and why we see them as a corrupt, out-of-touch elite fiddling while the planet burns.

Well, crap

UKanians went to the polls yesterday in early elections aimed at resolving the Brexit impasse. And they certainly have, delivering a huge majority to the Tories, and (barring internal rebellions of the sort which delayed Brexit) giving them the power to do whatever they want. And thanks to the UK's unfair electoral system, they got all that on just 44% of the vote...

But the Tories aren't the only beneficiaries of that unfair system. In Scotland, the SNP won just under half the vote, but 80% of the seats. Meanwhile, the LibDems got 11% of the vote nationwide, but only 2% of the seats, while the Greens and Brexit parties - small but notable minority votes which could easily be accommodated in a legislature as large as the UK's - were left with nothing. Its all the worse because the rest of the UK's elections - for its devolved legislatures and the European Parliament - use one form or another of proportional representation, so UK voters know what they're missing out on.

So what are the Tories planning? Bexit, obviously, which is bad enough. Undermining judicial review rights (which saw their illegal prorogation cancelled) and the Human Rights Act (their version of the BORA). A pogrom against Travellers. The UK voted for that, and now they're going to get it, but it is nothing good, and UKanians should get out while they can. The Scots are ahead of the game already, with a demand for another independence referendum, which Boris Johnson has already refused. But the more they refuse, the greater the pressure will be for a vote (because a. that's the democratic solution; and b. Scotland doesn't like London telling them how to run their lives). And in London doesn't let them hold a binding, legal referendum, they may simply go Catalonian and hold a non-binding, illegal one, and dare London to try and stop it or ignore the result.

Today's secrecy legislation

Introducing legislation which shits on the public's right to know seems to have become a daily occurrence for this government. Today's example is the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Bill. The bill establishes a framework for the establishment of "special purpose vehicles" (SPVs) to hide debt from local government balance sheets fund infrastructure such as roads and sewers in "high-growth" councils. SPVs will collect and spend public money in the form of an "infrastructure levy" collected through the local rating system, and will exercise local government powers in their specific areas to enable construction. But they will not be subject to the Official Information Act or LGOIMA, instead having minimal "bespoke disclosure and reporting obligations" which basicly amount to publishing an annual report.

(There's also a statutory Monitor to keep an eye on such entities, but as they must be a government agency, they should be covered).

Local bodies collecting rates and exercising statutory powers to acquire land and construct infrastructure are rightly subject to the transparency provisions of the LGOIMA. The same should apply to these "special purpose vehicles". Otherwise we're effectively seeing a transfer of local government powers into some secret, unaccountable netherworld. And that should not be acceptable to anyone.

Encryption, passwords, and self-incrimination

The University of Waikato and New Zealand Law Foundation have released a report today on the law around encryption in New Zealand. There's stuff in there about principles and values, and how proposed government policies to provide for "lawful access" by creating backdoors would destroy the trust which makes encryption work (and, given the availability of encryption, simply push people to use systems they can trust, without such backdoors). But they also find that the existing law around searches, under which people can be required to provide passwords or keys to enable government searches, on pain of imprisonment, fails to respect fundamental human rights, specifically the right against self-incrimination.

New Zealand law takes a broad view of self-incrimination, defining it as anything "reasonably likely to lead to, or increase the likelihood of, the prosecution of a person for a criminal offence". But if the police want to access your data because they think there is evidence there that you have committed a crime, then by definition assisting them increases your likelihood of prosecution and is self-incriminating. Unfortunately, the law as written does not include sufficient guidance to protect this right; there's a generalised right in the Evidence Act, but insufficient protections in the search clauses themselves. Which in turn effectively allows the government to force people to incriminate themselves, in contravention of legal norms and international human rights standards. As a result,

[t]he researchers recommend that the right or privilege against self-incrimination should be more strongly recognised in computer searches, and that persons suspected or charged with a crime should not be forced to disclose their passwords. While providers have a responsibility to assist the police in search or surveillance operations if it is within their existing technical capabilities, such assistance should not involve any act that would undermine the information security of their products and services or compromise the privacy of their clients as a whole.

Meanwhile, if the government ever asks you for your passwords, I recommend refusing. They'll threaten you with jail or a fine, but if the alternative is incriminating yourself (and by definition they are asking you to do so), then you should refuse to do so.

You can read the full report here.

Drawn

A ballot for two Member's Bills was held today, and the following bills were drawn:

• Insurance (Prompt Settlement of Claims for Uninhabitable Residential Property) Bill (Stuart Smith)
  
• Social Security (Exemption for Ex Gratia and Compensation Payments) Amendment Bill (Willow-Jean Prime)
  

Neither bill seems likely to be particularly controversial.

This is the first ballot since April, and there were 83 bills in the biscuit tin today, making it the largest ever.

Bougainville votes for independence

Earlier in the month, Bougainvilleans went to the polls in a landmark referendum to decide on whether they would remain part of Papua New Guinea or become independent. Yesterday, the results came in, with over 97% support for independence. The referendum wasn't binding - instead it means negotiations with the PNG government - but as part of the peace agreement which ended the civil war on the island, you'd expect it to be respected (and you'd expect New Zealand, which helped broker that agreement, to push for that). So hopefully in a few years time the Pacific will have a new nation.

Reviewing the whitewash

Back in 2015, then Ombudsman Beverley Wakem conducted a review of the OIA, Not a game of hide and seek. The "review" was a whitewash, which found no need for legislative change, and instead criticised the media and requesters - which destroyed Wakem's reputation, and undermined that of the Office of the Ombudsman in general. But it did recommend some minor practice improvements around how agencies internally handled requests. Now, the current Ombudsman is doing a followup investigation into the agencies the report was originally based on, to see if anything has changed:

The Chief Ombudsman is launching a new inquiry into whether central government agencies have addressed any weaknesses identified in a landmark investigation five years ago.

Peter Boshier told Parliament’s Government Administration Committee this morning that ‘now is the right time’ to revisit the 12 representative agencies involved in Not a game of hide and seek, the Ombudsman’s 2015 investigation into Official Information Act compliance and practice.

[...]

Published in December 2015, Not a game of hide and seek was initiated by former Chief Ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakem, in response to growing concerns that some agencies or Ministers were ‘gaming’ the OIA. The investigation found that while agencies overall met the required standards, there were definite improvements to be made.

“I really have to find out about what has changed since the original report was published,” Mr Boshier says.

The agencies being surveyed are ACC; Department of Corrections; Ministry of Education; Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Ministry of Health; Ministry of Justice; New Zealand Customs Service; NZDF; New Zealand Transport Agency; Ministry of Social Development; Ministry of Transport; State Services Commission. If you've requested anything from them in the last 12 months, then there's a survey here you can fill out. The Ombudsman will use the results to find out what needs to be investigated further.

The results should be interesting. But what will happen if, as expected, nothing has really changed? More slaps with the wet bus-ticket?