PUBLIC “SERVICE” ZOMBIE APOCALYSPE
Welcome to the land of the living dead. Still they come for us
New Zealand’s Official Information Act (OIA) produces precious little good. The OIA is not fundamentally flawed, but OIA requests are routinely and unlawfully declined, delayed and redacted. The Blob Club hides in the dark and covers for itself.
New Zealand’s Ombudsman Office is the last chance saloon for those trying to shine light into public entities. In a properly functioning democracy, New Zealand’s Chief Ombudsman would be the heroic Sherriff shooting it out for those trying to rely on the OIA regime. But NZ’s Ombudsman Sheriffs have been frightfully flakey fighters for freedom and transparency.
I covered this parlous state of affairs in my May 2024 Official Information Regress Substack:
OFFICIAL INFORMATION REGRESS
When the Labour Government came to power in 2017, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pledged “This government will foster a more open and democratic society. It will strengthen transparency around official information.”
That Substack referenced my earlier (August 2023) Substack An Awfully Tricky Triumvirate which covered the following:
Fonterra deliberately cooked its financial books to cover colossal losses and crookedly inflate Fonterra’s share price
The purpose of the book cooking was to hide Fonterra’s ineptitude and artificially bolster the exorbitant pay packets of former Fonterra CEO Theo Spierings
The victims of this fiscal skullduggery were the many dairy farmers who had pay inflated amounts to buy into Fonterra
Fonterra auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers was complicit in Fonterra’s financial reporting shenanigans
The Financial Markets Authority refused to provide – in the words of my OIA request - “each internal FMA report on the basis of which FMA decided to take no action in relation to Colin Armer’s complaints to FMA about financial reporting by Fonterra Co-operative Group Limited”
My Awfully Tricky Triumvirate Substack ended with:
The OIA allows me to complain to New Zealand’s Chief Ombudsman about FMA’s refusal to release FMA’s internal reports, and I have made my complaint. But we can’t afford to hold our breaths. For a very good reason, public confidence in the integrity of New Zealand’s institutions is at an all-time low; and it’s because most of our public servants, Ombudsmen included, have forgotten who they’re supposed to serve – which is us, the public.
I didn’t hold my breath and – almost two years on - the Ombudsman still hasn’t addressed my complaint. Three days ago, on 4 June 2025, I received this:
Ancient Greek playwright Euripides claimed long ago, "Mills of the Gods grind exceedingly slow, but grind exceedingly fine..." Unfortunately, in modern New Zealand, the Mills of Official Information grind exceedingly slow, and far from fine.
The exasperating trouble with all this OIA obfuscation and inertia is that things move on. Everything, no matter how significant, is gobbled up with the effluxion of time. People forget. The protagonists die. Spierings is dead.
What would it take to change public entities like the Financial Markets Authority and Chief Ombudsman? How can New Zealand’s public institutions begin to genuinely serve the general public and abide by the OIA regime?
There’s an old saying that a fish rots from the head first; in other words, when an organisation goes bad, the rot starts with the leadership. It follows that, if an organisation is to be resurrected, the head must change.
So who’s chief of the Financial Markets Authority, and who’s the current Chief Ombudsman?
The recently appointed chair of the FMA is Craig Stobo.
Mr Stobo appears to be a well-credentialed individual. (We should ignore, for present purposes, Craig’s Peter Plumley Walkeresque moustache.)
Our only legitimate interest is whether Stobo’s FMA will now come to the party and tell us all why the FMA did nothing about Fonterra’s multi-year financial malfeasance.
And who’s the current New Zealand Chief Ombudsman? Holy hell…it’s a certain John Allen. When I saw that name I momentarily told myself that John Allen is a common name and it must be another John Allen. But it really is HIM.
I encountered John about a month ago, lurching towards me along a cracked Wellington pavement - grimacing, drooling, deathly-pale, slack jawed and dead-eyed. Immediately recognising that John’s become a zombie, I scuttled away.
The previous time I’d seen John Allen was about 18 months ago. As Chancellor of Victoria University of Wellington, he spoke at one of my daughter’s graduation ceremonies. Animated by industrial quantities of Adderall or some other sustaining stimulant, he mouthed “Aotearoa” a thousand times, “New Zealand” not once and generally seemed on the brink of departing this mortal coil (which in a zombie sense he obviously now has).
John Allen has lurked for eons in leadership roles at Woke or otherwise useless public organisations…Te Papa, Kiwibank, Victoria University - Te Herenga Waka, Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency, Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade, New Zealand Post, the rainbow ticked “New Zealand Festival”…
So, who appointed Zombie John as New Zealand’s Chief Ombudsman on 31 March 2025? Technically, John was appointed by brain-dead Governor General, Cindy Kiro.
But, in appointing Allen, Kiro was simply acting as an automaton, on the unanimous recommendation of New Zealand’s Officers of Parliament Committee. The puppet masters on that cross-Party Committee are:
Zom John’s term of appointment as Chief Ombudsman is five years. It’s a common term. Former Minister of Finance Grant Robertson appointed resigned-in-a-huff Adrian Orr as Reserve Bank Governor for five years. Robertson’s preposterously lucrative appointment as Vice-Chancellor of Otago University will last five years. If the Climate Change Commission isn’t abolished (which it should be), Dame Patsy Reddy will sit in the CCC’s zombie chair for five years.
Zombies last for as long as the curse that created them remains, and then disintegrate. New Zealand’s zombie curse is National and Labour Parties with insatiable appetites for power and zero appetite for constructive change. It remains to be seen whether John Allen will disintegrate during his five year term.
Let me put my stake in the ground, Mr John Allen. If you, as Chief Ombudsman, don’t force the Financial Markets Authority to comply with the law and tell the public why the FMA took no action against Fonterra and those who conspired to cook Fonterra’s curdled books, I’ll do my damnedest to drag you into the cold light of day, for public consumption by the diddled cow-cockies.
No surprises here John. Wellington is so far out of touch with the rest of NZ that it doesn't bear thinking about. I call it the 'Wellington Syndrome', a creepy parallel universe inhabited by the Zombies you mention. It does not reflect the wishes of the voters, nor the taxpayers, except to pay lip service before every election. They are a bunch of lying arseholes, crooks and con men / con woman, all on the make and loyal only to their own class.
Is this Deep State in NZ?
Brilliant John. And thank you for the expose of these corporate criminals, the zombie elements and their granted reign. Indeed this is the apocalypse we are plagued by, placated by, and stymied by. I find it frustrating that here we have an obvious fraudulent and brazen bureaucratic ceiling cap on justice for our citizen farming community, and another laird levy on the livelihood of our food producers. Hope you receive the right response and wishing their were sharper teeth for the office of ombudsman.