Ombudsman John Allen said we don't have penalties but we have mana. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Of all the Government agency chiefs fronting up to MPs for Scrutiny Week at Parliament last week, Ombudsman John Allen had the least time, with only 20 minutes allocated.
But it is a relatively small independent agency, Allen has been in the job only 12 weeks, and the agency itself has a role of scrutinising 400 Government agencies.
As a new watchdog and an independent officer of Parliament, Allen looks set to bring a different style to his predecessor, Judge Peter Boshier, who held the role for 10 years.
The longer Boshier was in the job, the more critical he became of recalcitrant agencies.
He named and shamed several - Health NZ, Oranga Tamariki and Corrections most recently - and said it was time to consider harsher penalties to be available for non-compliance with the Official Information Act (OIA).
Allen says he will name and shame if necessary but he is building his own relationships with agencies and is not convinced that increasing penalties is the right answer.
“I’m not yet persuaded that fining chief executives for non-compliance is going to be a particularly effective tool,” he told the Herald.
It was a tool available to some ombudsmen in Australia, and he was getting more information on that.
But his view was that he was more likely to achieve success through the way the Public Service Commission – which employs chief executives, publishes data about the compliance levels of individual agencies.
And he wanted to give a greater profile to success stories of agencies complying.
“I think a mixture of those things is probably going to be more powerful than some sort of penalty.
“One of the advantages of this jurisdiction actually is we don’t have the ability to impose penalties; we don’t have the ability to deprive people of liberty. What we have is mana, and moral suasion.”
He said he wanted to make sure that context was included in reports. For example, many of the complaints about Corrections were related to the physical infrastructure of prisons.
“I’m not saying they are wrong to make them. It is important for us to understand that Corrections face a constraint, and the specific constraint is the capital funding to be able to address the physical infrastructure they are confronted to deal with.”
The sort of discussion he wanted to have with such agencies was about the strategic priorities the agency had set to address the issues, and in what timeline would it be addressed.
“Then we can engage with them with a view about the legitimacy of their priorities.”
The Ombudsman deals with complaints under the OIA and Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA), to investigate complaints about decision-making and conduct in the public sector; and examine places of detention to prevent torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment – including aged care facilities that detain people with dementia.
The role has been expanded under the last Government to include oversight of over 100 Oranga Tamariki contracted care or custody providers, and to accept disclosures about wrongdoing under the Protected Disclosure (Protection of Whistleblowers) Act 2022.
According to information given to the government administration select committee, while the overall clearance rate of complaints was high, at 99%, timeliness suffered because of a growing number of complaints.
As at May 31, 2025, 56% of all Ombudsmen Act and official information (OIA and LGOIMA) complaints were completed within three months (the target is 70%), 71% were completed within six months (target 80%), and 82% were completed within 12 months (target 95%).
Allen said he had deployed staff within the office to deal with complaints.
“In my view, if those opinions are delayed, in many, many instances they are past their use-by date or they are talking into a context which has moved materially since the report was first commissioned.”
The areas on which Allen wants to focus initially are timeliness in addressing complaints, looking to AI to gain greater efficiencies in triaging complaints and raising awareness of the office and its roles. Overall, awareness levels of the Ombudsman’s role were 66%, but more like 50% among Māori, Pasifika and Asian communities.
“We need to raise public awareness of this jurisdiction because it is a really remarkable jurisdiction.”
It was free to the complainant, it was private, and it was not adversarial.
“These things are hugely valuable to many, many individuals when they come to feel as though the state and its various agencies haven’t dealt fairly with them.
“And more particularly, it is independent of Government.
“It is a place you can come to. It is not a court or a judge but where people can investigate an issue, form a factual foundation and then ask themselves the question ‘was the conduct of the state in this situation reasonable or unreasonable’ and make recommendations to the agencies about ways they might improve.”
Last year’s annual report puts overall staffing at 238 employees, with 200 in Wellington and 38 in the Auckland office.
It has had 7336 complaints this financial year, compared with 6660 last year and 6046 the year before that.
It was tracking to receive 294 whistle-blower disclosures about wrongdoing in their workplace in the year to June 30.
Allen encountered the Ombudsman in previous jobs such as the former secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and head of NZ Post and in his most recent jobs in local government as head of the council-controlled organisation Wellington NZ, and chancellor of Victoria University.
“It’s a space I have been consistently interested in over time, in particular how you maintain active engagement by the citizenry in the democracy of the country and how you deal with misinformation.”
Both of those issues had become significantly more acute in more recent times.
“For me, this role plays a real role in providing people with information that can enable them to be better informed about Government, can enable them to engage more effectively with Government, whether local or central, and can, as a consequence, build trust and confidence in Government.”
He wanted to encourage government agencies to release work on decisions in a timelier way, “so as to ensure that the foundations on which decisions are being made are accurately understood.”
“Proactive release is the ultimate deliverable here, where agencies recognise the benefit of having that information in the public arena.
“They can see the to and fro and some elements of that decision-making.”
Referring to the advice given by officials to ministers, he said he understood that that involved a balance between free and frank expression, and the wider public interest.
“I am not looking to erode free and frank expression. I absolutely understand the importance of that to the successful, effective and efficient operation of Government.
“But I am also saying there is a serious opportunity here to release information that can be released proactively or in good time so as to help people who are outside Wellington, not in the beltway, to understand how these decisions are reached.”
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