The Environmental Law Initiative has laid a formal complaint with the Office of the Ombudsman, accusing the Prime Minister’s office of withholding information about a 2024 briefing note from Fonterra and Z Energy that argued for legislation to block private climate change lawsuits.
The complaint was lodged on Monday 25 May 2026 by Dr Matt Hall, the Research and Legal Director at the Environmental Law Initiative. It follows more than a year of Official Information Act requests that returned only what the group describes as “limited material”, and a separate High Court discovery process that finally surfaced the document in March 2026.
The hard-copy briefing was hand-delivered to the Prime Minister’s office in mid-2024 by government affairs staff from Fonterra and Z Energy. It set out arguments for new law that would prevent private litigants from suing major emitters over climate damage. The legal context is the long-running case brought by Northland iwi leader Mike Smith against Fonterra, Z Energy, Genesis, New Zealand Steel, Dairy Holdings and BT Mining, which is now back in the courts after the Supreme Court allowed it to proceed in 2024.
In the House on Tuesday Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said his office had been unable to find anyone who remembered receiving the document. “Our office have looked into the issue and they’ve just got no record, no recollection of this from 2024,” he told MPs, according to RNZ. Pressed by the Greens to name the staff member, the Prime Minister declined and added that “it’s not in the public interest to identify specific members of staff, but I understand it was someone who left a while ago.”
That answer drew sharp responses from the opposition benches. Greens co-leader Chloë Swarbrick, who secured the parliamentary debate, told the House that “if his hands are clear, then he should show us that his hands are clear, and he should have that independently verified”. She accused the Government of “attempting to shrug this off, as if there is nothing to see here”, according to the New Zealand Herald.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins picked up the thread on record-keeping. He said that if someone senior from the Prime Minister’s Office was meeting with them and receiving documents, “they must have a system in place to record that, and the prime minister has to be accountable to that”, suggesting it stretches belief that a briefing from two of the country’s largest companies could vanish from the institutional memory of the country’s most senior political office.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, who two weeks ago announced amendments to climate change litigation law on 12 May 2026, defended the meetings as routine. “We engage with many people, not in some nefarious secret way,” he told reporters. “It is just the nature of doing things in a small country.”
The timing is what makes the document politically awkward. The amendments narrow the grounds on which private parties can pursue companies for climate harm, and they were announced before the briefing note had been disclosed through the Mike Smith discovery process. Critics now want to know how much of the 2024 lobbying material informed the 2026 policy decision, and whether the Prime Minister’s office can credibly claim it played no part. Newswire’s earlier piece The Cracks Beneath Climate Certainty walks through the scientific debate that sits underneath these cases.
Dr Hall said the complaint to the Ombudsman is about transparency rather than the merits of the underlying policy. “These circumstances raise serious concerns about transparency, accountability, and the integrity of official decision-making,” he said in a statement reported by RNZ. Mr Smith himself has gone further, telling reporters that what the discovery documents reveal is “a co-ordinated campaign of secret lobbying, political interference and corporate influence at the highest levels of power”.
The New Zealand Bar Association has separately written to the Government asking for the climate litigation amendment to be reconsidered, arguing that any narrowing of common-law tort rights deserves a longer and more public process than a budget-cycle announcement.
The Ombudsman now has discretion to decide whether to formally investigate the OIA handling. If a full investigation goes ahead, the Prime Minister’s office would be required to explain what records exist, what searches were carried out and how a hand-delivered document from two NZX-listed companies could leave no audit trail. The Office does not generally comment on individual complaints until findings are issued.
For voters, the dispute folds together two themes that will shape the run-in to the 2026 general election, transparency over corporate lobbying and the durability of climate-related legal rights. If you want to see how the parties line up on those questions before polling day, our voting tool walks you through the key positions on environmental policy and on integrity in government.
Do you think the Prime Minister’s office should be able to lose track of a hand-delivered briefing from Fonterra and Z Energy, or is independent verification now the only way to settle this? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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