When the Emergency Comes, Who Knows You’ll Need Power for Your Ventilator?

What a routine Official Information Act request reveals about the gap at the centre of New Zealand’s emergency welfare system

New Zealand has a National Emergency Management Agency whose job, by its own description, is to act as “the steward of the emergency management system.”

What that stewardship actually amounts to for people who depend on dialysis, home oxygen, insulin, ventilation, or a continuous electricity supply to survive a major emergency is now a matter of official record — because in August 2026, in response to an Official Information Act request (reference OIA2627-0049), NEMA answered.

The answer, read in full, is that nobody is minding this particular gap.

Six questions, one underlying issue

The original request, transferred to NEMA on 16 July 2026, asked six things: whether any register of medically dependent people exists; whether NEMA has ever briefed its Chief Executive or Minister on the issue; whether any data-sharing agreements are in place with Health NZ, MSD, Disability Support Services, or electricity retailers; what legal advice exists on how Privacy Act protections apply in an emergency; what Cabinet-level policy work considered this population when the Emergency Management Bill was developed; and what guidance NEMA has issued to local Civil Defence Emergency Management Groups, including anything revised after the 2024 Government Inquiry into the North Island severe weather events.

Every one of these questions was, in substance, refused. NEMA’s Chief of Staff, Stefan Weir, cited section 18(e) of the OIA — the information simply does not exist — for four of the six parts, and section 18(d) — it’s already public — for the other two.

That is where a lazier reading of this correspondence would stop: six refusals, nothing to see.

But refusals under the OIA are not blank walls. They are disclosures in their own right, and read carefully — including a follow-up exchange in which NEMA was pressed for clarification — this correspondence tells a clear and troubling story about how (and whether) New Zealand’s emergency management system accounts for its most physically vulnerable citizens.

No register. No briefing. Not once, in three and a half years.

NEMA’s first admission is straightforward: it holds no register of medically dependent people, and it has:

“not requested, seen, stored, or used person-level health or disability data.”

Responsibility, the agency says, sits with Te Whatu Ora (Health New Zealand) and, separately, with electricity retailers who maintain their own consumer lists for operational purposes but do not share them with NEMA.

That much might be defensible as a design choice about where where personal health data should live.

What is harder to defend is the second admission, extracted only after Disability Politics pushed back on the first response’s narrower wording.

In its follow-up, NEMA confirmed — unprompted by any ambiguity this time — that:

“no advice, briefings, aide-memoires, and reports were provided to the Chief Executive or the Minister for Emergency Management since 1 January 2023 concerning the identification or location of disabled people, medically dependent people, or other people with heightened welfare needs during emergency response, including any advice on establishing a vulnerable persons register or equivalent capability.”

Read that again.

Since January 2023 — spanning Cyclone Gabrielle’s aftermath, the North Island severe weather events, the Government Inquiry that followed them, and the ongoing development of new emergency management legislation — not one document went to New Zealand’s Chief Executive for emergency management, and not one went to the responsible Minister, on the question of how the country identifies and protects its most medically vulnerable people during a disaster.

NEMA’s explanation is that this simply isn’t its job:

“NEMA would not be the responsible agency for preparing advice material of this nature.”

But this explanation doesn’t stand up in relation to NEMA’s own account of its remaining functions.

The same correspondence confirms that NEMA does issue guidance to Civil Defence Emergency Management Groups on “welfare registration, needs assessment, and supporting people with additional support needs.”

An agency that writes the guidance sector-wide, but never once briefs its own Minister on whether that guidance is adequate, is not an agency without a role in this space —

It is an agency that has decided this particular question doesn’t need to, or shouldn’t reach the top.

A gap the agency’s own example exposes

The most revealing single passage in the entire correspondence was not a direct answer at all. It was offered as supporting colour for a refusal.

Asked whether any memorandum of understanding or data-sharing agreement exists between NEMA and health authorities or electricity retailers for identifying medically dependent people, NEMA said no such formal arrangement exists — and then, in the very next paragraph, described exactly this kind of arrangement happening in practice:

“during a severe weather emergency response in 2025, our Lifelines Utilities Co-ordination function in our National Coordination Centre helped connect health authorities with appropriate contacts within an electricity distribution business to confirm addresses of medically dependent customers without electricity supply for the purposes of welfare checks.”

In other words: when it mattered, in a live emergency, this exact data-sharing did happen — brokered informally, by phone, on “the stated expectation” that the parties involved would handle it within Privacy Act principles.

There was no protocol. There was no pre-agreed process. There was a person picking up a phone and hoping the right things were said on the call.

When Disability Politics asked the obvious follow-up question — is there at least an internal standard operating procedure governing this function, even without a formal MOU? — NEMA’s response was telling in a different way.

Rather than treat the question as a natural clarification of its own disclosure, NEMA reclassified it as an entirely new OIA request, restarting the statutory clock.

The substantive answer it did offer amounts to this: the Lifelines function’s role is only ever to connect one agency to another; it does not itself hold or process personal information; and whatever privacy safeguards apply are the responsibility of the agencies it connects, reinforced on the day by “a reminder... to handle the matter under the provisions of the Privacy Act.”

A verbal reminder, given in the moment, is not a system. It is what a system looks like when it has not been built.

The legal groundwork nobody can locate

If Part 3 shows a system running on improvisation, Part 4 shows why nobody has fixed that.

The request asked for any legal or policy advice NEMA holds on how the Privacy Act 2020 applies during an emergency — specifically information privacy principle 11 exceptions, the Civil Defence National Emergencies (Information Sharing) Code 2020, and the Approved Information Sharing Agreement mechanism under Part 7 of the Act, all of which exist precisely to let agencies share personal information lawfully in situations like the one described in Part 3.

NEMA’s answer: none exists. Not one document, in three and a half years, from an agency that administers the very Information Sharing Code the question was about.

To its credit, when pressed, NEMA did not simply repeat the denial — it explained its process.

Subject matter experts from its Policy, Legal, Infrastructure Resilience, and Social and Community Resilience teams were consulted, a meeting was held, and a subsequent records search confirmed the absence of any responsive material.

That is a genuine improvement in transparency over the original one-line refusal, and it deserves to be acknowledged as such.

But in the same follow-up, NEMA volunteered something that undermines confidence in the search rather than reinforcing it.

It disclosed that it “should possibly not have accepted transfer” of this and other parts of the request from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in the first place, since NEMA is no longer hosted by DPMC and any relevant historical advice may in fact sit there rather than at NEMA.

Having made that admission, NEMA nonetheless chose to answer on the basis of what it itself holds, rather than transferring the question back to the agency that may actually hold the answer.

The upshot: the claim that no legal analysis of how privacy law interacts with emergency welfare needs exists anywhere in government has not actually been tested. It has only been established that it does not currently sit at NEMA — and NEMA has told us, in its own words, that it isn’t confident it looked in the right place.

Guidance without a foundation

The final piece of the picture is what NEMA does point to with confidence: publicly available documents.

The Emergency Management Bill’s development materials and a Cabinet proactive release are offered in answer to the question about disability rights considerations in the new legislation; the National Civil Defence Emergency Management Plan and the “Welfare Services in an Emergency” Director’s Guideline are offered in answer to the question about guidance issued to CDEM Groups.

Both answers leave a specific question unaddressed. The original request asked pointedly whether any of this guidance was issued or revised following the 2024 Government Inquiry into the North Island severe weather events — a natural question, since that Inquiry is precisely the kind of event that should prompt a rethink of how vulnerable people are identified and supported.

Neither the original response nor the follow-up confirms one way or the other whether the linked documents reflect any post-Inquiry revision at all.

Similarly, the request asked specifically about New Zealand’s obligations under Article 11 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities — the article dealing directly with the protection and safety of persons with disabilities in situations of risk and humanitarian emergencies.

NEMA’s answer folds this into a general reference to “disproportionately affected communities” in public Cabinet material, without confirming that Article 11 obligations for disabled and medically dependent people specifically were ever analysed as a distinct question.

What this adds up to

No single refusal in this correspondence is, by itself, damning. Agencies are entitled to define their roles narrowly, and NEMA’s account of a distributed system — health authorities hold health data, electricity retailers hold consumer data, NEMA coordinates — is coherent on paper.

But read as a whole, six refusals and a follow-up exchange add up to something more specific than “no records held.”

They describe a system in which no single agency has ever mapped out, on paper, how a person on home oxygen or dialysis is actually meant to be found and helped when the power goes out and the roads are cut off.

The one time where this was tested, in 2025, it worked through an improvised phone call and a verbal reminder about the Privacy Act rather than any prepared plan; where the legal groundwork that would make a prepared plan possible cannot currently be located anywhere in government, by the responsible agency’s own admission; and where, across more than three years spanning a major weather disaster and a formal government inquiry into the response to it, the question of whether any of this needs fixing has never once reached the desk of the Minister responsible.

That is not a data-protection success story. It is a description of a gap that has been managed, so far, because nobody has noticing it —

Until someone asked.

This piece is based on NEMA’s official response to OIA request reference OIA2627-0049 (6 August 2026) and the agency’s subsequent written follow-up correspondence, both released under the Official Information Act 1982.