Section 15 of the Ombudsman Act is the heart of the job. It is the power to form an opinion that a government action was unlawful, unreasonable, unjust or wrong, and to report on it.
In late 2025 a senator asked how often the Ombudsman had used one limb of that power: forming the opinion that a law itself was unreasonable or unjust and reporting that it should be changed. The Office said a detailed answer "would take a significant amount of manual work and be an unreasonable diversion of the Office's limited resources". It could say that the current Ombudsman had done so "on one occasion in his term".
Asked next about its record-keeping, the Office said of its two systems: "Neither system captures information in a way that supports automated reporting on the number of opinions formed under s.15(1) and reports made under s.15(2)". It also said it "has not identified any internal audits conducted regarding the use of s.15 powers from records dating back to 2015-16".
The Office rejected the suggestion that this is a record-keeping problem. It "does not consider that its record keeping systems are inadequate for statutory reporting".
Source: answers to questions on notice SBE25-338 and AE26-054, Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee.