Thanks Brett! Ha, funny you should say that. That exact thing actually happened a few years ago and turned out to be a Senior Severe Weather Forecaster at MetService. We ran his comments as a headline…no name has been attached to similarly written negative comments to us ever since. Of course, not saying that’s what may have happened below……….

🙂 Cheers
Phil and our small team.

Hi there “anonymous”, you don’t seem to understand the current set up – because at the moment you (taxpayers) already fund the commercial side of NIWA and MetService to make them even more commercial profits which aren’t put back into weather investments or your pocket. We want that data freed up in the same way you can drive on a highway in NZ without being stopped by NZTA and forced to pay 100K a year for it. You already tax fund TWO commercial organisations now for weather (neither NIWA or MetService are public departments, they operate as private commercial organisations – and you fund two companies to do the same thing, which is an even bigger waste of the tax dollars you seem loathed to spend). 

We’re wanting tax funded data to be OPEN (which means the data you already pay for is used by ANYone). What you wrote above is what is already happening – not what we are asking for.

It costs taxpayers nothing additional to make this data Open and yet it has massive benefits to the public and economy – as the INDEPENDENT OFFICIAL report noted in all other western nations.

What we are requesting increases competition – that could harm a small business like ours, but we believe in our brand and that we’ll be ok – but what you have written above is completely the wrong end of the stick on this.

If you perfer the Russian/China/Cuba/NZ model as better than what the rest of the first world is doing then nothing we write will convince you that change here is needed. 

Kind regards,
Philip Duncan