NZ Gazette has been published since 1841 but is only fully available online for issues since 2000. Christchurch City Council has scanned PDFs of the Gazette available from its central library, so the work to scan the Gazette has been done at least once. It looks like those scans might be distributed by LexusNexus, but this is presumably Crown copyright and one of the most important government publications. It shouldn't only be available through a private vendor. Rights for the government to distribute the PDFs must surely be part of the copyright agreement with LexusNexus. If not, the agreement should be changed or the Gazette should be re-scanned. If you're going to make it available under a Creative Commons license, as you do for current editions, you could probably get Google to do it for free and provide a full-text search service.

Researching the history of New Zealand, especially our government. Researching dates and specific text of orders and proclamations.

Providing access to these Gazette editions online where almost anyone can access them at any time of a day, rather than at a small number of limited-access locations (like the National Library).