Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries (2012) just published by New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries (click to download page) demonstrates well that R is a limitless tool for analysis and graphing, and the capability of using R is growing in government departments.
Special thanks to Andy South, whose rworldmap package enables an easy and systematic way to create map-pie charts. Also, Joris Meys’ solution helps to adjust an Atlantic-centered map to Pacific centered map (It would be nice if rworldmap package has Pacific-centered map as an alternative). R AnalyticFlow is one of the handiest GUI for R.
Derek McCrae Norton’s presentation in the 2011 useR conference gives an extremely effective way to marketing R in big organizations with long histories. If you would like to build up the presence of R in your organization, please read and follow Derek’s advice.
The extra surprise is that our publication team absolutely loves graphs (.eps) produced by R. The reason is simple — they do not need to do anything apart from adjusting graph positions. What they used to do with M$ excel graphs is very onerous — change all color themes, fonts and axis. Of course, this process will come back and forward several times. With R, once these cosmetic things are fixed, what’s left is just mass productions.
Project R 
interesting! Seem showever the link to “Derek McCrae Norton’s presentation” is broken?
Hi, xingmo. read all your blogs, they are all very interesting. I am working in Stats Nz and graduated from Auckland uni. I love R! looking forward to use more in my work.
I have a question about spatial analysis in R. Can draw a NZ regional map in R.
Thanks man. You are Welly or AKL based right now?
You can definitely draw NZ regional, territorial authority (TA) and meshblock map providing you have the .shp and .dbf files. You can always download them from http://koordinates.com/.
The R packages you will need are sp and maptools if not more.
Cheers