About

Every year, New Zealand MPs declare their directorships, property, trusts, debts, gifts and sponsored travel. Parliament publishes them as a PDF. This site reads each PDF, turns it into data, and shows what changed from one year to the next.

How it works

1. Each register PDF is downloaded from parliament.nz and split into one entry per member, using the member headings and the register’s numbered categories. This step is exact.
2. Each member’s entry is then read into separate items. The first pass uses rules. When an OpenAI key is configured, a language model re-reads each entry, joins wrapped lines, picks out who gave a gift or where a property is, and gives each holding a stable key so it can be followed across years.
3. Model output is checked before it’s used: every item must be made of words that appear in the member’s entry, and together the items must cover the entry. Anything that fails keeps the rules result.
4. Each item is matched with the same interest in the member’s previous register. Unmatched items are “added”; unmatched previous items are “removed”.

Right now 0 entries have been read by the model and 1079 by rules.

Limits

• The register only says that an interest exists, not its value.
• Gifts, travel and paid activities cover the period since a member’s previous return, not a calendar year.
• Matching is automatic. A reworded entry can look like one interest ending and a new one starting.
• This is an independent project, not an official Parliament publication. The PDF is the authoritative record; every page here links to it.

Sources