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About the data

This dataset is built by an automated scraper that reads the diary summary PDFs that Ministers publish on beehive.govt.nz and converts them into a searchable table. Because it's working from PDFs written by many different Ministers over several years, the underlying text isn't perfectly consistent, and search results reflect that.

In particular, search matches may miss differences in how groups are recorded. For example, searching “Federated Farmers” will not return entries recorded as “Fed Farmers”. If a Minister's office used a shorthand, abbreviation, or different spelling of a name, our search won't automatically know the two refer to the same thing. If you're using this data for research purposes, it's worth searching for likely variants of a name or contacting us for support.

There are also some gaps in the record. Not every Minister has proactively released their diary on time in every month or some summaries were non-scrapable. As a result, we caution that this dataset is only mostly complete, with a small number of periods missing. We're currently working on identifying and manually filling these gaps as more diaries are published or become available.

Exporting search or filter results is currently limited to 5,000 entries per export. If you need a larger extract for research purposes, get in touch at research@ministerdiarysummaries.org.nz and we can help.