New Zealand Legislation

New Zealand Legislation

Goal

Use official New Zealand Legislation sources to resolve legislation records, quote current or point-in-time sections, list versions, inspect current Bills, and check recent publication/update feeds.

Quick triage

Use this when:

• A user cites an Act or regulation by year/number and needs exact text
• A finding needs a current "as at" section citation from legislation.govt.nz
• A workflow needs to check versions or amendments since a date
• A user asks for Bills currently before Parliament
• A task needs to distinguish keyless web/XML access from the keyed PCO API

Do not use this for:

• Legal advice or statutory interpretation beyond quoting/checking source text
• Non-NZ legislation
• Unofficial commentary, case law, or policy guidance

CLI

python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py search "Grocery Industry" --type act --json
python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py get-act 2003/52 --json
python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py get-section 2003/52 9C --json
python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py get-section 1993/105 "Schedule 7" --json
python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py get-section 1993/105 "Schedule 7 clause 1" --json
python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py versions 2003/52 --json
python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py updates --since 2026-07-01 --json
python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py list-bills --json
python3 skills/legislation-nz/scripts/cli.py sources --json

Commands:

• search QUERY [--type act|bill|regulation|secondary-legislation] [--field title|content] [--source auto|web|api] [--limit N] [--json]
• get-act ACT_ID [--version YYYY-MM-DD|latest] [--sections-limit N|--all-sections] [--json]
• get-section ACT_ID SECTION [--version YYYY-MM-DD|latest] [--json]
• versions ACT_ID [--version YYYY-MM-DD|latest] [--limit N] [--json]
• updates --since YYYY-MM-DD [--type act|bill|regulation|secondary-legislation] [--limit N] [--json]
• list-bills [QUERY] [--all-statuses] [--limit N] [--json]
• sources or datasets for source metadata and caveats

ACT_ID can be a year/number pair such as 2003/52, a work/version id such as act_public_2003_52, or a canonical legislation.govt.nz URL.

SECTION accepts a body section label (9C), a schedule (Schedule 7, sch 7, sched 7), or a clause within a schedule (Schedule 7 clause 1, sch 7 cl 1). Schedules live in a separate XML tree from body sections, so they must be asked for by name. Bare numeric labels always resolve to the body section first — get-section 1993/105 7 returns s7 "Control defined", not Schedule 7. Each result carries a kind field of section, schedule, or schedule-clause; schedule clauses also carry a schedule field. Check kind before quoting a result as a section.

Source Behaviour

• get-act and get-section use keyless official XML format URLs from legislation.govt.nz.
• search, versions, and list-bills use keyless official legislation.govt.nz web pages by default.
• updates uses the official public web-feed generator and parses the returned Atom feed.
• search --source api uses the PCO developer API and requires LEGISLATION_NZ_API_KEY or PCO_API_KEY.
• Network calls time out after 10 seconds by default. Upstream blocks, bot challenges, missing API keys, and parse failures are surfaced as explicit non-stacktrace errors.

Resources

• CLI: scripts/cli.py
• Smoke test: scripts/smoke_test.py
• Source notes and caveats: references/api-notes.md