By Martin Buhr
Editor’s Note: Transparency is strongest when public information is easy to find, understand, and use. OpenBrief is a new New Zealand initiative that brings together official political data from multiple public sources into one searchable platform ahead of the general election. While TINZ does not endorse third-party platforms, we welcome initiatives that improve public access to reliable information and support informed democratic participation. OpenBrief is also giving pro bono assistance to TINZ to develop its fraud and corruption monitor.
New Zealand's political record is genuinely public — but it's scattered across a dozen sites and formats, and the connections between the pieces are the part that takes real work.
OpenBrief (openbrief.co.nz) exists to do that work in the open: it pulls together Parliamentary rosters, pecuniary interests, ministerial diaries, the donations and charities registers, and Hansard, alongside news reporting, commentary and public conversation, and turns them into searchable dossiers and a live view of how the political debate is moving.
Every figure on the site traces back to a primary source. OpenBrief takes no money from political parties, advocacy groups or government, runs no paid placement, and deliberately does not score politicians or predict outcomes. Neutrality is the point.
For the 2026 general election, that translates into a few things a voter can use directly. The election hub tracks the full candidate roster (currently 295 candidates across 13 parties and 71 contested electorates) and lets you browse who is standing in your own seat. Each electorate has a dashboard surfacing the topics and coverage we've uncovered locally, and we build briefings for sitting MPs defending a seat and developing profiles of candidates standing against them.
On the money, we track party and organisation funding from the donations register, and a free politics dashboard shows who spends what and where — with drill-downs into lobby groups, unions and think tanks. And because so much of an election is shaped by who is talking and how, we run dedicated views of the commentariat, the press and social media, and how the three interact.
OpenBrief is self-funded, built in Auckland, and operated by Mnemosyne Ltd. It keeps a public corrections log and a published methodology and welcomes good-faith questions from journalists and researchers.
