The state of open data in New Zealand (2026): which agencies actually let you use it

New Zealand has, on paper, one of the better government open-data policies in the world. In practice, whether any particular dataset is something you can legally build a product on depends on which agency publishes it, what kind of legal entity that agency is, and whether anyone there ever got around to applying the policy. The gap between "the government's position is that data should be open" and "this specific spreadsheet is reusable in a commercial product" is much wider than most people assume.

We learned this the slow way — by evaluating around sixty New Zealand data sources, reading the copyright statement on every one, and recording the answer. This is the map that came out of it. It's accurate as of early 2026; licensing changes, so treat it as a snapshot and a method rather than gospel.

The policy: NZGOAL, and why "policy" is the operative word

The New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework — NZGOAL — was approved by Cabinet in 2010. Its recommendation is clean: government copyright works should be released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY 4.0) by default, and non-copyright material (like the bare facts in a register) should be released with no rights reserved. Attribution, reuse, commercial use — all explicitly fine under CC-BY. It's a genuinely good framework.

The catch is in the word framework. NZGOAL is policy guidance, and its reach is strongest over Public Service departments — the core ministries. It is not a statute that automatically licenses every byte the wider state produces. Crown entities, Crown Research Institutes, and State-Owned Enterprises are separate legal entities with their own boards and, frequently, their own commercial incentives. They are not bound by NZGOAL the way a core department is. They can adopt it, and the good ones have. But adoption is a choice each agency makes, dataset by dataset, and "we haven't applied a licence statement" defaults — under the Copyright Act — to all rights reserved, not to open.

So the practical question is never "is this a government dataset?" It's "did this specific agency actually adopt the open policy for this specific dataset?" The answer splits New Zealand's data into four fairly clean groups.

Group 1 — the agencies that got it right

This is the good news, and it's substantial: most of New Zealand's core economic and spatial data is genuinely, cleanly open. The agencies below publish under CC-BY 4.0 (or CC-BY 3.0 NZ, functionally equivalent for reuse) with attribution as the only condition. You can put this data in a paid product today.

The pattern: if a dataset comes from a core public-service department doing statistical or spatial work, it is very likely clean. NZGOAL did its job there. Customs is the standout — the New Zealand tariff classifications carry no copyright or intellectual property rights whatsoever, the strongest possible legal status, stronger even than CC-BY.

(One footnote worth knowing: NZQA's statistics are CC-BY, but a commercial-use restriction applies specifically to exam papers and assessment schedules. The boundary is on the content type, not the agency. Always read to the end of the copyright page.)

Group 2 — the Crown agencies that opted out

Here is where the assumption "government = open" breaks. A number of Crown agencies have, deliberately, not adopted NZGOAL, and their copyright statements say so plainly — typically some variant of "for personal, academic or non-commercial use" or "commercial use requires our written permission."

In this group: Medsafe (the medicines regulator), the Health Quality & Safety Commission, the Firearms Safety Authority, the Real Estate Authority, and the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation (the NZ Super Fund). The mechanism is exactly the one described above — these are Crown entities, not core departments, so NZGOAL doesn't apply to them automatically, and each made its own call to keep tighter control.

It would be easy to read this as agencies being obstructive. It mostly isn't. The motivations are usually structural and defensible: a regulator may be wary of downstream misuse of safety-critical data; an agency that mediates private relationships (like real-estate licensing) has privacy and commercial-sensitivity reasons to limit bulk reuse; a sovereign-wealth fund has a bespoke disclosure regime for sound governance reasons. "Opted out" is the accurate description, not "refused." But the practical consequence for anyone building on the data is the same: it is not open by default, and you should treat it accordingly.

Group 3 — the locked sector: co-ops and industry bodies

This is the part that surprises people most, and it's almost total. New Zealand's primary industries — the backbone of the export economy — are largely organised around levy-funded industry bodies and farmer-owned co-operatives. And essentially none of their data is reusable.

Dairy (DairyNZ, LIC, Fonterra, the Global Dairy Trade auction), red meat (Beef + Lamb New Zealand), and the entire horticulture sector — wine, kiwifruit, apples, avocados, cherries, berries, the apiculture body, and the rest — publish their statistics under "members only," "non-commercial educational use," or plain all-rights-reserved terms. Often the data is technically downloadable from a public web page; the terms of use still forbid redistribution.

Again, the reason is structural, not adversarial. A levy-funded industry body is accountable to the members who pay the levy, not to a government open-data framework. Its data products are, quite reasonably from its point of view, a member benefit. A co-operative is a private commercial entity. None of them are doing anything wrong by keeping their data closed — but if you need New Zealand agricultural data for a commercial product, the industry bodies are a dead end.

The way through is to go to the government layer instead. Stats NZ runs the Agricultural Production Survey (livestock numbers, horticultural area, by region). MPI publishes the Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries — export volumes, prices, and forecasts across eleven sectors. Both are CC-BY 4.0. They won't have the granularity an industry body's internal data has, but they are the authoritative, usable numbers, and for most purposes they are enough.

The three rules

If you remember nothing else, remember these. They predicted the licence outcome correctly for almost every source we looked at, and they will save you the trouble of reading sixty copyright pages yourself.

1. A listed company's investor materials are all-rights-reserved by default. Air New Zealand's monthly traffic stats, the gentailers' operating reports, Fonterra's disclosures — these are published through specific regulatory channels for a specific audience (investors making decisions), not as open data. The base case is "no redistribution without prior written permission," and it usually says so explicitly. Don't assume a public PDF on an investor-relations page is reusable; it almost never is.

2. Co-operative and industry-body data is uniformly locked. Every levy body and farmer co-op we checked, without exception, restricted commercial reuse. If the publisher is an industry association or a co-operative, assume closed and look for the government source that aggregates the same sector.

3. A Crown agency can opt out of NZGOAL, and "government" tells you nothing on its own. NZGOAL is opt-in policy guidance, strongest over core departments and weakest over Crown entities, CRIs and SOEs. "It's a government dataset" is not evidence that it's open. Only the agency's own copyright statement is.

How to check any source yourself

The method is simple and worth internalising, because licences change and a snapshot ages:

1. Find the agency's copyright or "about this site" page. Every New Zealand public body has one. It is the authoritative statement, not the data portal's generic footer.
2. Look for an explicit CC-BY or NZGOAL declaration. "Released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0" is the green light. A specific licence link is the green light.
3. Treat silence as restricted. No licence statement does not mean open — under the Copyright Act it means all rights reserved. This is the single most common mistake.
4. Check the entity type. Core department doing stats or spatial work → probably clean. Crown entity, CRI, SOE, co-op, industry body, listed company → check very carefully, expect restrictions.
5. Attribute regardless. Even when attribution isn't strictly required, citing the source is the cheap, correct thing to do — and if you've misjudged a licence, a clear attribution is the difference between a polite email and a legal one.

That checklist will get you to the right answer on a New Zealand data source faster than almost anything else.

This is, more or less, the work eolas does for every dataset it carries: read the licence, record it against the table, and only serve data we can stand behind. The licence is part of the metadata, not an afterthought — so when you query a New Zealand dataset through us, the answer to "can I actually use this?" comes with it. If that's a problem you've been solving by hand, that's what we're for.