Open governments make it easy for their citizens to understand:

• how the government works
• how they can influence government policies and services
• how they can check that those policies and services are working.

New Zealand’s Open Government Partnership website

International Open Government Partnership website

New Zealand has a strong history of open and transparent government that is internationally recognised​. 

Open and transparent government

NZ has made 12 commitments

New Zealand’s National Action Plan 2018–2020 shows the 12 ways we have committed to being an open government under the Open Government Partnership: 

1. Engagement with Parliament - To improve public understanding of how Parliament works and engage a greater number of people with its work.
2. Youth Parliament - To improve understanding among young people of how Parliament works and to highlight topics that matter to young people.
3. School Leavers’ Toolkit - To develop a Schools Leavers’ Toolkit, comprising a suite of tools, resources and curriculum supports.
4. Making New Zealand’s secondary legislation readily accessible - To make New Zealand’s secondary legislation readily-accessible.
5. Public participation in policy development - The New Zealand public sector will develop a deeper and more consistent understanding of what good engagement with the public means.
6. Service design - To develop an assessment model to support implementation of the all-of government Digital Service Design Standard by public sector agencies.
7. Official information - To improve the availability of official information.
8. Review of government use of algorithms - To increase the transparency and accountability of how government uses algorithms.
9. Increase the visibility of government’s data stewardship practices - To increase the visibility of data practices for government-held data.
10. Monitoring the effectiveness of public body information management practices - To make the management of government information more visible and therefore transparent.
11. Authoritative dataset of government organisations as open data for greater transparency - To release and maintain an authoritative dataset of government organisations as open, machine-readable data to enhance the transparency of government structures to the public.
12. Open procurement - To publish the data on government-awarded contracts that is currently publicly available on the Government Electronic Tenders Service (GETS) as open data.

National Action Plan 2018–2020 — Open Government Partnership New Zealand