LegislationNZ

9 October 2006

Parliamentary Written Questions and Answers since 2003 have been added to the Written Questions database. The data is also browseable by date. The database will be kept up to date on a daily basis.

1 November 2004

We have updated Hansard from 2003 to date. The data is browsable and searchable. It will be updated on a daily basis from now on. There are some changes brought about by the new production system at the Office of the Clerk. First, there is no separate collection of "Questions for Oral Answer" - these are contained within the daily Hansard transcript.

Hansard Advances are available as a browsable and searchable collection, when they have not been superseded by the "Final" version. Therefore a link to Advances, and a Checkbox for the searchable collection may or may not appear on the Browse and Search page.

Second, the "new" material (since 2003) is converted from PDF files, with each page as a separate HTML file, linked together, and with a Table of Contents file. This is a compromise, in that searchers need to be aware that page breaks may occur in the middle of a sentence. So, it is possible a phrase search or a sentence search may not retrieve words within a particular phrase or sentence, if they happen to span a page. We realise this is not ideal, but with the new data structure this is a difficult problem to solve without introducing even worse compromises.

Third, there are no search zones or fields containing "Headers" such as the speaker and replyspeaker name. They are retrievable in the full text search. The "Subject" field contains the title of the debate. We have introduced a "summary" display in the search results to help identify relevancy.

6 March 2003
The Knowledge Basket is pleased to provide free browse of Hansard from 1987 to 2002, to our site licence clients. Anyone can download "PDF" versions of Hansard debates from 2003. Hansard is also available for searching - but be aware that this service will incur a cost. Hansard will continue to be updated as new material arrives from the Office of the Clerk.
Frequently Asked Questions about Hansard FAQ - click here

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