Show HN: Made NZ's member of parliament financial disclosure data searchable
open-register-of-pecuniary-interests.joshmcarthur.comNew Zealand Members of Parliament are required to annually disclose their financial interests (shareholdings, directorships, consultancies, etc.) but this gets published annually as an unwieldy 80+ page PDF that's hard to search effectively.
I processed structured data out of the PDF and built a searchable interface: https://open-register-of-pecuniary-interests.joshmcarthur.co....
You can search across all MPs' disclosed interests by name, company, or interest type. For example, you can quickly find which MPs have interests in specific sectors or companies, filter by category or political party.
The data extraction was interesting - I found that a two-pass approach worked well with Gemini 2.5 Flash - one to pull out MP names and referenced page numbers, then I extracted the specific pages each MP appeared on and extracted structured data just from these pages.
The approach could work for similar transparency registers in other countries - most seem to publish open data as PDF, which technically ticks the box, but isn't the most accessible format to work with. Even within NZ, I'm planning to expand the data I process to previous years, as well as processing data for local and regional councils (who have the same legal requirement to publish financial interests of council members).
Open sourced at https://github.com/joshmcarthur/open-register-of-pecuniary-i....
Tech stack: Ruby on Rails, SQLite (FTS5), Tailwind/DaisyUI - keeping it lightweight since this is just a side project to make public data more accessible.
Interesting. Both timely, given the recent discovery of the massive failure to disclose the asset hiding in his family trust by Carl Bates, yet also rendered less pertinent because of it - in reality a wide swathe, and possibly a majority of government ministers now are routinely not disclosing substantial gifts at all, let alone other forms of what are indisputably corrupt transactions.
The use of trust structures for tax efficiency is one thing, but they are so opaque they largely make a mockery of disclosure both because the size of the trust's asset base is opaque and often the trustee structures are pure paper fictions. It's still good to have this though, well done you.
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