Historical Hansard

An official record of debates has been kept continuously since 9 July 1867. Speeches made in the House of Representatives and the Legislative Council between 1867 and the commencement of Parliament in 1854 were compiled in 1885 from earlier newspaper reports, and this compilation also forms part of the New Zealand Hansard record.

Click on the volume number below to open a PDF version of that volume of Hansard:

• Numbers up to 507 link through to PDFs, hosted by the HathiTrust Digital Library, which were created by scanning the official printed volumes of Hansard. This collection of volumes (1854-1990) can be searched here. 

• Numbers 508 to 605 link through to PDFs that are based on word processor text files created prior to publication of the official printed volumes of Hansard. These volumes do not have the official page numbers normally required for citing a quotation from Hansard. This collection of volumes (1990-2002) can be searched here.

• Numbers 606 to 714 link through to PDFs of the official printed volumes of Hansard. This collection of volumes (2003-2016) can be searched here.

• Click here for more information on searching the historical collections.

For more recent volumes, go to Read Hansard Reports. 

The Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives gratefully acknowledges the HathiTrust Digital Library, the University of California and the Google Books Library Project for their generous assistance with creating and hosting the New Zealand Parliament’s historical Hansard.

If you have trouble accessing any of the historical Hansard content, please contact the Parliamentary Information Service.

Quick links:

• 1854-1869
• 1870-1879 
• 1880-1889 
• 1890-1899 
• 1900-1909 
• 1910-1919 
• 1920-1929 
• 1930-1939 
• 1940-1949 
• 1950-1959 
• 1960-1969 
• 1970-1979 
• 1980-1989 
• 1990-1999 
• 2000-2009 
• 2010 onwards 

Information on how to search the historical collections:

• Volumes up to 507 (1854-1990) link through to PDFs, which were created by scanning the official printed volumes of Hansard. Un-corrected Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been used to create searchable volumes. Search accuracy varies by volume, depending on the print quality of original documents, so later volumes volumes tend to be more accurate because the text is clearer. For most early volumes multiple (up to five) different digital versions have been created from bound volumes held in various US university library collections. These different digital versions can be found here. It is possible to create a searchable collection of, for example, all five digital versions of volume B (1856 to 1858), such as can be found here. The benefit of this is that the entire mini-collection can be searched so that a word or phrase that may be missed in one version (because of mis-rendering in the OCR process) is highly likely to be picked up in at least one of the other versions. Search functionality is whole-word only, so a search for ‘Launcelot’ indicates that there are 23 volumes that contain at least one occurrence of that word, whereas no volumes contain ‘Launcel’. Search the entire 1854-1990 collection here

• Volumes 508 to 605 (1990 -2002) link through to PDFs that are based on word processor text files created prior to publication of the official printed volumes of Hansard. When searching te reo Māori words be aware that words with macrons have not been accurately rendered so these may not be picked up in your search. To search across this collection download the 99 volumes (about 500 Mb) or a sub-set of the 99 volumes into a folder on your computer and then perform a search (PDF ‘Find’) on the files in that folder. (If you are using Adobe Reader select “Open Full Reader Search" to select the folder and to choose whether you want your search to be whole-word and/or case sensitive.) Download this collection here.

• Volumes 606 to 714 (2003-2016) link through to PDFs of the official printed volumes of Hansard. To search across this collection download the 109 volumes (about 550 Mb) or a sub-set of the 109 volumes into a folder on your computer and then perform a search (PDF ‘Find’) on the files in that folder. (If you are using Adobe Reader select “Open Full Reader Search" to select the folder and to choose whether you want your search to be whole-word and/or case sensitive.) Download this collection here.