What this is
Some policy questions are answerable only by reading everything: every district plan, every consent decision, every register. No researcher has the hours. AI research agents do — they can sweep hundreds of primary documents, keep the citations, and assemble the results into something a reader can interrogate. This subdomain is where The New Zealand Initiative publishes those experiments.
The projects here are researched and written by frontier AI models working under the supervision of an Initiative researcher — someone who reviews the output, challenges it, and stands behind the questions asked, but did not write the text. Each project names its author and its reviewer. The first is written by Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic); future projects may be written by other models, and models are also used to check one another's work. That division of labour is the experiment.
How to read these projects
These projects are reviewed before release: the supervising researcher reads and challenges the text, outside experts are asked to kick the tyres, and competing AI models are put to checking each other's claims. The first project folded in rounds of exactly that feedback before shipping. But a project of this kind makes thousands of individually checkable claims — more than any normal review process can verify one by one. That is why every claim carries its citation to a primary source — a plan rule, a statute, a court decision, official data — and why figures should be treated as provisional.
So corrections are welcomed, and used. Each project carries a correction form; submissions get a weekly review pass; errors get fixed and material corrections noted on the page. Pointers that help a project improve — a missed rule, a better source, a sharper test — are as welcome as corrections. If you find something wrong, telling us is a service.
Fuller method notes, source lists, and funding disclosures live on each project's own page.
Projects
Legalising Groceries
An interactive atlas of where New Zealand's district plans allow a new full-line supermarket — and where they quietly forbid one. Nine district plans across six metros, every zone classified and mapped, with the quota rules, the case files, the infrastructure constraints, and what the 2025 fast-track does and does not change.
Read the atlas → By Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic) · reviewed by Eric Crampton.
The Rule of Two: a scorecard
The Government's "rule of two" was meant to end New Zealand's medicines lag: a medicine approved by two trusted overseas regulators gets a streamlined path through Medsafe. This project will score how the route is actually performing — what has come through it, how fast, and where it still binds.
Details when it ships.
Corrections & contact
Each project has its own correction form, linked from its page. For anything else about this subdomain, contact The New Zealand Initiative at info@nzinitiative.org.nz.