Every Government minister missing deadline for Parliamentary questions on average
Thursday, 4 June 2026
Every current minister missed the deadline for answering Written Parliamentary Questions on average last year.
The Green Party, who uncovered the data, say this is undermining the accountability function of Parliament and is in keeping with an anti-transparency Government - while Leader of the House Louise Upston has noted that keeping on top of almost 60,000 questions is difficult.
Written Parliamentary Questions (WPQs) allow any MP to ask an unlimited number of written questions of ministers, unlike the more limited oral questions asked in Question Time.
The data uncovered by the Green Party showed the average time across the whole ministry in 2025 was 11.6 working days - two and a half days more than the nine-day deadline set out in standing orders, where ministers are told to publish written questions within three days and answer them within six days after that.
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The only minister who met the deadline, Andrew Bayly, resigned as a minister in February of 2025, making the data for him incomplete.
Every other minister took longer than nine working days, from Court’s Minister Nicole McKee who took 10.1 days on average to Dr Shane Reti who took an average of 13.6 days.
Reti’s average may have been blown out by heavily delayed questions - one took 241 days to answer.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon took 11.2 days while Finance Minister Nicola Willis took 12.2. Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters took 10.7 while Regulation Minister David Seymour took 11.8.
Upston said ministers were dealing with a huge number of questions that were often sprayed out to every single minister.
“In 2025, 58,938 Written Parliamentary Questions [WPQs] were answered by ministers. To my knowledge all ministers’ offices endeavour to answer these as soon as they can, although if an office has hundreds of WPQs to answer each week, it is understandable that not all are answered within the six working days,” Upston said.
“On occasion, the Opposition will ask hundreds of WPQs at once to all portfolios, which further makes it difficult to answer on time.”
Speakers have shown some leniency for a day or two of lateness in the past, with Speaker Trevor Mallard issuing a ruling in 2022 that “There will be occasional circumstances where replies are a day or two late, and I do not expect to receive complaints from members in those circumstances.”
Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan said the lateness was in keeping with the “least transparent Government we have seen in a while”.
“This is just another example of how the Government would much rather not let the New Zealand public know what they've been doing in the background,” Xu-Nan said.
“It's about accountability. As an elected member of Parliament all of us have a responsibility to to scrutinise how things are working in the executive with our Cabinet ministers and ministers outside Cabinet, and the Written Parliamentary Question is a core function of that democracy and public transparency and public accountability.”
Xu-Nan said ministers had ways to deal with massive amounts of questions such as answering with placeholders saying a further answer would come in due course, and noted that the fact that the average question was answered late was troubling.
“The ministers have the opportunity within that six days to say: ‘hey, this is actually going to take me a little while, you're asking for a lot of things here. I'm just going to put a placeholder and I'll get back to you’. That's a perfectly reasonable.”
Some new ministers appointed in 2026 are not included in the data.