The one standard we can all agree on, and how our MPs score against it
August 1, 2026
Here is a New Zealand Cabinet minister, in the House, on the record, describing a colleague:
“If this guy opened a funeral parlour, nobody would die. He can screw up anything—” — David Seymour (Hansard, 10 Mar 2026)
And here is another minister, asked in the House to explain what systemic bias is:
“Well, systemic bias is bias that’s systemic.” — Mark Mitchell (Hansard, 29 Aug 2024)
I came across a run of clips like this — first from the UK Parliament, then ours — and the thing that surprised me wasn’t that politics is rude. It was the setting. This is not a campaign rally or a late-night panel show. This is them at work, in the chamber, doing the job we elected them to do, and the record of it is kept forever.
Is that really how they behave while working? I couldn’t tell from clips, because clips are selected to be bad. So I went and measured it.
What should we expect?
Before measuring anything I had to decide what “good” even means here, and the distinction that makes it tractable is between what a politician believes and how they conduct themselves.
What they believe is legitimately contested. Capital gains tax, the road, the tunnel — that’s what elections are for. I can’t score it without just scoring “agrees with me,” and neither can anyone else.
How they conduct themselves is a different kind of question. Burke put the reason well, to the voters of Bristol in 1774:
But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination.
If that’s right, then how an MP argues isn’t decoration on top of the job — it is the job. We don’t send them to Wellington to hold opinions; we send them to sit through the select committee, read the officials’ advice, hear the submitters, and reason their way to a decision. Legislate, scrutinise the executive, represent. Everything else is downstream.
The one standard we can all agree on
Here’s the part I keep coming back to.
Take nine plain expectations of conduct. Answer the question you were actually asked. Say something, rather than something-shaped. Get your facts right. Argue from evidence rather than fallacy. Do what you said you’d do. Attack the argument, not the person.
A good politician scores 100 on every one of them.
Not “better than the other lot.” Not “about average for Parliament.” One hundred. Every one is a floor rather than a stretch goal, and I don’t think there’s a voter in the country who’d call any of them unreasonable.
That’s what makes conduct worth measuring when policy isn’t. You and I might disagree completely about tax, immigration, Te Tiriti, the lot — and still agree, without argument, that the person making our case should answer the question and tell the truth while doing it.
And it’s worth being blunt about why, because this isn’t a preference for good manners. They are representing you. That’s the whole arrangement: they carry your interests into a room you’re not in, and they speak with your authority when they get there. When the MP you voted for sneers at the other side, ducks a question, or reaches for a number nobody checked, that is done in your name.
So the question isn’t the comfortable one — whether you think politicians in general are a bit much. It’s narrower and it’s aimed at you. How do you want your side to win? Is it fine for them to fight dirty, as long as they’re fighting for something you believe in? Is a lie acceptable if it advances your goals?
Almost nobody, asked that directly, says yes. And no party campaigns on dodging or on getting the facts wrong — every one of them claims the opposite. It is the one standard in politics that isn’t up for grabs.
So it should be possible to check. And mostly it isn’t — fact-checks are one-off and forgotten inside a week, and there’s no durable record of how an MP conducts themselves on the boring Tuesdays, only the clips that go viral. That’s the gap I tried to fill.
Measuring it
NZ Politician Scorecards gives every MP a trading card. Nine attributes, scored 0–100, all oriented so higher is better, all measuring conduct rather than policy:
- Forthrightness — do they answer the question actually asked?
- Strength — do promises turn into implemented policy?
- Veracity — do their factual claims hold up?
- Authenticity — do their words in the House match their words outside it?
- Divination — do their predictions come true?
- Charisma — can they persuade across the aisle?
- Civility — attacking the argument, or the person?
- Rigor — evidence and valid inference, or fallacy?
- Specificity — is there content in the sentence, or is it a platitude?
Scrape public statements, score each one against a fixed rubric with an LLM, average up to a card. The part I care about is that every score links back to the statements behind it — click any stat and you get the quotes, each with its own score, the reasoning, the date, and a link to the source. The number is just the mean of the evidence you’re looking at. If you think it’s wrong, go and check.
Top and bottom. Left: the highest-ranked card with all nine attributes scored — Adrian Rurawhe, who was Speaker of the House until the end of 2023. Right: the lowest of the 130 ranked cards. The nine icons are the ones listed above, reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom in the same order; card rank is the geometric mean of all nine, so one bad attribute drags the whole card down. Portraits from Wikimedia Commons.
The data behind it: 135 MPs, 94,429 individually scored statements, spanning October 2023 – July 2026. About 69% comes from Hansard, the verbatim parliamentary record (204 sitting days, ~7.5 million words), plus 2,976 party press releases and 65 post-Cabinet press conferences. Hansard matters most because it’s the only source that is adversarial, on the record, and covers every MP equally. Press releases tell you what a party wants you to think; Hansard tells you how they behave when someone is arguing back.
Nobody passes
Against a pass mark of 100, here is the entire result.
Of the 1,150 MP-attribute scores in the dataset, not one reaches 80. The highest score any MP holds on anything is Adrian Rurawhe’s civility, at 79. The best whole card in Parliament is 66. The worst is 44.5.
Rigor is the bleakest of the nine. Of 14,503 statements scored for whether they argue from evidence rather than fallacy, three clear 90. None clear 95.
Civility averages 54, and about one in ten scored statements in the House lands at 20 or below — which is to say, is essentially just an insult. So the impression I got from the clips wasn’t a selection artefact. It’s roughly the base rate.
The league table on the site is therefore a bit misleading, and I want to say so plainly: it isn’t a ranking of good MPs and bad MPs. Everybody fails. The ranking is just the order they fail in. A civility average of 54 isn’t “middling” — it’s the class average on a test where the pass mark is 100.
(One honest caveat: a card score is a mean over hundreds of statements, and averaging compresses toward the middle. Individual statements do hit 100. The claim isn’t that no MP is ever exemplary — it’s that none of them sustains it.)
Seven ways to fail
One example per attribute, all verbatim, all linked. The number is the score that statement received. These are the clearest illustrations I could find rather than a balanced sample — the site has all 135 cards if you want to check your own team.
Forthrightness — 5/100. The Mitchell tautology from the top of this post. Asked to explain a term, he defines it with itself.
Specificity — 5/100. A whole sentence, committing to nothing:
“We are confident we will have effective legislation that will deliver good outcomes.” — Casey Costello, NZ First (Hansard, 27 Feb 2024)
Veracity — 10/100. The real figure is that roughly half the prison population is Māori — a very different claim to the one made:
“Fifty percent of Māori are in jails at the moment” — Willie Jackson, Labour (Hansard, 24 Jul 2024)
Rigor — 5/100. An ad hominem resting on a premise invented in the same breath (“they openly admit it”):
“The only thing most of them seem to be experienced at is being a bunch of Communists – they openly admit it.” — Winston Peters, NZ First (party press release, 28 Mar 2026)
Civility — 5/100. A jibe at another member’s mental capacity, mid-answer:
“And for the member who has just sprung into life—although perhaps not mentally—” — David Seymour, ACT (Hansard, 20 Aug 2025)
Divination — 10/100. A cheerful forecast, falsified the same afternoon: National, ACT and NZ First all voted the bill down at first reading.
“It’s a good bill, and I’m sure everyone in the House will support it—I certainly do.” — Duncan Webb, Labour (Hansard, 30 Jul 2025)
Authenticity — 30/100. My favourite of the lot, because both halves are from the same speech on the same afternoon. First:
“It’s the Greens—it’s the sanctimonious ‘tofu wouldn’t melt in your mouth’ Greens—who are the ones who are driving the division and acrimony within our body politic, aided and abetted by Labour.”
and then, minutes later:
“civility in politics and the ability for New Zealanders to talk to each other and to push back against that global direction of division and polarisation is an important part not only of our democracy but of how we succeed as a country.” — Paul Goldsmith, National (Hansard, 8 Oct 2025)
Two attributes are missing from that list, and the reason is worth admitting. Strength and Authenticity are usually discussed rather than demonstrated — an MP stands up and describes an opponent’s broken promise — and my pipeline files that low score under the speaker. So MPs currently lose points for pointing out someone else’s failure. I found it while writing this post; it affects about 37% of the low Authenticity examples and 7% of the low Strength ones, and it hits opposition MPs roughly four times as often as government ones, since scrutinising the government is their job. Strength is out of the list entirely. Goldsmith survives because both halves of his are about himself.
It isn’t that they can’t
All of which would be unfair if the standard were unreachable. It isn’t.
Scroll the top of the civility scale and most of what you find is ceremony — tributes, condolences, farewells to retiring members, thanks to submitters. Warm, genuine, and carrying no adversarial stake at all. The chamber is entirely capable of civility in the part of the day where nothing is being contested.
The interesting cases are the ones where something is contested and it happens anyway. Chris Bishop, mid-argument, at 95: “the member does make a good point around funding pressure on the National Land Transport Fund. That is true.” Vanushi Walters — the top-ranked card — telling the other side “I do acknowledge to the members opposite that there are times when you do need to limit the right to freedom of expression.” Ginny Andersen granting that protests outside people’s homes can genuinely cross a line. None of these cost anything except the momentary pleasure of not conceding.
And then the single clearest illustration in the dataset, which is one MP, in one debate, on one afternoon. Simon Court, on the Resource Management Act, 31 March 2026 — scored 85:
“So the member Tamatha Paul makes a good point: the Resource Management Act is broken.”
and, in the same debate, to the same colleague — scored 20:
“what you Sim City obsessed planning nerds believe should be the right number of houses, Tamatha Paul” — Simon Court, ACT (Hansard, 31 Mar 2026)
He is plainly capable of the first. He did it an hour before the second, to the same person.
Two more for the record. One of the three statements that clear 90 for rigor, from a minister declining to spin a statistic running in his own favour:
“But we need to be careful not to draw simple conclusions from complex data. No single factor explains year-to-year changes in deaths and serious injuries, and it’s still too early to say whether this represents a long-term downward trend.” — Chris Bishop, National (speech to the AA annual conference, 27 Mar 2026)
And from the other side of the House, correcting a misused number with the source attached:
“The Prime Minister’s statements where he talks about ‘people on the youth benefit are now languishing on welfare for an average of 24 years’ — that’s also not backed up by the Taylor Fry report; that’s a forecast.” — Ricardo Menéndez March, Green (Hansard, 1 May 2024)
That’s the standard. MPs from every party reach it. It just isn’t where the mass of the distribution sits.
Where the failures cluster
Two patterns in the rankings that I didn’t expect, and can describe better than I can explain.
The party you’d blame isn’t the variable. I assumed the data would sort the parties. It doesn’t really — the party averages sit within a few points of each other, and MPs vary far more within each party than the parties do between themselves. Whichever team you came here to have confirmed, it won’t be: the top five cards are three Labour MPs, a National MP and an NZ First MP.
The bottom of the table is the leadership. Of the 130 ranked MPs, the last ten include Winston Peters (130th), Shane Jones (129th), Rawiri Waititi (128th), Marama Davidson (127th), Christopher Luxon (126th), David Seymour (124th) and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer (122nd) — the Prime Minister, a Cabinet minister, and five party leaders and co-leaders. The two remaining leaders, Chris Hipkins (82nd) and Chlöe Swarbrick (89th), are still in the bottom half. The top of the table is backbenchers, a former Speaker, and select committee workhorses — mostly people you’d struggle to name.
It’s general rather than anecdotal: score correlates negatively with how much an MP talks (r = −0.25), and the twenty most-quoted MPs average 87th of 130.
I don’t know why, and I’d rather flag the guesses as guesses. Part of it is certainly selection — ministers front oral questions, which is the most adversarial hour in the building, so they’re sampled at their worst. Part of it might be that conduct like this is rewarded: a good select committee question travels nowhere, and Seymour’s funeral-parlour line travels a long way. Every one of these nine attributes is a virtue when you’re persuading the person in front of you and a liability when you’re playing to an audience. Whether MPs are actually responding to that, or whether the people who rise to lead parties were always like this, I can’t tell from this data. (Checking how often MPs cross party lines — voted.nz collects the divisions — would be one way in.)
What I can say is the plain version: the people whose words carry furthest, whom we’ve promoted highest, are the ones scoring worst. The visible part of our politics is the worst part of it.
What it isn’t
A prototype, and I’d rather undersell it.
The scores are automated estimates, not verdicts. Against small human-labelled test sets, civility comes out at r = 0.88 (average error 0.13 on a 0–1 scale) and veracity at r = 0.73. Good — but those test sets are small.
Accuracy varies by attribute, predictably. Civility and specificity are judgeable from the text alone, so they’re reliable. Veracity is not: deciding whether a claim about someone’s voting record is true means going and checking the voting record, which the model can’t do. Those scores reflect plausibility, and should be read that way. Strength and Authenticity carry the attribution bug described above and should be discounted heavily until I fix it.
And coverage is uneven. A minister who fronts oral questions every week generates far more text than a first-term backbencher, so confidence differs enormously between cards; the site shows a confidence level per attribute for that reason.
Nothing here is an accusation of wrongdoing. It’s a starting point for looking, and the evidence is one click away.
Why bother
Measurement won’t fix politics. But notice how much we already measure about our politicians — polling, preferred PM, seat projections — and how little of it is about whether they’re doing the job well. We measure popularity with great precision and conduct not at all.
Which is a shame, because conduct is the one thing we could actually agree on. You and I can disagree completely about tax and still both want the person arguing our side to answer the question, get their facts right, and skip the jokes about hair. That’s a standard with no political side to it — and right now, on the public record, in our name, not one of the 135 people we elected is meeting it.
There’s an election in November. It would be nice to be able to ask.
Have a look: nz-politician-scorecards.onrender.com — cards on the front page, the dataset for full stats and downloads, about for method and caveats. It’s on free hosting, so the first visit after a quiet period takes a few seconds to wake up.