Parliament is debating a law change that will vastly expand the range of welfare decisions which can be made by computers, with the reforms set to pass under urgency over the weekend.
The specific focus of the legislation is to enable the Ministry of Social Development’s automated systems to cancel a wide array of benefits if beneficiaries do not respond sufficiently quickly to regular eligibility reviews.
“MSD makes millions of decisions every year. Many are of course routine and rules-based, but the legislation that govern it have not kept up. That means unnecessary manual processing, duplication and inconsistency. It also means staff are spending less time supporting people into work and more time on administration. And that’s not good enough for the clients of MSD or the taxpayers. This bill fixes that,” acting minister Scott Simpson told Parliament on Friday morning.
However, the text of the bill goes further than the specific decisions compassed in briefings to ministers, empowering “MSD to approve the use of an automated electronic system by a specified person to make any decision, exercise any power, comply with any obligation, or take any other related action under any specified provision, with appropriate safeguards”.
It comes as new figures in the Budget reveal the Government expects to pay out $55 million less in benefits over the next four years as a result of the automation drive.
Green Party social development spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said the legislation would make it harder for people to access benefits and get paid the amounts they need.
“A computer cannot see the unique circumstances or humanity of someone in poverty. It cannot weigh up what a whānau needs to put food on the table this week, or whether the rules even fit the situation in front of it. It cannot weigh the consequences on someone’s life if assistance is declined. That judgment is what frontline case workers exist to provide,” he said.
“If anything, this Government should be boosting the frontline workers and income support so people can actually get the support they need. Stripping human judgment out of these decisions will only deepen the harm.”
Under current legislation, MSD’s ability to automate decisions is tightly curtailed. That power is also governed by the department’s Automated Decision-making Standard, which requires it to publicly state what decisions it leaves up to computers rather than humans.
The ministry’s roster of such decisions contains just two: Inland Revenue child support payments and Jobseeker Support reapplications.
However, official documents released alongside the legislation show a far greater array of decisions are already automated by the ministry.
This includes mandatory eligibility reviews for a number of benefits, which usually take place every 12 months. In February 2025, a Regulatory Impact Statement noted, MSD was deciding automatically to “commence a review of a specified benefit that a client receives; request information from clients; [and] suspend and cancel assistance, if the client does not complete the review”.
This covered benefits such as the childcare subsidy and orphan’s benefit.
MSD was also then using automated decision-making to allow the cancellation of a range of benefits granted on medical grounds, if beneficiaries did not provide updated medical certificates sufficiently quickly. Associated benefits could also be cancelled automatically.
In a 2026 update to the regulatory statement, officials advised amending the law “to allow MSD to suspend supplementary benefits when a client does not complete a medical review,” before going on to note this was already “current operational practice”.
Menéndez March said passing the reforms under urgency limited the public’s ability to understand the rationale for the changes or to provide input on them.
“This is the broadest expansion of automated decision-making by any government in a generation and it’s irresponsible it is going through with no proper analysis or public input. The Government hasn’t offered transparency on what they intend to use automated decision-making for, nor been clear on whether it’ll be used to cut jobs and get rid of human interactions at Work and Income,” he said.
University of Auckland honorary research associate Dr Andrew Chen, an expert in AI and technology policy, said the legislation would significantly broaden MSD’s abilities to rely on computers over humans.
“It’s a bit alarming that it’s being passed through under all stages urgency without any opportunity for the public and civil society to think more clearly about what this might mean for MSD and its customers,” he said.
He pointed to public submissions on legislation passed last year, which also widened the scope for automated decision-making at MSD, as examples of what experts would likely say had they had an opportunity to weigh in on this move.
Those submissions broadly opposed the changes, raising concerns about the accuracy and reliability of automated systems.
