Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora
Applies the ruleThe Crown entity that funds and provides public health services in New Zealand, successor to the District Health Boards the Health and Disability Services Eligibility Direction 2011 is addressed to. Its eligibility pages state which clause of the Direction each category comes from, which makes them unusually easy to check against the instrument, and they also state the documentary proof a provider will ask for - which the Direction does not.
The body that applies the rule and decides applications. It publishes what it requires, which is authoritative about its own practice but is not the text of the law.
www.healthnz.govt.nzCannot be cited for
It administers the eligibility rule and does not make it. Where its pages and the Direction differ, the Direction is the instrument. It must not be cited for the content of the reciprocal health agreements with Australia and the United Kingdom: its summaries of those are an agency's reading of treaties scheduled to the Health Benefits (Reciprocity with Australia) Act 1999 and the Health Benefits (Reciprocity with the United Kingdom) Act 1982, and neither agreement is published here. The address matters here too. https://www.health.govt.nz/ returns HTTP 403 to Firecrawl and to a direct request alike, including the Ministry of Health page that Health New Zealand points at for the 1 December 2026 changes. The readable page is https://tewhatuora.govt.nz/our-health-system/eligibility-for-publicly-funded-health-services/eligibility-explained, which serves content from healthnz.govt.nz; the similarly-named https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/health-services-and-programmes/eligibility-for-publicly-funded-health-services redirects to a programmes index and is the wrong page.
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