New Zealand Cabinet Office
Open-knowledge reference entry
In New Zealand, the Cabinet Office is an executive office within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet that acts as a secretariat for Cabinet, the Executive Council and Cabinet Committees. It provides constitutional, policy and procedural advice to the Governor-General, Executive and Parliament on a range of administrative matters, including procedures, appointments, and the general administration of Cabinet and its committees. It is situated in the Beehive.
History
The Cabinet Office grew out of the Colonial Secretary's office with the establishment of the Cabinet Secretary in 1856. The role of the Cabinet Secretary was formally separated out of the Colonial Secretary's office in 1892, and around the turn of the century, the position became associated with the Prime Minister's Office, although research to date has not determined when this occurred.
Like the role of the Cabinet Secretary, the Cabinet Office was not established through any written constitution or legislative instrument. Its current position sits within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), established in 1989.
The first Cabinet Manual was compiled by the Office in 1979 as a consolidation of the rules, procedures, and conventions of the Cabinet. The Cabinet Manual is published by the office and is available on its website, although the initial versions were not publicly released.
Currently, the Cabinet Office still resides as a unit within DPMC, is headed by the Cabinet Secretary, and is ultimately responsible to the Prime Minister for recording Cabinet decisions and developing and administering Cabinet processes.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128990789. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1856, 1892, 1989 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Zealand Cabinet Office” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.