New Zealand Marking - SENSITIVE

Detects the New Zealand Government SENSITIVE protective marking under the Protective Security Requirements (PSR) classification system: the legacy SEEMail bracket trigger-word convention ([SENSITIVE]), endorsed forms (e.g. BUDGET SENSITIVE, COMMERCIAL: SENSITIVE, CABINET SENSITIVE), and the bare ALL-CAPS document-banner form gated by New Zealand government context. Regex logic verified against the official PSR Classification Handbook (protectivesecurity.govt.nz) and Cabinet Office Circular CO(08)1; matched case-sensitively.

Type

regex

Engine

boost_regex

Confidence

high

Confidence justification

High confidence on the legacy-bracket and endorsed forms: both are case-sensitive, structured markings with low natural-English collision risk. The bare SENSITIVE banner (65) is a common English word and is the widest tier, so it requires positive New Zealand government/PSR corroborative evidence plus a NOT-exclusion for generic commercial-sensitivity idioms.

Jurisdictions

nz

Regulations

Privacy Act 2020 (NZ)

Frameworks

PSR

Data categories

government, security

Scope

narrow

Risk rating

8

Platform compatibility

Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Compatible, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

\b(?:BUDGET|COMMERCIAL|CABINET)(?:\s+|:\s*)SENSITIVE\b|\[SENSITIVE\]

Corroborative evidence keywords

New Zealand, PSR, Protective Security Requirements, Cabinet

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

• Please treat this document as BUDGET SENSITIVE until the Minister's announcement. — Endorsed form, space-separated (Cabinet Office Circular CO(08)1 endorsement)
• COMMERCIAL:SENSITIVE — do not release without General Counsel approval. — Endorsed form, colon-separated, no space
• This Cabinet paper is classified CABINET SENSITIVE and restricted to Ministers only. — PDF-wrapped endorsed form — line wrap inserts a newline between the endorsement and the classification word
• Marked BUDGET: SENSITIVE pending the appropriation announcement. — PDF-wrapped colon-separated endorsed form — newline after the colon separator
• Subject: [SENSITIVE] Draft Cabinet paper for review — Legacy SEEMail bracket trigger-word form
• New Zealand Government agencies must handle this SENSITIVE report under PSR requirements. — Bare banner form gated by New Zealand government/PSR corroborative evidence within 300 characters

Should not match

• This report contains sensitive information about the ongoing negotiation. — lowercase English word (case-sensitive exclusion)
• THIS DOCUMENT IS COMMERCIALLY SENSITIVE — TREASURY BRIEFING NOTE — bare tier excluded by the commercial-sensitivity NOT-group; COMMERCIALLY (not COMMERCIAL) also fails the endorsed-form word boundary
• SENSITIVE (sample) — replace with your organisation's Cabinet material — bare tier excluded by the template/noise NOT-group (documentation/sample content)

Known false positives

• ALL-CAPS prose (legal boilerplate, headers, or documents rendered entirely in capitals) defeats the case-sensitivity signal the bare SENSITIVE banner relies on. Mitigation: Treat banner-tier-only (65) hits as lower confidence when the surrounding text is itself all-caps; the legacy-bracket and endorsed tiers (85) remain the reliable signal.
• Uppercase SENSITIVE in generic commercial-sensitivity idioms (e.g. "COMMERCIALLY SENSITIVE", "MARKET SENSITIVE") is common in non-government business writing and is unrelated to PSR classification. Mitigation: The bare tier (65) requires New Zealand government/PSR corroborative evidence and excludes the commercial-sensitivity idiom set via a dedicated NOT-group.
• The Australian PSPF SIT (au-marking-sensitive) also detects a bare ALL-CAPS SENSITIVE banner gated by Australian government context. Text that is ambiguously or jointly Australian/New Zealand government context (e.g. trans-Tasman agency correspondence) can legitimately fire both SITs on the same SENSITIVE occurrence. Mitigation: This is expected, acceptable co-firing rather than a defect — downstream consumers should treat concurrent AU/NZ SENSITIVE hits as a signal to check which jurisdiction's corroborative evidence actually matched, not as a false positive to suppress.
• The SEEMail square-bracket trigger-word convention ([SENSITIVE]) is being decommissioned during 2026 as the Secure Government Email (SGE) Framework replaces SEEMail. It retains legacy detection value for circulated documents and email archives but is not the durable long-term signal. Mitigation: Weight the bracket tier (85) as a transitional/legacy indicator; the endorsed and bare-banner tiers reflect the current PSR Classification Handbook convention and are expected to remain valid after SEEMail's decommissioning.

Collections

• NZ Protective Markings