Every year we ask ourselves a simple question: are more people able to see what their governments are doing, and have a say in it, than a year ago? For 2025-26 the answer is a clear yes. More development applications reached more people, more communities came online for the first time, thousands of people had their say on what gets built near them, and a proposed law that would have made it harder to use freedom of information was withdrawn. Here is the year in numbers, and a few of the stories behind them.
- Planning Alerts: more of Australia is watching what gets built
- Reaching regional Australia
- Keeping the lights on
- What people were talking about
- Right to Know: defending the right to ask
- The FOI Amendment Bill, and why this year mattered
- They Vote for You: a growing audience for how MPs vote
- OpenAustralia.org.au: modernising our oldest service
- Under the hood: quieter, steadier, more reliable
- Choosing where to focus
- Thank you
Planning Alerts: more of Australia is watching what gets built
Planning Alerts emails people when a development application is lodged near them, so they can comment before a decision is made. This year the service did more of its core job than ever.
We collected 198,020 development applications from councils around the country, up 27% on last year’s 155,785.
Behind that number are people taking action. Planning Alerts carried 1,593 comments from residents to their councils this year, up 13%, and 6,192 people signed up for the first time. By the end of the year 146,012 active alerts were quietly watching neighbourhoods across Australia, ready to let someone know the moment something is proposed nearby.
Interest stayed strong all year, with Planning Alerts drawing around 120,000 visitors a month.
Reaching regional Australia
One of the things we are proudest of this year is where the growth happened. We added 57 new councils to Planning Alerts, and most of them are regional and rural. Together they are home to around 1.5 million people who can now get an alert when something is proposed near them.
The new councils span New South Wales (29), Victoria (21), Western Australia (4), Queensland (2) and Tasmania (1). They include small shires that rarely get this kind of attention: Bourke, Brewarrina and Cobar in far-western New South Wales; Alpine, Towong and Murrindindi in Victoria’s high country; Glamorgan Spring Bay on Tasmania’s east coast; and larger centres like the City of Joondalup and the City of Rockingham in Western Australia and Melton and Maribyrnong in Melbourne’s growth corridor. Many of them came online through new “framework” scrapers built to read whole families of council websites at once, including a new scraper for the NSW Planning Portal that brought 24 councils on board in one go.
Keeping the lights on
Just as important as adding councils is keeping the ones we already have working. Council websites change constantly, and when one does, its scraper can break. This year we restored 133 councils to working order after their feeds had failed, among them Brisbane, Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Townsville, Logan, Geelong and Cairns. Every one was checked by hand and confirmed to be collecting applications again before the fix was signed off. All 133 are still running today.
What people were talking about
Some applications drew a real crowd.
The most-commented application of the year was the heritage-listed Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, where a proposal to replace coloured transom glass drew 149 comments through Planning Alerts.
A new Guzman y Gomez outlet at Macquarie Park attracted 34, a nine-storey residential building in Marrickville drew 17, and a shop-top housing development including affordable housing at Bondi Beach drew 16.
Out of the cities, a proposal for five dwellings at Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula and a 100-place childcare centre at Castle Hill each brought neighbours to the table.
It is a good reminder that “planning” is never abstract: it is the building on your corner, the childcare place you have been waiting for, and the heritage you want kept.
Right to Know: defending the right to ask
Right to Know helps people make freedom of information requests to government, in public, so the answers benefit everyone. This year people used it to make 1,678 FOI requests, and 854 people signed up for the first time.
The requests themselves show what the public wants to understand: complaint-handling statistics, citizenship ceremony dates, Senate Estimates briefings, and how agencies are handling AI-driven workloads. Hundreds of requests were answered successfully or partially over the year, and many made this year are still working their way through the system.
Some agencies field far more requests than others. This year the bodies asked most often through Right to Know were the Australian National University, the National Disability Insurance Agency and the Department of Home Affairs.
Running a public FOI service also means thinking hard about the people in it. This year we set out how we balance transparency, safety and the public interest on Right to Know, so that opening up information never comes at the cost of someone’s safety.
The FOI Amendment Bill, and why this year mattered
The biggest story for Right to Know was not a number. In 2025, the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025 was introduced. As drafted, it would have allowed agencies to refuse anonymous FOI requests, introduced an application fee, and let agencies refuse requests estimated to take more than 40 hours. Measures like these would have made freedom of information harder to use for exactly the people it is meant to serve, and we set out our concerns in detail when the Bill was introduced.
On 5 March 2026 the Bill was withdrawn from Parliament, after it became clear it did not have the support to pass the Senate. We are careful to stay out of party politics, so we will let the record speak: a wide range of legal, integrity and media-freedom organisations raised concerns, and the government chose not to proceed. For a service built on the principle that the right to ask belongs to everyone, it was a significant year.
They Vote for You: a growing audience for how MPs vote
They Vote for You turns the parliamentary record into plain language, so anyone can see how their representatives actually voted. This year it tracked 735 divisions (the formal votes held in Parliament) and added 14 new policy topics that let people compare positions at a glance.
The audience grew strongly through the year, from under 10,000 visitors in July to peaks above 60,000, as people checked the record around key parliamentary moments.
We also looked closely at the record itself this year, and found that about seven in ten decisions in Parliament are made “on the voices”, with no recorded vote at all. It is a reminder of how much of what happens in Parliament never makes it into a tally that anyone can check, and why the votes that are recorded matter so much.
OpenAustralia.org.au: modernising our oldest service
OpenAustralia.org.au is where it all began. It publishes the proceedings of the Australian Parliament in a searchable form, so anyone can look up what was said, follow a representative, and get an email when a topic they care about comes up. This year 249 people registered (up from 101 the year before) and hundreds set up email alerts to keep track of the issues that matter to them.
The honest story here is about the code underneath. OpenAustralia.org.au contained some of our oldest and most stable software, but it was becoming more and more expensive to operate.
To ensure that the OpenAustralia.org.au remained secure, maintainable and ready for new features, we made the decision to complete a full re-write of OpenAustralia.org.au. This also included moving it to a brand new server and database, all while ensuring that we kept the existing service running. This work was one of the biggest engineering efforts we have undertaken in recent memory.
Under the hood: quieter, steadier, more reliable
A lot of our year goes into work most people never see: keeping services fast, secure and running. This year we moved to a fully reviewed pull-request workflow across our code, which means every change is now checked before it ships. Across our repositories we merged 829 changes over the year, up from just 28 the year before. Most of that jump is the new way of working rather than a sudden burst of output: a year ago much of the code went straight to the main branch, and now it goes through review, with automated tools keeping our software dependencies patched and secure.
Across the year our contributors added 105,414 lines of code and removed another 80,498, a net gain of about 25,000 lines, spread over roughly 1,940 substantive changes. The biggest single effort went into a core refactor of the code behind OpenAustralia.org.au. We also continued to maintain the community-run scrapers that feed Planning Alerts, the small programs that read each council’s website.
Choosing where to focus
Part of running a small organisation well is knowing what to let go of. This year we made the hard decision to retire Election Leaflets, the project that let people upload and search political advertising. Stepping back from it lets our small team put its energy into the services the most people rely on, and into the work still ahead, like the OpenAustralia.org.au rewrite.
Thank you
None of this works without the people who use our services, the volunteers who write and fix scrapers, and the supporters who back our work. Planning Alerts, Right to Know, They Vote for You and OpenAustralia.org.au exist so that more Australians can see what their governments are doing and have a say. On this year’s numbers, more of us can than ever before. Thank you for being part of it.
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