Category Archives: Projects

How your MP votes, now on OpenAustralia.org

OpenAustralia.org is ancient by internet standards. When it was created 7 years ago Twitter had just launched. There was no Instagram. Or GitHub. After all this time it keeps chugging along, still making our Parliament more accessible and understandable. Today is a rare and happy day when we add something new to the venerable site. […]

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How do you edit division summaries?

There are many ways to edit division summaries. Here, I’m going to explain an approach that’s worked well for me. Choose a division First, I choose a division to summarise. I like to choose divisions that are relevant to policies that I’ve created, such as For decreasing availability of welfare payments. This means I often […]

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Keep an eye on the policies that matter to you

Believe it or not there is no easy to understand explanation of every vote in our Federal Parliament. That’s why They Vote For You relies on the hard work of people like you to summarise votes and research Policies so that we can all better understand how our MPs are voting on our behalf. Largely […]

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Show your support for FOI laws today!

  Today you have an opportunity to support effective Freedom of Information (FOI) laws in Australia. If you support strong FOI legislation then you really can do something to help, and you have to do it today! Tomorrow the Senate will be voting on a Bill which we at the OpenAustralia Foundation believe will undermine […]

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Submission for the “Inquiry into the Freedom of Information Amendment (New Arrangements) Bill 2014”

    The Secretary of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee recently invited The OpenAustralia Foundation to make a submission on their Inquiry into the Freedom of Information Amendment (New Arrangements). These amendments make it harder and more expensive to argue the case if and when agencies refuse requests for information under FOI law. This makes […]

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They Vote For You

We believe everyone should know what our politicians do on our behalf in parliament. If we don’t, how can we hold them to account meaningfully? How can we begin to talk to them about what we want them to do? Trust in politicians is at an all time low. Yet we live in a time […]

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Time for another hackfest – Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) edition

A photo from a previous OpenAustralia Hackfest

The OpenAustralia Foundation is pleased to invite you to another one of our legendary hackfests. In some of our previous hackfests we’ve opened PlanningAlerts to over 1.8 million more Australians and brought hacks and hackers together to launch our Freedom of Information project Right To Know. Places are limited so RSVP for free now or […]

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Parliamentary vote tracker project: A Case Study – Asylum Seeker Policy

This post is part of a series on our parliamentary vote tracker project. Read our previous post to learn more about the concept of policies and policy selection. You can also read our previous posts: a technical update and an introduction to what we’re doing and why. Co-authored by Natasha Burrows. Specific wordings of policies have been […]

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Parliamentary vote tracker project: The concept of policies and policy selection

This post is part of a series on our parliamentary vote tracker project. You can also read our previous posts: a technical update and an introduction to what we’re doing and why. Advice from Richard Taylor has been a great anchor throughout the process of developing policies. This is that: The first priority when creating […]

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Parliamentary vote tracker project: what we are doing and why

Chamber Red and Notice Paper

Hello! Welcome to a series of posts about the OpenAustralia Foundation’s new conception, a parliamentary vote tracker. This project is based on the Public Whip, a site developed in the UK by Julian Todd and Francis Irving. The point of this project is to make the processes and procedures of parliament more accessible to the […]

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