they vote for you

Open Australia is a website that makes Hansard more accessible and searchable. But now Open Australia has come up with a fantastic democracy tool. You can put in the name of any politician, or a policy, and see how they voted on it. Not only that, you can see a history of their votes, whether they tend to cross the floor, whether they tend to vote unusually, and who else in parliament might be their ally! There are also heaps of clickable explanations of parliamentary jargon and details of matters voted on.I'm really impressed! Whoever wrote this program deserves congratulations!

Big news from the OpenAustralia Foundation! 

They Vote for You is our brand new website that allows you to find out exactly how your representatives in parliament vote on issues you care about. You can easily look up your local MP and see how they have voted, or look up an
issue such as a carbon price, surveilance powers, or same sex marriage, and see how MPs have responded. 

We hope this site will be found to be as useful and engaging as our existing projects that all help shed light on our democracy. 

Here is an example of the results of a search about voting on privatisation.

It comes complete with pictures. I have never seen many of these politicians. An awful lot voted to sell off our assets.

For privatising government assets

They Vote For You by Matthew Landauer

Published at Open Australia Blog on October 21, 2014

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 when technology has the potential to bring us ever closer to our representatives. It’s time we started using it.

What we see on television or read about online or in newspapers about parliament focuses on arguments in Question Time. We see adversarial battles, emotional rhetoric and partisan spin. It can be a distraction. It’s not an accurate view of what goes on in parliament.

We need to look behind what they say, and examine how they vote, because the most important things that politicians do in parliament is vote. They vote to make new laws, and update and amend the existing ones. Changes to the law can and do have a profound effect on our society, and the way we go about our daily lives. Yet if you want find out how they voted, you have to roll your sleeves up, trawl through pages and pages of Hansard, Votes and Proceedings and Journals of the Senate and try to make sense of it all. This is not something anyone can do easily.

Parliament should be easy, and accessible. That is why today the OpenAustralia Foundation is launching a new site They Vote for You, so you can find out how your representatives in parliament vote on issues you care about.