Are you unsure if your federal member of parliament is worth voting for? To find out you can listen to what they say about themselves or what their party says or you can find out how they actually voted on the issues that are important to you.
My consistent approach to any kind of disagreement is to ask for evidence. Solid information about the matter is most important followed by sensible interpretation of what it means. This thread is about presenting useful data.
The voting of the national parliament, both houses, over a period of time (say the last three years) is a huge amount of raw data to consider and beyond all of us but the most dedicated. Luckily somebody has done the hard work for you and summarised it in a way that you can get into without a lot of work. I didnât say no work at all.
I am talking about the web site https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/ This is provided by a group who think that telling Australians how their representatives have voted on each issue is important. They are not a political party nor associated with any particular view that I can determine. Quite a few âthink tanksâ lean one way or another and some are fairly clearly connected with a given party. As far as I can tell this mob, The Open Australia Foundation, are not.
There have been complaints that the OAF is biased; that may be so. It may also be that the complainers did not like the idea of their actions being made plainer. If you live by doing one thing and saying another, that is you are a politician, then a method of allowing people to easily compare your actions to your words could be awkward to say the least. Keep in mind the information is about matters where there was actually a vote. If you want some other information they canât help.
What is wrong with They Vote For You? Without reading each bill presented to the parliament it is hard to work out just what each is about. I have more life to live than doing that. So, if you are going to read this web site and not verify every item you have to accept that the lists they present are actually about the topics as they describe. This problem happens any time you allow another person to curate the information you are going to study. One of the good signs about their work is they have a mechanism to report errors so that they may be corrected. You donât see that too often from lobbyists.