Find out how your parliamentarian voted before you vote

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 didn’t 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 ‘think tanks’ 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 can’t 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 don’t see that too often from lobbyists.

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A quick google search has revealed the following.

  1. The site does includes details of some, not all, issues voted on.
  2. Information can be edited by anyone who signs up to the site.
  3. A Sydney Morning Herald article from March 2022 mentioning that two MPs were taking legal action as the site incorrectly record their votes and the associated foundation refusing to change the information on the site.

Looking at the site.

  1. Voting just once on a particular topic allocates a firm position to a particular MP.
  2. When a Bill is voted on multiple times in the same day, each occurrence is counted even though the votes are on the same issue.
  3. Ratings are based solely on the headline of a particular measure, which may give a false impression of the actual details of the measure.
  4. The absence of details about all votes makes some of the ratings meaningless.

Whilst the site may be useful for some specific information, there are enough orange or red flags to suggest that it is not a reliable decision making tool.

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Yes it is imperfect, how would you do it better with limited resources? Does being imperfect make it useless?

This is disputed. The OAF claims all they do is record actual votes. Those complaining say there were errors, who was correct was never determined as far as the SMH article goes. If this is the only problem then they are not doing too badly. Here is the link for those who want to look.

There are many categories from always, to never, to can’t say. Also ratings are not fixed, as more votes are taken the category can change. How else can it be done? Do you want to set some threshold before it counts?

What is wrong with that exactly? All the OAF claim is to record actual votes, if they started not counting some there would be complaints.

As I said in the introduction titles of bills can be opaque. They can also change as can the content. Somebody has to interpret this into a short statement, if you think that any such statements are wrong let us know. In the meantime if they didn’t do that most people would have no idea what it was all about. The actual title of bills almost never makes it into news articles. Distilling a mass of data into something accessible inevitably means obscuring some detail.

I don’t know what you mean, can you explain and give an example.

What is better? If you are particularly interested in certain topics there is nothing to stop you from going further and checking into the detail yourself. I see this as an index and a summary not a complete database. You seem to switch between complaining about the processing that they do and then saying they don’t do enough.

Even if imperfect how else are you going to understand what your representative has been up to, believe what they say?

If you were to actually see or listen to Parliament in action you would be aware that almost all of it is procedural with voting taken on lots of steps in debates, motions, allowances, standing orders, amendments, even a vote on should they end the day and retire to the bar.

The only vote of any interest to me is the final vote on a major piece of legislation, which may only come along once every few months. How my local rep votes on that may be of interest.

All the rest is of no interest, and of no importance. A site that purports to record this stuff is not providing any worthwhile function, in my view.

Have you looked at what they report? Do you see procedural irrelevant material there? Is is linked to any of their ratings on specific issues?

Indeed I have looked at the information on my local member.
No reason for me to consider that site says anything I didn’t already know or expect.
Standard voting down party lines.

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For it’s opening offering it was a surprise to see the volume of information being presented. It may be of greatest value to someone making a voting decision for the first time or in a new electorate?

For background on the member in the speakers role or any with ministerial appointments, it’s possible many will see little new to be learnt. The one is not usually required to vote and is expected to remain detached from partisanship. The others leading by example are expected to prosecute the platform of their chosen leadership.

Good luck to the project.

Note:
Having met the local federal member several times, listened to them in person and sought the assistance of their office, all have been very informative. Looking to the suggested web resource I found the site mildly useful.

The positioning of the local member on the colour spectrum is self evident. Being a prominent member of the pre-election government it’s no surprise the voting reported was straight down the party line. Consistent approach recognised by appointment as the new speaker before the final sessions of 2021. For other members and parties there may be added value in measuring their diversity - deviance from the party norm.

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Simply include a prominent disclaimer on website pages. possibly listing the percentage of total bills that are included in their analysis. Being open and honest in this way shouldn’t take a lot of resources.

No, simply differentiating samples of one or two from more regular patterns would be sufficient.

Representing a sample of one as a sample of two or three can distort the overall ratings.

Legislation relating to coronavirus assistance included the introduction of a supplement for jobseeker recipients. The initial amount was $550 per fortnight, which reduced over time to $250, then $150 per fortnight. The supplement was then replaced with a $50 per fortnight permanent increase.

In October 2020, the government introduced a bill to provide further assistance. A Labor MP proposed amendments, including for the supplement to continue at a rate of $250 per fortnight. The proposed amendments were not carried.

Various Government MPs are listed as supporting “decreasing the availability of welfare payment” because they voted against the proposed amendment. However, the website doesn’t appear to mention them voting in favour of that Bill (which increased welfare payments) or the Bills that introduced the supplement and ongoing increase.

In what way was the rating corrupted by procedural votes?

Wouldn’t know. The site doesn’t say.
My point is much of Parliament voting is just procedural.

I’m confused, you said “A site that purports to record this stuff is not providing any worthwhile function, in my view.”

Confused? Me too about what the site is attempting to measure.

The confusion was because you made a complaint and then said that you had not checked the data to see if the problem actually existed.

Which is true but unless you can show that it is a problem for data presented not relevant to the matter of the veracity of the site.

And editorially ignoring data does the same. Which is why the person doing data processing and summarising has a key role, to minimise distortion and misrepresentation as far as possible. Note I said minimise - it cannot be eliminated.

So here we are talking about how we know what is true and what is not. When it comes to politics or many of the disputes in the public we need to verify or trust, and preferably both.

It is common for public sceptics to claim that you cannot trust anybody. But if questioned they do actually trust somebody and that trust is often awarded because they like the outcomes of their pet source not because they have checked them out in some verifiable way.

Back to the question of how our representatives voted. You can:

  • ignore the question and know nothing about it,
  • process the data yourself and feel confident in the outcome according to your self belief or
  • verify that whoever is processing the data is doing a fair job in being competent and unbiased.

I am suggesting the third option. I am not saying the outcome will be perfect. but it will be better than the other two.

Um, get the law changed so that the parliament itself has to report this?

That would address some of the other problems being highlighted here.

The parliament has administrative staff whose job it is to record this sort of stuff. How hard could it be to require that any vote recorded is added to a public database? (accessible in some reasonable format e.g. CSV i.e. not Hansard)

Then it doesn’t even matter if it includes procedural stuff like gag motions, condolence motions, symbolic motions. It’s all there in the “CSV” file. You can filter to see what is important to you.

The only requirement on the parliamentary staff would be that the voting record is 100% comprehensive i.e. nothing left out.

That would appear to be a fairly serious problem, particularly in the middle of an election campaign.

At the very least, the site should note that the correctness of the information is under legal challenge and the site should explain why they believe it would be inappropriate to change the information i.e. presumably why they think they are correct and the MPs are incorrect. If a vote was recorded in Hansard, they should be able to provide a citation link to support their claim.

I think the problem here is that this web site is editorialising, rather than just presenting facts about who voted in which way on what motions.

This particular item should presumably be included in the “disinformation” topic, albeit disputed.

Ditto. The final vote is the only relevant aspect i.e. final vote in each house. Voting on bills before amendments isn’t that interesting to me. (But, again, if all votes are recorded then you are free to filter out what is not of interest to you.)

However if something gets voted down and never becomes legislation then the final vote is still relevant.

Yeah, I don’t need a web site to tell me that the answer is “no” but go on. :frowning:

I guess one flaw with that is that you typically would learn nothing about the alternatives. (Occasionally MPs are shuffled around or lose their seat only to regain it or get promoted from a state parliament - but I would guess that most of the time, only one candidate in an electorate is or has been an MP. In some electorates none of the candidates may have been an MP e.g. where the incumbent retires.)

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I would think that one of the people who brought this up as a potential problem might have found an actual serious error. I don’t know what the internal data validation routines of the group are but I would be more interested if there was a demonstration that they are faulty and how faulty.

I think it is impossible to summarise a large amount of data into something that is accessible without editorialising.

I have changed my mind about this site after going in for a more detailed look.
Whilst it shows that my local rep, who I did not vote for last election, and have not this election, is basically a party line member when it comes to votes in Parliament, it also lets me see what the member has said in speaches to the house.

This is great stuff.

Whilst quite a few rises to speak are ‘Dorothy Dixers’, many are speaking on behalf of electoral issues which are of course of relevence to me.

Shows an active representative, rather than a time-serving backbencher more interested in playing with their mobile phone.

Also lets you see just what is being debated in the houses that you never hear about, but can be important.

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I looked at one example of voting record. I was surprised to see it there because I wasn’t aware that it had even been voted on in the current parliament and yet my local MP was listed as “voted consistently against”. Pretty difficult to vote consistently against something that was never voted on.

So the way votes are assigned to categories is somewhat dodgy. (In other words, yes, this apparent anomaly can be explained but a lot comes down to opinion.)

I looked at another bill, which had the effect of making some things better and some things worse. The “some things worse” was listed as something to vote on. The “some things better” was not listed as something to vote on. Again, some substantial room for the opinions of the creators of the web site to influence the outcome.

That is now my opinion from having done some reading on that web site and also OAF’s actual web site. They are clearly pushing a certain agenda.

That’s all good in a democracy as long as the web site is presented as opinion, rather than fact.

Interesting observation on the web site:

If you’re wondering why we don’t source our information from the official record of how people voted, Votes and Proceedings or Journals of the Senate, it’s because they’re not published in any useable form by Parliament. It would make everyone’s life so much easier if these were available in an open and machine-readable format.


 which is exactly what I was saying above.

However there would still be other remaining deficiencies in the data, as the FAQ also notes.

And just as interesting is the paragraph just preceeding the one you quote:

Debate transcripts of the House of Representatives and the Senate are published online as Hansard. They Vote For You takes these records and compiles lists of votes that you can access under Divisions. You can search these votes or you can browse the votes that are relevant to the particular policy areas listed under Policies (for more on our policies, see What are Policies and how do they work?).

I think they are trying to do the best they can with the available data. I see no evidence that what is on the site is simply ‘opinion’. And likewise no evidence of bias.

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Hi folks,
Thanks for the discussion on this thread. I commend everyone for keeping the conversation civil and being respectful towards each other, not always easy around election time.

An election is a special event and in the public interest, and so we try to allow as much as possible the use of the forum for these discussions to occur. Now that we’re into the ‘blackout’ period, we’ve decided to retire this and related posts and resume our normal consumer programming. It’s been great hearing from you all, and we hope you enjoyed the discussion.

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