About
What members asked, what ministers answered, and how Parliament voted, in plain language.
What this is
Question Time AU summarises Question Time (questions without notice), debates and votes in the Australian House of Representatives and Senate. The aim is to show what each member asked and what the minister said in reply, in plain language, with the jibes, interjections and theatre left out.
How the summaries are made
1. The official record
The official Hansard for each sitting day is downloaded as XML from OpenAustralia, which publishes it from the Parliament's own records.
2. Only the substance
Interjections and the presiding officer's remarks are removed before any summarising. Question Time is split into one exchange per question, with any supplementary questions kept together.
3. Reported speech
A language model running on our own hardware writes each exchange as a third-person summary in reported speech. It is instructed to keep every figure, name and commitment and to drop rhetoric.
4. Checked for copying
Every summary is checked automatically so that it never repeats more than eight consecutive words from the transcript, apart from official names. Anything that fails is rewritten or held back for human review.
5. Member details
Member names, seats and parties come from OpenAustralia's member records, not from the model, and show the party each member belonged to on the day.
Limitations & disclaimers
Summaries are produced automatically and can contain mistakes. They are not transcripts and are not the members' own words.
Every exchange links to the official record: please check it before relying on or quoting anything.
Privacy
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Separately, to show the Most Popular page the site counts how many times each page is viewed per day. For that count only the page address, the date and the number are kept: no IP address, browser details or anything else that could identify a visitor.
There is no advertising on this site.
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Contact
Questions, corrections or problems with the site: [email protected]. If a summary looks wrong, please include the page address.
Sources & licences
- Hansard is © Commonwealth of Australia and is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. This site is non-commercial and presents summaries, not the Hansard text.
- Hansard XML and member data are provided by OpenAustralia; member data is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Member photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC0 or public domain); each photo's author and licence are shown on the member's page. Office addresses and phone numbers come from the Parliament of Australia's published contact lists.
This site is independent and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Parliament of Australia or OpenAustralia.