About the data

Where it comes from

Voting records come from They Vote For You, a project of the non-partisan OpenAustralia Foundation. It processes the official Hansard and Votes and Proceedings published by the Parliament of Australia.

Postcode and suburb lookups use Australian Bureau of Statistics postal areas, suburbs and localities, and 2025 electoral boundaries, weighted by 2021 Census population (CC BY 4.0). Postal areas approximate Australia Post postcodes and suburb boundaries can differ slightly from local usage, so for a specific address the AEC electorate finder is authoritative.

Electorate maps draw the same ABS boundaries over OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), with map tiles from OpenFreeMap.

Registers of interests

Declared interests come from Peculiar Interests, an open dataset from the ANU Cybernetic Studio (CC BY 4.0). It reads the official House register PDFs and the Senate register every night. A few members lodge handwritten statements. These are transcribed automatically and marked “not yet verified” here until a person has checked them, so always check the original document, which is linked from each member's register page.

Registers record what is held, not its value. They also rely on members' own declarations and on them notifying changes within 28 days.

Donations

Donations come from the AEC Transparency Register. There are three kinds of recipient, and they're always shown separately: a candidate's own election campaign, the member personally between elections (annual returns), and their party branch. Most major-party candidates lodge nil returns because donations go to the party, so the party view is often where the money is.

A donor has to be named once their gifts to one recipient total more than the disclosure threshold. The rest appear only as a total, shown as “not named”. Party receipts also include money that isn't a donation, such as public election funding and transfers between branches. These are listed separately and not counted as donations. A donation doesn't mean a donor influenced a vote or decision.

Elections and candidates

Results and official candidate lists come from the Australian Electoral Commission. Before nominations close, candidates listed for the next election are ones who have been publicly announced, and each links to its source. Candidates who aren't in Parliament have no voting record, so their party's record is shown as context. That's a guide to how the party votes, not a statement of the candidate's own views.

State elections

Victorian results come from the Victorian Electoral Commission, including by-elections since 2022. Where a winner passed 50% before every preference was counted, final-two figures come from the VEC's indicative full distributions. Sitting members come from the Parliament of Victoria's Hansard, and their office contact details from its member contact lists. Announced candidates are tracked by the Tally Room until the VEC's official list is published.

Candidate profiles are written by this site from the sources listed under each one, mostly candidates' own pages and official council and parliamentary records. Profiles marked “draft” haven't been checked by a person yet. Please tell us about any errors.

How figures are calculated

Figures are either sourced (shown as published) or calculated here by a documented, versioned method.

Sourced from They Vote For You

Recorded-vote participation, the “voted with party majority” figure (from TVFY's rebellion count), policy agreement scores, and each position label (“Voted consistently for”, “Not enough votes to say”). Labels are TVFY's own categories, never recomputed from the score.

Votes counted on each policy (calculated, v2)

The member's recorded Aye/No on each division in the policy, compared with the policy's position on that division (which can be Aye or No). A division counts as one they didn't vote in only if it was held during one of their terms in that chamber. Term dates come from OpenAustralia's record of every MP's and senator's terms, compiled by hand from the Parliamentary Handbook. Time as Speaker isn't counted, because the Speaker presides and only has a casting vote (dates from the list of Speakers). For anyone with no recorded terms, service is inferred from their own votes instead: consecutive votes up to 180 days apart. Fewer than 3 counted votes is labelled limited evidence.

Terms of service and ministerial roles

Dates in Parliament and ministerial and shadow ministerial roles come from OpenAustralia's hand-maintained records, which follow the Parliamentary Handbook. They are checked against They Vote For You's list of current roles each time the data is refreshed. One documented correction is applied: OpenAustralia dates the first Albanese ministry from 1 June 2022, but Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles, Jim Chalmers, Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher were sworn in on 23 May 2022 as an interim ministry (First Albanese ministry, and the Parliamentary Handbook's ministries table). Corrected dates are marked on member pages.

Photos

Member photos come from Wikimedia Commons, matched to each parliamentarian through their official Parliament ID on Wikidata. Only photos under Creative Commons Attribution (including ShareAlike) licences, CC0 or in the public domain are used, and each is credited with its author and licence on the member's page. Members without such a photo, and candidates who haven't been in federal Parliament, are shown with their initials.

Voted differently from party colleagues (calculated, v1)

Compares a vote with how the member's party colleagues voted in the same division, using the party they belonged to at the time and excluding the member. Ties, independents, presiding officers and parties with no other member voting are never flagged. This doesn't show that a formal party position existed; free votes look the same.

Comparing two members (calculated, v1)

Vote agreement and policy comparisons use only divisions both members voted in, and say how many there were. With no shared divisions, no comparison is shown. TVFY's all-years scores appear separately, because they can cover different periods for each member.

Donations

Amounts are summed as published. Identical-looking receipts (same donor and amount) are kept as separate receipts, because the AEC files list them separately and their totals reconcile with the parties' reported totals. Where a candidate's itemised gifts exceed the total on their own return, both figures are shown and the difference is flagged. The AEC files don't distinguish cash from in-kind gifts.

What a policy agreement score means

A policy is a set of divisions (recorded votes) on one issue, each marked with the vote a supporter of the policy would cast. A member's agreement score is the share of those votes where they voted the same way. Votes marked “strong” count more. The scores and policy definitions are calculated by They Vote For You.

Scores only cover recorded divisions. Many decisions in Parliament pass “on the voices” without a recorded vote, and votes don't capture everything a member does, so read a score as one piece of evidence rather than the full picture.

Votes against their party

A vote counts as against their party when a member votes differently from most of their party's members in the same division. In the Australian Parliament this is rare, because most members vote with their party.

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