Our Mission
Why OPAX Exists
Australian democracy runs on a simple promise: that the people we elect will do what they say. But promises are made in speeches, while power is exercised in votes, contracts, and regulatory decisions — often far from public attention.
Until now, there was no way for ordinary citizens to systematically check whether their representatives followed through. Parliamentary records span 125 years and over a million speeches across federal and state parliaments. Donation disclosures are buried in annual returns. Over 300,000 votes and 16,000 government contracts are scattered across dozens of databases. Connecting these threads required weeks of manual research — if you even knew where to look.
OPAX changes that. We make the gap between political rhetoric and political action visible, searchable, and impossible to ignore.
The AI Unlock
“For decades, parliamentary records sat in dusty archives or scattered databases. Understanding whether a politician’s words matched their votes required weeks of manual research.”
AI has changed this fundamentally. OPAX uses machine learning to embed 1,012,000+ speeches from federal and state parliaments into a semantic space where meaning — not just keywords — can be searched. Ask a question in plain English and get sourced, cited answers drawn from 125 years of parliamentary debate.
But OPAX is not just search. It is pattern recognition at scale. By cross-referencing speeches against voting records, political donations, and government contracts, AI can identify systemic disconnects that would take human researchers months to uncover.
“This is what happens when you point AI at democracy’s own paper trail.”
Semantic Search
Find meaning across 1M+ speeches from federal and state parliaments — not just keywords, but concepts, arguments, and positions.
Investigative Q&A
RAG-powered research assistant that answers questions with sourced citations from parliamentary records.
Disconnect Scoring
Quantified gap between what MPs say and how they vote. Per-politician, per-topic, per-party — tracked over time.
Donor Influence Correlation
Cross-reference 205K donations against voting records and legislative outcomes. Follow the money to its impact.
Pay-to-Play Detection
16K government contracts matched against donor records. Flagging patterns where political donations precede contract awards.
State Parliament Coverage
VIC, NSW, QLD, SA parliaments and committee hearings — extending accountability beyond Canberra to where most policy hits the ground.
How It Works
AGGREGATE
Pull data from 15+ official sources: Hansard (1901-present), AEC donation disclosures, TheyVoteForYou division records, AusTender contracts, and state parliaments (VIC, NSW, QLD, SA) including committee hearings.
CONNECT
Link speeches to the MPs who gave them, votes to the bills they decided, donations to the industries they came from, and contracts to the donors who received them. Disconnect scoring quantifies the gap between rhetoric and action.
ANALYSE
AI-powered semantic search finds meaning across 1M+ speeches. Donor influence correlation, pay-to-play detection, and disconnect scoring reveal systemic patterns that manual research never could.
EXPOSE
Interactive investigations, politician profiles, donation trails, and influence networks — all sourced, cited, and open for anyone to verify.
The Data
OPAX aggregates data from 15+ official Australian sources — spanning federal and state parliamentary speeches, voting records, political donations, government contracts, and legal documents. Covering the Commonwealth plus VIC, NSW, QLD, and SA parliaments including committee hearings. All public. All verifiable.
Open Source & Transparency
OPAX is itself transparent. Built with open data, open source tools, and open methodology. Every data pipeline, every analysis notebook, every line of code is publicly available for scrutiny, replication, and improvement.
We believe the tools of accountability should be accountable themselves. If you find an error in our data or methodology, we want to know about it. That is not a weakness — it is the whole point.
Democracy works best when citizens can see
what their representatives are actually doing.
OPAX makes that possible.