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Registers of interests

The newest additions and deletions recorded in parliamentarians' registers of interests, in their own words.

Sources: Registers of Members' and Senators' Interests, 48th Parliament ↗︎, entries as declared, not verified by OPAX; and the Queensland Register of Members' Interests, 58th Parliament ↗︎, facts and links only. Additions and deletions carry the date the register records. A gift or trip with no organisation match names one the AEC and lobbyist registers do not list under that spelling. Organisation matches to AEC Transparency Register returns, CC BY 4.0 ↗︎, the lobbyist registers and FITS use exact normalised names.

The corpus in numbers

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In the live index

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How the corpus is collected and what is known to be missing: Methods · About OPAX

What OPAX is

OPAX, the Open Parliamentary Accountability eXchange, exposes governance blind spots by cross-referencing what politicians say on the record with the money that flows around them. A politician who gives two hundred speeches about a problem but votes against every reform, or an industry that donates millions while its regulation stalls, leaves a paper trail. OPAX makes that trail searchable and citable. It started as speeches and donations; it now also carries the votes those speeches led to, the bills those votes decided, the government grants that sometimes follow the same money, and the registers that record who lobbies whom.

What you can do here

• Ask: put a question to the speech corpus (widen it to the recorded divisions with one checkbox) and get an answer written only from the passages retrieved for it. Every claim is cited; every citation opens the actual speech at a stable, linkable page; if the record is thin on a question, the answer says so.
• Search: hybrid semantic and keyword search with reranking, filterable by speaker, party, parliament and year, with citation-ready exports.
• Money map: the largest disclosed donors in three dimensions, ringed by industry around the parties they gave to, with a year range you can drag, a words layer showing who speaks on each industry's debates, and a grants layer showing which of those donors also collect government money.
• Reports: six standing investigations — climate & energy, gambling, housing, immigration, First Nations and media ownership — drawing on parliamentary debate, government announcements, legislation and financial records, refreshed as the record grows.
• Explore: the Time Machine (dial up any year since 1998 and see what parliament was arguing about), the tide (which debates are rising or fading), the record quiz, the ledger (every disclosed donation flow in one exportable table) and who gets the grants.
• Bills: a registry of federal bills since 2013, each one linked to the divisions that decided it and the speeches made about it, with a plain-English summary of what its explanatory memorandum says.
• Encyclopedia: an entry for every parliamentarian, party, donor and topic, with quick facts, voting record, declared interests, expenses and the money map narrowed to that entity.

The record

The last two rows above are not speeches: recorded divisions and AEC donation returns share the corpus's citation and search plumbing, so they are counted here even though the donations themselves are described in full below. The speech rows are filtered to the era of currently serving parliamentarians (13 March 1993 onward), deduplicated across overlapping sources, and stripped of procedural noise (division roll-calls, chair interjections, day indexes). Federal Hansard is Commonwealth copyright, reproduced here under the CC BY-NC-ND terms that cover the official transcript; each state parliament sets its own copyright terms, and OPAX reproduces and cites speeches for research rather than republishing whole documents commercially — check the source link on any document before quoting it commercially.

Full detail, model identity and known defects: methods & how to cite OPAX · machine-readable manifest: corpus.json.

The money

Every federal donation disclosed to the AEC since 1998 is loaded — 199,233 rows — and the money map plots the 250 largest donors against 11 parties as 662 flows, built from 127,658 of those rows after excluding public funding, internal party transfers and donations from government-linked entities. Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania publish their own donation registers under an open licence, and OPAX runs the same map over each: Queensland (250 donors, 402 flows from 22,703 gifts), Victoria (250 donors, 291 flows from 3,416 donations) and Tasmania (166 donors, 172 flows from 221 donations, because its disclosure scheme is only a year old). State and federal totals are never added together, because AEC returns already fold in what a party's state branches raised.

The newest layer is government grants. Every Commonwealth grant award published on GrantConnect since the register opened at the end of 2017 (360,058 awards, $235.5 billion, CC BY 3.0 AU) and every Queensland Government funding line since 2017-18 (230,007 awards, $85.7 billion, CC BY 4.0) are matched to the donor register by ABN wherever one is published: 763 Commonwealth recipients ($26.3 billion, 11% of the register) and 489 Queensland recipients ($3.3 billion, 4%) are also donors. On the money map itself, 30 of the 250 largest federal donors and 27 of the 250 largest Queensland donors also collected grants — $1.0 billion and $334 million between them — shown as a toggleable layer with its own flows from a single grantor node. A donor receiving a grant is a fact on the public record, not a finding; the grants explorer states plainly what share of a recipient's dollars arrived while a party it had donated to held office, and nothing stronger.

Alongside the donations sit an uncapped roster of 438 associated entities, third parties, significant third parties and political campaigners that raise or spend on politics without being a party — everything above $100,000 in any year from the AEC's own annual returns — and, separately, the parties' own lodged debts and discretionary benefits. Six lobbyist registers (federal, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia) are loaded in full: on the money map, 133 of the 250 largest federal donors also show up as a registered lobbying client or a name in a ministerial diary — 102 as lobbying clients, 92 in one of 61,499 disclosed meetings between ministers and everyone they met, from the New South Wales Cabinet Office and the Queensland Cabinet Office. Queensland alone also publishes who lobbied whom and when: 8,235 logged contacts since September 2016. A separate federal register, the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, tracks who works in Australia for a foreign government or political organisation for the purpose of political influence; OPAX carries the whole public register (145 registrants, 728 declared activities) and shows it on any donor, lobbying firm or parliamentarian page it matches, always with the reminder that registering is a legal disclosure, not a finding of wrongdoing.

Every donation, meeting and grant figure here is a floor, not a ceiling: disclosure schemes only require reporting above a threshold, so smaller gifts and quieter meetings leave no public trace. New South Wales and South Australia's political donations are not on OPAX at all — New South Wales' own terms forbid automated collection of its disclosure portal, and South Australia banned political donations from 1 July 2025. Western Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory publish their donations, but under terms that do not permit republishing them here; that data is held for internal research only and nothing from those three jurisdictions appears on the site.

Votes and bills

Every recorded division OPAX could get in a structured form — 13,867 of them, federal divisions from TheyVoteForYou and state divisions parsed from New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland Hansard, 1998 to today — is a citable document in the search index in its own right, and 962 sitting and former parliamentarians (622 federal, 133 New South Wales, 122 Victorian, 85 Queensland) carry a voting record on their own page. Most questions in every chamber are decided on the voices and leave no division at all, so "no recorded vote" never means "did not vote".

A federal bill registry now covers every bill introduced from the 43rd Parliament (2013) to today: 2,969 bills, 31,377 progress events and 19,958 links out to the divisions, speeches and Acts that followed from them. 13,949 of those links are speeches that name the bill on a day it was genuinely before the chamber — checked against the bill's own progress record, not guessed from a topic string, because federal Hansard topics from 2013 on carry only the bare word "Bills". 1,698 of the 2,969 bills carry a three-sentence, model-written summary of what their explanatory memorandum or Bills Digest says, each one labelled "written by a model from the explanatory memorandum; not the record" (a further 812 were generated but held back after failing an automatic check, and are not shown).

Two gaps in the underlying speech corpus shape what a bill or a division page can show, and are worth stating plainly. There is no Senate Hansard in the corpus at all for 2014 to 2022, so a bill whose real fight happened in the Senate in that window looks quiet on OPAX no matter how contested it was. And 2024 is thin across the board — federal chamber speeches drop to 82 for the whole year — so the 47th Parliament's bills (2022–2025) reach a linked speech only 24% of the time, against 74–84% in every other parliament since 2013. Neither gap is a fault in the bill registry; both close only as more Hansard is loaded.

People

1,557 names appear as speakers in the corpus since 1993; 313 of them currently sit in a state or federal parliament. 829 portrait photographs cover just over a thousand of those names: 551 official portraits from Parliament House, fetched through OpenAustralia because the official image API blocks every identified research tool, reproduced under aph.gov.au's site-wide CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 terms; and 277 from Wikimedia Commons for state parliamentarians and pre-2006 federal members, each individually licensed — Creative Commons, public domain or CC0 — and credited by name on the person page it appears on.

Declared shareholdings, real estate, directorships, gifts, travel and liabilities are shown for 317 sitting members — every House member (151), all but one senator (73) and every Queensland MP (93) — 10,052 declared entries in total, each one linking to the exact page of the source PDF it was read from. They are not in OPAX's ask-and-search index: the House and Senate registers are licensed CC BY-NC-ND, Queensland's terms could not even be read (they sit behind a firewall that blocked every request), and a rewritten version of a declared interest would be a derivative work in a way a fact with a link back to the original PDF is not.

Enrichments written by machines

• Topic labels: every speech is, eventually, tagged against a fixed taxonomy of 21 subjects — gambling, financial services, mining & energy, climate & environment, property & construction, housing, health, media & communications, hospitality & alcohol, defence & security, agriculture, unions & the workplace, immigration, First Nations affairs, tax & the budget, education, welfare & social services, integrity & democracy, infrastructure & transport, justice & law, and foreign affairs — applied by a mix of the hosting platform's own labeller and separate agents that read back over what it produced. The pass is still running: a speech with no topic chip yet has simply not been reached, not been checked and found to have none.
• Machine briefs: many speeches and every topic page carry a short "In brief" summary, written by a language model from that one passage alone and labelled as a machine summary. It is a reading aid, not a replacement for the speech underneath it.
• Report essays: the six standing reports retrieve live from the corpus for every section, and every factual claim is built to trace back to a real, quoted passage — but the connecting prose (the opening summary, the era-by-era narrative) is a model's synthesis of the report's own generated sections, written last. Read it as a guide to where to look, not as the finding.
• Bill summaries: 1,698 federal bills carry a three-sentence, plain-English account of what their explanatory memorandum or Bills Digest says, written by a model and checked by a mechanical rule that rejects any sentence copying nine or more consecutive words from the source. Every one carries its own attribution, because an explanatory memorandum is a bill's own sponsor explaining their own bill, not a neutral account of what it will do.
• Explain flow: the "Explain this money" walkthrough on a donor or party page is not a language model at all — its sentences are assembled by ordinary code from the same structured donation and grant figures the map itself draws on. It can still be wrong, but only the way a mail-merge can be wrong: a bad number or a mis-filed category upstream, never an invented claim.

What this cannot prove

OPAX puts the record and the money side by side. It does not draw a conclusion from them, and neither should a reader without checking the primary source first.

• Money near a decision is a pattern to investigate, not evidence of a favour.
• A division is not the whole vote: most questions in every chamber are decided on the voices, so a member with no recorded division on a bill did not necessarily do nothing.
• Every donation, meeting and grant figure here is a floor. Amounts under a jurisdiction's reporting threshold, and anything from a jurisdiction OPAX does not cover, are invisible by construction, not because nothing happened.
• Registration under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, or an entry in a lobbyist register, is a legal disclosure the law requires, not a finding of wrongdoing.
• A donor receiving a grant, or a bill's sponsor sharing an industry with donors to their party, is a fact on the public record. What it means is for the reader to weigh, with the primary sources OPAX links to at every step.

The corpus's own technical limits — what Hansard is and is not, where coverage is thin, which members' records are unreliable — are on the methods page, not repeated here.

Licences and reuse

OPAX's own code is open source under AGPL-3.0, at github.com/jaketracey/opax. The data behind it is not ours, and it carries a patchwork of licences rather than one. The Hansard record itself — however it reaches OPAX, through TheyVoteForYou, OpenAustralia or a state Hansard feed — is Commonwealth or state parliamentary copyright, reproduced here under CC BY-NC-ND terms; TheyVoteForYou's own compiled division data carries a separate open licence of its own (the Open Data Commons Open Database Licence). Most of the money data — AEC returns, GrantConnect and the Queensland grants portal, the Queensland and Tasmanian donation registers, the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme register, and most lobbyist registers — is Creative Commons Attribution, in one version or another. The House and Senate registers of members' interests are licensed CC BY-NC-ND, which is why they appear on OPAX as facts with a link to the source page rather than as reproduced text; Queensland's register carries no verified licence at all, so it is treated the same cautious way. And a few sources — Western Australian, ACT and Northern Territory donations among them — are held under all-rights-reserved terms and are kept off the public site entirely; that data exists only for internal research. Every page that carries licensed data names its source and, where one applies, its licence; when the two disagree, trust the page, since licences and coverage windows both move and this paragraph will not always be the first place they are updated.

How to reach us

OPAX has no dedicated inbox. Data errors are the corrections we most want to hear about, and the fastest way to report one, ask about the methodology, or point out a source we have missed is to open an issue on the GitHub repository, where the code, the ingestion scripts and the issue tracker all live in one place.

Methods

How OPAX works, and how to cite it

What OPAX is, and is not

OPAX is a retrieval and analysis layer over public records. It is not the official record. Before publishing a quote, verify the wording at the source link on the document page. Every document links to its official origin where one exists.

Corpus construction

Speeches are included from 13 March 1993, the election that seated the longest-serving current federal parliamentarian, so nothing in the corpus predates a currently serving member. Speeches under 200 characters are excluded (procedural fragments), duplicates across overlapping sources are removed, and procedural noise (division roll-calls, chair interjections, day indexes) is stripped. The machine-readable corpus manifest, including per-source counts and the current corpus version, is at corpus.json.

Retrieval and generation

Search runs hybrid semantic + keyword retrieval with a reranking pass. Answers are generated only from retrieved passages, with citations. Embeddings: multilingual-2024-05-06. Generation model (pinned): gemini-2.5-flash-lite. Model identity may change between corpus versions and is recorded in the manifest.

Reproducibility

Searches are reproducible given a query, filters and corpus version: every export file embeds all three. Generated answers are not reproducible and must not be quoted as data. The supported method for a paper: state the question, cite the returned documents by their permanent OPAX links, and archive the export file.

Known limitations

• Hansard is a revised record ("substantially verbatim"), not a raw transcript.
• Party labels use a 15-value canonical vocabulary; some speeches carry no party label.
• State coverage windows differ by parliament (QLD only from 2024, NSW/VIC from 2015).

Licence, code and corrections

AGPL-3.0. Source and issue tracker: github.com/jaketracey/opax. Data errors are corrections we want, so please report them.

Parliamentary expenses

What the expense categories mean

Every parliamentarian page on OPAX splits claimed expenses by category. Those category names are the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority's own, reproduced unchanged from its quarterly expenditure reports, so a figure here can be checked line by line against the published source. This page says what each one covers.

Some of these are not expense types at all. IPEA records the purpose of a trip against transport lines, so labels such as parliamentary duties or electorate duties answer why the travel happened, not what was bought. Others are entitlements paid at a set rate rather than reimbursements of receipts. Both are marked below.