Report
Immigration
Border policy, offshore detention and migration levels across the decades. A standing OPAX investigation pairing disclosed donations with what was said in parliament, every claim cited to the record.
Parliamentarians · Parties · Donors · Topics
Ask what your politicians actually said.
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Answer
Sources
Also retrieved, not cited in the answer
Answers are written only from the passages retrieved above, and currently draw on the speech corpus. If the record is thin, the answer says so. Answers are generated fresh each time, so cite the sources, not this text. How answers work
The record by state
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Five parliaments so far: the Commonwealth, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland, each labelled with the speeches indexed from it. Click a state to search its parliament's record; Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania are not yet in the corpus. State donations: Queensland · Victoria · Tasmania (from 1 July 2025, when its disclosure scheme began).
Where the money goes
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The 250 largest donors in 28 years of AEC returns, ringed by industry around the parties they gave to. Drag to orbit; click a donor or party to open its entry; pick an industry to see that cluster alone on the full map.
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Money & words
Just added to the record
The newest documents to enter the index. The corpus updates as parliaments publish.
Reports
Long-running investigations pairing the money with the words, every claim cited.
Keep asking
Jurisdiction
AEC disclosure data: donations under the disclosure threshold are not reported and cannot appear here, so totals are a floor, not a ceiling. Public electoral funding and internal party transfers are excluded. State and federal returns are not summed: AEC returns already include state branch receipts. Download the dataFull-screen map
From the record
In brief
Machine summary of this speech; the full record follows.
The corpus in numbers
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By collection
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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.
What you can do here
- Ask: put a question to the speech corpus (widen it to legal documents and news with one checkbox) and get a grounded answer. Every claim is cited; every citation opens the actual speech at a stable, linkable page.
- Search: hybrid semantic + keyword search with reranking, filterable by speaker, party, parliament and year, with citation-ready exports.
- Reports: standing investigations pairing the structured money data (AEC donations classified by industry) with what was actually said in parliament.
The corpus
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The speech corpus is filtered to the era of currently serving parliamentarians (March 1993 onward), deduplicated across overlapping sources, and stripped of procedural noise (division roll-calls, chair interjections, day indexes) so retrieval surfaces substance, not housekeeping. Voting records, government contracts and the disconnect-scoring analytics from the previous version of this site are being rebuilt on the new platform. Full detail: methods & how to cite OPAX.
How answers are produced
Retrieval runs hybrid semantic and keyword search with a reranking pass over the corpus; a language model then writes the answer only from the retrieved passages, with citations back to each source speech. If the record is thin on a question, the answer says so. OPAX is open source (AGPL-3.0).
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.
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