OpenAustralia news

February 2009

19 February 2009

Multiple email alerts over the last few days

Some of you might have been getting multiple email alerts for the same day's speeches over the last few days. We're sorry about this. It turns out one of the email alerts was causing the mailing system to fail and each day it was retrying and sending out the old mails again. We found the wayward alert and fixed it. Tomorrow (Friday 20 February) you might get another duplicate email but after that everything should be back to normal.

As always, if you find a problem or something isn't working as expected please do let us know by emailing us at contact@openaustralia.org.

Posted at 17:29:00 by Matthew | Link to this

26 February 2009

Another big step forward for government transparency in Australia

Today we proudly bring you the Register of Members' Interests. We have now made these extremely important documents available online for the first time ever.

In the Register of Interests, Representatives and Senators declare information of financial interests, stocks and shares held, gifts received over a certain value, and memberships of Clubs and Associations.

Now, the Register of Interests is available for all sitting Senators and Representatives and is available at the bottom of each of their pages.

See, for instance, the Register of Interests for the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, available at the bottom of his page. (direct link)

This latest addition was largely made possible by the generous help of volunteer Stephen Thorne at Netbox Blue who scanned the 1500 pages of the Register of Members' Interests and Bernard Wright, the Registrar of Members' Interests, for providing us with the hardcopy material.

Posted at 08:30:00 by Matthew | Link to this