Australian Parliamentary Debates from the House of Representatives, 1998-2025

Lindsay Katz from the University of Toronto created this database of Australian Parliamentary Debates. It contains proceedings from each sitting day in the House of Representatives from 02 March 1998 to 31 July 2025, parsed from official XML Hansard transcripts. The data includes standardized party and electorate information, with improved flagging for questions, answers, and interjections.

Use Cases

• Analyzing political speech patterns based on standardized party and electorate columns.
• Training models for question-answer detection based on the improved flagging of rows starting with specific phrases.
• Studying parliamentary discourse and interjections based on the corrected and separated interjection data.
• Tracking the participation and presence of Members of Parliament over time based on validated attendance records.

Strengths

• Covers a substantial time range of over 27 years of parliamentary proceedings.
• Includes specific data cleaning efforts such as standardized party and electorate columns and improved question/answer flagging.
• Data is derived from the authoritative source of official XML Hansard transcripts from the Australian Parliament website.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

XML Hansard transcripts from the Australian Parliament website.

Collection Method

Parsed from source XML transcripts.

Time Range

02 March 1998 to 31 July 2025

Geography

Australia