As elections roll around there’s a whole lot of information thrown at you to convince you that a certain politician or party will do/did/believes a really bad thing so you shouldn’t vote for them.
All is fair in love and elections, but there has been an increasing amount of chatter in recent weeks with people citing the website ‘They Vote For You’ as a resource to understand how a particular politician votes, and inferring from that what individual politicians believe or care about.
There’s a few problems with that, but let’s separate two important things. First, let’s look at whether you should consider voting records (or other records from parliament) to inform your views on any particular politician, and secondly the specific issue of the ‘They Vote for You’ website.
Long history of misusing parliamentary records to misinform voters
The vast majority of people – even politically interested people – have absolutely no clue how the business of parliament works.
People in politics prey on the fact that the average voter doesn’t understand parliamentary processes, and do not have the knowledge to be able to reject or refute a claim about what happened in parliament. That includes our local members: take for example this release from Kevin Anderson about being ‘gagged’ in parliament (which, needless to say, was not an accurate depiction of events – and we didn’t run that story).
All kind of parliamentary records are misused to mislead voters. Voting records, procedural records, and even photos are used along side a partisan message that’s telling you to interpret what you’re seeing in a particular way.
For example, photos of the chamber are often used with claims about people showing up or not showing up, and making inferences about what that means. The chamber is empty most of the time, and you can’t tell from the photo what exactly was happening, or even when it happened. If someone is sharing a photo of a parliament chamber and claiming it means something, you can safely ignore that as misinformation. Or a little more kindly, just a prop for some political spin.
The one record you do want to take note of when it comes to parliamentary business is what people say on the record. Videos in particular allow you to see how committed to the speech the speaker is, and don’t have the same interpretation issues as the transcription.
Parliamentary business is a bit odd
If you’ve had any exposure to parliament at all, it was probably Question Time, which is a fairly vibrant hour between 2 and 3pm on sitting days where everyone comes to the chamber for a bit of a show. It’s broadcast on television, dominated by partisan stunts and ‘Dorothy Dixers’ (fake questions from the Government party to allow the Government ministers to talk about how great they are).
That’s not what it’s like for the rest of the day.
The rest of the time there’s almost no one in the chamber. The speaker, and a minimum number of people are all that is in the parliament usually – everybody else scatters back to their offices to do actual work, attend meetings, take part in committees, and so on.
All across parliament house are two things in almost every room and plenty of hallways too: televisions constantly broadcasting what is happening in the chambers, and big clocks with bells and lights. As the parliament goes through their day, the relevant minister or scheduled speaker will say their bit or move their motions to a vastly empty room in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. When a vote (or division) is required, they ring the bells – which promptly ring all over the building for the allotted time, with the green lights flashing for the House or the red lights for the Senate, and politicians appear like cockroaches from wherever they are and rush to the chamber to be counted in the vote.
Because they haven’t been in the chamber – and just because of the way partisan parliamentary systems work – MPs vote with their party 99.9% of the time. And a lot of that time they have not much idea on what it is they are voting on, they just go to their party’s side.
The vast majority of votes are also procedural, not substantive – it actually doesn’t matter that they don’t know the details on what they’re voting on. So they aren’t voting on the issue in a piece of legislation, they’re voting to refer the matter to a committee, or accepting a message from the other chamber, or some other utterly inconsequential thing.
(A favourite of many political nerds is when they have a division on a motion “that the member be not further heard” which is basically the parliamentary way of saying ‘shut up’, often followed by an ‘SSO’ – a suspension of standing orders – which is essentially ‘we don’t wanna shut up’.)
As a general rule, a recorded vote in the Australian system means very little. On a big contentious issue, or if they have ‘crossed the floor’ and voted against their party line, absolutely you can look at how they voted – but you should look up the official Hansard record yourself, not trust a third party website or a social media post.
They Vote for You
They Vote for You is a website run by a charity called OpenFoundation Australia, and describes itself as a source to “help you decide who to support in an election”. OpenFoundation Australia run a number of websites that are about improving transparency of government processes. And while it is a good and noble thing to improve transparency, the They Vote For You website tends to confuse voters more than it helps.
The organisation is independent and claims to be non-partisan, however, the ‘issues’ tracked on the They Vote For You site and the framing – or the language used to describe those issues – it a bit left wing rather than neutral. It’s also very city-centric, meaning it can be particularly misleading or confusing for rural voters.
Let’s take for example an issue that is very topical in the New England in recent years: public transport. The site will tell you that our own Barnaby Joyce has consistently voted against public transport.
But, let’s have a look at their policy definition.
Only transport between major centres is included – and by major centres they mean big cities, there’s nothing in the votes captured there which is about public transport here in the New England. And public transport isn’t a federal government issue, there wouldn’t be a lot of legislation about public transport in the federal parliament, so let’s look a little further at the votes they have grouped under this policy heading.
They’re all motions – that is just words, not votes on legislation that would have any effect. Not a single one is on an actual bill (or law) about funding public transport, it’s mostly Greens having a whinge about major roads projects and and wanting the funding diverted to public transport. And you’ll note the most recent motion was 2016.
As for how Barnaby voted on the six motions they have gathered under this policy, let’s have a look at what’s on the site.
They’re all from his Senate days. The first one was a motion by former Greens leader Bob Brown calling for a feasibility study into high speed rail, and everyone else in the chamber voted against it. The second is a motion by former Democrats leader Lyn Allison calling on the Government to note the call of the Melbourne Transport Forum that there should be more funding of public transport, and the both Labor and the Coalition voted against it. The third is another motion from Bob Brown that they support a resolution of Newcastle City Council which Joyce was absent for (but that still gets counted in the site’s calculations), and the fourth was a motion by Greens Senator Christine Milne that they should develop a National Strategy to reduce dependence on oil by redesigning our cities to have us all ride pushbikes or something, both of which only enjoyed the support of the Democrats and Greens.
Has there been legislation about public transport since 2016? Of course there has. The establishment of the high speed rail authority in 2022 for an example that is on exactly the same subject as the first motion listed in this policy group. There’s also all that stuff around commuter car parks in 2020 and 2021, and plenty of other funding and initiatives that relate to public transport. There’s also motions about public transport on the They Vote for You website about privatising public transport that are not attributed to this policy area, like this one.
Let’s have a look at something else topical – nuclear power. There’s probably no one else in the parliament as vocal on their support for nuclear power, yet the site says they can’t tell you Joyce’s position on nuclear power.
Now that’s could be right, Barnaby may not have voted on anything about nuclear power. Except there was a naval nuclear power safety bill, and an inquiry into nuclear power last year, so that’s unlikely.
To be clear, it’s not an anti-coalition site. For example, it lists pretty much all the leadership of the Labor Party as being against roads infrastructure funding – which is obviously not true, Albanese is the biggest champion of infrastructure investment you’ll ever meet. That assessment has also been made on a similarly small handful of relatively meaningless divisions, and not included major bills.
So, basically They Vote for You is a bit like Wikipedia – poorly maintained and missing lots of stuff, occasionally gets something right but it’s more good luck than good management. The assessments given by the site are largely misleading, and shouldn’t be used as a guide for how a politician feels about anything.
This isn’t a new problem either; it’s been well known in political circles for years that the site has issues. There was even legal action taken against the site for incorrectly recording votes, and listing ardent supporters as not supporting things they care about a lot – like Barnaby and nuclear power, or Albanese and roads infrastructure.
Other tools to be wary off
Every election there’s a bunch of tools and guides that pop up offering to help you decide which politicians align with your views. Most of them you need to dig a bit deeper to see if it’s really helpful or intentionally misleading. Most things from issue bodies like health charities are straight up assessments of how the parties sit on their issues. Other partisan leaning organisations like GetUp (Labor/Greens linked) or Advance Australia (Liberal linked) should be used with caution.
There’s also the Voter Advice Applications, like the ABC’s Vote Compass and ANU’s smartvote. These tools get you to do a survey and then tell you which party’s policies your views align with. They’re not often right, as the assessment of the party policies and the design of the survey is usually done from an inner city point of view (or even by a foreigner with no local understanding – VoteCompass is developed by a Canadian company, smartvote is Swiss). And often because of the lead time required to develop the tool, they are put together without knowing all the policy positions or what will be the key issues in the election, so aren’t a great way to help you decide who to vote for in this particular election.
Importantly, Voter Advice Applications are also really a survey data collection tool, not an altruistic attempt to assist voters. Complete them for fun, sure, but if you want to actually know what a party stands for, look up their official website – and understand that the data you give in completing those surveys does get stored and used.
Here’s some things to look for in deciding what sources you can trust and which ones you should disregard:
- Who is behind this? The parties and various political movements often put up websites and guides to ‘help’ you chose a side. Look for the ‘Authorised by’ tag that all electoral matter during an election has to have, it will usually just be a name and address. Copy that and put it in to Google, and see if they’re related to a political party.
- Is it up to date? The biggest giveaway that something is not the best source is how out of date the content is. Check the dates – you might be looking at something from a previous election.
- Is it Australian? Lots of memes and infographic type things get shared around that are from the US or maybe a European election, and aren’t relevant or correct for our situation. The spelling is usually the giveaway here, but just like with looking up the ‘authorised by’ line, if you put the text of the meme into Google and it brings up a whole pile of stuff from a US election 5 years ago or something like that, you know it’s not local, and not right.
- Is there an independent source saying something similar? Are similar arguments being reported in the mainstream news? Is there a government report or other credible non-partisan source saying the same thing? If you can verify the claim elsewhere, it’s more likely to be solid.
And if you’re not 100% sure that it’s legit, please don’t share it on social media.
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