Register of Gifts to the Senate and the Parliament

[Henare Degan]

Hi OpenAustralians,

We recently received an email to our contact address asking about the Register of Gifts to the Senate and the Parliament. What I'd like to know is if this is the same thing as the Register of Members' and Senators' interests we already publish.

Senate order Registration and declaration of Senators' interest, Receipt of gifts – declaration section (1)(C) states, "The Registrar of Senators’ Interests is to maintain a public Register of Gifts to the Senate and the Parliament.". To me this suggests that there is a separate register maintained, called the Register of Gifts to the Senate and the Parliament that contains gifts to the Senate or Parliament, not just to the Member or Senator, as contained in the documents we have published.

What say you?

Henare

[Kat Szuminska]

Hey Henare

That's a tricky question! I don't know the answer.

As you correctly point out, gifts over certain amounts given to individual parliamentarians are registered in the Register of Members' Interests and Senators' Interests. I'm not aware of another register for gifts to the institutions as a whole, but the Registrars might be able to answer that one, here are links to their contact details.

Registar for the Register of Members' Interests' Bernard Wright 

http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/pmi/index.htm

Registar for the Register of Senators' Interests'  Rosemary Laing

http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/Committee/interests_ctte/index.htm

They're the folks I contacted to get permission to republish those documents, so if you get in touch feel free too let them know I suggested you talk to them.

cheers,

Kat

[Craig Thomler]

This is what a google search found....

http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/pubs/standing_orders/e02.htm

Any senator, including any Senate office holder and any senator who is
a leader or a member of a parliamentary delegation, who in any
capacity receives any gift which is intended by the donor to be a gift
to the Senate or the Parliament must, as soon as practicable, place
the gift in the custody of the Registrar of Senators’ Interests and
declare receipt of the gift to the Registrar.

....The Registrar of Senators’ Interests is to maintain a public

Register of Gifts to the Senate and the Parliament.

And: http://www.aph.gov.au/SENATE/COMMITTEE/interests_ctte/info/reg_gifts.pdf

4. Declarations of receipt of gifts will be placed in the Register of
Gifts to the
Senate and the Parliament in alphabetical order under the name of the
senator receiving the gift.

5. The register will also contain a chronological list of gifts
received with the
name of the recipient senator, the name of the donor, and a
description of the
gift and its current location.

6. The original of a senator’s declaration of receipt of a gift to the
Senate or theParliament will be kept on a registry file. A copy, date
stamped with the registry stamp, will be placed on the register.

7. Declarations are public from the date of receipt.

8. New declarations will be tabled in the Senate within six months of
receipt, preferably in June and December.

10. A declaration will remain on the register as long as the gift
remains in the possession, custody or control of the Senate or the
Parliament. Declarations in the name of senators who are former
members of the Senate will be held in a volume of the register
separate from the volume holding declarations of serving senators.

-------------

There's a list kept by the Senate Registrar, it's public and new
additions are tabled in the Senate within six months of receipt. It
includes everything still in the hands of the Senate or Parliament

And old copies are kept physically in the National Library:
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2397909

Cheers,

Craig

On Sep 3, 12:53 pm, Kat Szuminska <kat...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Henare
>
> That's a tricky question! I don't know the answer.
>
> As you correctly point out, gifts over certain amounts given to  
> individual parliamentarians are registered in the Register of Members'  
> Interests and Senators' Interests. I'm not aware of another register  
> for gifts to the institutions as a whole, but the Registrars might be  
> able to answer that one, here are links to their contact details.
>

> Registar for the Register of Members' Interests' Bernard Wrighthttp://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/pmi/index.htm
>
> Registar for the Register of Senators' Interests'  Rosemary Lainghttp://www.aph.gov.au/senate/Committee/interests_ctte/index.htm

[Henare Degan]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 21:47, Craig Thomler <craig....@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is what a google search found....
>
> http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/pubs/standing_orders/e02.htm

Thanks Craig, that's great. I found that too and came to the same conclusions.

> There's a list kept by the Senate Registrar, it's public and new
> additions are tabled in the Senate within six months of receipt. It
> includes everything still in the hands of the Senate or Parliament

By public, I assume it means in the same way as the Register of
Members'/Senators' Interests was before OpenAustralia published it
online - available to the public in Canberra during certain hours and
only by inspecting it ;)

> And old copies are kept physically in the National Library:
> http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2397909

I've created a ticket[0] for us to track getting this and getting it online.

Cheers,

Henare

[0] http://tickets.openaustralia.org/browse/OA-333

[Henare Degan]

On 3 September 2009 09:05, Henare Degan <henare...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've created a ticket[0] for us to track getting this and getting it online.

Cheers,

Henare

[0] http://tickets.openaustralia.org/browse/OA-333

I used Right To Know and got the register, it's not very exciting: https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/register_of_gifts_to_the_senate

[Rosie Williams]

Hi, 

I decided to add properties owned by members and senators to my database at eXpenseAus and it occurred to me that the OAF may have already created an online searchable database with info regarding pecuniary interests in it so I've been looking for it here today. So far I have only found links to the original documents. 

Have you or are you going to scrape these documents to put the data into a database? If it is available can you post a link to it please?

regards

Rosie

[Henare Degan]

On 26 November 2013 19:36, Rosie Williams <budg...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Have you or are you going to scrape these documents to put the data into a database? If it is available can you post a link to it please?

It's impossible to scrape the PDFs from Parliament unfortunately. We did want to create a transcription tool and @mithro made some progress on that.

A while back the SMH got some uni students to manually transcribe the register: http://www.smh.com.au/national/political-interests and @maxious scraped it into a database: https://classic.scraperwiki.com/scrapers/au_federal_register_of_interests/

Cheers,

Henare

--
Henare Degan
Volunteer & Director - OpenAustralia Foundation

e » hen...@oaf.org.au
w » www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au
t » @OpenAustralia

[Rosie Williams]

Thanks for the confirmation. It didn't look scrapable to me so I am doing it by hand - which is why I wanted to see what other people had done as I started just with the properties but keep thinking there would be uses for all the types of entries in the forms and I'm trying to figure out the most efficient way to go about the task and just how keen I am to add various types of interests. I'll be doing this for purposes of combining with other datasets for purposes of forensics rather than just to have a html version of the pdfs.

Thanks for the links. The scraper wiki page seems to be down.

Congratulations on getting the pdfs online. Thankfully as there are only a couple hundred or so it is not an impossible task to do by hand although I do have trouble with the handwriting which at times is illegible!

regards

Rosie

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

You can still get the data out of scraperwiki classic via the API
https://api.scraperwiki.com/api/1.0/datastore/sqlite?format=csv&name=au_federal_register_of_interests&query=select%20*%20from%20%60swdata%60
There's only 7000 or so records so I've attached it to this email.

It's possible to make your own crowdsourced transcription project on
http://crowdcrafting.org/
In fact, PDF transcribing is so common they provide an example
http://crowdcrafting.org/app/pdftranscribe/
You can also host a project on your own server
https://github.com/PyBossa/pdftranscribe

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[Henare Degan]

On 27 November 2013 04:33, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir <max...@gmail.com> wrote:

It's possible to make your own crowdsourced transcription project on
http://crowdcrafting.org/
In fact, PDF transcribing is so common they provide an example
http://crowdcrafting.org/app/pdftranscribe/
You can also host a project on your own server
https://github.com/PyBossa/pdftranscribe

Amazing http://t.co/ilykM5A7wI

[Keith Moss]

Wow.

GovPond.org has umpteen thousand PDFs. Go go crowdsourcing.

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Cheers,

Keith

[Rosie Williams]

Thankyou very much for that.  I will give it all some thought and see what I can come up with.

regards

Rosie

[Rosie Williams]

I've added the data to eXpenseAus at http://infoaus.net/budget/expenses/expenses_home.php 

I'd like to combine it with other data to create a more powerful forensics tool but haven't quite got round to that. 

My twitter followers really enjoy this data so thanks for making it available. 

regards

Rosie

[Rosie Williams]

I was going to do this in a much more complicated fashion but realised I could just add the locations of the properties owned by federal politicians to the page listing the locations of their visits so that people can see if they have visited locations where they own investment properties. 

http://infoaus.net/budget/expenses/visit.php?name=RUDDOCK%20Philip

Rosie