Yearly Archives: 2016

Join us for our 2016 End of Year Picnic in lovely Sydney Park

To celebrate all our achievements in 2016, and all you great people who make them possible, we’re having a little party on Sunday the 11th of December in Sydney. We’d love to see you there! While some of the biggest contributors to OpenAustralia Foundation projects are spread across Australia, unfortunately a national tour is not […]

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There’s no better way to learn how easy FOI requests are than to make one

Most people I speak to about making Freedom of Information requests think it’s too difficult to waste time on—it’s for lawyers, not them. When I’ve seen our FOI system presented in a teaching context, the clear message is ‘FOI is too hard, too slow, and too expensive’. The message has sunk in, including with journalists, […]

Posted in Event, RightToKnow.org.au | Tagged , , | 4 Responses

Our look at Australia’s current draft of its first Open Government National Action Plan

On November 13, the Open Government Partnership (OGP) wrote to the Australian Government http://www.opengovpartnership.org/sites/default/files/Australia%20-%20Steven%20Kennedy%20-%20November%202016.pdf “This letter is to inform you that, the Government of Australia has now acted contrary to the OGP process for three consecutive action plan cycles (2014, 2015 and 2016).” Australia is now at the final stages of preparing an action plan. […]

Posted in Announcement, Open Government Partnership, OpenAustralia Foundation | 1 Response

How to send your Freedom of Information request to many authorities at once

Right To Know makes it simple for you to request information from any public authority in Australia. Sometimes you might want to ask the same question but to lots of different public authorities at once. Right To Know can help you there too, with batch requests. Batch requests let you write one request that gets […]

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Bums on seats: how often is your representative present in Parliament?

Attendance levels in Parliament vary a lot. With the 45th Parliament just a few weeks in, our parliamentary vote tracking website They Vote For You is currently listing some federal politicians with 100% attendance and some with as low as 38% attendance. But what do these figures actually tell us and how accurate are they? […]

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The year is almost over – here’s our plan for the rest of 2016

While our trip to Cockatoo Island a year ago seems like it was an age away, this year feels like it has sped by. We’ve already launched two major projects in 2016 – something I don’t think we’ve ever done before. No wonder it feels like we’ve been busy. We had our final quarterly planning […]

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Happy Right To Know Day – you have the Right To Know, now right across Australia

Is it safe for your children to swim in the river? How much did your council spend on that fancy new mobile app? Will we be building better public transport? How much graffiti is being reported in your area? What really happened to those stranded whales you heard about? Australia’s state and local governments create […]

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OpenAustralia Foundation responds for your Right To Know

Today the ABC reports “Tax Office imposes blanket ban on FOI requests via Right To Know website”. In the article the OpenAustralia Foundation’s response provides the context of the Australian Tax Office’s (ATO) refusal to process valid FOI requests made through the Right To Know. We hope to see the ATO continue to process your requests, as they […]

Posted in Announcement, Media, RightToKnow.org.au | Tagged | 1 Response

They Vote For You – Why isn’t there a policy on that?

Firstly, thank you for visiting They Vote For You! We currently have over a hundred policies that you can use to explore how your representatives vote on particular issues. But what if something’s missing that you really care about? And why isn’t it there already? Here are three possible reasons why we may not have […]

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They Vote For You – What new policies would you like to see?

They Vote For You now has over one hundred policies to help us keep track of how our representatives are voting on our behalf! They range from whether to have a Royal Commission into banking to whether to legalise same-sex marriage, and you can find them all on your representative’s voting record. For example, here’s […]

Posted in OpenAustralia Foundation, They Vote For You | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Responses