Methodology and data sources
WhoRunsAus turns public records into an explorable map while keeping the source and meaning of each relationship visible.
What a connection means
A line represents only the relationship named on that line, such as shared current party membership. It does not imply coordination, influence, wrongdoing, friendship or any relationship beyond the cited public fact.
Identity and parliamentary membership
People retain a Wikidata QID as their global key and are matched one-to-one with the Parliament of Australia's Parliamentary Handbook identifier. Current party, chamber, electorate, biography and service history come from the Parliamentary Handbook; any ambiguous or incomplete identity match stops publication.
Faction classifications
Factions are not inferred from party, voting patterns or graph position. A faction is shown only when a published current-member list maps uniquely to a current parliamentarian and includes an HTTPS source, publisher and retrieval date. Conflicting lists are excluded and recorded separately. An empty faction means “no unambiguous sourced classification in this snapshot”, not “no faction”.
Voting attendance and party rebellion
They Vote For You reports the share of recorded divisions in which a parliamentarian voted and, for party members, the share in which they voted against the majority of their party. Voting attendance is not physical attendance in Parliament. Pairing, leave, ministerial duties, the presiding officer's conventions and divisions that are not recorded can affect the figures, so they are context rather than a performance score. These metrics are produced from the They Vote For You database under ODbL 1.0.
Update and correction policy
Data changes are versioned in Git. Corrections should include the affected page, the disputed field and a public source. We aim to acknowledge correction reports promptly and review substantiated factual issues within 48 hours.
News aggregation
News feeds contain only the publisher's title, a plain-text source-provided summary capped at 200 characters, the canonical external link, publisher, time and matched parliamentarian IDs. We never fetch or store article bodies. Items are URL/title deduplicated, limited to the latest 48 hours and capped at 100. Name matching uses unique full names and globally unique surnames from the checked-in parliamentarian dataset; no match is invented. Stories that use only a title or nickname, or do not name a parliamentarian, may not appear. Sources are checked adaptively and reviewed snapshots are promoted daily after release checks.
Current news snapshot: 37 items from 4 configured publishers, retrieved 30 July 2026.
Polling and electorate scenarios
National observations are parsed from Wikipedia's attributed polling aggregation. Missing values stay missing. The electorate map begins with the AEC's final 2025 two-party-preferred result and adds the movement between the 2025 national ALP TPP baseline and the latest complete published ALP 2PP observation.
Uniform swing scenario — not a prediction. It assumes identical movement in every electorate and does not account for sampling error, pollster effects, candidates, redistributions, local campaigns, preference flows or seat-specific information.
Poll tables and faction lists are adapted and restructured from the specific Wikipedia articles cited on each record under CC BY-SA 4.0; the derived fields remain available under the same licence.
141 poll observations · 150 AEC divisions. This product incorporates data that is © Commonwealth of Australia (Australian Electoral Commission) 2026. AEC data used with permission. The AEC has not evaluated this altered derivative and gives no warranty.
Newsletter and advertising
Newsletter addresses submit directly to a configured external provider; WhoRunsAus does not persist them. The form is disabled when no HTTPS provider action is configured. Advertising is also disabled by default: the script and slots render only after public AdSense identifiers are configured, and the product rule requires more than 30,000 monthly page views before application or activation.
Current sources
Snapshot retrieved 1 August 2026.
Known limitations
- Upstream public records can lag parliamentary changes.
- Faction reporting is incomplete and changes over time.
- Shared-party display connections are bounded to keep the graph readable.
- WhoRunsAus is an independent project and is not an official parliamentary record.