The holy grail of political transparency
A new project aims to give political journalists the information they need, when they need it. And it may just save them a repetitive strain injury.
BURN THE REGISTER is a new collaborative journalism project that will make the interests register of federal politicians searchable. It received a grant from the Walkleys Innovation Fund in 2017. This is a case study highlighting what’s currently wrong—and right—about political transparency.
Australia’s 226 federal politicians, who have contributed to thousands of young Australians being locked out of the housing market, own more than 500 properties, worth as much as $370 million.
When this discovery was delivered in April, at the height of the community’s concerns over housing affordability, it highlighted tension between politicians’ personal experiences and those of the community.
Finding the story took painstaking analysis of hundreds of PDF documents on the Parliamentary Register of Interests.
It was an example of timely, labour-intensive journalism from two of Australia’s top bureaux inside the Canberra Press Gallery.
But the story behind the story is one of both triumph and frustration.
Inside the ABC
The ABC’s Ashlynne McGhee has worked in the Canberra Press Gallery for barely a year, but in that time she has made her mark with innovative and agenda-setting stories. She has pursued politicians over political donations, filmed a TV package from the Middle East on a smartphone and secured documents through FOI law that highlight just how close TV series Utopia is to reality.
In April, McGhee decided to pursue one of her most ambitious projects.
“The Government was spruiking housing affordability as the centrepiece of its budget, yet we knew so little about their own property portfolios,” she said.
”Australians have a right to know if an MP voting to keep negative gearing has a big investment property portfolio—so they can make up their own mind if that’s a conflict of interest.”
Similar work had been done before, including by Deakin university researchers in 2014 and in 2016 by The Australian’s Joe Kelly and Kylar Loussikian, who now writes for the Daily Telegraph, but McGhee believed that the public needed to know about the investments of all MPs in the latest parliament. She spent days trawling through members and senators’ property declarations.
“By the end, my brain was fuzzy, my eyes blurred and I had a mild RSI developing in my wrists! The registers are in PDF and in many cases handwritten, so it was a massive data entry task to transfer them to Excel.”
In a comprehensive online story and TV package, she found that politicians were “aggressive” investors and few could even be considered “tycoons", with at least 10 properties to their name.
The story went live on the ABC website on the morning of Wednesday April 19.
A rude awakening
That morning, Fairfax journalist Adam Gartrell woke up and, like any other day, checked his phone from bed.
“I woke up in the morning and saw a Tweet and at first I thought ‘oh, how has our story gone out already?’”
In the preceding weeks, Gartrell and his colleague Tom McIlroy had been working on an almost identical story to McGhee's.
Gartrell and McIlroy are also journalists with growing reputations. The former, alongside colleague Amy Remeikis, was credited with smoking out Barnaby Joyce’s kiwi citizenship in August and the latter divides his time between the Parliament House bureau and the Canberra Times newsroom depending on where the next explosive public service story needs him.
As the property debate escalated in April, they too had recognised that nobody had provided a comprehensive stocktake on what property our current politicians own. But in a rare coincidence for such a labor-intensive investigation, McGhee had beaten them to publishing by a matter of days.
“That morning I thought ABC was doing a lift of our story, but I clicked through and realised they’d done all the same work that we’d done,” Gartrell said.
“I think I probably screamed an expletive and jumped out of bed and started calling people.”
McIlroy was one of the first people he spoke to.
“When the ABC story was published we both felt deflated and disappointed — but quickly we realised that a well written analysis meant our work didn’t need to be wasted,” McIlroy said.
Within days, they published their own story, which McIlroy described as “very well read”.
A better way
McIlroy believes the parliamentary register of interests is a “rich trove” of information that “isn’t properly utilised by the Press Gallery” and that “politicians hate the scrutiny”.
The problem hindering journalists is twofold: the sheer scale of the 2500+ page register, and disclosure rules that mean records are difficult to access in messy, scanned, often handwritten PDF forms.
Gartrell recalls the “exhausting” week of work he and McIlroy committed to transcribing just a small subset of the register.
“I was utterly exhausted, the eyes were glazing over and it was getting to the point where I was seeing politicians’ disclosures in my dreams.”
The situation leaves many stories undiscovered.
“When we’re talking about banking legislation, or the banking royal commission, finding out how many government MPs have shares in the big four — that’s the sort of work that if you could do it quickly and easily, then you can do those stories,” Gartrell said.
“If you have to devote three of four days to try to get that story up, then you might not bother, and that’s a shame because those are important stories.”
Citizens, journalists and publishers have attempted to solve this problem before. Charity OpenAustralia started listing disclosures on their website in 2009 and UTS journalism students (in partnership with Fairfax) won a digital journalism Walkley in 2012 for transcribing the the register and producing a series on political gifts, but neither has proven an enduring solution.
More recently, journalists have collated the material on an ad-hoc basis, depending on what’s in the news. It means efforts are being duplicated, leaving less time for analysis and deeper investigation.
BURN THE REGISTER is a new project that aims to solve the problem permanently by making the register searchable. It’s a community of individuals, assisted by crowd-sourcing technology and optical character recognition, committed to creating the definitive resource accessible to all media outlets and the general public.
The project has received funding from the Walkley Innovation Fund, and is currently running weekly “sprints” to transcribe disclosures in a rigorous, systematic, fun and collaborative way. McGhee, McIlroy and Gartrell are among dozens of Press Gallery journalists supporting the project.
Gartrell describes it as “God’s work”.
Sign up for a walkthrough of BURN THE REGISTER and start contributing at https://burntheregister.com. The author of this piece is founder of BURN THE REGISTER.
Register reform?
The federal interests disclosure system is flawed for three reasons, according to Fairfax journalist Adam Gartrell: the rules aren’t clear, the Senate allows interests to be hidden, and disclosures aren’t searchable.
“It’s basically open to every individual MP’s interpretation about what they need to disclose,” he said.
“For example, it was very hard for us to say we had a specific number of these properties because some of them hide their properties behind trusts, or private companies.”
There is also a loophole that allows the interests of spouses of Senators to remain private.
Then there’s form of the register.
“Having to download manually each handwritten PDF is just completely archaic and why it’s so time consuming,” he said.
“Sometimes you can’t even read their handwriting — that could be deliberate — but for example Greg Hunt has the worst handwriting in human history and we couldn’t even make sense of what he’s disclosing.”
Change is on the horizon, but progress is slow. In 2011, the Senate Standing Committee of Senators’ Interests chaired by Senator Cory Bernardi said the committee “will continue to investigate” options such as online forms “and will report to the Senate on this matter in due course”.
Six years later, and the latest report from the committee states it is “awaiting the development of a suitable technical solution”. The possibility of a new system for the next Parliament has been raised in estimates hearings.
Over in the House of Representatives, reform is underway, but it’s far from substantial.
The House committee has decided that from next Parliament MPs will not have to send in paper-based hard copies any more — emailing in PDFs will be enough.
