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Status: activeType: 🏛️ civic techCountry: Australia Website: www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au
Status active
Type 🏛️ civic tech
Country Australia
Website www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au
Contact contact@oaf.org.au
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RSS feed www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/feed
Concepts Radical Transparency E Government Accountability Sink
Last activity 2026-02-17 rss
Latest post: Become a Fundraising Champion for Civic Tech

OpenAustralia Foundation

The OpenAustralia Foundation is a non-partisan charity whose work centres on making Australian parliamentary and government information accessible and usable. They build and maintain several well-known tools:

  • They Vote For You — tracks how every MP and Senator votes on legislation
  • OpenAustralia — makes parliamentary debates searchable and followable
  • Right To Know — a platform for making and tracking Freedom of Information requests
  • Planning Alerts — notifies citizens of development applications near them

The foundation's model is to take government data that is technically public but practically inaccessible and present it in a form ordinary people can actually use. This kind of infrastructure work is foundational to an informed democratic public.

The foundation's independence has been tested. In 2021–22, Liberal MPs Andrew Bragg and Dave Sharma complained to regulators and then threatened legal action over They Vote For You's representation of their voting records, arguing it was misleading. Landauer maintained the site was non-partisan and acknowledged it was constrained to recording formal votes only — not the public positions MPs take outside the chamber.1

Key people

Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska co-founded the foundation in 2009.1 Landauer has served as director and is the public face of the organisation, including during the 2021–22 controversy over They Vote For You's accuracy.

See also

  1. "It was established in 2009, co-founded by Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska." and "federal Liberal MPs Andrew Bragg and Dave Sharma accused They Vote for You of distorting their voting records," "OpenAustralia Foundation", Wikipedia. ↩↩

History