About

Peculiar Interests brings together the interests declared by Australia's federal MPs and senators. You can look up a politician, see who has declared shares in a company, or read the latest changes. The data is also available to download as JSON and CSV.

The House publishes statements as PDFs; the Senate uses a web app. This site extracts the declarations from both sources and checks for updates each night. Each politician's page links to their official statement.

How we extract the data

Senate declarations come from the data service behind the official register. For most House statements, we extract the text from PDF tables. Handwritten scans are transcribed using Claude, then checked against the document by a person. Transcriptions awaiting review are labelled on the politician's page.

We keep the wording of the declarations, treating placeholders such as "Not Applicable" as empty entries. The mentions pages group names from company, bank and other organisation fields so you can see who declared them.

Corrections

If we have misread a declaration, open a GitHub issue or email ben.swift@anu.edu.au with the person's name and the error. For errors in the official statement, contact the Registrar of Members' Interests or the Senate Standing Committee of Senators' Interests.

About the project

Peculiar Interests is a Cybernetic Studio project by Ben Swift at the ANU School of Cybernetics. Ben also makes the Australian Government AI Tracker. The code is licensed under MIT and the dataset under CC BY 4.0. The project is independent of the Parliament of Australia and political parties.