OpenAustralia.org was launched last night. It is a collaborative, grassroots effort styled on TheyWorkForYou. in the UK.

Want to know when your local Federal member speaks in the House of Representatives? Enter your postcode and then you can be notified via RSS every time they speak in Parliament. You can even check out the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level for the readability of their speeches. Records go back to 2006.

Interestingly, the FAQs mention that they are keeping some “silly statistics” like “how often your member has uses alliterative phrases like “she sells seashells”. Why? Mainly in the hope that people will read deeper than just the headlines and numbers and actually have a look at the speeches. The other reason is because when TheyWorkForYouused to publish rankings of the most verbose politicians, staffers used to try to rig it by getting their bosses to ask incredibly rambling questions.