For the upcoming Australian federal election, I want a quick summary view of what politicians have been doing in their time in office, so I can decide if I want to vote for them or not. I am physically incapable of listening to politicians speak, and watching the news is a pretty inefficient way of finding this information.
Thankfully, They Vote For You does a lot of hard work to summarise what politicians are voting for in parliament. They get their data from the Australian parliament, which, also thankfully, publishes a lot of information about what is going on.
They Vote For You makes it easy to see what your representatives are voting for, but doesn’t make it easy to see each party’s stance on an issue. This is where my site comes in. It uses data provided by They Vote For You to show voting records at a party level.
Have a go! https://what-does-the-government-do.netlify.app/
It’s not perfect - the votes recorded are from divisions, which only make up a small minority of all the votes happening parliament. There is plenty more information published by the Australian parliament, but it’s nowhere near as concise as the information here.
Technical details
I used Netlify Functions to access the They Vote For You APIs. See my post on Netlify Functions.
I ended up writing the HTML myself. Hugo & other static site generators all seem to be most easily used to create blogs. I got frustrated trying to create a custom site with Hugo. I kinda regret this choice, as there’s already a lot of duplication between pages, but at least it was simple-ish to put together.
I intended to write all the CSS myself, but quickly gave up and went with Bootstrap. My initial version had no styling, and my first “hallway usability test” failed dismally with my partner asking “Is it supposed to look like this? It looks broken.” :P