Watch your Senator with Project Democracy

Members of the Australian Senate often seem remote compared to House of Representatives members — in part because they represent a whole state rather than a more tightly-defined area — but in the current Federal Parliament the lack of a dominant party means that the Senate’s review function is more active than ever. Project Democracy makes it easier to track the activities of the Senators that represent you, offering news coverage, extracts from Hansard, electronic contact forms and discussion boards for every member of the Senate. The site is running an email campaign to try and encourage people to “track a senator” (you get a weekly email update, they get told how many people are watching them). I suspect a lot more people will be looking at Senator Nick Xenophon and Senator Barnaby Joyce — but it’s still good to see Internet-era political information sites with a more sophisticated approach than adopting Facebook as a campaign tool but then banning your staff from using it.