PromiseLocker is a new crowd sourcing web app that aims to catch Australian pollies out when they tell a fib. As its name implies, it captures and tracks all of the promises made by elected officials; from the big campaign slogans to the smaller promises made by individual candidates. You can then keep tabs on who the nation’s biggest liars are.
Politicians don’t have the best track record when it comes to keeping promises made on the campaign trail. In addition, political parties have been known to remove promises from their websites after the election, which can make it difficult to keep tabs on every promise that was made. This is where the new crowd sourcing project PromiseLocker aims to help.
“People vote for candidates on the basis of their election promises, but there has never been an easy way to view all of the promises made and check if they were kept,” explains PromiseLocker’s co-founder Chris Noone.
“We decided the only way to collate the promises was to tap into the wisdom of the crowd and provide tools for people to record the promises and share them online. It’s impossible for the media to capture every promise uttered by all of the candidates, but collectively this knowledge rests with the voters.”
PromiseLocker allows anyone to submit a promise made by a political organisation which they then provide regular updates on as the promise’s “curator”.
Crucially, the curator is required to provide supporting evidence of any promise they submit, such as the political party’s website or a reputable media link. This should help minimise the amount of bogus/fake promises uploaded by political mud-slingers.
“Before the election all of the major parties recorded promises on PromiseLocker, except the Liberals,” Noone noted. “That makes it even more important for voters to seize the opportunity to keep the Liberals honest.”
We think PromiseLocker is an excellent concept, but its current form does seem a bit confused and unwieldy — instead of focusing on the nation’s political parties, the site attempts to encompass literally any person or organisation. You can even record a Personal Promise which seem to be mainly centered around fitness and motivational goals.
Personally, we think a streamlined offshoot aimed solely at keeping our political representatives in check would be a better way to go.
You can check out the application for yourself here.
Comments
10 responses to “Keep Track Of Politicians’ Promises With New Crowdsourcing App”
Abbott is a grade A con artist .. this app is gonna come in handy !!
he’ll keep fringe benefits tax break employees receive for buying cars though salary sacrifice “BUT” cut $500 million from the Automotive Transformation Scheme. Theses are the same mob that threaten labor would destroy the Australian car industry …. when Labor would give a $500 million boost to the car industry funding to the end of the decade and $300 million a year beyond 2020
…………..how can Australians fall for this ? nothing but a con. btw thanks for the apps
Yeah, he.. like all the others once again promised a range crossing for Toowoomba. However this time the sneaky bastard cooked himself up an out… “we’ll put in the range crossing if you vote me in the next term”… Grrrr HATE…!!
If a company is viable it should be able to support itself.
But Labor has destroyed the car sales industry. Havent you been keeping up with the news?
New car sales have been falling ever since Labor made changes to the FBT.
Some headlines (you can search for the articles yourself):
“Fringe benefits tax changes to wipe out 100,000 new-car sales: FCAI”
“FBT changes to spark 20pc drop in car sales.”
“Manufacturing threatened by Rudd’s changes to car tax deductions “
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.
Just in case: even if you want to support local car manufacture, making changes to the FBT make sense. It is poorly targeted, because it doesn’t restrict the subsidisation (and really, that’s what we’re talking about here) is not limited to domestically manufactured cars. It would be more sensible to replace it with some alternative support package which represents the subset of the savings from the FBT change, which is the hit to local vehicle manufacture.
There is also the obvious: losers will make any claims they can plausibly get away with, true or not, in order to hold onto their benefits (think Alliance of Australian Retailers regarding plain cigarette packaging).
@warcroft …..
yeh i also cant seem to tell either if your being serious or not but this seem to be a common occurrence with abbot supports … DID YOU EVEN READ THE ARTICLES ? no where does it say “Labor has destroyed the car sales industry” ….. what do you think abbots plan to “cut $500m from industry assistance” will do to the Australian car “MANUFACTURING” industry (you know the industry that australian jobs actually rely on ???) that fact that you pointed to tabloid articles instead to pasting fact really says alot ….
this is why we cant have fast internet in Australia folks (soon my telstra wireless service will be fast then the liberal nbn no joke)
There are two simple refutations to those claims:
1) The figures quoted are projections based on best case scenarios and not considering time of year factors (like car sales always drop after June 30th). Given that sales were falling months before the FBT announcement (which is why Ford closed up shop and there have been so many demands for increases in subsidies), those projections look absurd. Particularly when last week, figures revealed in the AFR showed what actually turned out to be a 0.2% drop in car sales post the change. Not 20% – 0.2%. Project that same factor of hyperbole onto the 100,000 claim (which isn’t lost sales, it’s projected lost sales, like when the mining industry claims 20,000 jobs have been lost, when in reality not one person was fired), and you get 1,000 car sales lost.
2) Even if there wasn’t demonstrated evidence that the claims from the automative industry (and a certain media company) were outrageously exaggerated, the changes meant that taxpayers were no longer subsidising cars that were being purchased for 95% private use. That’s clearly a rort, as the benefits are mainly for those with a high income tax rate, being subsidised by those on a low one.
There are far better arguments for subsidising car manufacturing than car sales (not the least of which is a maintaining defence capability), which is why we subsidise the industry so heavily.
Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, but I don’t actually trust the ‘wisdom of the crowd’. I think I’ll rely on PolitiFact Australia’s ‘Abbott-O-Meter’ when it launches. From the PolitiFact site:
Also:
Politifact can dive deep into the big promises because they are staffed with a few full-time journalists, but they would have to be superhuman to be watching what is happening in every Libera-held electorate in the country. The model is simply not scalable. It’s like Encyclopaedia Britannica vs Wikipedia.
There is absolutely no need to care who gets into office or not. what matters is . is they do what they are told! Australians are a victim of their own Apathy and it shows! because we dont want to be a political person, we would rather play or watch sports n get tanked!
THat is changing. younger kids today (im in my 30’s) I put myself in that group the technology age, are wanting to take that power back. I would like to see everyone once a month vote on the bills in parliament . in each electorate. and the majority of the vote, then instructs the nominated representative how to vote in parliament and the senate. if they dont, they go to jail for treason. its very simple!