Searching parliament's resources

Hansard

Hansard is the official report of the proceedings of the Parliament of Victoria (POV) from 1856 to the present day. Hansard can be found on the Parliament of Victoria website in a number of formats:

• Search Hansard includes:
  • advanced search of Hansard (1991–present)
• Browse Hansard includes:
  • Progressive publishing (HTML) – updated during sitting days (December 2018–present)
  • Hansard and Argus PDF records (1851–present)

Hansard contains records of parliamentary debate, question time, member’s statements, constituency questions—any official parliamentary activity

Search Hansard

• Advanced search: search by keyword, house (Legislative Assembly or Legislative Council), member of Parliament, year et cetera
• Search results: filter by house, member of Parliament, year, activity et cetera.
• Parliamentary proceedings (activity filter):
  • Second-reading debates—documents the debate of a bill before the house
  • Question time—documents the question from the opposition / minor party / independents and the appropriate minister’s response. Question time is one of the opportunities for government to be held to account.
  • Constituency questions—questions based on a matter that has been brought to an MPs attention by a member of their electorate

Search tips

Basic search:

• Useful if you know exactly what you’re looking for, or you want a broad picture of a keyword, phrase or topic
• Best used with search functions such as “__”, + etc
• Filters inlcude House, Parliament (current or previous or combination), Party, Activity (i.e. debate, petitions, committee etc), Current and/or former members

Advanced search:

• Additional search fields, such as:
  • Exact phrase
  • Title (subject heading of the contribution)
  • Without the words
  • Time frame (e.g. last seven days)

Search results

• Graph (histogram) at top of page indicates the frequency of mentions of a search term across the years. It can be further narrowed down by clicking on the year to get narrower time frames – month, day et cetera
• Can be refined further by different categories, such as:
  • Phrasing
  • Parliament
  • House
  • Activity type (i.e. debate, petitions, committee etc)
  • Sitting year
  • Locations
  • Organisations
• Results are colour coded and labelled for the house, and also include the:
  • • Proceeding (e.g. Bills, Committees, Members statements)
    • Date
    • Subject heading (e.g. Bill name, subject of question or statement)
    • Member and party name

Browse Hansard

Browse Hansard includes:

• Progressive publishing (HTML) – updated during sitting days (December 2018–present)
• Hansard and Argus PDF records (1851–present)

Browse Hansard is useful to see an overview of a particular sitting day or week. It  comes with an expandable table of contents showing the topics and which members spoke.

Parliamentary Library research papers

The Parliamentary Library publishes research papers on matters of importance to members of parliament, current or emerging issues and trends, and historical information. The research is:

• apolitical, providing a wide spectrum of perspectives, evidence and arguments
• supported by references to source material
• useful for a comprehensive understanding of an issue 

Find out more at www.parliament.vic.gov.au/about/publications/research-papers

Victorian Auditor-General’s Office

The Victorian Auditor-General’s Office is responsible for auditing the public sector on behalf of Parliament and Victorians. As an independent officer of Parliament, the Auditor General is an important part of Victoria’s integrity system.

Each year VAGO releases a series of audit reports which are published on their website.

The website has filter, search and advance search functions. This includes filtering reports by those which have been completed, are in progress or are in planning phase.

Find out more at www.audit.vic.gov.au/

Victorian legislation

There are three options for searching on the Victorian Legislation site: Legislation in force, Legislation as made, Bills.

Legislation in force

• This is the current legislation and will be the most up-to-date Acts of Parliament
• Within each Act it will have the version number and links to superseded versions of the Acts

Legislation as made

• This is the original Act, and does not include any amendments that may have been made at a later time

Bills

• This includes bills currently before parliament and bills that have been passed, withdrawn or defeated or lapsed.
• Each page will generally include an Introduction print (first iteration), and Explanatory Memorandum, and the passage of the bill through Parliament with links to key speeches, such as the Statement of Compatibility and the Second Reading Speech.

Find out more at www.legislation.vic.gov.au/