Who are your MPs and what do they stand for?

One of those actions could be to contact their one members of parliament from the Legislative Assembly (lower house) and their five members of parliament from the Legislative Council (upper house).

Why contact a member of parliament

There are a number of reasons someone might contact a member of parliament. It could be to attend an event, to help connect them with support organisations, or to ask them to advocate on their behalf on an issue. Members of parliament can also sponsor a petition, ask constituency questions, or may speak on their community's behalf in parliament. No matter the reason for contacting a member of parliament, there are three things that are useful to consider:

• What the issue is
• Why is the issue important
• What would you like the member of parliament to do

The Engaging with parliament poster set has instructions and links for the main ways people can be involved in parliamentary processes, including Contacting an MP, Petitions, and Committees.

Finding out who are your members of parliament

The first step to contacting your members of parliament is to work out which electorate your in.

The Victorian Electoral Commission’s website has an interactive map where you can look up the electorate details of any location in Victoria. The map has a field for the address and by default will provide the Upper House Region (Legislative Council) and the Lower House District (Legislative Assembly) as well as local council information. There are additional layers that can be added, such as Federal Divisions.

• It's worth noting, that if you're contacting members of parliament about an issue to do with a school or business, it may be in a different electorate to a residential address, especially if you live and work in a metropolitan area as some of the Lower House Districts can be geographically small.

Once you know what electorates you live in, then it's off to the Find a member section of the Parliament of Victoria website to select the appropriate electorates from the drop down menu on the left-hand side of the page.

• To make it easier you can just select the electorate for the Lower House District, and the result will show the Legislative Assembly member. Clicking on the member's information will take you to their page that includes About, Electorate, Reporting, History and Contact information, as well as a list of their portfolios (responsibilities).
• The Legislative Council members are listed on the 'Electorate' tab of the member's page.  

How to find out what your members of parliament stand for

It's possible to contact all six members of parliament about your issue, but it may also be worth considering working out which members of parliament might be most interested in your issue.

On the About tab of a member's page you will find their background, what they did before entering parliament and also maybe areas of interest.

• Members of parliament will also have listed any of their ministry positions, leadership positions and committees they have been or are members of
• At the bottom of the page you will find a link to their Inaugural speech, thier first speech in parliament that often outlines why they wanted to be a member of parliament

Using this information you can explore the issues that each member of parliament might care most about.  

Diving deeper

If you want to know more about what your member of parliament has been up to since joining parliament, you can always search Hansard, the official report of parliamentary proceedings.

Like most database search engines, you can refine Hansard search by choosing key words, exact phrases and titles. But you can also refine the search by members of parliament under the 'Current Members' drop down menu. This means you can search for what your six members of parliament have said on your issue.

• Hansard is a record of all parliamentary proceedings, so selecting a number of key words may help limit your search.
• You can also limit your search to a particular time, if you're wanting to see what's been said this year, for example.

There is more information available on how to search Hansard on our Supporting resources page

You can refine the search results even further by:

• clicking on the graph along the top of the page to focus in on particular years, months or days
• using the filter system on the left-hand side, especially the 'Activity' filter. Important words in the 'Activity' filter to look for include:
  • Second reading = debate on bills
  • Member statements = statements on matters of importance to that member of parliament
  • Divisions = votes on bills (documents how the member may have voted on a bill)
  • Constituency questions = Questions the member of parliament have asked on behalf of a member of their community