About checkhansard
A free, fast search engine for every speech given in Australian Parliament since 1991.
What’s in the data
We index every chamber speech from the House of Representatives and the Senate, as published in the official Hansard, plus committee hearings from 2016 onwards. Coverage runs from 1991 to the present, updated daily from aph.gov.au.
- 900,000+ speeches indexed
- 877 members tracked (past and current)
- Both chambers — Senate, House of Representatives, and joint committees
- 1991–present — date range
Use the Source filter on the search page to narrow to chamber debates, committee hearings, or both. Committee hearings are available from 2016 onwards; chamber debates are indexed back to 1991. We don’t currently index pre-1991 Hansard or written submissions.
How the three search modes work
Keyword
Exact and substring matches using standard text search. Fast, predictable. Use “quotes” to match phrases exactly. Best when you know a specific word or phrase that was spoken.
Semantic
Uses AI embeddings (Voyage AI) to find speeches whose meaning matches your query, even when they use different words. Best for questions and topics (“when did the government announce AUKUS?”, “speeches about climate adaptation”).
Best match (hybrid, default)
Runs both modes in parallel and ranks speeches by a blended score. Speeches that match both keyword and semantic rank highest. This is the recommended mode for most queries.
Privacy
We log search queries along with mode, filters, result count, and duration — used only to improve search quality. We never log IP addresses in the clear; we hash them with a daily rotating salt so they can be counted but not identified or linked across days. We don’t set tracking cookies, run ads, or share data with third parties.
Search queries that have been run at least three times over the past 30 days may appear in the autocomplete dropdown to help other users find common topics. Rare and one-off queries are never surfaced.
For the full breakdown, see the privacy page.
Attribution
Hansard content is © Commonwealth of Australia, made available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. checkhansard is not affiliated with the Parliament of Australia.
Contact
Feedback, bug reports, data corrections — drop us a line.