Who publishes this, and why you can check

The publisher

The Too Hard Basket is published by Australian Public Interest Alliance Incorporated (APIA), an incorporated association registered in Western Australia under the Associations Incorporation Act 2015 (WA), incorporation number IARN A1046494Z, ABN 33 842 796 620. APIA is not registered with the ACNC and is not endorsed as a deductible gift recipient, so donations to it are not tax deductible.

APIA exists to publish and maintain independent datasets about Australian government performance. The emphasis is on maintain. Public-interest projects often begin with strong intent and then stop being updated, and a register that goes stale is worse than no register, because people go on citing it. Putting the dataset under an incorporated body rather than a personal account is an attempt to make it outlive the enthusiasm of the person who started it.

APIA is governed by a committee of three, of which Alan Hewitt is President. The membership is on the public register maintained by Consumer Protection (WA). APIA is self-funded by its founder and has received no external funding to date. If that changes, this page will say so and name the source. APIA's governance page carries the constitution, the legal status and the same disclosures.

In practice this is one person's work. The other two committee members provide the governance an incorporated association requires; they do not direct the project or review it day to day. That is worth saying plainly, because “a committee of three” implies more institutional weight than exists, and a reader who worked it out later would be entitled to wonder what else had been oversold.

It also matters less than it might. Nothing here asks you to trust the organisation. Every figure is computed by published code from published data, every row links to the official record it came from, and the methods page sets out what the method cannot see as well as what it can. If something on this site is wrong, it is wrong in a way you can demonstrate — which is a better guarantee than a larger committee would be.

Disclosure

Alan Hewitt, APIA's President, volunteers in an unpaid capacity in the electorate office of Kate Chaney MP, the independent member for Curtin.He is not employed by her, not paid by her, and not directed by her. APIA receives no funding, direction or editorial input from any parliamentarian, party or candidate, and this site was not requested by any of them.

There is a second half to that disclosure, and it is the more important one, because it concerns where the project came from. The idea for this register — and the phrase “too hard basket” — came from watching Kate Chaney press the government about House committee reports it had never answered. Several were answered afterwards. The observation that followed was not about her: it was that a list of unanswered reports only existed because one member happened to compile it, that it covered one chamber, and that it stopped being maintained when the political moment passed. This site is an attempt to keep that list permanently, for every chamber, so that making it does not depend on anyone's attention.

A disclosure volunteered reads as integrity. The identical fact discovered later reads as concealment. That is the whole reason this section is near the top of the page rather than in a footnote.

Independence, as commitments rather than adjectives

“Independent” is a word anyone can print. These are the specific things it means here, and each of them is checkable or falsifiable:

• No political party affiliation, membership or endorsement.
• No government funding. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed here before the money is accepted.
• No paid advocacy, consulting or lobbying on any matter this site covers.
• No commercial products, sponsorships or advertising.
• Every dataset published in full under a named open licence.
• Every method published, including what it cannot see.
• A corrections policy with a named contact and a stated turnaround.

It costs very little to run — a domain, a mailbox and a static host — and that is deliberate: a register that needs money to survive eventually needs someone who has money to like it.

What this site does not do

It does not say whether a committee's recommendation was a good one, or whether the government was right to accept or reject it. Those are arguments, and there are plenty of people having them. This site records only what the official record shows: that a report was tabled, that a response was or was not tabled, and when.

It does not attribute motive. Where a response is absent, this site says no response is recorded — not that one was refused, suppressed or avoided. Where a judgment is finely balanced, it is resolved in the government's favour, so that every figure here is a floor rather than a ceiling.

And it is not partisan, which is easier to demonstrate than to assert: the record by government shows four governments of both persuasions inside the same narrow band, published under both of the two defensible ways of attributing a late response, so that neither can be quoted alone.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it should be fixed, and the fastest way to make that happen is to say so. Write to corrections@toohardbasket.org.au with the row and the source. Corrections are made within 24 hours of being confirmed and listed in the corrections log, so the record of what this site said, and when it changed, stays visible.

Anything else: contact@toohardbasket.org.au. The dataset and the code that produces every figure are in the public repository — data under CC BY 4.0, code under the MIT licence. How the register is built.

What comes next

The Senate was the first register and the House of Representatives is the second. 1 more is planned — Western Australian parliamentary committee reports — and each is published as its own register with its own rule rather than merged into the others, because the obligation is different in each case and averaging them would hide that. The Senate asks for three months and the House for six; a single combined number would mean nothing.

Registers live: 2. Planned: 1.