The House register

Where this comes from, and what it leaves out

This register publishes what the presiding officer records, and nothing else. At roughly six-monthly intervals the Speaker presents to the House a schedule of the status of government responses to committee reports. The most recent is the schedule as at 30 June 2026, presented on 2 July 2026. It lists 105 reports and records a response received for 61 of them. The rest are here.

Whether a report is past its deadline is the Speaker’s judgement, not ours: the resolution of 29 September 2010 gives six months but excludes any period when the House was dissolved, so the interval cannot simply be counted off a calendar.

Alongside it, the government publishes its own status report, presented on 1 July 2026 and covering the same date. That is where the words “the Government’s response is being considered” are actually written; the President of the Senate abbreviates the same sentence to an asterisk in his report. It is read here for one purpose — to say what the government has said about a report — and it can never add a report to this register or remove one from it. Which reports are outstanding is the Speaker’s to say. All 44 reports below were found in it, and for every one of them the government records nothing more than that its response is being considered.

The schedule counts itself, by Parliament, on its fourth page, and that tally says 45 rather than the 44 published here. The difference is one report for which the schedule’s own entry records a response received before this reporting period, and for which the government’s report records the same response. Two records say the report was answered and one aggregate says it was not, so it is not published here as waiting. We would rather be one short than name a report as unanswered when it was answered.

What it does not have. Reports tabled after 30 June 2026, which the Speaker has not yet reported on — and because the schedule is presented about twice a year, that gap can be months wide. No compliance history: unlike the Senate, the House has no published register of responses going back to 2000. The Speaker gives his own on-time verdict on the responses each schedule records, which is what the figure above reports, but it covers one reporting period rather than a quarter of a century. And no submission counts yet — the figures on how many people and organisations wrote to these inquiries have to be collected inquiry by inquiry, and that has not been done.

Outstanding reports

Ordered by how long each has waited. Answered in part is the Speaker’s “partial response received”: the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit is answered by executive minute, one recommendation at a time, and a report is not treated as finished until every recommendation has been answered. 9 reports are in that state. How this is built.

Report titles link to the report itself on the Parliament's website where the Tabled Documents index has it. That index begins in 2022, so reports tabled before then are listed here without a link rather than with a guessed one.

Being considered is the government’s own sentence, from its status report, not a characterisation of ours.

By committee

Committees with reports still outstanding, most first.

Compared with the Senate

The two chambers are asked for different things: the Senate wants a response within three months, the House within six. So the two registers are not a league table, and the counts should not be added together without saying what each covers. Both are drawn from their presiding officer’s own record, and both currently stand as at 30 June 2026. The Senate register →

The whole register is available as CSV in thepublic repository, licensed CC BY 4.0. If you believe a row is wrong, please write tocorrections@toohardbasket.org.au — corrections are made within 24 hours of being confirmed and listed in the corrections log.