The Senate register

Where this comes from, and what it leaves out

This register publishes what the presiding officer records, and nothing else. Twice a year the President reports to the Senate on the status of every committee report that requires a government response. The most recent is the report as at 30 June 2026, tabled on 11 August 2026. It lists 285 reports and records a response received for 187 of them. The rest are here.

Since that date 14 more responses have been tabled, and those reports have been removed. The Senate also runs a live tracker of reports awaiting a response; it is carried here only for reports tabled after the President’s date, so it can add to the register but never overrule it. On this build it adds nothing, and every row below is the President’s.

What it does not have: reports tabled after , which neither source yet lists; anything the President excludes from his report, which includes reports on bills whose recommendations can only be dealt with in debate, estimates and annual-report scrutiny, and the Senate’s domestic committees; and the House of Representatives, which has its own presiding officer, its own schedule and its own six-month rule.

Outstanding reports

Ordered by how long each has waited. The status column is the President’s own:being considered is what he records as “Interim*”, and defines in his report as the government saying only that “the Government’s response is being considered”.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.

By committee

Committees with reports still outstanding, most first.

Whether the deadline is met

The register above is what is owed now. This is the record over 26 years: every response tabled between 2000 and 2026 whose report date the Senate’s register records — 1,486 of them — measured against the three-month rule. The interval runs from the report’s last tabling, which is the reading most favourable to the government. What this does and does not count.

Median: 420 days, or about 14 months, against a rule of three.

By government

A late response can be attributed to the government that tabled it, or to the government in office when the report was tabled. The two readings disagree about who performs worst, and the disagreement is the point: the ordering is an artefact of the choice, while the range — never above single figures — is not. Both are shown so that neither can be quoted alone.

Columns two and three count responses by who tabled them; columns four and five count them by who was in office when the report was tabled. No government in 26 years reaches one response in ten inside the deadline, on either reading.

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.