ParlSubmissions

GOYA! GET OFF YOUR BACKSIDE!

This blog believes that people should get involved with our democratic process by letting your voice be heard through submissions to parliament. Even 1% of the time you spend writing your posts or comments in the blogosphere would be a huge improvement!

UPDATE 2008-05-18: The Wonkery is a new site devoted to tracking and preparing for government inquiries… you are all welcome to join!

You can find out a list of inquiries (both into bills referred to committee and general enquiries) at the Current Inquiries By Subject at the Australian Parliament House.

Note that the times between advertising for public submissions and the closing date for submissions is getting tighter and tighter, but I can’t imagine it being under a working week, but just under a fortnight is quite common.

A How-To Guide for making submissions is posted on the Australian Parliament House website, along with other guidelines to witnesses and procedures.

A list of RSS feeds from parliament is available here, which include those for newly announced inquiries and recently tabled reports. If you plan on rocking up in person, try the upcoming hearings feed.

You can see a list of my personal submissions (some short, some longer) to give you an idea of how little you need to do: basically your entire submission could be “I support the bill” or “I urge parliament to reject the bill”.

• Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill 2006 and my submission, and those of mates Kieran Bennett and Chris Flynn. You can see that even individuals like us can be noticed if you read the final report Sections 5.2, 5.4 and 5.5.
   
• Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill 2007 a.k.a “AccessCard”, the final report, my submission and a Defence Signals Directorate Note to the committee that directly addresses some of the issues I raised.
   
• Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Bill 2007 and my submission.
   
• Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Testing) Bill 2007 and my submission (and a horrifying submission from Australia for Australians that is worth reading to see exactly who this bill was meant to please). Other submissions are here, while the report is here.
   
• Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 & Related Bills, and my very rushed submission.

Feel free to add a link to a submission you have made as a private individual

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See also related posts:
Cluster Bombs: Hang your head in shame Australia! 2007-06-02
My Submission on Content Services Bill 2007 2007-05-30
Human Services are too dumb to manage a smart card 2007-02-22
Isreali war machine helps Australian democracy? 2007-02-22 reviewing Cluster Bomb submissions and the eligibility to make submissions
Senate IT Committee System outage woes 2007-05-27 on the technical troubles I had making a submission because the parliamentary info web server was misbehaving.
Review of JingoismCitizenship Testing Bill Submissions 2007-07-05

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