Simply put I wanted to know where all the Parliamentarian's went to school and any links that exist between them. The closest approximation to this was this Sydney Morning Herald article which I used as a starting point.
There are several intriguing questions that arise from this research:
- Where did my local MP and [insert name of any politician my friends keep asking me about] go to school?
- Which members have attended the same school?
- Has school funding been affected by the number of politicians as alumni ?
- Has there been a shift between parliaments ?
- Are there schools which routinely have MPs ?
- Does the location of the school impact party and policy ?
The other good reason for doing this make Australian political data easier to find and update. There is a good library for it in R https://github.com/RohanAlexander/AustralianPoliticians, but I wanted to make the data a little more agnostic.
See analysis or notebook for initial analysis.
View the Felt Map here
Please note that I collated this data to the best of my ability in my free time and for fun. If you plan to use it for research purposes, I recommend conducting some quality assurance and contributing to the dataset. Additionally, please ensure that you provide proper attribution and consult the copyright and licensing information. copyright
We are missing the exact school for the following ministers and senators.
- Alex Antic - Public
- Arthur Sinodinos - Public
- Jana Stewart - ?
- Jess Walsh - Non-government
- Karen Grogan - ?
- Peter Whish-Wilson - Both
- Marielle Smith - Both
- Graham Perrett - Public
- Peter Khalil - Non-government
- Milton Dick - Non-government
- Rob Mitchell - Public
- Llew O'Brien - Did not graduate but left school in year 9
- Michelle Ananda-Rajah - ?
- Sam Birrell - ?
- Susan Templeman - Public
- Stephen Bates - International probably
- Tracey Roberts - ?
- Vince Connelly - Non-government
- Julian Simmonds - Non-government
- Nicolle Flint - Non-government
Wikipedia has the best linkage between a member and school attended, it is not as rich as APH. The school names in APH are looked up against acara_school_locations_2022 to see if we can find a match. Locations are derived from Wikipedia and Google maps. Some universities have multiple locations and campuses which may have lead to incorrect locations I use headquarter locations in this case https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P159 As above some may be online in which case I will just pick a headquarters of campus
- Wikipedia
- This one is invaluable - https://handbook.aph.gov.au/Parliamentarian
- Manual search where no school found (Wikipedia text search, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, APH, blog posts and articles etc) I should've kept track of this to start with
- School information https://www.acara.edu.au/contact-us/acara-data-access
- SMH article
- acara_education_finances - Financial data from ACARA only (2021)
- acara_finance_missing - Schools where no financial data exists
- acara_school_locations_2022 - School locations from ACARA
- acara_school_profile_2022 - School profiles from ACARA
- aec_parties - Party lookup from AEC
- aec_elb_2021 - AEC 2021 Electoral Boundaries
- aph_parliamentarians - All Parlmentarians downloaded from APH
- education - Education data compiled from multiple sources (Originally Wikipedia+APH)
- education_acara - Matched datasets to ACARA data
- members_wiki - Members from Wikipedia
- members_aph - Members from APH
- members_occupations - Members occupations from APH
- members_secondary_occupations - Miniiters secondary occupations
- members_secondary_school - Members secondary school from APH (split by "/,")
- smh_careers - Career data from SMH
- smh_ministry - Ministry data from SMH
- members - All members compiled from multiple sources
- education - All education compiled from multiple sources
- member_education - Linking table between members and education
- member_aph
- member_aph_47
- member_aph_46
- member_secondary_school_education_47
- member_secondary_school_education_46
pip install poetry
poetry installUsing QGIS open the data/analysis.qgz file.
Using Datasette run the following command from the root directory
datasette install
datasette data/aped.db --load-extension spatialite- AEC : © Commonwealth of Australia (Australian Electoral Commission)2023
- ACARA : © Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 2023
- ABS : © Commonwealth of Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics) 2023
- https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/standards/australian-statistical-geography-standard-asgs-edition-3/jul2021-jun2026/access-and-downloads/data-services-and-apis
- Mapbox
- Openstreetmap
- Map tiler
- Linked Data ? https://asgs.linked.fsdf.org.au/dataset/asgsed3/collections
- Pandas + Geopandas
- QGIS
- PostgreSQL + PostGIS
- Wikidata
- Jupyter
- Plotly + Dash
- Mapbox
- Felt
- Convert to issues
- Convert QGIS to using aped.gpkg
- Add high_school_international to members table
- Add issue templates for suggesting member data
- Add at a glance
- Add related news
- Fix Age or make generated column
- Finish Plotly map see app
- Switch to Indigenous names for Capital cities (Because 2023)
- Add theyvote for you link https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/representatives/grayndler/anthony_albanese
- Add openpolitics https://openpolitics.au/member/penny-allman-payne
- https://github.com/openaustralia/openaustralia-parser
- I can never remember how SPARQL entities work exactly so I just got ChatGPT to write them for me
ogr2ogr -f GPKG aped.gpkg PG:"service=ape" -oo LIST_ALL_TABLES=YES -mapFieldType "StringList=String,IntegerList=String" -oo SCHEMAS="public"
- Schools should be publicly funded
- Latest School Statistics
- Do politicians know what it's like to do your job?
- Politician Degrees
- Women in parliament
- Demographics of 46th Parliament
- ABS Education Stats
Developers: Daniel Carter, Noah YimEditors Fleta Page, Rob Harris Design/Production: Mark Stehle, Matthew Absalom-Wong