Methodology

Automated jobs poll public sources on a daily schedule, prioritising party leaders and ministers before backbenchers. We ingest Hansard (OpenAustralia), minister media releases, national politics RSS (ABC, Guardian AU, SMH), verified social accounts, and Reddit for leaders/frontbench only. National news requires speaker attribution — statements are only linked to the minister who delivered them.

Each statement is deduplicated by URL with source, date, and attribution confidence recorded at ingest. Party leaders' direct speech and social posts are captured first. News items must match speaker-attribution patterns before insert. Topic labels and policy relevance scores are assigned during AI analysis (step 03). Only verified statements appear on the public Statements page.

Statements and declared policy positions are converted into vector embeddings using OpenAI text-embedding-3-small. When a new statement is embedded, it is compared against the politician's past statements and declared policy positions using pgvector cosine similarity. This measures semantic alignment between what a politician says now versus what they have previously said or committed to.

When the AI identifies a significant contradiction between a new statement and past positions or policies, it generates a divergence record with a plain-English explanation and severity rating. New detections are queued as under_review; only human-reviewed items are published on the site. Ingest runs daily; AI analysis runs hourly on embedded statements.

Divergences are rated on a four-point scale. Minor: subtle shifts in emphasis or timing. Moderate: noticeable change in position on a secondary issue. Major: clear reversal on a significant policy commitment. Critical: direct contradiction of a core election promise or repeatedly stated position.

All AI-detected divergences undergo human review before publication. Reviewers verify source material, confirm the contradiction is genuine, and may adjust severity. Published divergences appear on the Divergences page; false positives are removed. The ingest pipeline runs daily (social 01:00, RSS 02:00, Hansard 03:00, Reddit 04:00 UTC) with embeddings every 30 minutes and AI analysis hourly.