Parliamentary committees are where Australian policy signals surface first. New inquiries, hearing programs and committee reports foreshadow legislation and regulatory change months before it lands — and Freedom of Information disclosure logs show you what departments are being asked to reveal. All of it is public. Most of it is just hard to watch consistently.
This guide lists the official sources and a workable manual routine, then explains where the manual approach breaks down.
The official committee sources (all free)
The Parliament of Australia publishes RSS feeds that cover most committee activity:
- New Senate inquiries — aph.gov.au/senate/rss/new_inquiries
- Senate committee reports — aph.gov.au/senate/rss/reports
- Senate hearings today ("the Red") — aph.gov.au/senate/rss/red
- Upcoming Senate hearings — aph.gov.au/senate/rss/upcoming_hearings
- House committee inquiries — aph.gov.au/house/rss/house_inquiries
- Joint committee inquiries — aph.gov.au/house/rss/joint_inquiries
- House daily program and divisions — aph.gov.au/house/rss/daily_program
Beyond the feeds: committee pages on aph.gov.au carry submissions, hearing transcripts and tabled reports; ParlInfo holds the searchable Hansard record; and Senate estimates runs to a published calendar three times a year, with Questions on Notice tracked per portfolio.
FOI disclosure logs
Under section 11C of the Freedom of Information Act 1982, Australian Government agencies must publish information released under FOI requests in a disclosure log on their website, normally within ten working days of release. Disclosure logs are a quiet but valuable signal: they show what journalists, industry and researchers are probing inside each portfolio.
- Each agency hosts its own log — there is no single consolidated Commonwealth feed.
- Most logs are plain web tables with no RSS feed and no alerting; checking them means revisiting each page.
- The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) publishes guidance and links to agency FOI pages.
A workable manual routine
- Subscribe to the APH RSS feeds above in a feed reader.
- Bookmark the disclosure logs for the five to ten agencies that matter to you; check them weekly.
- Put the Senate estimates calendar in your diary each sitting cycle.
- Skim the committee pages of your portfolio committees for new submissions before hearings.
Where the manual approach breaks down
The sources are reliable; the routine is the problem. The feeds are not filtered by topic, so an energy analyst reads every inquiry to find the three that matter. Disclosure logs have to be polled by hand. Ministerial and departmental media releases — which give committee activity its political context — sit on dozens of separate sites. And nothing consolidates the day into a briefing you can read before your first meeting.