22.1. Overview of Parliamentary Papers

What are Parliamentary Papers?

Parliamentary Papers are documents presented to the Australian Parliament. Sometimes this is required by law. Other times it’s just for information. The Parliament of Australia website notes:

Documents presented include the annual reports of all government agencies, reports of royal commissions and other government inquiries, parliamentary committee reports, and a wide variety of other material.

As well as Trove, Parliamentary Papers can be found through ParlInfo, Parliament’s own online database.

Here’s a few randomly selected examples:

thumbnail	title	contributor	date	fulltext_url
	Management of live animal imports : Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry|Management of live animal imports : Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry / the Auditor-General.|PP no. 150 of 2010, AR no. 47 (2009/2010)	Australian National Audit Office|Australian National Audit Office.|Australian National Audit Office. 84487 dbfcf370-6138-5ee4-8120-e841cd93dda3|Cass, Barbara.|Eddie, Jennifer.|Ramsey, Sally.	2010	https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2316823797
	Report of the Auditor-General upon audits, examinations and inspections under the Audit and other acts.	Australia. Auditor-Generals' Office. 76914 18bfd662-21be-58cb-8554-59078c9f8f3c	1985	https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2141201801
	PP no. 65 of 1997, Report no. 49|Warnarrwarnarr-Barranyi (Borroloola no. 2), land claim no. 30 : report and recommendation of the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Justice Gray, to the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and to the Administrator of the Northern Territory.	Australia.|Australia. Office of the Aboriginal Land Commissioner.|Australia. Office of the Aboriginal Land Commissioner. 79073 2040593d-1b22-5b49-a19b-4947f2c19211|Australia. Office of the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs.|Gray, Peter R. A.|Northern Territory. Administrator.	1997	https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2177452298

How many Parliamentary Papers are digitised in Trove?

Many Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers have been digitised and made available through Trove. But, because of the way they’re arranged and described, it’s difficult to know exactly how many there are. I’ve attempted to harvest details of all the Parliamentary Papers in Trove using a combination of techniques. Based on this dataset, it seems there are currently 24,991 digitised Parliamentary Papers in Trove. Here are some more statistics from this dataset:

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df = pd.read_csv(
    "https://github.com/GLAM-Workbench/trove-parliamentary-papers-data/raw/main/trove-parliamentary-papers.csv",
    keep_default_na=False,
)

stats = [
    ["Number of digitised Parliamentary Papers", df.shape[0]],
    ["Total number of pages", df["pages"].sum()],
    ["Median number of pages per publication", df["pages"].median()],
]

stats_df = pd.DataFrame(stats)
stats_df.style.format(thousands=",", precision=0).hide().hide(axis=1).set_properties(
    **{"text-align": "left"}
)

Number of digitised Parliamentary Papers	24,991
Total number of pages	2,448,576
Median number of pages per publication	60

Most of the Parliamentary Papers in Trove were published before 2013. If you search in ParlInfo for Parliamentary Papers published before 2013 the total number of results is 25,853 – close, but not exactly the same. There could be publications missing from Trove, or duplicates in the ParlInfo results.

When were the Parliamentary Papers published?

The date metadata is not always accurate, but it seems good enough to explore the distribution of Trove’s Parliamentary Papers over time.

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import altair as alt

df["year"] = df["date"].str.extract(r"\b(\d{4})$")
years = df["year"].value_counts().to_frame().reset_index()

chart_dates = (
    alt.Chart(years)
    .mark_bar(size=3)
    .encode(
        x="year:T", y="count:Q", tooltip=[alt.Tooltip("year:T", format="%Y"), "count:Q"]
    )
    .properties(width="container")
)

display(chart_dates)

Fig. 22.1 Publication dates of digitised Parliamentary Papers in Trove

From the chart above it looks like the earliest Parliamentary Paper pre-dates the Commonwealth Parliament. What is it?

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df["year"] = df["year"].astype("Int64")
earliest = df.loc[df["year"].idxmin()]
display(
    HTML(
        f"<a href='{earliest['fulltext_url']}'>{earliest['title']} / {earliest['alternative_title']}</a>"
    )
)

Annual report on British New Guinea. / 4th September 1888 to 30th June, 1889

Titles and topics of Parliamentary Papers

What are all these Parliamentary Papers about? You can use the title, subject, and contributor fields to explore their content.

Here, for example is a word cloud generated from the title field. There’s a lot of annual reports, and many of the titles include the abbreviation “PP”, so I’ve excluded the words “report”, “annual”, “PP”, and “AR”.

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from wordcloud import STOPWORDS, WordCloud

# Add to the list of standard stopwords
stopwords = ["report", "annual", "pp", "AR"] + list(STOPWORDS)

titles = " ".join(df["title"].to_list())
wc = WordCloud(stopwords=stopwords, width=800, height=300)
wc.generate(titles).to_image()

The subject field contains a list of standard(ish) subject headings. Here’s the top twenty values:

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import re


def split_and_clean(value):
    values = value.split("|")
    return list(
        set([re.sub(r"(\w)--(\w)", r"\1 -- \2", v).strip(".") for v in values if v])
    )


df["subject"] = df["subject"].apply(split_and_clean)

subjects = df["subject"].explode().to_frame()
# Remove trailing full stops
subjects["subject"] = subjects["subject"].str.strip(".")
subjects["subject"].value_counts().to_frame().reset_index()[:20].style.format(
    thousands=","
).hide()

subject	count
Australian	7,321
Australia	6,833
Tariff -- Australia	1,575
Finance, Public -- Australia -- Accounting -- Periodicals	1,568
Federal issue	1,265
Administrative agencies -- Australia -- Auditing -- Periodicals	1,165
Finance, Public -- Australia -- Auditing	1,150
Finance, Public -- Auditing	1,140
Executive departments -- Australia -- Auditing -- Periodicals	1,135
Tariff Australia	1,111
Legislative auditing -- Australia -- Periodicals	1,106
Australia -- Appropriations and expenditures -- Periodicals	1,035
Public works -- Australia -- Periodicals	947
Public buildings -- Australia -- Periodicals	862
Finance, Public -- Australia -- Periodicals	765
Industries -- Australia -- Periodicals	760
Australia -- Industries -- Periodicals	686
Periodicals	553
Tariff -- Australia -- Periodicals	551
Key item	501

The name of the agency that created a particular publication can also give an indication of its content. Here are the top twenty contributing organisations:

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def clean_contributor(value):
    if cleaned := re.search(r"(.*?) [0-9]+ [0-9a-z\-]+$", str(value)):
        return cleaned.group(1).strip(".")
    else:
        return str(value).strip(".")


contributors = df["contributor"].str.split("|").explode().to_frame()
contributors["cleaned name"] = contributors["contributor"]
contributors["cleaned name"] = contributors["contributor"].apply(clean_contributor)
contributors.dropna()["cleaned name"].value_counts().to_frame().reset_index()[
    :20
].style.format(thousands=",").hide()

cleaned name	count
Australia. Tariff Board	3,802
Australia. Parliament	3,284
Australian National Audit Office	3,111
Australia. Parliament. Standing Committee on Public Works	2,059
	1,560
Australia. Industries Assistance Commission	1,053
Australia. Parliament. Joint Committee of Public Accounts	825
Australia. Parliament. issuing body	787
Australia	415
Australia. Parliament. Senate. Committee of Privileges	399
Australia. Parliament. Joint Standing Committee on Treaties	348
Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives, issuing body	305
Australia. Parliament,	294
Australia. Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody	282
Australia. Inter-State Commission	276
Australia. Special Advisory Authority	240
Australia. Inter-state Commission	239
Australia. Treasury	236
Australia. Parliament. Senate. Standing Committee on Regulations and Ordinances	219
Australia. Parliament. The Senate, issuing body	212