This is a similar data exploration exercise I did with Australian Federal Acts. Here I used Python to extract all bills currently before Australian Parliament and parsed the titles of the Laws they will amend.

One interesting insights was a single bill that modified many different pieces of legislation, the administrative reviews tribunal (miscellaneous measures) bill 2024. This is required due to an early Act that was completely dissolved. This bill is to simply clean up all references to the old Act.

Like the Australian Federal Acts piece, this required software to extract the bill files from website API’s, parse the word documents into JSON and then navigate the document hierarchy of titles and paragraphs to find the associated Act references. Once all the links and nodes were identified, the visualisation was possible.

Looking back, I wish I had made the senate bills red and the house bills green to reflect the seat colour of the houses.

Nuts and Bolts