Have Fun Tracking All Domestic Flights Taken By Aussie Pollies With ‘Poli Flight’


Attn: data nerds.
If you’ve been wondering if you could see JUST what our politicians spend on travel, preferably in a way that’s ~ visually appealing ~ then BINGO, today’s your lucky day.

The folks over at Acquire Procure have created just that in the form of Poli Flight.

In technical terms, it’s an interactive data visualisation of every Australian politician’s domestic travel between July 1 and Dec 31, 2014 (the figures for 2015 aren’t yet available).
In non-technical terms, it’s time to stalk some fuckers.

You can slice up the data every which way: by politician, airport, date, $$$.


“Yes, you can see how the politicians compete over time on how much money they are spending on flights,” Acquire say, which, as it turns out, is a ridic $1 million per month.

*Except for Malcolm Turnbull, who keeps live-tweeting his public transport trips in a not-at-all-obvious way.


This is how it all works:

To play with / investigate / fuck around with the map, you’ll have to go HERE.

FYI their data hunt brought back these #auspolinsights: 
  • $5.9M was spent on domestic scheduled flights (just under $1M / month)
  • Just over 10,000 flights were taken by 235 politicians
  • Our politicians covered just over 11,000,000 km’s in the air (just under 50,000 km’s per politician)
  • The average flight costs around $580
  • West Australian Senator Rachel Siewert topped the leaderboard, spending over $77k in the six month period
  • The Sydney to Canberra sector accounted for almost 1,500 flights (almost 11 flights per weekday) 

Via  Acquire Procure.

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