It’s time for something new

After 14 years we’re hanging up our keyboards. Our team is joining the lovely people at Culture Amp, where we’ll be helping build a better world of work.

Icelab

Election Speeches

Each election, Prime Ministerial candidates lay out their parties’ platforms in campaign speeches. These speeches are more than just historical records; they tell us about national concerns and political obsessions, wars and drought, industry and society. They speak to – and in some cases, exploit – our aspirations and our fears.

Client:Museum of Australian DemocracyVisit the website

The site collects the official election speeches by successful and unsuccessful candidates from every election from 1901 right up to the present day.

Election speeches home page

Reading level and speech length

Some candidates speak in simple phrases: others are more eloquent. Are speeches getting shorter over time?
Reading level and speech length charts
Detail of speech by Stanley Melbourne Bruce

Word frequency over time

The relative popularity of different terms gives us an insight into the concerns for time, the aspirations and fears of our nation.
Word frequency chart for "Communism"

API access

Want to play with the data yourself? The site provides rich API access to every speech, candidate, election and topic – and a full-text download so you can roll your own analyses.
List of API endpoints