Vote text missing from parliament.nz’s Hansard
With disturbing frequency I discover small discrepancies between parliament.nz’s PDF and HTML versions of Hansard. Fortunately, the software code for TheyWorkForYou.co.nz raises a warning when it’s obvious that something is wrong.
Below is an example from Hansard for 23rd September. We can see some text is missing from the vote question in parliament.nz’s HTML version:
A party vote was called for on the question, That the following words be added: “That the member, Mr Peters, be requested to apologise to the
Ayes 2
ACT New Zealand 2.Noes 117
New Zealand Labour 49; New Zealand National 47; New Zealand First 7; Green Party 6; Māori Party 3; United Future 2; Progressive 1; Independents: Copeland, Field.Amendment not agreed to.
The vote question text has been cut-off. To correct this, I have to manually download the PDF version from the parliament site, find the correct text, and patch my local copy of the HTML. Then I re-run the software that loads this data into my database. Here is the correct vote question text from the PDF for our example:
A party vote was called for on the question, That the following words be added:
“That the member, Mr Peters, be requested to apologise to the New Zealand Herald’s editor, Tim Murphy, and political editor, Audrey Young, for calling them liars and demanding their resignations, and that the member be suspended for the remainder of the day.”
Unfortunately my software might not be catching all the ommissions and errors in parliament.nz’s HTML - but at least it catches some.
They’ve had performance problems to deal with recently at parliament.nz, I suspect that’s because they are not caching pages of their site for quick delivery. They may have exhausted their budget on paying vendors to hack work-arounds to the Mircosoft Content Management Server 2002 system they’ve built their site on. Possibly there’s no budget left after this to pay for fixes to their software to ensure accurate translation of source information into an HTML format.
Since I’m volunteering the hours of my time spent each week maintaining TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, I’m not subject to budget constraints and management prioritization. Part of the benefit of using a Free Software stack to run TheyWorkForYou.co.nz is that there are no licensing fees to pay. Another benefit is the freedom to choose tools that stay out of your way, to allow you to get on with fulfilling business requirements.
