Web Page - Hansard

Reporting Services (Hansard)

About Us
Hansard — History
About Hansard
Operation
Parliamentary Committees
Parliamentary Broadcast
Documents Available

About Us
The primary task of Reporting Services is to provide a clear and independent record of all the proceedings of the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly.

Reporting Services publishes Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debates.

We also report and provide transcripts of evidence given to select and standing committees of the Parliament, both in-house and throughout the state; ministerial conferences; commonwealth parliamentary committee hearings; and Youth Parliaments.

Reporting Services provides television and audio services for the Parliament. The proceedings of the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly are televised in-house and streamed on the internet.

Approximately 30 staff are involved in reporting and disseminating the parliamentary debates.

Hansard
The history of parliamentary debates is similar to the description given of the history of a newspaper. The first day it is read with eagerness, the next day it is thrown away; after the lapse of some years it is worth its weight in gold. The ancient volumes of Hansard, imperfect as they are, are often intensely interesting reading for the light they throw on dead statesmen, or past conditions of society, legislation and controversies.

Lord Cadogan, Lord Privy Seal, in a draft report submitted to the Joint Committee of the British Parliament on Debates and Proceedings in Parliament. Lords Sessional Papers, XV, 1888.

History
Official reporting of parliamentary proceedings began in the British Parliament in 1803 when the press were allocated seats in the public gallery of the House of Commons. The reports were published in William Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates. Luke Hansard was the British Government’s printer at that time. Luke’s son, Thomas Curson Hansard, in 1811 purchased Cobbett’s interest in the publication of parliamentary debates, and in 1829 he decided that the title page should bear his name. Since then the Official Report of the House of Commons has usually been known as Hansard, and the name has been adopted for the official reports of a number of legislatures throughout the commonwealth.

Since 1896, Hansard reporters have been providing clear and independent reports of the debates of the Parliament of Western Australia.

In 1996, Reporting Services’ role in allowing community access to parliamentary debates was strengthened when in-house broadcasting of the chambers began, and the broadcast of parliamentary debates is now streamed to the internet.

About Hansard
Hansard is not a verbatim transcript; rather, it is a full report in the first person. The member’s words are used. However, obvious mistakes are corrected and redundancies and needless repetition are removed. Clarity is provided; ambiguity and elegant variation are avoided. Nothing is omitted from the transcript that adds to the meaning of the speech or illustrates the arguments advanced, and nor are words altered unless they are incorrectly used.

(Erskine May’s

Parliamentary Practice

Operation
Hansard staff work under intense pressure for extended periods to ensure the daily Hansard is available in hard copy and online by 9.00 o’clock the morning after the sitting.

Hansard reporters sit at the end of the table of the House to take their report. Currently, there are 15 reporters and two trainee reporters. Reporters have a 10-minute ‘turn’ in the Chamber when both Houses are sitting, and a five-minute turn when only one House is sitting.

Three main means of reporting are used: most reporters use Stenograph machines to write shorthand to a disc, from which the shorthand is translated instantaneously into conventional written English (computer-aided transcription); three use Pitman’s shorthand and then dictate their turn to a high-speed word processor operator or use voice recognition technology; and four reporters transcribe turns from audio using either QWERTY keyboard or voice recognition technology. The minimum shorthand speed required is 180 words a minute.

Reporters are responsible for transcription of a turn and its editing to conform to Reporting Services’ editing guidelines, which are based on the brief provided in Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice. Reporters generally have only an hour to edit their turns before they are required in the chamber again.

Subeditors then edit reporters’ copy and are responsible for ensuring consistency and making decisions on style. Subeditors are also responsible for preparing the daily and weekly Hansard for publication.

The senior word processor operator/indexer compiles the questions on notice and paginates the weekly Hansard for printing. She is also responsible for compiling the index of speeches and subjects, which is published in March each year.

Parliamentary Committees
Committees are reported in a variety of ways, depending on their location and the resources available at the time. Committee hearings held in Perth are generally covered by reporters taking 15-minute turns. However, if a number of committee meetings are being held at the same time, one or two Stenograph CAT reporters may cover a hearing for up to two hours.
Committees held outside Perth are generally reported using digital audio recorders. A reporter operates the sound recording equipment and writes a log of the proceedings. The audio is transcribed by reporters at a later date in Perth. If more than one CAT reporter is assigned to a committee, the evidence may be taken in shorthand and converted to conventional English using computer-aided transcription.
A subeditor subsequently reads the copy produced by reporters for accuracy and consistency, and prepares the transcript for the committee clerk.

Parliamentary Broadcast
The AV Control Room is responsible for ensuring a broadcast-quality recording of the debates in each chamber that is distributed around the building through the CCTV system, to ministerial offices and to the internet.

A full-time audio visual operator/supervisor coordinates three casual audio visual operators. All operators have experience in broadcasting.

Documents Available
Hansard is published by the State Law Publisher in daily proof and weekly editions, and in bound volumes at the end of each year. A cumulative index is published in a separate volume. The bound volumes are the official and permanent record of parliamentary debates, and they incorporate corrections made after the publication of the weekly Hansard.

Corrected Hansard is available on the Parliament website progressively from the Friday of the sitting week. Corrections made after the publication of the weekly Hansard are incorporated progressively throughout the year in the documents loaded on the website.