Not that many people are going to care other than the recipients, and me apparently, but it turns out that titles, postnomials and terms of address are a whole ball game that I dropped the ball on.
One of the things claude mentioned to me in the course of fixing something else was that a federal MP's surname was listed as "OAM", not their actual surname - oops.
I promptly asked it to add a postnomials column to the MP's table, and fix the scrapers to read this info properly instead of mucking it up.
But it turns out there's a whole other set of conventions i never even thought about - someone in the lowerhouse is "Firstname Lastname MP" or "MLA", and someone in the uppper house is "Senator Firstname Lastname", unless they're a minister (e.g. Minister for Transport) in which case, they're now "The Honorable Firstname Lastname".
It gets even more complicated if they're a qualified medical doctor or lawyer with their own credentials and titles, or an OAM - which goes first?
Anyway. That was today's fun. By the time you're reading htis, it should be coded correctly and they should start showing up with their correct titles.
I care, because this - the PIPE project - isn't actually just another keep-the-bastards-honest site. I also genuinely respect a lot of the work our politicians do, because nearly everyone that gets into politics does so because they want to make the world a better place. A lot of the things passed in parliament don't get mentioned in the press because they're not controversial and both sides look at the proposal and go, "yep, that's a good idea."
I think it's important to at least TRY and be respectful of our politicians - and let's face it, in this day and age, we don't give them a lot of reason to be their best selves, do we? So in that spirit, the site's been updated to be more respectful of correct titles, honorifics and postnomials.
Let's support our politicians to live up to them.
Cheers, and have a great week y'all - from Alison