An attempt to measure the quality of questions in question time of the Australian Federal Parliament

This paper uses standard information retrieval techniques to measure the quality of information exchange during Question Time in the Australian Federal Parliament's House of Representatives from 1998 to 2012. A search engine is used to index all answers to questions, and then runs each question as a query, recording the rank of the actual answer in the returned list of documents. Using this rank as a measure of quality, Question Time has deteriorated over the last decade. The main deterioration has been in information exchange in "Dorothy Dixer" questions. The corpus used for this study is available from the author's web page for further investigations.