Peter Whish-Wilson voted consistently against regional processing of asylum seekers

How "voted consistently against" is worked out

They Vote For You gives each vote a score based on whether the MP voted in agreement with the policy or not. These scores are then averaged with a weighting across all votes that the MP could have voted on relevant to the policy. The overall average score is then converted to a simple english language phrase based on the range of values it's within.

When an MP votes in agreement with a policy the vote is scored as 100%. When they vote against the policy it is scored as 0% and when they are absent it is scored half way between the two at 50%. The half way point effectively says "we don't know whether they are for or against this policy".

The overall agreement score for the policy is worked out by a weighted average of the scores for each vote. The weighting has been chosen so that the most important votes have a weighting 5 times that of the less important votes. Also, absent votes on less important votes are weighted 5 times less again to not penalise MPs for not attending the less important votes. Pressure of other work means MPs or Senators are not always available to vote – it does not always mean they've abstained.

The final agreement score is a weighted average (weighted arithmetic mean) of the scores of the individual votes.

Average agreement score = sum(n×w×s) / sum(n×w) = 0.5 / 236 = 0.2%.

And then this average agreement score

• between 95% and 100% becomes "voted consistently for"
• between 85% and 95% becomes "voted almost always for"
• between 60% and 85% becomes "voted generally for"
• between 40% and 60% becomes "voted a mixture of for and against"
• between 15% and 40% becomes "voted generally against"
• between 5% and 15% becomes "voted almost always against"
• between 0% and 5% becomes "voted consistently against"