AskTribune · GuideOpen AskTribune →
AskTribune · Guide

How AskTribune works

What happens when I ask? Two dials, one price rule, grounded in the official record and citing the speeches and releases it draws on.

1. What it reads

AskTribune reads across a corpus of 173,770 official records spanning January 2019 - October 2026.

  • Victorian Hansard: 59,886 records
  • Senate Hansard: 28,512 records
  • House of Representatives Hansard: 25,280 records
  • NSW Hansard: 14,394 records
  • Federal committee inquiry submissions: 9,222 records
  • Records Of Service: 7,513 records
  • NSW Government media releases: 6,573 records
  • Federal parliamentarian profiles: 6,451 records
  • Commonwealth ministerial media releases: 5,754 records
  • Victorian Liberal media releases: 2,151 records
  • Party Media: 1,685 records
  • Victorian Nationals media releases: 1,487 records
  • Federal committee inquiry reports: 1,289 records
  • Prime Minister media releases: 1,213 records
  • Victorian Government media releases: 1,094 records
  • Victorian Greens media releases: 561 records
  • Federal committee hearing transcripts: 354 records
  • Federal party policy platforms: 148 records
  • Victorian parliamentarian profiles: 92 records
  • Commonwealth agency reports (RBA · PBO · JSA): 41 records
  • NSW parliamentarian profiles: 35 records
  • Victorian One Nation media releases: 35 records

2. The two dials

Scope — records read per turn. Standard 20 · Broad 40 · Broad+ 60. A record is one media release, parliamentary speech or committee transcript.
Mode — what A.T. reads, and how deep. Answer · Research · Analysis. Answer draws on Tribune's curated Notes. Research and Analysis also read the public records behind them, with Analysis doing the deepest cross-record synthesis.

3. What it costs

A credit buys ~71,429 input tokens or ~18,182 output tokens. The estimate is shown before it runs.

4. Worked example

The prompt
Summarise the most significant developments in Australian politics today, drawing on the most recent records.
The answer

Today's most significant developments cluster around three threads: the trust tax fight, gas policy, and economic management — all playing out in the Senate's 14 October sitting.

Trust tax dominates Question Time. Senator McGrath (LNP) moved to take note of answers on the government's proposed 30% minimum tax on discretionary trusts, characterising it as a "war on small business" and "war on farmers" that treats trusts as a target without understanding how small enterprises operate [TA-261014-senate-ef0456d18190:s060]. This follows the broader pattern across the sitting of sustained Coalition pressure on the trust tax legislation, which the Treasurer has framed as aligning asset-income taxation with wage income from 2028.

Gas reservation legislation advances. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, and colleagues pushed landmark domestic gas reservation legislation, requiring a share of LNG exports to remain available for Australian households and industry. This was raised repeatedly in the House, including through questions on the scheme's design.

Cost of living remains a live grievance on the ground. Outside the big legislative fights, the Member for Groom, Garth Hamilton, used a constituency statement to describe record small-business closures (30 a day nationally), falling productivity, and young people losing hope of home ownership in his electorate — alongside concerns about insurance affordability and industry practices [TA-261014-house-4229d3edebed:s063].

Other notable threads: tributes to the late Bruce Baird AM continued across the House, and the AWU's 140th anniversary was marked by Labor MP Emma Comer [TA-261014-house-4229d3edebed:s044].

> What's the substance of the government's gas reservation requirements?

> How has the Coalition's trust tax opposition evolved since the bill's introduction?

5. Using Tribune

  1. Start in Answer mode to explore. It's fast and intuitive — quick answers drawn from Tribune's curated Notes, the best way to scan what's happening across politics and policy today.
  2. Step up a mode when something matters. Use Research mode when you've found something important and want to dig into the records themselves. Use Analysis mode when you're doing important work and want A.T. to connect what has been said across speeches and releases.
  3. Check Notes and Sources to see A.T.'s work. The Notes panel shows the editorial layer A.T. is drawing on; the Sources panel shows the records cited. The citations are the way to test A.T.’s assumptions against those records directly.
  4. Open a Note to focus A.T. Calling a Note from the Notes panel narrows A.T. to a specific context — a sitting day, minister, or topic — which produces sharper outcomes in any mode.

6. Engines

Every ask runs on one of two engines. Pick in the Engine row of the Commands drawer — the choice is remembered on your account and applies everywhere you ask: the terminal, Discussions, Composer, Questions and the Archive.

Frontier
  • Answer: Haiku 4.5 — 0.092 cr per 1,000 input tokens, 0.462 cr per 1,000 output tokens
  • Research: Claude Sonnet 5 — 0.277 cr per 1,000 input tokens, 1.385 cr per 1,000 output tokens
  • Analysis: Claude Opus 5 — 0.462 cr per 1,000 input tokens, 2.308 cr per 1,000 output tokens
Open-Weight
  • Answer: GPT-OSS 120B (Open-Weight) — 0.014 cr per 1,000 input tokens, 0.055 cr per 1,000 output tokens
  • Research: GPT-OSS 120B (Open-Weight) — 0.014 cr per 1,000 input tokens, 0.055 cr per 1,000 output tokens
  • Analysis: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Open-Weight) — 0.028 cr per 1,000 input tokens, 0.111 cr per 1,000 output tokens

If the primary Open-Weight supplier is unavailable, the turn can be served by a backup supplier instead — the answer's receipt always names the model that actually answered.