How this works

Every figure is published by a government or a statistical agency. Nothing is estimated by FOCUp except where this page says otherwise.

• The Commonwealth budget — Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 6, for expenses by function and sub-function.
• State and territory budgets — the Parliamentary Budget Office’s National Fiscal Outlook, which restates all nine Australian governments on one basis so they can be compared fairly.
• What is inside a state’s spending — ABS Government Finance Statistics, Table 4 of each state’s workbook.

The sources pages name the document behind every individual figure, with the label and locator that let you find it in the original.

State spending breakdowns are the single exception, and they are labelled as such wherever they appear. The budget office publishes a state’s total for health but not the split; the ABS publishes the split, two years behind. So we apply the ABS share of actual spending to the current total — if a state actually spent 61.8% of its health budget on hospitals, the hospitals line is 61.8% of the current health total.

Every input is published and the arithmetic is one sentence long, but it is an estimate and the site says so at the point you see the numbers, not here.

We do not choose them. Promises are taken in full from the budget office that priced them — the Parliamentary Budget Office’s Election Commitments Report federally, and the Victorian PBO’s Election Commitment Tracker for Victoria. Every commitment those sources publish is loaded, for every party they cover. None is selected, filtered, reworded or ranked by us.

Where a promise is shown, the wording is the budget office’s and a link to the original is beside it.

This is the part most worth checking, because it treats parties differently and the reason has to be a fact rather than a judgement.

To compare a platform against a budget we need to know which budget line each promise moves. The budget office groups commitments under headings, and only some headings name a budget function. Labor and the Greens file under portfolios and departmental areas, most of which map to a line. The Coalition’s commitments are filed under seven campaign themes — “A stronger economy with lower inflation” and similar — which do not say where the money comes from.

So 224 of the Coalition’s 230 commitments are priced by the PBO and only 8 can be placed in a budget line. Splitting the rest would mean deciding, commitment by commitment, where each belongs — inventing a classification rather than reading one. We will not do that, so the Coalition is listed with its figures and left out of the comparison. If a future report files them by portfolio, they will be included automatically.

Most states have no independent costings at all, because only New South Wales and Victoria have a Parliamentary Budget Office. That is a fact about those states, not a choice by us.

FOCUp is an independent site operated by Fix Our Country Up, a registered business name, in Victoria. It is not affiliated with, funded by or endorsed by any political party, candidate or elected representative, and takes no money from any of them.

Its privacy policy sets out what is collected and what deliberately is not.