Terms of use

FOCUp is operated by Fix Our Country Up, a registered business name, based in Victoria, Australia. “FOCUp” is the short form of that name and means the same thing wherever it appears. “We” and “us” below mean Fix Our Country Up.

Have a go at the budget. Share your score. Do not pretend our numbers are the government's, do not put anything in a title you would not want read back to you, and do not use someone else's email address. That is genuinely most of it. The rest is below, because “that is genuinely most of it” is not a legal document.

A budget simulator with a sense of humour and no sense of restraint. It takes the real revenue and spending figures out of Commonwealth and state budget papers, hands you the controls, and tells you what you just did to the bottom line. Every figure comes from a published source. Every assumption behind a modelled consequence is written on the page where it appears, because “trust us” is not a methodology.

The jokes are ours. The numbers are not. We have been careful not to mix the two up, and we would like you to be careful too.

• Not a forecast. Dragging a slider does arithmetic. It does not predict what would happen if a government actually did this. Economies are not spreadsheets, and we are not pretending otherwise.
• Not financial or political advice. Do not make a decision that matters because of a number on this website. We are not licensed to advise you about anything, including this.
• Not affiliated with any government or political party. We model party platforms from their published costings so they can be compared on the same axes. Putting a party on the site is not an endorsement of it, and the modelling is ours, not theirs. Nobody has paid us. Nobody has asked. Frankly, nobody has called.

No account and no paywall. Building a budget and seeing your score asks nothing of you; saving one asks for an email address, because that is what produces your share link and the copy we send you. In return, a short list of things that will get your budget removed:

• Putting something in a title that is unlawful, abusive, or pretends to be a real person or organisation. Titles are stored, and titles of public budgets get read by us for moderation. Write accordingly.
• Using an email address that is not yours. Someone else's inbox is not a place to leave your budget.
• Scripting the site, scraping it at volume, or going at the rate limits with a crowbar. The save endpoint is rate limited. It is not a challenge.
• Passing FOCUp output off as official, as a Treasury figure, or as a prediction of anything. This is the one that actually annoys us.

Break these and we can remove what you saved. There is no appeals tribunal. There is an email address.

You built it, you own it. Saving it lets us store it and show its score on a share page and the leaderboard — which, as it happens, is all a share page shows. We do not claim it, sell it, or use it for anything you would be surprised by. What we do with the numbers in aggregate is set out on the Pulse, and it involves counting, not you.

The budget figures underneath come from government publications. Most are released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which lets anyone reuse them and requires the source to be credited — so every figure on FOCUp traces back to the paper it came from on the sources pages. That is a licence condition, not us being nice. The code, the wording and the jokes are ours.

We take the figures from published budget papers and do not touch them. Ingestion is reconciled against the published totals, and where a source is incomplete the site says so instead of quietly inventing a number to fill the hole.

We will still get something wrong eventually. When you find it, tell us at hello@focup.au and cite the page you are comparing against. “Your health number looks weird” is a start. Budget Paper No. 2, page 47 is a gift.

FOCUp is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available, uninterrupted or free of error. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from your use of it.

Nothing on this page excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law. Those cannot be contracted out of, and we are not going to pretend otherwise in a box you scrolled past.

Short version: we collect almost nothing, and your email address is never stored against your budget. The long version is worth three minutes and lives in the privacy policy.

These terms get a new version number when their substance changes — not when we fix a typo, and not when we improve a joke.

These terms are governed by the law of Victoria, Australia, and the courts of Victoria have jurisdiction over any dispute about them.