Basic overview of OpenAus with focus on BudgetAus, Grants & Tenders data.

1. Financial Transparency – Balancing
the Books
 When you think about who
knows what and about whom
in our society it is hard to
ignore the increasing
information asymmetry.
 Suelette Dreyfuss talks about
this emerging asymmetry in
her presentation to a recent
conference on transparency &
open government at
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4mswTqp
xUQ&feature=youtu.be
 According to Dreyfuss
“Big Data makes government
very powerful in its
relationship with the citizen.
This is even more so with the
rise of intelligent systems,
software that increasingly
trawls, matches and analyses
that Big Data. And it is moving
toward making more decisions
once made by human beings.”

2.  When I began BudgetAus 3 years
ago almost no budget information
was actually available for re-use. I
had to copy-paste 2.5 thousand
rows of data from the 20 different
portfolios to create my first
data-set of the federal budget.
 My efforts were recognised in the
mainstream media and also
internationally when the federal
budget data was published in
machine readable formats for the
first time in 2014.

3.  The government historically provides very little in the
way of accessible, objective information on it’s
spending. Until the 2014 budget, government
spending had been published in around 20 PDF or
Word Doc files (one for each portfolio).
 This type of publication did not allow for searching or
totaling across all the portfolios. This is what I built
BudgetAus to do.
What are the sources of data on
government spending?

4.  Other sources of government spending data are the
Commonwealth tenders data which has been online
for some time however this information has never
been analysed for purposes of political transparency.
 Commonwealth government grant data is only
coming online in a comprehensive way now and there
are still data sets missing or incomplete.

5.  OpenAus uses budget data,
grants and tenders data to
give Australians a window
into government spending.
 The existence of this
transparency project also
highlights missing data sets
and works to improve
transparency.
BUDGET DATA
GRANTS
TENDERS
AGENCY
ADMIN

6.  BudgetAus contains top down spending data published on
budget night and allows users to find & total spending by
search terms across the entire budget.
 Users can see distribution between portfolios & display
cuts & increases at program level by entering a search
term.
 BudgetAus also includes data from the Register of
Organisations which includes agency history & the
government’s plans for it’s future.

8.  Bottom up spending data is published as grants and
tenders on various timetables which depend on how often
each agency makes grants.
 Tenders for all Commonwealth agencies are reported
weekly in one export file at AusTenders.
 Grants data is published less frequently depending on
funding rounds & is not yet available in a central location
other than OpenAus. Coverage is not yet total. Some key
agencies do not report their grants data according to
specification.
Bottom-up Spending Data

9.  The government estimates grants form around 6% of
the budget but freely admits that the lack of central
reporting makes keeping track of the total difficult.
 To remedy this, the Public Management Review
Agenda, which came out of the Audit Commission
proposed a new site to come into effect in 2016 to
provide whole-of-government reporting of grant
recipients similar to AusTenders (Commonwealth
Procurement reporting website).
Commonwealth Grants Reporting

10.  With tenders & grants data now published in re-
usable formats I am able to calculate totals across
grants and tenders and make this searchable by
postcode, name, federal electorate, LGA & search
term.
 Because grants data is only coming online now, the
top level searches give results only for last & current
financial year.
OpenAus

12.  Commonwealth tenders make up about 10-15% of the
annual federal budget.
 Tenders data follows a different specification from
grants data and does not include the government
program under which the contract is administered so
can’t be totaled by program.
Commonwealth Tenders

13.  Every week between 1000-2,500+ new tender
contracts are published. You can find new tender
contracts on the Tenders homepage.
 A map provides an easy way to identify individual
locations receiving contracts in the past week.
 Latest weekly contracts are also divided into
electorates & parties so users can track where the
money is going in a political sense.
Tenders data

14. Tenders home page

15.  You can also search tenders by several criteria and get
totals by government going back 25 years with
average spend and number of contracts by
government.
 Each search also provides an overview of the data by
distinct name, ABN, postcode, electorate etc for that
search criteria.
 Eg search term ‘health’ may contain 655 distinct
postcodes, 138 electorates & 1,899 distinct ABN’s.

17.  Tenders data is available in CSV download free for
data sets under 500 rows and at .001c per row for
data sets over 500 rows.
 Overview information for results on postcode also
include SEIFA scores & locality information.
 SEIFA is a measure of inequality by area calculated by
the Australian Bureau of Statistics based on Census
data.

18.  OpenAus attempts to redress the information imbalance
between what organisations know about individual
spending and what individuals know about government
spending and who they are giving tax dollars to.
 OpenAus is a world class tool in political & financial
transparency.
“I’ve worked with Rosie Williams on budget data transparency since
November 2013. Rosie has developed her OpenAus data project into the
best government data transparency initiative I know. OpenAus has been
continually updated and improved to make underlying data intelligible and
to focus on key aspects for analysis…

19. …My interest has particularly been on the transparency of federal budget data.
BudgetAus is the best ongoing facility for reviewing and analysing spending data,
especially by programme.Rosie’s efforts have added significantly to the
transparency of federal budget data. She has also become an important member of
the non-government community who are trying to enable better and more
informed use government data.”
Garry Brooke Director, Appropriations Management Team,
Department of Finance, 2003-2010.
 If you would like to support this work please visit the
sponsorship/about page. To find out more about the project visit
the about page.