Overview
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This document discusses the OpenAus project, which aims to increase transparency of government spending in Australia by compiling and presenting budget, grants, and tenders data in an open and accessible format. It provides an overview of the types of spending data available on OpenAus, including top-down budget data and bottom-up data on grants and tenders. It also describes some of the features and capabilities of the OpenAus tools for searching, analyzing, and downloading government spending information.
Overview
- 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
- 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.