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Welcome to BudgetAus

BudgetAus is an ongoing activist project in government transparency. The focus of BudgetAus is primarily on data related to government funding, including Federal and State budget funding. BudgetAus is funded as a business. Find out why

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How to get started with BudgetAus

Head over to the BudgetAus Forum to meet and greet and find the How To's on searching the Federal Budget. Alternatively, just enter a search term (eg housing) into the All Fields search box (below) to see results. Click on the Portfolio name in the results to get a list of all Programs administered by that Portfolio; Click on the Agency name to get a list of all Programs administered by that Agency; Click on the Program name to get a list of Schemes within that Program. These results will give totals for current year and last year budgets with each click. These are generated automatically by our code based on the original figures from the Portfolio Budget Statements which are linked for reference at Scheme level.

Search All Fields

This form gives results from the fields Portfolio, Agency, Program & Scheme.
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How to get involved in the Project

You can give your tips and ask your questions about what information you want to see the government provide at the Forum. Additionally, you can join BudgetAus and run your own blog on the BudgetAus platform. This gives you unlimited access to the BudgetAus data and the opportunity to lobby for your causes through the blog each member receives access to on subscription as well as help lobby to get the information we all want out of the government and published in a way we can easily use it.

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What is BudgetAus?

At launch BudgetAus provides searching across all Portfolios with totals at Scheme (Program Component), Program, Agency and Portfolio level. eg You can find all Schemes which mention the word 'housing' across all Agencies and Portfolios or you can get a total of the Special Accounts automatically generated. You can also compare this year's budget data with the year prior. Additionally, BudgetAus now provides all forward year funding estimates on mouse-over.

What has BudgetAus done so far?

The owners of BudgetAus designed and developed the system from scratch. This involves figuring out a system under which the budget information can be grouped in order for logical searches to be made of the data, importing the data into the project (both by hand and digitally), attempting to liaise with the government to make this aspect of the project complete and available to the public on May 14 and promoting the project and the issues this attempt raised to the public through the media.

BudgetAus was the first implementation of the entire Australian Federal Budget into a searchable database format. Prior to this effort, the Federal budget was only published in the format of 20 or more PDF documents. This prevents searching across the Portfolios or Agencies at any level ie You could not find all Programs on any one topic without manually reading all 20 lengthy PDF's. BudgetAus is not aware of any attempt by government to provide anything even mildly approximating the functionality provided through the BudgetAus database.

Where is the BudgetAus project headed?

Once the budget data was placed in the database to be put to work by our original code base, we can add additional functionality and data on top of that. One prime example is Funding by Federal Electorate or state budgets. These goals are massive undertakings in and of themselves. We, the owners of believe that BudgetAus can serve as a catalyst for requiring the government to publish this information in re-usable formats for projects like this one and that without a project such as BudgetAus agitating the government to provide this information within a timeframe that is considered useful to the public, that the government will continue to neglect its own policies on open government, engagement and democratisation.