The #AusGovInfo Reserach Community is a new initiative which aims to provide a platform to manage recruitment of volunteers (or paid help) to transparency projects. Over the long term I hope to build a community of people who work together and share their expertise and skills on transparency projects.

Welcome to #AusGovInfo. The articles (and all the code & dataset cleaning, integrating & updating) are the work of Rosie Williams BA (Sociology). You can find out more about the site by clicking on the info button in the bottom right of your screen.

The intention with the articles is to allow any data that appears in the site (including the articles) either in charts, maps or tables, to update automatically when each dataset is updated so that articles do not go out of date but continue to be relevent as they show new data.

This site contains multiple integrated transparency projects using open administrative data published by the Australian Commonwealth government and is the result of several years of work.

The articles focus on transparency and accountability in politics, government, industry and community. There are several articles on the not-for-profit sector exploring privileges religious organisations enjoy compared with secular organisations.

On the flip side of transparency are the articles on privacy which focus on the ethics of how administrative data about relatively powerless individuals is dealt with by government. This can be contrasted with the ways in which information about wealthy and powerful organisations is so often hidden from public scrutiny.

There are two major datasets that this project is making use of, the political donations data from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and the Tax Transpareny dataset published by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

The Tax Transparency dataset has been integrated with political donations data to show which 'top-earning' corporations are also political donations and show the amount each corporation has paid to political parties in recent years.

It is important to note that only donations that fall above the disclosure threshold are made by the AEC in machine-readable format regardless of whether political parties provide records of all donations received to the AEC or not.

The disclosure threshold was $13,800 in the 2018-19 financial year and is pegged to the CPI. I have charted the breakdown by Party of the gap between the total receipts of each party and those that have been reported and published by the AEC.

With the exception of payments excluded from collection or publication by the AEC, this donations project includes all payments received by political parties regardless of whether they are designated as a political donation, 'other receipt' or government funding (with appropriate labelling).

This is because I think a lot of people want to know all sources of funding received by political parties regardless of their receipt type. Having said that, it is worth pointing out that only payments designated by the donor or party as a 'donation' attract the legal requirements associated with donating to a political party. ie Payments that are not donations can be made by charities or other types of organisations without the same legal implications that those payments would attract were they designated as 'donations'.

The Australian Charities & Not-for-Profit Commission was created by the Labor government in late 2012. The ACNC then weathered attempts by the Abbott government to abolish it.

The ACNC regulates over 50,000 charities. Of that number, nearly 1 in 4 charities record a main activity as religion and enjoy tax breaks denied to secular organisations.

Education plays a big role in funding to Australian charities. Australian universities are among our 'wealthiest' charities due to HECS, assets and research grants/tenders received.

Religious schools also dominate government funding as one in three children are now educated in the private system. However it is important to note that comparisons between funding of privately owned charities such as schools and hospitals must be compared with funding to comparative government institutions in order to properly understand the system.

Government organisations can not be registered charities so funding to public schools and hospitals is not in the charities data. School funding is a program in the Commonwealth budget project available from the top menu.

Religious charities are also prominant in social services including aged care, private hospitals and relief of poverty due to their historical role in these functions.

This project aggregates financials across multiple variables, providing snapshots of the financial health of registered charities by main activity, state, country of operation and federal electorate.

The project also links ABN with Commonwealth grants, tenders and DGR data, providing a wealth of information on individual charities.

The level and scope of this analysis is not available elsewhere.

Members of the House of Representatives and Senate are required to disclose a range of information on a regular basis to the Register of Member's Interests and Register of Senator's Interests respectively.

While the requirements are similar between the two Houses of Parliament, the registers are goverened by separate agencies and are different systems. To date, these registers have provided only PDFs to the public which can not be manageably scraped. This means the data has to be extracted manually, which requires a lot of labour to keep up to date.

During the latter part of 2020, I hope to recruit volunteers to help keep these datasets up to date.

With new Ministers announced regularly, this Commonwealth Grants project maps each Minister against the grants made during their tenure in any given position. A new Minister (or occasionally an entire Ministry) has been published on average every eight weeks since the beginning of the 2017-18 financial year (mid 2017). A new dataset has been created with these positions and dates to map both budget data (which operates on a financial year) and Commonwealth the grants that each agency claims are coming out of annual budget appropriations.

Portfolios are the administrative lines drawn between specific agencies and responsible Ministers. Each Portfolio administers specific agencies and those agencies can only spend funding appropriated through Parliament and documented in the Portfolio Budget Statements published on budget night or the MYEFO updates each December or Portfolio Additional Estimate Statements published in February.

Portfolio names change when Administrative Arragement Orders are made by the presiding government. This can change the portfolio to which an agency is attributed or the Minister responsible. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison announced significant changes to the Portfolios and agencies they administed which came into effect on 1, February 2020.

Unless otherwise specified, grants in this system date back to January 2018 when the Commonwealth implemented a whole-of-government grants reporting system, using the same schema (fields) across every agency for the first time.

See the budget project for updates on how the government is reporting budget data during the Covid-19 crisis.