Government Spending / 2014 10% open

What data is expected?

Records of actual (past) national government spending at a detailed transactional level; A database of contracts awarded or similar will not considered sufficient. This data category refers to detailed ongoing data on actual expenditure. Data submitted in this category should meet the following minimum criteria:

• Individual record of transactions.
• Date of the transactions
• Government office which had the transaction
• Name of vendor
• amount of the transaction
• Update on a monthly basis

What data is available

•   Openly licensed? No (No URL given)
•   Is the data available for free? No
•   Is the data machine readable? No (CSV)
•   Available in bulk? No
•   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? No
•   Publicly available? No
•   Is data in digital form? Yes
•   Is the data available online? No (Here)
•   Does the data exist? Yes

Details

Data is released fortnightly through Austender, and compilation dating back to 2011 is available on data.gov.au. The dataset at https://www.tenders.gov.au/?event=public.reports.listCNWeeklyExport is a dataset of contract notices; "The Contract Notice Export is an export file containing contract notice data for all Australian Government agencies who report procurement on AusTender published over a one week period." Although this is valuable data (and in line with that published by other excellent jurisdictions) it is not expenditure information in terms of the definition of this element ("Government spending at a detailed transactional level, that is at the level of month to month government expenditure including money spent on specific contracts or with specific vendors."). It does not detail individual payments to vendors when they are made, only the overall estimated value of the contract at the time of award. IMHO there should also be category for contract award information for which this dataset would be an excellent example. But it is not the expenditure information required by the census.

There is aggregated data on expenditure on the national statistics website - http://www.abs.gov.au/

Reviewer comments

After expert review, we found that the data does exist, but not available to the public in the format we specified.