Live national statistics and every performance number government owns — published as it happens, at every level.
One of the six doors of The People’s Portal — the DAA’s key policy. One site, one login: everything your government knows, spends and decides, across local, state and federal.
Prices. What things cost, updated daily — groceries across all major retailers, fuel at every service station, rent by suburb, utilities by retailer and region, building materials, agricultural inputs, medical costs and insurance premiums. Roughly a million products, against the ABS CPI’s 87,000 price observations collected quarterly. Gouging is detected automatically and flagged to the ACCC. This is the board most Australians will open first, and the reason the rest of the door gets read.
The country. Population and the components of change, migration by stream, housing approvals, completions and vacancy, water storage and allocation, energy generation and price, land use and vegetation, air and water quality, emissions by source, weather and fire. The numbers arguments are had about — published live, so the argument moves on to what to do about them.
The money. The budget as a live account: revenue in, spending by department and program, surplus or deficit against forecast, debt to whom and at what rate. Enter your income and see roughly what you pay and what comes back. Before each budget, Australians rank their priorities; the results are published, and the Treasurer must explain publicly where the budget aligns with them and where it departs.
By department. The DAA does not produce the numbers — the departments do. Each of the seven publishes the indicators that measure its own mission, to one standard, in one place, with the target beside the actual result:
Economy — inflation, wages, employment, business formation and insolvency, trade, royalties, tax collected by category.
Security — crime by offence and location, clearance rates, scam and fraud losses, border movements, cyber incidents, police numbers and response times by district; and the justice system in full: prisoner numbers and the remand share, cost per prisoner per day, recidivism at two years, court backlogs and time to trial, bail and parole outcomes, deaths in custody.
Build — every project’s schedule, budget and variance, power price and outages, fuel stocks and refinery throughput, water storage, freight movements, building approvals, telecommunications coverage.
Future — research spend and output, patents, AI and space programme milestones.
Learn — enrolments and attendance, literacy and numeracy, completions, apprenticeship commencements and completions, university outcomes and HECS debt.
Care — hospital admissions and waiting times, bulk-billing by postcode, GP and specialist availability, cancer screening, detection and survival, chronic disease, aged-care places and quality, NDIS participants, payments and plan outcomes.
People — population and migration, housing stress and homelessness, family formation, road deaths, alcohol and drug harm, and suicide — published as a national indicator rather than buried in an annual report, under the presentation standards that apply to that data.
And the efficiency of the system itself is published. Cost per transaction, forms eliminated, duplicate collections removed, time to decision, payment times to suppliers, and the falling count of separate systems — the measures that show whether joining the nation’s data is actually saving money, rather than asking the public to take it on faith.
The government itself is measured like any other operation: headcount by department and agency, payroll, contractors and consultants against permanent staff, property held, agency count over time, and cost per service delivered. A government committed to going from twenty-two departments to seven should be willing to show the number falling.
Every series carries its level. National, state, local government area, postcode. Cost per prisoner is comparable between states; rates and response times are comparable between councils; the same crime series reads at any level. Commonwealth streams publish first because the Commonwealth can publish them; states and councils join as they adopt the platform, which is provided free and open source with adoption funded.
And every number is published the same way: its direction, its comparison against target or against last year, and when it was last updated — with revisions logged rather than overwritten, so a figure quoted last month can still be checked against what the record said last month. A number without direction is trivia; a number without a comparison cannot be judged; a number without provenance cannot be trusted.