Appendix E – Report requirements and methodology

Legislative requirements and consultation processes

Timing, parties and scope

Section 64MA of the Parliamentary Service Act 1999 (the Act) requires the Parliamentary Budget Officer to provide a report after every general election on the total impact on the budget of the election commitments of the major political parties. This Election Commitments Report (ECR) must be published by the later of 30 days after the end of the caretaker period, or 7 days prior to the first sitting day of the new Parliament.^[1]

The Act defines a ‘designated’ or major parliamentary party as a political party with at least 5 members in the Commonwealth Parliament immediately before the caretaker period. The major parliamentary parties of the 47th Parliament of Australia required to be included in the ECR are:

• the Australian Labor Party (Labor)
• the Liberal Party of Australia, Country Liberal Party, Liberal National Party of Queensland and The Nationals, treated as a single party (the Coalition)
• the Australian Greens (the Greens).

It has been the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s practice to also provide minor parties and independent parliamentarians with the option to be included in the ECR. Information on how to do this was provided in a guidance note^[2] and followed up with letters. 

For the 2025 ECR, there was one independent member of parliament who chose to be included and who continued as a representative in the Parliament following the election: Dr Helen Haines MP, the independent member for Indi. Her commitments are published as an additional chapter in this report. 

The Act requires that for each included parliamentary party the ECR must include: 

• the financial impact of all of the election commitments that the Parliamentary Budget Officer reasonably believes would have a material impact on the Commonwealth budget estimates over the 2025-26 Budget forward estimates period (the budget year and the next 3 years)
• the total combined impact of each party’s election commitments on the budget estimates over the 2025-26 Budget forward estimates period. 

The report may include other information in addition to these statutory requirements. For the purposes of the 2025 ECR, costing minutes are included for all commitments that have a net non-zero financial impact, separate chapters and analysis are included for each party, and all analysis includes estimates of impacts over the medium term.

Consultation with parties and independents

The Act provides that the Parliamentary Budget Officer must seek, and may take into account, feedback from parliamentary parties when preparing the report. We follow a similar approach for minor parties or independents choosing to opt in. These processes are summarised in Figure E-1 below.  

• Parliamentary parties must submit a list of their election commitments to the PBO on the day before polling day and the PBO must publish these on the day after polling day.
• The PBO separately tracks and identifies election commitments made by parties during the campaign and must provide its list to each party within 3 days after the end of the caretaker period.
• At least 48 hours before publicly releasing the report, the PBO must provide each party with a copy of the part of the report setting out the costings of that party’s election commitments.

Financial impacts included in this report

In the appendices to the report, financial impacts are provided:

• both in terms of their net impact on the budget aggregates, and the resulting final levels of the budget aggregates
• on several budget aggregate bases (including a fiscal, underlying cash and headline cash balance basis) (see Box E-1)
• broken down by their individual components and by different sources of receipts and payments (and their accrual equivalents)
• in nominal dollars and as a proportion of GDP to the end of the medium term. 

Individual costing minutes are included for commitments that have a net non-zero financial impact on the budget aggregates and are available in the 2025 Election commitment costings section of the website.

Figure E-1: Process for consultation with parliamentary parties and independents

Additional features for the 2025 ECR

This is the PBO’s fifth ECR. Each report builds on the previous one and the 2025 report includes, for the first time, the total combined impact of each party’s election commitments on the levels of government gross debt, net debt and public debt interest payments.

Table E-1: summarises key information from each report to date, including election and report timing and the number of commitments per party.

Table E-1: Key elements of the Election Commitments Report

(a)    Each capped commitment is included individually in the total.
(b)    Because commitments are primarily those identified by parties, this number is affected by the way that parties choose to group their commitments. For example, making fewer more highly aggregated commitments with many subcomponents would result in a lower number of commitments. The number and value of election commitments included in the ECR is often lower for the party in government than for the other major parties, as it will often include large parts of its platform in a budget update released just prior to calling the election.
*     Includes a costing for the budget analysis of interactions between the party's election commitments. 

Identifying election commitments

The election commitments in this report include all election commitments that have been identified by the PBO as policies that parties would seek to implement after the election and which would be expected to have a material impact on the budget.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer determined the commitments that are included in this report, and the detailed specifications for these commitments, based on:

• the lists of election commitments that the parties provided to the PBO on the day before the election
• our tracking of election commitments and announcements before and during the caretaker period
• our assessment of the fiscal impact of commitments
• consultation with parties.

The rest of this section describes the criteria for election commitments to be included in the report, and the PBO’s approach to identifying commitments meeting these criteria.

What makes a commitment for the purposes of this report?

The Parliamentary Budget Officer decides which commitments should be included in the ECR, based on announcements made by the parties prior to polling day and any associated fiscal impact. Election commitments included in the report must be public, specific, and material. That is, for an announcement to be included as an election commitment in the report, it must at least satisfy the following:

• The commitment must have been publicly announced. This may include announcements made before and during the caretaker period. The PBO’s legislation provides for the Parliamentary Budget Officer to seek additional information about election commitments as required, including from people outside the relevant parliamentary party if they have been involved in the development of an election commitment.^[3]
• The announcement must have been made by a candidate for or member of the parliamentary party, or an independent parliamentarian. This may include current sitting parliamentarians who are not contesting the election (for example, current members who are retiring or senators who are partway through their term).
• The announcement must be specific enough to cost. Where no firm commitment is made as to the policy mechanism or details that would deliver on the announcement, it may be considered aspirational in nature. Where an announcement involves detailed actions to achieve an aspirational target, the PBO would include the commitment in the report.
• The commitment must have a material impact on the Australian Government budget. This includes commitments for additional expenditure that would be material but have a net zero impact because the party specifies that it would be offset by savings. What makes a commitment material is discussed further in the next section.

While a commitment must at least satisfy the above, there may still be judgement involved when determining whether announcements made during the election campaign and not included on the list provided by the party constitute election commitments for the purposes of the report. In forming this judgement, the Parliamentary Budget Officer may consider other factors such as which party member made the statement and the nature of the commitment made.

The PBO’s legislation requires the Parliamentary Budget Officer to take account of statements made before and during the caretaker period when determining election commitments for the purposes of the report. For the 2025 election, the caretaker period ended on polling day. In the event of an extended caretaker period, the PBO would consider announcements made during caretaker after polling day.

What makes a commitment material?

To be considered material, an individual election commitment must reasonably be expected to have a non-zero impact on the Australian Government budget. This includes commitments for additional expenditure (or savings) that would be material but have a net zero impact because the party specifies that it would be offset by a corresponding saving (or expense).

In determining materiality, the Parliamentary Budget Officer will consider commitments on both an individual basis and in the context of the party’s entire platform. In situations where there are multiple non-material changes they may be considered to have a significant impact on the budget when aggregated together.

Material commitments

In practice, all small but specific administered commitments are included in the ECR. The below examples set out cases where a commitment would be considered to be material for the purposes of the report. In some cases where a material commitment has a net zero impact on the budget balances, the commitment is included in the report but without a separate costing minute.

• The commitment reallocates funds across different programs which are in the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook (PEFO) baseline, but not yet contractually committed to a particular project or funding recipient and not managed as part of a global program (eg. Defence). Though the commitments may have no additional cost to the budget, each component (and therefore the commitment) would be considered to be material for the purposes of the report.
  • For example, if there is a $500 million grant program already in the PEFO baseline, but only $100 million of grants have been contractually committed prior to the start of the caretaker period, $400 million is available to any party contesting the election to commit to new projects under the program at no additional cost to the budget.
  • Alternatively, a party could announce that uncommitted funds in the program would be returned to the budget and allocated to a different priority, at no additional cost to the budget.
• The commitment involves an increase in departmental expenses and this increase could not reasonably be expected to be absorbed in existing agency budgets. Examples include:
  • the establishment of a new agency
  • substantial new activities (temporary or ongoing), such as a Royal Commission.
• The commitment is unquantifiable but would be expected to have material impacts. 

When is an announcement not material?

There are 4 main reasons that an announcement, meeting the other criteria for being a commitment, might not be a material commitment for the purposes of the report.

• The commitment is a regulatory or legislative change alone (where it can be administered using the current regulatory arrangements). Departments are already resourced to undertake this type of work as part of their business as usual activities. Further, the direct fiscal impact of these types of commitments is generally small, and often zero, if they can be administered using current regulatory and institutional arrangements.
• The commitment involves minor departmental expenses and these could reasonably be expected to be absorbed, or is already provided for, in existing agency budgets. Examples include modest changes to the administration of existing programs or grants to specific entities including state and territory governments.
  • In some cases, a party will specify in the commitment that the affected agency would absorb any costs associated with implementing the commitment. In this case, the PBO considers whether those expenses would be material, both individually and in aggregate across the party’s entire platform.
• The commitment is in the PEFO baseline because the announcement is a ‘decision of government’. That is, the decision to implement the proposal was appropriately authorised by the government prior to the start of the caretaker period. This could be in the 2025 26 Budget or 2024-25 Mid-year Economic or Fiscal Outlook prior to the election, or between the budget and the start of the caretaker period.
  • While policies may not be explicitly announced as a ‘measure’ in Budget Paper 2, they may still be factored into the budget baseline, including through the line item Decisions Taken But Not Yet Announced and Not for Publication.^[4]
  • The PBO seeks advice from all parties on the source of funding for announcements made during the election campaign. Where the party in government advises that an announcement was a decision of government, the PBO verifies this with the relevant government agency.
• The commitment draws funds from an appropriation or ‘global budget’ at the function level, rather than at a program level within the portfolio where the Minister has significant discretion on allocation within the global budget. An example of this is the Defence portfolio.
• The commitment is conditional. Commitments which are dependent on another body’s decision which the government cannot directly bring about and/or which is uncertain are not included. In these cases, the commitment is likely to be unquantifiable.
• The commitment materially affects the statement of risks (for example, a contingent liability).
  • A contingent liability is a possible obligation that arises from past events and whose existence will be confirmed only by the occurrence or non‐occurrence of one or more uncertain future events not wholly within the control of the entity. Budget Paper 1 includes quantifiable contingent assets and liabilities that are improbable, but not remote, in the statement of risks.

How does the PBO identify potential commitments?

During the caretaker period, the PBO identified over 3,000 potential election commitments by participants in the ECR. Box E-2 outlines the sources reviewed by the PBO with the aim of identifying all election commitments with a material impact on the budget. The PBO considered the criteria discussed above to identify which of these potential commitments were election commitments for the purposes of the report. 

As discussed in the party sections of the report, this independent tracking of election commitments may lead to some additional election commitments being included beyond those identified by parties just before the election. It may also lead to changes in the specifications of some election commitments, where announcements were judged to add components to or otherwise modify a commitment.