Captain Costings
A little web infographic about campaign promises and costings during Australia’s 2013 federal election.
What are your sources?
Most of the figures are taken from the Liberal Party’s costings document, published on 5 September.
Labor have published an equivalent document, but it lists policies that are relatively cheap; all of the major multi-billion-dollar commitments were in the May budget.
What’s not included?
Many election promises are too small, in the scheme of the $375 billion Federal budget, to be worth displaying.
Only the differences between parties are shown; for instance, the Gonski school funding package is now agreed to by both parties. Likewise, some infrastructure projects have close to equal funding from both sides, even though one or the other has made a bigger fuss about it.
Broadband is a big (and expensive) policy difference between the parties, but the Liberal costings obscure their expected savings in amongst other public debt, so it’s been left out for simplicity.
The Liberal document also claims a $1.1bn “dividend from stopping the boats”, but it’s not clear that one side will actually stop boat arrivals any more than the other, especially since their policies are so similar.
Who are you?
I’m Hourann Bosci (@daBosq on Twitter). I am not affiliated with any party, but am disappointed at the less-than-clear media coverage of each party’s spending, so I rushed this out the night before.
This site’s source code is right here! Graphics are generated in D3.js. The pirates come from Shutterstock.
All other text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia licence.