Since December 2024, the Institute’s projects team have been tracking policy commitments made by Australia’s major political parties in the run-up to the federal election. This work aims to:

• Provide a consistent and accessible summary of party commitments across key policy areas to support research and analysis.
• Support broader public understanding of major party policy agendas ahead of and during the federal election.
• Assist partners and stakeholders in understanding potential policy pathways of the major parties.

The Election Tracker systematically captures, categorises, validates and analyses election commitments through a rigorous four-stage methodology designed to deliver broad coverage of election commitments. Our approach involves:

1. Identification of commitments: We identified commitments through ongoing monitoring of official party websites, reputable news outlets, and public announcements by political candidates.
2. Categorisation: Each commitment is classified according to policy category, party affiliation, and other relevant variables.
3. Data validation: Commitments undergo a thorough validation process to verify details.
4. Data analysis: We use internal analytical tools and Airtable’s platform functionalities to process data, identify trends, and share findings publicly.

Explore our interactive tracker

Emerging insights

The tracker will continue to be updated throughout the election period, offering a resource for understanding evolving priorities. Nevertheless, the tracker has already revealed several emerging insights.

First, health policy dominates the cross-party agenda, ranging from initiatives such as mental health funding, enhancing healthcare access, and hospital capacity improvements. Infrastructure priorities are also prominent, reflecting commitments to large-scale projects, including energy grid upgrades, transport developments, and regional development schemes.

The tracker also highlights areas that have received limited attention during the election campaign. For example, emerging issues such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity have received less priority from major party platforms to date, as has climate change, which was seen as a critical issue in the 2022 election.

The tool allows users to explore the data using Airtable’s built-in features to sort, filter and group information, including:

• Integrated search: Easily search across the data using the unified search function.
• Flexible sorting: Sort data by party, spending category or other variables.
• Multiple views: Access information through list, kanban and grid formats.

Finally, some caveats:

• Under “details” column, a description of the policy is taken as a direct quote from the original source to support data fidelity, and does not reflect the views of the Institute or its partners.
• The tracker does not include the Teals, smaller parties and independent candidates.
• The tracker provides a broad overview of policy commitments and promises and might not be fully comprehensive. It is updated weekly and may not capture all announcements in real time.
• Costings are not included, as many commitments are either uncosted or lack official costings.

With all this said, we hope you find the tool useful!

Dr Jack Isherwood is a Senior Research Associate at the James Martin Institute for Public Policy, joining the Institute from Western Sydney University in 2023. Jack has research interests in artificial intelligence and climate policy and formerly worked in higher education management.

Image credit: Australian Government/M Chan/Julian Meehan