Australia: Department of Finance

The Department of Finance publishes information through AusTender, the centralized procurement information system of the federal government.

According to the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, all non-corporate Commonwealth entities and prescribed corporate Commonwealth entities must report contracts and amendments to AusTender within 42 days of entering into or amending a contract, if the contract or amendment is valued at or above the following thresholds (including VAT):

  • $10,000 for non-corporate Commonwealth entities
  • For prescribed corporate Commonwealth entities:
    • $7,500,000 for construction services
    • $400,000 for other procurements

Every standing offer (similar to a list of pre-qualified suppliers) must be reported to AusTender within 42 days of a buyer entering into or amending it.

Available formats:
JSON
Excel
CSV
Access

Overview

Data date range:
Nov 2010 - Jan 2024
Update frequency:
Unknown
Last retrieved:
Jan 2024 (retrieved monthly)
OCID prefix:
-
License:
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia (CC BY 3.0 AU)

You are free to:

  • Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

  • Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

  • No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Language:
English
Retrieved from:
https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/austender/ocds-api/1.1

Data available

A contracting process has several stages: tendering, awarding, contracting and implementation. You can learn about the contracting stages in this tutorial.

Parties

Count of parties:
1,450,647

Planning

Count of planning activities:
0

Tenders

Count of tenders:
723,867
Count of tenderers:
0
Count of tender items:
0

Awards

Count of awards:
723,948
Count of suppliers:
726,859
Count of award items:
0

Contracts

Count of contracts:
723,948
Count of contract items:
957,100
Count of transactions:
0

Documents

Count of documents:
0

Milestones

Count of milestones:
0

Amendments

Count of amendments:
242,567

Besides core OCDS fields, Australia also publishes some additional fields related to amendments and limited tender exemptions Besides core OCDS fields, Australia also publishes some additional fields related to amendments and limited tender exemptions.

Data quality

Summary

The dataset has quality issues to take into account, notably:

  • Contracts with amendments:
    • The status, period and value of contracts with cancelled amendments are overwritten with the status, period and value of the cancelled amendment. This means that contracts in the OCDS data may have incorrect properties, for example there are contracts which are active or completed in the AusTender front end but appear with a status of ‘cancelled’ in the OCDS data.
    • The identifiers for the items associated with a contract differ between the original contract and each amendment. This means that amended contracts may have multiple duplicated items.
    • When a contract is amended to change the name of a supplier, a new identifier is assigned and the previous supplier is not removed, resulting in multiple suppliers being associated with the contract.
  • Buyer information is not provided in either the parties section or the buyer field and procuring entity information is not referenced from the tender/procuringEntity field. However, you can use the parties.roles field to identify the procuring entity for each contract.
  • Organization identifiers are not provided in the parties/identifier field. However, you can use the parties/additionalIdentifiers field instead.
  • Organizations identifiers are not provided for some organizations, in these cases you may need to fall-back to organization names to identify organizations.
  • There are discrepancies between the number of notices available in the AusTender front-end and in the OCDS data.
  • Descriptions for item classification (UNSPSC) codes are not provided. However, you can look up descriptions for the codes in publicly available UNSPSC code datasets.

Last reviewed: Sep 2019

Access data

This OCDS dataset is available for download in JSON, Excel or CSV format. You can download the data for contracting processes in a specific year or for all time.

JSON

Each contracting process is represented as one line of JSON text in the .jsonl file.

The .jsonl file is compressed using Gzip. Windows users need 7-Zip, WinRAR or WinZip to decompress the .gz file.

Excel

Each contracting process is represented as one row in the main sheet. Other sheets link to it via the _link_main column.

Excel files can have at most 1,048,576 rows. If a year is missing, it had too many rows.

CSV

Each contracting process is represented as one row in the main.csv file. Other files link to it via the _link_main column.

The .csv files are archived using tar and compressed using Gzip. Windows users need 7-Zip, WinRAR or WinZip to decompress the .tar.gz file.

Do you have any questions or feedback on this dataset or any other content on this page?
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