Panopticon

A data spine on the Australian Commonwealth public sector, built for accountability journalism. Every figure on every page traces to a published source, and links to the report it was read from.

782 pages: 215 agencies, 550 officials, 17 portfolios.

What is here

• Agencies — for each body: contracts and their value, APS headcount, budget, the diversity and tenure profile of its workforce, the bodies beneath it, what it paid which organisations, its key management personnel year by year, and every name it has been known by.

• People — for each official: current and previous roles, remuneration by year with the components that make it up, contact details where genuinely published, and the coverage naming them.

  This site carries the officials whose highest credible disclosed total remuneration exceeds $500,000 — 550 of them. The register itself holds several thousand more; the cut exists because the publishing platform refuses more than 1,000 pages in a request, and it is applied on the figure rather than on seniority so that it can be stated precisely. "Credible" means the components sum to the total the source itself published: a figure that fails that test is a keying error, not a salary, and is excluded.

• Portfolios — the same, aggregated.

How to read it

• A blank is unknown, never zero. Where a figure is missing the page says so.
• Every year links to its source on transparency.gov.au. If a number looks wrong, the published report is one click away.
• ⚠️ marks a caveat that changes the reading — most often an agency reporting under a former name, or a figure whose components do not sum to the total the source itself published.
• Figures use publishable matches only. Where an agency name could not be resolved with confidence, its rows are excluded rather than guessed at.

Coverage

Annual reports 2018-19 to 2024-25 (1,288 reports), AusTender contracts from 2008, APS employment data from 2010, and 22,550 Mandarin articles.