Australia's $70 billion procurement transparency problem (and the open source fix)

The Australian Constructors Association calculated in 2024 that halving the cost of preparing government tenders would free $743 million for additional project delivery and return $2.1 billion to the broader economy each year. That number exists because the civil construction industry has to bid blind. The data that would tell an SME which agency awards work to firms its size, in its region, at its price band, is technically public and practically unusable.

This post is about why, and what we're doing about it.

What OCDS and OC4IDS are

The Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) is an open specification for publishing government procurement data. It defines around 551 fields covering the full contracting lifecycle: planning, tender, award, contract, implementation. The schema is governed by the Open Contracting Partnership, a non-profit. Adoption is free for any government.

OC4IDS is the infrastructure-focused sibling. Same family, project-centric rather than contract-centric. A single corridor or multi-year build typically involves dozens of awarded packages over many years. OC4IDS structures them as one project record with nested contracting processes. It is what the World Bank and CoST (Construction Sector Transparency Initiative) use globally for infrastructure transparency.

What we already do

The Cross River Rail and Bruce Highway corridor snapshots on demiton.io publish in OC4IDS. Parties, contracting processes, awarded values, modifications, metrics - all structured and machine-readable. We did a substantial refactor to align our snapshot schema to OC4IDS v0.9.5: parties, contracting processes, budgets, forecasts, modifications, the works.

A one-year-old company based in Brisbane now publishes more structured procurement intelligence on one Australian corridor than five state governments publish in total.

That is not a flex. It is an indictment.

The wall we hit every time

Cross River Rail works because the Commonwealth voluntarily publishes AusTender data as OCDS. Bruce Highway is harder; the contracts are state-procured by Queensland TMR, but QLD publishes a clean CSV on data.qld.gov.au and we translate it to OC4IDS.

Now try Westgate Tunnel. Or Forrestfield-Airport Link. Or any project in NT or Tasmania.

The law in every one of those jurisdictions requires the contracts to be published. Not one law requires them to be published in a usable format. "Publish on the portal" is the entire compliance test.

Jurisdiction	Threshold	Legislation	Machine-readable?
Commonwealth	$10k	CPRs under PGPA Act	Yes (voluntary OCDS API)
NSW	$150k	GIPA Act 2009	No (OCDS feed killed March 2025)
VIC	$100k	Standing Directions 2018	No
QLD	$10k	Financial Accountability Act	Yes (TMR CSV only)
SA	$500k	Treasurer's Instruction 18	No
WA	$50k	Procurement Act 2020	No
NT	$200k	Procurement Act 1995	No
TAS	$50k	Financial Management Act 2016	No
ACT	$25k	Government Procurement Act 2001	Yes (Socrata CSV)

Who else is doing this

Before the cost argument: Australia is not being lapped by one country.

All 27 EU member states publish structured procurement data via the eForms mandate, operational since October 2023 and fully live via the Public Procurement Data Space from September 2024.
The United Kingdom legally mandates OCDS publication under the Procurement Act 2023, in force 24 February 2025.
Ukraine has done it for nine years under its 2016 Law on Public Procurement, via the ProZorro platform, one of the world's largest OCDS publishers.
Moldova, Nigeria (700+ federal agencies), Slovakia, Paraguay, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina (Buenos Aires City), Chile, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Honduras, Indonesia, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Quebec, Montreal.
New Zealand has a standing Open Government Partnership commitment to adopt OCDS.

The Open Contracting Partnership Data Registry lists more than 100 publishers from over 50 national and sub-national governments. Australia is not on it. Not federal, not a single state, not a single agency.

NSW had the answer and switched it off

NSW Treasury ran an OCDS-compliant API for seven years. Bulk JSON downloads, full procurement lifecycle, used by researchers, journalists, and us.

In March 2025, during the migration from NSW eTendering to buy.nsw, NSW switched it off. The static archive sits frozen on the OCP Data Registry, 2005 to February 2025, flagged "no longer updated by the publisher." No explanation. No roadmap.

NSW solved this problem and then unsolved it.

What "cost-prohibitive" actually means in this country

The Australian Department of Finance has internally assessed full OCDS adoption as "potentially cost-prohibitive."

Intermedium tracks the whole-of-government ICT number at roughly $30 billion a year. In 2024-25 alone, governments committed $6.5 billion in new digital initiatives on top of existing operational budgets. Not maintenance. New.

The Defence ERP overrun alone is 700x the cost of OCDS. 'Cost-prohibitive' is doing a lot of work in that Finance briefing.

Source: ANAO, iTnews, OCP

NSW Treasury built and ran the only working sub-national OCDS endpoint in Australia for seven years. There is no published line item for what it cost, because it was small enough to live inside business-as-usual budget. The whole thing was a Node.js wrapper over the existing tender database. The UK Cabinet Office built the Central Digital Platform inside existing baseline funding.

"Cost-prohibitive" is the cleanest Yes-Minister sentence I have seen this decade.

What this is actually costing the industry

$2.1B

Returned to the Australian economy annually

If tender preparation costs were halved across the industry

Australian Constructors Association, 2024

A typical Australian civil tender response takes 40 to 80 hours of internal effort and $5,000 to $50,000+ in out-of-pocket cost. Civil SMEs typically win 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 bids. The amortised bid-prep cost per win is $25,000 to $300,000 before any work is delivered.

The Productivity Commission's 2023 inquiry was blunt: in public infrastructure and defence procurement, "billions are spent on deficient, slow or over-budget projects because procurement models are far from best practice." The PC's February 2025 housing paper found dwelling construction productivity is 12% lower than 30 years ago after quality adjustment.

For comparison, look at what happened in Ukraine after ProZorro became mandatory in 2016:

Unique suppliers to government +45%
Healthcare procurement saved 15% on average, 35% where 3 or more bidders competed
75% of SME bidders won at least one tender in 2017
Corruption perceptions halved

That is what an SME's hit rate looks like when the data is open. The SME is not bidding harder. The SME is bidding smarter because it can finally see what the agency actually awards.

The Commonwealth Procurement Rules require non-corporate Commonwealth entities to source 25% of contracts by value from SMEs (40% for contracts up to $20M). Without structured historical data, no one outside Finance can verify whether the targets are being met or which agencies are actually accessible.

The transparency is performative.

What we're building

I'm starting an open source project: OpenContractsAU. A community-owned scraper that produces OC4IDS-compliant JSON for every Australian jurisdiction. No login, no API key, no commercial gate. The data the law already says must be public, in the format every modern procurement system expects.

The first two jurisdictions are NSW and Queensland, together accounting for roughly half of national public works spend. QLD is already close (the TMR CSV exists; we just normalise to OC4IDS). NSW needs a live scraper for buy.nsw.gov.au plus a historical importer for the orphaned 2005-2025 OCP archive.

Demiton will be the first consumer. We will delete every line of state-specific scraping code from our own monorepo the moment the public dataset exists and consume the community feed like everyone else.

Repo: github.com/demitonapp/au-procurement. Going up this week.

Contributors welcome. NSW and Queensland first.

Is this legal?

Yes. Scraping publicly-disclosed, legally-mandated business data is not personal information under the Privacy Act - it concerns businesses and ABNs, not individuals. The portals are not "restricted data" under the Criminal Code because they are public and unauthenticated. The 2024 statutory tort of serious invasion of privacy (commenced 10 June 2025) does not apply: there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in legally-required public disclosures, and s 7 covers conduct authorised by law. Copyright does not protect facts (IceTV v Nine Network [2009] HCA 14 killed the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine in Australia).

OpenContractsAU respects robots.txt, identifies itself with a descriptive User-Agent, rate-limits to one request per three seconds, and honours takedown requests. The contributing guide enforces these.

FAQ

What is the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS)?

OCDS is an open specification for publishing government procurement data. It defines around 551 fields covering the full contracting lifecycle: planning, tender, award, contract, and implementation. The schema is governed by the Open Contracting Partnership. Adoption is free.

What is the difference between OCDS and OC4IDS?

OCDS is contract-centric: one structured record per contract. OC4IDS (Open Contracting for Infrastructure Data Standard) is project-centric, designed for infrastructure projects that span multiple contracts over multiple years. The World Bank and CoST use OC4IDS for global infrastructure transparency reporting.

Does Australia publish procurement data in OCDS?

The federal AusTender platform publishes an OCDS API at api.tenders.gov.au. No Australian state government currently publishes OCDS data. NSW Treasury ran an OCDS-compliant API from 2018 to February 2025; it was discontinued during a platform migration to buy.nsw.gov.au.

Which countries legally mandate OCDS publication?

The United Kingdom under the Procurement Act 2023 (in force February 2025) and Ukraine under its 2016 Law on Public Procurement have direct legal mandates. The European Union's 27 member states publish structured procurement data mapped to OCDS via the eForms mandate. Over 50 governments worldwide publish OCDS-compliant data.

Is it legal to scrape Australian government tender portals?

Yes, for publicly-disclosed legally-mandated contract award data. The data is not personal information under the Privacy Act because it concerns businesses and ABNs. The portals are not restricted data under the Criminal Code because they are public and unauthenticated. The 2024 statutory tort of serious invasion of privacy does not apply to legally-required public disclosures.

Which Australian jurisdictions publish contract data in machine-readable format?

The Commonwealth (AusTender OCDS API and CSV), Queensland (CSV via data.qld.gov.au for TMR contracts), and the ACT (Socrata CSV) publish machine-readable contract award data. NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Northern Territory, and Tasmania publish only HTML-rendered award notices on their tender portals.

What contract value threshold applies in each Australian state?

Commonwealth $10,000. NSW $150,000. VIC $100,000. QLD $10,000. SA $500,000. WA $50,000. NT $200,000. TAS $50,000. ACT $25,000. Above these thresholds, contract awards must be publicly disclosed by law.

How much does it cost a government to implement OCDS?

The Open Contracting Partnership characterises typical national implementations as sitting in the single-digit to low-tens-of-millions USD band globally. NSW Treasury's seven-year OCDS implementation was a Node.js wrapper over the existing tender database, small enough that no discrete budget line was ever published.

How much does inaccessible procurement data cost the Australian construction industry?

The Australian Constructors Association estimates that halving tender preparation costs across the industry would free $743 million for additional project delivery and return $2.1 billion to the broader economy each year. A typical civil tender response takes 40 to 80 hours of internal effort and $5,000 to $50,000 or more in out-of-pocket cost.

What is OpenContractsAU?

OpenContractsAU is a community-owned open source project that produces OC4IDS-compliant JSON for every Australian jurisdiction by scraping publicly-disclosed contract award data from official government tender portals. Free to consume, no API key required. NSW and Queensland are the first jurisdictions.