How has COVID-19 shifted Australian Parliament's Expenditure? Data Analysis in Hyper Anna

Insights below are generated automatically using Hyper Anna’s data analytics platform, analysing publicly available Current and Former Parliamentarians’ Expenditure data from January 2019 to March 2020.

WHAT YOU’D EXPECT #1

You would expect that most cost like international travel, will have gone down. So did expenses increase? And if so, why?

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AH HA MOMENT — INSIGHT #1

Travel and Employee costs down. Office Facilities costs up.

As we entered the beginning of lock down, employee costs and overseas travel expenses decreased significantly (22% and 65% respectively). On the other hand, office facilities’ expenditure increased by 20% — driven by NSW and The Hon Michael McCormack MP.

WHAT YOU’D EXPECT #2

You may expect that at the start of lockdown period, all states being on a level playing field, to reduce costs equally. But was this the case? Or did some states buck the trend increasing expenditure?

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AH HA MOMENT — INSIGHT #2

When every other state decreased spend, NSW bucks the trend — 14% higher expenses than Q1.

Worth noticing also that while all other states’ expenditure dropped by 12% — 29%, NSW increased by 14% in the same period. In a single click, we can see what caused this — significant increases in office expenditure, and printing costs in Sydney.

WHAT YOU’D EXPECT #3

You’d expect that all MPs to reduce spend equally — it’s the start of a pandemic after all.

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AH HA MOMENT — INSIGHT #3

Ms Alicia Payne MP’s spend increased by 450%, well above the average MP in this quarter. In a single click, we can see that her team had a lot of printing costs — busy at the photocopier perhaps? Getting ready with social distance brochures? Or perhaps taking time to get quarterly invoicing done before full lockdown processing expenses incurred in previous quarters? Regardless, outliers and anomalies can be viewed in seconds in Anna.

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Closing Thoughts

With the advances in business intelligence technology, new generation analytics tools like Hyper Anna are at the forefront of delivering insights that are truly insightful — accurate, fast and truly designed to surface ah-ha moments, surfacing hidden patterns in your data. All with the ease of a single click, so teams can focus on the actions that matter most.