There is no set approach across jurisdictions to the issue of policy costings. The majority of Australian jurisdictions—New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory—are silent on the issue. The Commonwealth has the most detailed guidance on policy costings. The guidance is given statutory sanction in the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998 (Cwlth). This Act outlines the process for the costing of election commitments by both the Government and the Opposition. The Act states the Prime Minister may request the secretaries of the Departments of Treasury and/or Finance to prepare costings of publicly announced government policies. Requests from the Leader of the Opposition are given to the Prime Minister who may agree to refer it to the responsible secretaries. The onus is then on the responsible secretary to release the policy costings before the polling day.

Victoria allows the Department of the Treasury and Finance, in conjunction with the relevant agency, to cost government and non-government policies as long as the assumptions for the costings are identified and agencies are not required to undertake extensive policy research. In Western Australia, the Financial Responsibility Act 2000 (WA) ensures the Treasurer releases a financial projections statement within 10 days of the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly. The ACT allows for the factual analysis of Opposition policies, including costings, but requests should be forwarded to the Chief Executive of the Chief Minister’s Department.

John Howard proposed a ‘Charter of Budget Honesty’ in his first Headland Speech in 1995 (Howard 1995). The National Commission of Audit, appointed by the Coalition shortly after it took office in 1996, canvassed the proposal in greater detail, and the legislation was finally adopted in 1998.^[2] Among Commonwealth bureaucrats, the general view seems to be that a clear prescription of the rules surrounding budget costings has made life easier for most departments. But the requirement that election promises and commitments by both Government and Opposition parties would be costed by officials has proved contentious. There have been allegations that the process favours the Government, including complaints from former Labor Shadow Minister for Finance, Bob McMullan (quoted in Wanna 2006, p. 8), that the charter ‘is deliberately and demonstrably unfair’. Wanna (2006, p. 12) agrees that the Charter’s main impact has been ‘to award significant political advantage to the incumbents’. It does not allow opposition parties to approach the departments of Treasury and Finance and Administration on a confidential basis in the period prior to the calling of an election, creating an asymmetrical position in which its policies must be costed in the last two to three weeks of a campaign, and in a situation where its credibility is being ‘intensively assessed’. Wanna (2006, p. 12) argues that if opposition parties ‘were able to benefit from technical advice in advance of the election period, they would approach the election campaign more on an equal footing to the Government’.