How the figures are built

All expenditure data originates from the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA), published quarterly and mirrored on data.gov.au. Each parliamentarian profile links back to the specific quarterly release it draws from.

Figures are work expenditure reported by IPEA — travel, office costs, and the other categories in the IPEA extract — expressed in Australian dollars. Each line item is recorded against the parliamentarian, the reporting quarter, and IPEA's own category and sub-category. Salary and superannuation are not included.

Some quarters contain adjustments or reimbursements that appear as negative amounts; these are preserved as reported rather than discarded, so totals reconcile with IPEA.

The smallest unit is a single reporting quarter. The time-period selector also offers rolling totals — last 6 / 9 / 12 months, 2 / 3 / 5 years, and all time — computed by summing each parliamentarian's expenditure across the relevant consecutive quarters. A "quarters on record" count shows how many quarters a person appears in within the window, which is lower for those who entered or left Parliament mid-window.

Parliamentarians are keyed on a stable identity (person_key) so that name variants, honorifics, and title changes across years all resolve to a single person — avoiding the duplicate-entry problem that plagues naive name matching.

Party names in the source data appear in many forms (e.g. "ALP", "Australian Labor Party (ALP)", "The Nationals"). We canonicalise these to one consistent label per party for filtering and display. For members who have changed party over time, we show their most recent party.

On a profile, rank is the parliamentarian's position by expenditure among all parliamentarians in that quarter, and vs median compares them to the middle of the field that quarter. These are descriptive, not evaluative.

New quarters are added after IPEA publishes them. The dataset is otherwise static — historical quarters do not change once released.

Raw totals are not normalised for electorate size, remoteness, or time in office, so they are not a fair like-for-like comparison — a remote-state senator will legitimately spend more on travel than an inner-city member. Per-capita and per-sitting-day context, and salary/superannuation, are candidates for future releases.