Introduction

This part of the annual report addresses the performance of the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) in 2018–19 against the purpose and performance criteria published in the PBO Corporate Plan 2018–19 and the PBO Portfolio Budget Statements 2018–19. This includes reporting on our priorities, key activities and achievements during 2018–19.

Purpose

The purpose of the PBO is to inform the Parliament by providing independent and non-partisan analysis of the budget cycle, fiscal policy and the financial implications of policy proposals.

As outlined in Part 1, there are three primary functions we perform to achieve our purpose.

  Policy costings and budget analysis – we enable fiscal impacts to be considered during policy development by providing policy costing and budget analysis services to all parliamentarians.
  Research – we improve public understanding of budget and fiscal policy issues by conducting and publishing research in these key areas.
  Election commitment report – we enhance the transparency around election commitments by preparing a post-election report on the budget impacts of the election commitments of parliamentary parties.

We set performance criteria and measure ourselves against these to monitor our performance.

Priorities to support our purpose

Our overall performance is assessed against our outcome, as specified in both our Portfolio Budget Statements 2018–19 and Corporate Plan 2018–19:

Informing the Parliament by providing independent and non-partisan analysis of the budget cycle, fiscal policy and the financial implications of policy proposals.

The PBO achieved its purpose in 2018–19, with the following highlights.

  A general election was held on 18 May 2019 and concluded a period of heightened demand for our policy costing and budget analysis services. During this period we responded to requests in a timely manner with high-quality advice. A large number of public policy announcements by parliamentary parties referred to our costings.
  We published our report on the budget impact of election commitments within the timeframes required by legislation – the culmination of significant preparation work throughout the term of the 45th Parliament.
  We continued to maintain a high-quality program of published research papers, shorter analysis pieces, and chart packs to build public understanding of key budget issues.

The achievement of our purpose, through the delivery of each function, is discussed below, including an analysis of our performance against the criteria set out in our Corporate Plan 2018–19. Table 4 at the end of this Part also provides an assessment against the specific indicators in our corporate plan.