A commitment to independent and real-time costings

As the campaign has been ramping up, the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) has been publishing weekly updates to its 2026 Election Commitment Tracker. This is a running ledger that informs both the public and the parties of the cost of each proposal.

The head of the PBO, Xavier Rimmer is emphatic about the importance of this resource being an independent assessment for public disclosure.

'We don't answer to any minister, and we don't take direction from any Member of Parliament. They tell us the question to look into, and the investigation is entirely our own. It's entirely independent, apolitical, and not coloured by any sort of pressure from any Member of Parliament,' he said.

Confidentiality and legislation requirements can limit the amount of information that is made public. When a Member of approves publication of their work, it appears on the PBO’s website.

Along with work the PBO prepares for MPs, they publish resources that serve as a non-biased source of information for Victorians to understand both the long-term and short-term impacts of government policy through budgets, and help them understand the state of the Victorian economy.

However, Rimmer acknowledges this tool has some limitations.

'The PBO only provides any of its services to current sitting Members of Parliament, and we only track commitments for parties with two or more Members in the current Parliament. So in the current Parliament, the parties that we track commitments for are the ALP, the Liberals and Nationals in coalition, the Greens, and Legalise Cannabis Victoria.’

When the PBO costs a proposed policy, it doesn’t only produce a singular number for that project, it models the proposal’s impact on the budget across the next decade. This is explained in a plain language costing overview that includes the nature of the commitment, what is being costed and the assumptions behind the figures produced. This last element is crucial for understanding how a policy might be impacted by future events.

'On accountability, it really does put an onus on Members of to better flesh out their ideas and provide better supporting information because that information is available through the PBO,' Rimmer said.

'We like to think of it as levelling the playing field between parties in government and those that are not.'

The tracker isn't only useful for the upcoming election. The PBO contains an extensive archive of past election cycles that lets the public go back to prior commitments and check whether a policy promised at the last election was delivered, and at what cost.

’Better-developed policy means a better-informed public and, hopefully, better decisions being made by politicians.'

With the election fast approaching the PBO will continue to update their proposal tracker weekly and continue doing their work to keep Victorians informed up until the day they step into the voting booth.

'I think what I would like Victorians to know about the PBO is that we're a service with an objective to inform policy development and debate in Parliament, but also in the broader Victorian community,' Rimmer said.

'We're trying to put information into the hands of Members and, through them, into the hands of the public to help people better understand what their representatives are proposing. We're also providing resources that can help inform people about what is going on in Victoria.'