YourGov draws on five primary categories of data to build a comprehensive picture of government performance. We believe that no single data source tells the full story — triangulating across official publications, open data, citizen experience, and public discourse produces a more reliable assessment.
We systematically collect publicly available information from federal, state and territory government websites. This includes annual reports, corporate plans, budget papers (PBS/PAES), Senate Estimates transcripts, and media releases. Our crawlers index over 2,600 government entities across all nine Australian jurisdictions.
We aggregate FOI disclosure logs published by Commonwealth and state agencies, tracking response times, refusal rates, and the nature of requested information. This data provides an important transparency signal for each department.
Data from data.gov.au, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Productivity Commission, and equivalent state portals is incorporated into our analysis, including workforce statistics, financial performance, and service delivery metrics.
YourGov conducts quarterly surveys of Australian residents aged 18 and over. Each wave targets a minimum sample of 2,000 respondents, recruited via online panels and weighted by age, gender, state/territory, and remoteness (ARIA+) to reflect the Australian adult population.
We analyse publicly available commentary from parliamentary proceedings (Hansard), news media, academic publications, and social media discourse. Natural language processing identifies sentiment trends and emerging themes related to government service delivery.
Our analysis pipeline combines automated data processing with human editorial oversight. Raw data is ingested, cleaned, and normalised before being processed through a series of analytical models.
AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis:We use large language models fine-tuned on Australian government and public policy corpora to classify sentiment in media coverage, parliamentary discourse, and citizen feedback. Models are validated against a hand-coded dataset of 10,000+ items reviewed by our editorial team, achieving an inter-rater agreement (Cohen’s kappa) above 0.82.
Cross-Referencing Official Data: Quantitative claims made in annual reports and budget papers are cross-referenced against ABS statistics, ANAO audit findings, and our own survey data. Discrepancies are flagged and investigated before publication.
Trend Detection: Time-series analysis identifies meaningful changes in performance indicators, filtering out statistical noise. We apply Bayesian change-point detection to distinguish genuine shifts from normal variation.
Citizen surveys are central to YourGov’s assessments. Each quarterly wave follows a rigorous methodology designed to produce representative, reliable results.
Sample Size: Minimum 2,000 completed responses per wave, with booster samples for smaller jurisdictions (ACT, NT, Tasmania) to ensure adequate representation. Department-specific deep dives target 500+ respondents who have interacted with the relevant agency in the preceding 12 months.
Weighting: Responses are weighted using iterative proportional fitting (raking) against ABS Census benchmarks for age, gender, state/territory, remoteness, education level, and language spoken at home.
Margin of Error: National estimates carry a margin of error of +/- 2.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. State-level estimates vary from +/- 3.1pp (NSW, VIC) to +/- 5.5pp (NT, ACT).
Each government entity receives a composite score from 0 to 100, calculated as a weighted average of six dimensions. Scores are normalised within each jurisdiction to account for structural differences between federal and state/territory agencies.
Timeliness, digital maturity, completion rates, and accessibility of services.
FOI responsiveness, reporting quality, Senate Estimates engagement, and audit compliance.
Survey-derived satisfaction scores, complaint resolution rates, and Net Promoter Scores.
Budget variance, efficiency dividends, value-for-money assessments from ANAO audits.
APS Employee Census results, diversity metrics, staff turnover, and capability investment.
Digital transformation progress, policy experimentation, cross-agency collaboration, and adoption of emerging technologies.
YourGov aims to provide the most accurate and comprehensive assessment of Australian government performance available. However, users should be aware of the following limitations:
Last updated: March 2026. Questions about our methodology? Contact us at hello@yourgov.com.au