New South Wales

Because governments measure the same budget in more than one way, and the news usually quotes a different one from us. None of them is wrong — they just count different things. Here is the whole story in three lines.

Running the state — the number we show

Money in, minus what gets spent keeping things going: wages, hospitals, schools, police. It leaves out the cost of building things. This is what the sliders move, so it is what we put at the top.

Running it, plus building it

The same thing with roads, hospitals and schools added in. Always a bigger hole wherever a government is building, which is nearly always. The editor shows this one too, underneath, so you can see both.

Debt works the same way. Net debt is what is owed after subtracting the money the government holds — that is the figure we show. Gross debt is everything borrowed, before counting any of the savings, and for the federal government it runs past a trillion dollars. If you have seen “a trillion in debt” in a headline, that is this one. Both are true.

Every figure here comes from the Parliamentary Budget Office — an independent body that publishes all nine Australian governments on the same basis, so they can be compared fairly. The sources pages name the paper behind each line.