The FOCUp Pulse

When someone saves a budget, one counter goes up for each line: raised, cut, or left alone. That is all that is stored. Nobody's particular combination of choices is written down, which means this page can tell you how many people raised health, and cannot tell you — or anyone — which of them also cut defence.

That is deliberate. A person's full set of budget choices is close to unique, and close to unique is close to identifying. A tally belongs to nobody.

Figures are held back until at least 20 budgets exist — for each cohort separately, not just overall. That threshold does two jobs. A percentage drawn from eleven people deserves to be pulled apart by the first person who checks it. And a tally of one is not really a tally: if a single Victorian had ever saved a budget, every Victorian counter would come from that person, and reading them together would rebuild their whole budget. Requiring a crowd before a cohort is reported is what stops slicing from undoing the protection above.

Where people live is what they told us, on an optional question they were free to skip — not guessed from an IP address. Mobile connections geolocate to the carrier's gateway, which would have quietly inflated New South Wales and Victoria, the two states most likely to be quoted. Budgets saved without an answer still count in the totals and appear in no state's figures.

Totals are limited to Australian connections by default, so the numbers describe people here rather than anyone who found the site. Back to Australian connections only. That check uses the country of the connection, which is read from the request and discarded — no address and no country is stored anywhere.