your guide to making sense of election promises

Three weeks into the federal election campaign and both major parties have already pledged to spend billions in taxpayer dollars if elected on May 3.

But with so many policies announced — and surely more to follow — sometimes it can be hard to make sense of exactly what is being promised.

That ambiguity can come back to bite voters, and the government, during the next term.

So, how do you sort the deliverable promises from the downright impossible?

It’s a question we reckoned with while tracking Labor’s 2022 campaign promises over the last term through our Election Promise Tracker.

Politicians can make it hard to hold them accountable for their commitments later, so it’s important to know when you’re being sold a pup. Here are our tips on what to look out for in the lead-up to polling day.

Distant horizons

Promise tracking relies on clearly defined actions that can be assessed against a specific timeline, and ideally by the end of a government’s term.

But politicians have a habit of announcing policies that extend over much longer horizons, with no guarantee their party will be in government to see them through.

This can happen with large infrastructure projects and other big spending announcements, such as Labor’s 2022 promise to bring investment in the Great Barrier Reef to $1.2 billion by 2030, or the Coalition’s 2025 plan to build its first nuclear reactors by the middle of next decade.

Even five-year promises — whether to build 30,000 social and affordable homes or cut 41,000 public service jobs — aren’t particularly helpful when terms are three years long.

Certainly, governments should set long-term priorities. But if pledges won’t be completely fulfilled, voters should at least know what to expect during the coming term.

One way to gauge if parties are serious about promises is if they have outlined the shorter steps required to reach their longer-term goals.

Can it be measured?

The difference between concrete promises and mere rhetoric largely boils down to whether a pledge can be objectively measured.

Sometimes a promise can seem measurable but still lack a reliable or definitive measure to assess it when the time comes.

Jobs targets are a classic example of this, seen in the Coalition’s 2022 election pitch to create “1.3 million new jobs” and also Labor’s recent boast to have delivered “a million new jobs”.

As experts have persistently pointed out, these numbers do not account for population growth or, importantly, the fact that governments cannot take credit for every new private sector job.

Another example is Labor’s infamous promise to shave $275 off the average annual household electricity bill by 2025. While there is good data to track electricity bills, we won’t have the numbers necessary to assess the most recent term until mid-2026.

When it comes to promises that depend on specific figures, voters should consider whether they will have reliable data to assess the final outcome.

Lacking the details

Parties regularly dole out promises at press conferences along the campaign trail, but these announcements can be vaguely worded, leaving voters to fill in the blanks.

For example, Labor’s 2022 pledge to “get real wages growing” could have been understood several different ways, including as a promise to increase wages during just one quarter. (Our promise tracker took it to mean wages would be higher at the end of the government’s term than at the start.)

In fairness, parties do often publish their policies online, but these documents can be light on specifics.

During the current campaign, for example, Labor has promised to spend $1 billion in mental health support. Its policy says the funding will build or upgrade more than 100 mental health centres — but has so far neglected to say when that will happen in their policy documents.

The finer details can sometimes be found in a party’s costing documents, which also show whether funding announcements are already budgeted or genuinely new, although the major parties often release these documents only days out from the election.

This can leave little time for serious public scrutiny or analysis, especially for early voters, who in this election could account for half the electorate.

So before you vote, it’s worth checking whether more details have been released about the promises that matter to you.

The importance of keeping track

Promise tracking helps voters hold their government to account by ensuring politicians don’t wriggle out of their commitments.

Many will recall, for example, Labor’s 2022 pledge to “establish a Makarrata Commission with responsibility for truth-telling and treaty” — and, following the Voice referendum, the prime minister’s attempt to recast it as a general commitment to the “process” of Indigenous reconciliation.

Equally, it’s important that governments aren’t held to promises they never made.

In the case of Labor’s energy bills pledge, the Coalition has begun to claim that voters were promised a $275 “per year” saving but that household bills had instead increased by $1,300. That total appears to represent a tally of unconfirmed cumulative increases over each of the government’s three years, whereas Labor promised to deliver its $275 reduction “by 2025”.

Despite popular opinion, governments in Australia and abroad typically deliver on the majority of their promises.

But convincing voters of that fact requires giving them enough details to know what they are voting for and, ultimately, to assess whether it has been achieved.