5th Australian Workshop on Public Finance

The 2025 Australian Workshop on Public Finance is hosted by the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Australian National University (ANU) and will be held on Thursday 31 July and Friday 1 August 2025 at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU. There is no registration fee for the workshop.

This event is sponsored by Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Taxation Office, Department of Finance, Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Department of Social Services and Treasury.

The conference will feature empirical research papers in a variety of areas in public economics, with a particular focus on papers that make use of the A-LIFE, DOMINO, PLIDA (formerly MADIP), BLADE, Single Touch Payroll or other Australian administrative datasets. Each paper will be assigned an academic discussant and a policy discussant. The conference will also provide an opportunity to discuss the state of development of Australian administrative data, and for researchers that are making use of large administrative datasets to share their latest research and insights. 

There will be two keynote address presentations, Professor David Byrne, Professor of Economics, Ritchie Chair of Economic Research at the University of Melbourne, and Dr Christopher P. Adams, US Congressional Budget Office. 

There will be a limited number of extra places available, please email roslyn.smith@anu.edu.au to register your attendance.

We are adding a pre-conference workshop on Wednesday 30 July focused on the practicalities of using PLIDA for public policy research, which will bring together PLIDA users from within the APS for a discussion of the opportunities and complexities involved with use of administrative data for research within the APS. The draft programme comprises four presentations from different teams within the APS who are using administrative data as part of their policy research. The session will focus on developing connections between APS researchers and sharing know-how around coding and common 'business rules' for data processing when conducting research with administrative data. There will be a limited number of extra places available to government employees, please email josiah.hickson@anu.edu.au to register your attendance.

Details and program of our 2024 workshop are available here.

We look forward to seeing you in Canberra.

Best wishes

Robert Breunig, ANU; Ashley Craig, ANU; Kayelle Drinkwater, Department of Social Services; Josiah Hickson, ANU & Department of Employment and Workplace Relations; Ha Vu, Deakin; and Arezou Zaresani, Sydney