Build a government procurement watch tool
Stream every awarded Commonwealth contract above a value threshold, filter by agency or supplier ABN, and alert on patterns. ausdata.io ingests AusTender daily and exposes contracts plus aggregated supplier profiles as JSON, so you can build a tool like the Auditor-General does without writing CSV pipelines.
The problem
AusTender publishes CSVs and a search form. Building a watch tool means daily downloads, schema drift handling, deduplication, and supplier aggregation. Most newsrooms and consultancies do not have an engineering team to maintain that.
The fix
/v1/data/austender/contracts streams the same notices as JSON with consistent field names, paginated and filterable. /v1/data/austender/suppliers gives pre-aggregated total spend, contract counts, and top agencies per ABN. Run a daily cron, store deltas, send alerts.
Endpoints used
Code
# Top 10 Defence contracts over $1M awarded this month
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
"https://api.ausdata.io/v1/data/austender/contracts?agency=Department%20of%20Defence&min_value=1000000&limit=10"
# Aggregate spend for a supplier across all agencies
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
"https://api.ausdata.io/v1/data/austender/suppliers?abn=12345678901"Steps
- 1
Define the filter
Agency name, minimum value, date range, or supplier ABN. Combine filters with query string params.
- 2
Page through the results
Use the limit and offset params to paginate. The meta block tells you the total result count.
- 3
Persist and dedupe
Store contract_id as the primary key. Re-runs are idempotent: new contracts append, edits update in place.
- 4
Alert on patterns
Trigger on supplier ABN appearing for the first time, on values above a threshold, or on agency concentration shifts.
Other use cases
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