What do crime and political inefficiency actually cost Australia?

AusCost is building a running national ledger — tracking the economic impact of crime and corruption from published government and institutional estimates, in one place, in plain numbers.

Indicative cost so far in 2026

$—

Derived from the published annual estimates below · method

Serious & organised crime, 2023–24

$82.3B

Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission

Corruption's estimated drag on GDP (~4%)

$72.3B

The Australia Institute, 2018

Rise in organised-crime cost since 2020–21

+37%

ACIC — $60.1B (2020–21) to $82.3B (2023–24)

What's coming

The full AusCost platform will track, in one place:

Cost of crime — organised crime, fraud, drug markets, and the prevention and justice-system spend that responds to them.
Cost of political inefficiency — corruption, pork-barrelling, procurement waste, and project blowouts, with sources for every line item.
Trends over time — how the ledger is moving, nationally and by category.

Every figure traceable to its source. No commentary without a citation.

Method & sources

The counter above is indicative, not an official statistic. It pro-rates the sum of two published annual estimates ($82.3B + $72.3B ≈ $154.6B/yr, about $4,900 per second) across the elapsed portion of the current calendar year. The underlying estimates use different methodologies and periods, and are combined here for scale only. The full platform will model each component separately.