A Curious Tractor
Track action rather
than wait for others.
A Curious Tractor is a civic infrastructure studio. We build the data, the tools, and the evidence that communities, journalists, and small organisations need to see how power moves in Australia, and to act on what they find.
The Four Corners episode might never come. The Royal Commission might not see this pattern. The Auditor General is five years behind. We don’t wait.
Curious
Ask real questions.
Don’t accept received wisdom. Don’t take the government press release at face value. Don’t trust the tagline on the foundation’s homepage. Read the data. Follow the money. Find the thing everyone is looking past.
Tractor
Do the work.
Not glamorous. Not viral. Not a thinkpiece. Infrastructure. Pull the weight. Plough the ground. Build the thing, publish the thing, let communities use the thing. Repeat weekly, for years.
Why We Exist
Power is opaque. Communities most affected have the least information.
01
The systems don’t talk to each other.
AusTender shows contracts. AEC shows donations. ACNC shows charities. GrantConnect shows grants. Nobody joins them. So nobody can see the same org taking $3M in contracts, donating $200K to the party that awarded them, while the community most affected receives none of it.
02
Institutions move slowly. Communities can’t wait.
By the time an inquiry reports, the money is already out the door. By the time the Auditor General catches it, the pattern has already shifted. Transparency infrastructure needs to move at the speed of the abuses it is trying to surface.
03
Public good tools shouldn’t be gated by a paywall.
If this was a $500/month SaaS tool, the people who most need it couldn’t use it. Community organisations, Indigenous-led groups, journalists working on thin budgets. So we built it free for them, and we fund it through partnerships, research commissions, and the portfolio.
The Portfolio
Four lenses. One civil society operating system.
Each project stands alone. Together they’re a complete view: the power, the evidence, the stories, the action. When communities push back, they need all four.
Power
CivicGraph
Australia’s accountability atlas. 559K entities, 1.5M cross-system relationships. Contracts, donations, grants, boards, lobbying, ALMA evidence, ATO tax transparency, all resolved into one public graph. Who holds power, where money flows, who’s being cut out.
Explore the atlas →Evidence
JusticeHub
Sector evidence for youth justice and community-led change. The Australian Living Map of Alternatives (ALMA) — 1,155 interventions, 570 evidence records, 506 outcomes. What actually works, who’s doing it, what the evidence says.
Visit JusticeHub →Stories
Empathy Ledger
First-person stories from inside the systems. The lived reality behind the data. Each story can anchor to a CivicGraph entity so readers see both the human and the structural context at once.
Visit Empathy Ledger →Action
Goods
Commerce with accountability. Buy from community-controlled and Indigenous-led organisations doing the work. Powered by CivicGraph supplier verification and procurement intelligence.
Coming soon →How It Fits Together
Each project strengthens the others.
CivicGraph exposes the pattern. JusticeHub shows which interventions the evidence supports. Together you can say “the money went here, the evidence says it should have gone there.”
Empathy Ledger anchors every story to a real org on CivicGraph. Readers get the human experience and the structural context in one place.
Goods uses CivicGraph to verify suppliers, surface Indigenous-led businesses, and track government procurement compliance. Buy accountable. Sell accountably.
Communities push back. CivicGraph gives them the data, JusticeHub gives them the evidence, Empathy Ledger gives them the voice, Goods gives them a way to trade. All four are the operating system.
How It’s Funded
Self-funded. No investors. No extractive capital.
Free for communities
Small organisations, Indigenous-led groups, journalists, and researchers use everything free. No gates. No tiers. This is what we exist for.
Paid by institutions
Government agencies, universities, and peak bodies commission custom research, briefings, and bespoke analyses. Their fees fund the public-good infrastructure for everyone else.
Partners
Who we work with
We partner with foundations, researchers, journalists, and community organisations who share the “track action rather than wait” philosophy. Partner relationships are public and transparent. Partners never get vetoes over our investigations — that’s non-negotiable.
See the Snow Foundation partnership for an example of how we work together.
Get Involved
What you can do
Journalists
Investigate with us. Access the data, co-byline the story, keep your independence.
Researchers
Query the graph. Cite the atlas. Partner on academic work, thesis projects, and peer-reviewed publications.
Community organisations
Use everything. Tell us what’s missing. Introduce us to the people in your region we haven’t reached.
Funders and institutions
Commission research. Fund specific investigations. Support the infrastructure that everyone else uses free.