The rulebook every Australian federal grant follows, including the obligation to publish it.
The Commonwealth Grants Rules and Guidelines bind Australian federal entities in how they design, award and report grants. They are the rulebook behind everything that appears on GrantConnect, and they are unusually prescriptive about process.
They require that a grant opportunity be designed with stated objectives and selection criteria, that the selection process be described and then followed, that decisions be documented, and that awarded grants be published within a set period after the agreement takes effect. Ministers who award grants against departmental advice must report that fact.
The publication duty is why Australia is unusually complete on Bemzu. Listing is a legal obligation rather than a courtesy, so what appears on GrantConnect is close to the whole federal picture, which is not true of any other country in the corpus.
For an applicant the practical value is predictability. The guidelines document must state the selection process, the criteria and how decisions are made, and the entity is obliged to follow what it published. An assessment that departs from the stated criteria is a breach of the rules, not merely bad practice.
They apply to Commonwealth entities. State and territory governments have their own frameworks and their own portals, and a great deal of Australian business support sits there rather than under these rules.
| GrantConnect and the GO ID | Australia's whole-of-government grants register, where every Commonwealth opportunity gets an identifier like GO8429. | |
| Grant opportunity guidelines | The single Australian document that decides eligibility, assessment and money, the equivalent of reading a topic plus the work programme plus the annexes. | |
| Selection process (Australia) | Every Australian grant opportunity states how recipients are chosen: open competitive, targeted, or demand-driven. |
Also mentioned under ARC and NHMRC.
Eight questions, no account, nothing sent anywhere. You will know which of the 1526 open calls you can actually enter before you finish your coffee.
Check my fit
