About Mogged
Mogged charts the life of every Australian Commonwealth department and agency from Federation on 1 January 1901 to today: how each came into existence, which bodies its functions came from, every rename, and what became of it.
What is a Machinery of Government change?
A Machinery of Government (MoG) change moves responsibility for a function from one part of government to another. For Departments of State the instrument is the Administrative Arrangements Order, made by the Governor-General on the Prime Minister’s advice, usually after an election or a change of Prime Minister. Agencies are created, renamed and abolished by Acts of Parliament, regulations, or executive decisions. Australians say a department has been “mogged” when it is caught up in one.
Reading the graph
- Time runs left to right, from 1901 to today. Each bar is one organisation under one name.
- Bars that continue one another (a rename, or the main line of a merger) sit on the same row, so a lineage reads as one line. Curves join an organisation to the bodies it came from.
- Solid curves mean the whole body moved; dashed curves mean part of it did.
- Departments of State have stronger bars than agencies, and royal commissions are hatched. Click any bar to see its history.
- Clicking a bar also lights up its lineage: every name the body has had, the bodies it grew out of and the ones it became, up to two changes away. The full history page shows three changes each way.
- The strip under the years shows the Prime Minister of the day, coloured by party:
- Labor
- Liberal and its forerunners (Free Trade, Commonwealth Liberal, National Labor, Nationalist, United Australia, Liberal)
- Country
- Protectionist
- Hold Ctrl (or ⌘) and scroll to zoom; drag or scroll to move around.
Colours group policy areas into seven families; each band is labelled with its area:
- Government & law
- Economy & industry
- Social policy
- Infrastructure & communications
- Culture, Indigenous affairs & territories
- Land & environment
- Defence & external
Kinds of change
- Renamed from
- The same body continued under a new name.
- Merged from
- The whole body was combined with others to create a new one.
- Absorbed
- The whole body was folded into an existing one.
- Split from
- A new body was created from part of an existing one.
- Took over functions from
- Some functions moved to an existing body.
- Replaced
- The body was abolished and a new one took over its role.
What counts as an organisation
Following the National Archives of Australia, every incarnation of a body is its own entry: a department that was abolished and re-created, even under the same name, appears twice, and a rename starts a new entry linked to the old one. Searching for any former name takes you to the organisation as it was when it had that name, with its earlier and later names alongside.
Mogged covers every Department of State since 1901, every body on the Department of Finance’s list of Commonwealth entities and companies under the PGPA Act (1 July 2026), their predecessors, and other significant statutory authorities, boards, commissions, courts, parliamentary departments and government business enterprises that have since closed or been sold, and every Commonwealth royal commission (each appointed by its own Letters Patent). Military units, other inquiries, programs and advisory committees without their own staff are out of scope.
Sources
- Department of Finance, List of Commonwealth entities and companies under the PGPA Act, 1 July 2026.
- Administrative Arrangements Orders and Commonwealth legislation (Federal Register of Legislation).
- National Archives of Australia, RecordSearch agency registrations.
- Wikipedia’s articles on Australian Commonwealth departments and agencies.
- Annual reports, Parliamentary Library research papers and agency histories.
Each organisation page lists its own sources. The data was compiled with AI research assistance and checked against these sources, but errors are possible: where a date or link is uncertain the page says so. Corrections are welcome — the data lives in plain JSON files described in the project’s data guide.
Credits
Inspired by mog.nsg.au, which charts Queensland’s Machinery of Government changes. Built with TanStack Start and hosted on Cloudflare Workers.