Somewhere between submitting your loan application and getting an answer, a lender pulls up a document you have probably never seen: your credit report. This record is one you are entitled to see yourself, and it says less about who you are than about how you have handled credit so far.
What a credit report contains
A credit report is a plain history of how you've handled credit, not an assessment of you. It typically includes identifying details, the credit accounts you have held (loans, credit cards, and increasingly, some other forms of consumer credit), how much you have borrowed and from whom, your repayment history, and any defaults or serious credit infringements listed against you. It also records enquiries: every time a lender has checked your file, usually because you applied for something.
The report is a factual ledger of credit behaviour, compiled by credit reporting bodies (in Australia, that is largely Equifax, Experian and illion) from information lenders and other credit providers report to them. It leaves out your income, your job, your savings, and your character.
Credit score vs credit report
These two things get used interchangeably, but they are not the same. The credit report is the underlying data. The credit score is a number that a credit reporting body (or sometimes a lender using their own model) calculates from that data, as a shorthand for how risky you look on paper.
Different bodies use different formulas, so you can get a different score from each one, and a different score again from a lender's internal model, which may weigh things its own way. There is no single official Australian credit score. When you check your score with a credit reporting body, treat it as one estimate among several, not a fixed grade. Moneysmart explains how to request your own credit report, rather than issuing the score itself. What actually matters to a lender assessing you is the report itself, the underlying history, more than any single number derived from it.
Who can access it and when
Your credit report is not public. Under the Privacy Act, and as overseen by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), access to it is restricted to lenders and other credit providers, and only when you have given them permission to check it, which you typically do as part of a credit application.
This is also why it is worth being deliberate about who you let check it. Every application you make, whether it goes ahead or not, can leave a mark on the file, which is easy to overlook until it is already there.
How enquiries affect it
Each time you apply for credit, the lender's check is logged on your report as an enquiry, and enquiries are visible to anyone else who looks at your file afterwards. One enquiry is unremarkable. Several enquiries in a short window, though, can read as a signal that you are actively seeking credit from multiple sources at once, which some lenders treat as a risk flag, whether or not you were actually approved anywhere.
This is why shopping around for a home loan is worth doing carefully. Getting a general sense of what different lenders offer is fine, but formal applications leave a record, so it is worth narrowing your options before you apply, rather than applying widely and comparing afterwards. If you do need to compare seriously, ask lenders whether they can give you an indicative assessment before running a formal credit check.
Missed payments and defaults work differently again. A default, once listed, does not disappear the moment you repay it. It stays on your file for a set period that varies depending on the type of listing (a missed payment reported as an overdue account is treated differently to a formal default, for instance), and drops off only once that period passes. There is no way to have an accurate default removed early only because it has been paid.
Getting your free report and fixing mistakes
You are entitled to a free copy of your credit report from each of the main credit reporting bodies, on a regular basis, and you do not need a reason to ask for one. Getting into the habit of checking, especially before you apply for a home loan, means you find out what a lender will see before they see it, while you still have time to do something about it.
If something on your report is wrong, a debt you never took out, a default that has already been paid but is still marked open, an account that is not yours, you can dispute it directly with the credit reporting body that listed it. Under the Privacy Act framework the OAIC oversees, they are obliged to investigate and correct genuine errors. Keep records of anything you paid off or disputed, since you may need to show your side of it.
The practical routine is simple: request your report from each body, read it properly rather than skimming for a score, and raise anything that looks wrong before it sits there unresolved. A clean, accurate file will not guarantee approval, but an inaccurate one can quietly cost you a loan you would otherwise have qualified for, and that is worth catching early.