Australia in data
2020-01-24 — 2025-06-10
Suspiciously similar content
Data about Australia. Australia’s attempt to quantify itself is of variable quality and utility. See Rob J Hyndman’s piece, We need more open data in Australia.
1 Cultural
There are some great cultural data sets in Australia, but I hear about them more because of their fragility and controversy than their content.
2 Geodata
There is in fact a vast amount of high quality open data about Australia, and I have completely lost track of this category. This section is woefully incomplete.
Why not start with the oldest human geodata?
The AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia is one place to start. It shows the conventionally-agreed boundaries between traditional owners of the land we are on, and thus denotes who politeness dictates one should be paying respects to.
Digital Earth Australia aggregates several useful data sets.
- Digital Earth Australia Map
- Digital Earth Australia Hotspots (mostly things on fire)
Open Data Cube is a Python library for working with satellite images with an Australian origin story:
The Open Data Cube (ODC) is a non-profit, open-source project motivated by the need to better manage Satellite Data. This project was born out of the work done under the “Unlocking the Landsat Archive” and the Australian Geoscience Data Cube (AGDC) projects.
2.1 Real estate
The official obsession of Australians is real estate, so a useful spatial dataset is microburbs, the loss leader for a real estate-oriented data consultancy.
The microburbs data set claims to include
70,000 data points for every Microburb (55,000 of these, with an average of 400 residents), far more than publicly available on the site.
10-300 data points on every address in Australia. It covers features to a fine-grained level:
- Demographics
- Geography
- Amenities and businesses
- Infrastructure
- Voting patterns
- Livability scores
This is ideal for:
- Identifying real estate buying opportunities
- Assessing the performance of real estate agents
- Retail store placement and location analysis
- Planning and development concerns
Their pitch explains the content. I’d read it with the note, “We have not updated our data substantially since 2016 and our free services are increasingly stale.” I reckon if you need current info, they will cut you a deal.
2.2 Nature
2.3 Climate change
As noted under climate change, projections data can be downloaded.
2.4 Industry
There is a neat report Creative designs: geography of Australia’s digital technology industries (Hajkowicz et al. 2023) which plots where “tech happens” in Australia. Download here. Interactive map here.
3 Population data
3.1 Australian Bureau of Statistics
Traditionally, ABS Data has been “open” but a total PITA to use automatically because it is packaged in idiosyncratic spreadsheets with an obscure filing system.
The idiosyncrasy of the data might be remedied by the new Data API which is an SDMX-REST:2.1-compliant repository and can use standard official statistics tools.
The more traditional spreadsheet-download method is still available, and there are some packages to help with that. Rob Hyndman points out the following:
3.2 Australian electoral data
eechidna, by Jeremy Forbes, Carson Sievert, Rob Hyndman, Diane Cook, Heike Hofmann, and many others, has spatiotemporal electorate data from 2001–2019. This is an excellent package and the one that I myself use. Recommended.
For a simple example of one useful thing you can do here, check out Where your vote counts (source code), which maps how marginal various Australian federal electorate votes have been and thus, presumably, where you have the most power as a voter.
Monash NUMBATs explain some tweaks: Hexmaps with sugar bag make it easier to see the electoral map.
Peter Ellis, on his Australian Federal Election 2019 forecasts post introduces his useful ozfedelect package for R, for a bit of modelling using Electoral data. There’s more stuff from that author.
You can also DIY. Ben Raue advises:
The election results data published by the AEC is already pretty good. It’s tidy and easily interconnectable with unique IDs. Unlike the state and local election results which is why I started my own collection of those results in a tidy format. All the results websites are available from the AEC website then click through to downloads. In some cases datasets are broken up by geography (by state or electorate) but it’s trivial to merge them back together in R. The House of Reps downloads for 2019 are here.
4 Legal setting
Open data has had a moment (Bureau of Communications Research and Deloitte Access Economics 2016; J. Houghton and Gruen 2012; J. W. Houghton and Gruen 2014). A previous job of mine was in fact to help the state of NSW open up its data; but that is a story for another time and something which I have too much to say about to fit here, so I’ll say nothing at all.
5 Other fun stuff
- Life tables.
- OZdatasets is a large index of every Australian data set found by rOpenSci OzUnconf19 volunteers.
- OpenNEM: NEM tracks energy market stats and source/supply stuff.