NOTES

FORTHCOMING ISSUES

As previously advised, a number of releases of Overseas Arrivals and Departures, Australia (cat. no. 3401.0) have been delayed due to passenger card processing issues as announced by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) .

Contingency processing plans are delivering and the ABS is now able to confirm the following release schedule for 3401.0. Note that the regular schedule of releases will resume for May statistics on 7 July 2015.

ISSUE	Release Date
April 2015	2 July 2015 (previously late June/early July)
May 2015	7 July 2015 (no change)
June 2015	7 August (no change)
July 2015	4 September (no change)
August 2015	6 October (no change)
September 2015	9 November (no change)
Regular scheduled monthly releases of 3401.0 thereafter.

DATA NOTES

This release contains overseas movement data which should not be interpreted as 'persons'. See paragraph 7 of the Explanatory Notes for more detail.

The statistics in this release have been rounded. See paragraph 35 of the Explanatory Notes for more detail.

CHANGES IN THIS ISSUE

On 1 October 2014, DIBP transitioned to a new provider of passenger card processing. A number of releases of Overseas Arrivals and Departures, Australia (cat. no. 3401.0) have been delayed due to passenger card processing issues as announced by DIBP. Contingency processing plans are now delivering data from DIBP. The ABS has increased quality assurance processes for March 2015. To ensure quality and accuracy, both input and output data have been thoroughly tested for each of the variables that are collected from the Australian passenger card.

For March 2015, investigations by the ABS identified a higher number of passenger cards missing than expected. Using additional data provided by DIBP from its Travel and Immigration Processing System (TRIPS), the ABS estimated 57,883 (2.2%) passenger cards missing from Tullamarine Airport (Melbourne), Eagle Farm Airport (Brisbane), Kingsford Smith Airport (Sydney), Adelaide Airport, and Perth Airport. These records were added to the overseas arrivals and departures data for March. Any variables in these records that remained missing were imputed. For further information, see the Data Quality Issues (Appendix 2) in the left hand side navigation bar under the Explanatory Notes tab.

PRELIMINARY ESTIMATES OF OVERSEAS ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

Due to the delay in processing passenger card data used in producing Overseas Arrivals and Departures, Australia (cat. no. 3401.0) each month, the ABS has also produced preliminary estimates based on modelled data from October 2014 to March 2015. For access to the data and further information see Preliminary Estimates of Overseas Arrivals and Departures, Australia, Jan to Mar 2015 (cat. no. 3401.0.30.001).

INQUIRIES

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