NOTES

FORTHCOMING ISSUES

ISSUE (QUARTER)	Release Date
March 2011	16 May 2011
June 2011	15 August 2011
September 2011	14 November 2011
December 2011	1 February 2012

OUTCOME OF THE 16TH SERIES CPI REVIEW

The ABS recently completed an extensive review of its CPI and has announced changes including the continued quarterly publication of the outlays based Analytical Living Cost Indexes (ALCIs). The weighting pattern used in the ALCIs will be updated from the September quarter 2011. For more details about changes to the ALCIs and the CPI, please refer to Information Paper: Outcome of the 16th Series Australian Consumer Price Index Review (cat. no. 6469.0), or www.abs.gov.au.


IMPACT OF THE FLOODS

Flooding in Queensland began in late December 2010. It is expected that the first significant economic impact of this and floods in other states will be reflected in the March quarter 2011 release of this publication.

Price collection for the December quarter 2010 was not affected by the floods.


ROUNDING

Any discrepancies between totals and sums of components in this publication are due to rounding.


CPI DATA RE-REFERENCED TO JUNE QUARTER 1998 = 100.0

For ease of comparison, the index reference period for the CPI data used throughout this publication has been re-referenced to June quarter 1998 = 100.0. All index numbers and percentage changes shown are calculated on this basis. This may lead to some minor differences from the figures published in Consumer Price Index, Australia (cat. no. 6401.0).


INQUIRIES

For further information about these and related statistics, contact the National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070.


SUMMARY COMMENTARY


THE ANALYTICAL LIVING COST INDEX

The Analytical Living Cost Indexes (ALCIs) for Selected Australian Household Types have been designed to answer the question:

'By how much would after tax money incomes need to change to allow households to purchase the same quantity of consumer goods and services that they purchased in the base period?'

In the December quarter 2010, changes in living costs ranged from a low of 0.5% (self funded retiree households) to a high of 0.7% (age pensioner households and other government transfer recipient households), while employee households rose by 0.6%. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 0.4% over the same period.

Since the series began in June quarter 1998, changes in living costs for each household type have historically tracked closely to the CPI. The living costs of other government transfer recipient households showed the highest increase of 50.3% followed by age pensioner households which increased 48.4% and employee households which increased by 48.0%, slightly higher than the 43.8% increase in the CPI. The living costs of self-funded retiree households increased by 43.6%.

These differences have come about for a number of reasons. The inclusion of mortgage interest and consumer credit charges in the analytical living cost indexes has a significant impact for employee and other government transfer recipient households. The inclusion of mortgage interest and consumer credit charges and the different treatments of housing and insurance in the ALCIs result in variations between the ALCIs and the CPI series. The expenditure patterns of those households measured by the ALCIs differ from those of the overall household sector covered by the CPI. This also contributes to differences in the percentage changes.

For a discussion of the relationship between the ALCIs and CPI, see the Explanatory Notes.