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REGIONAL STATISTICS

OBJECTIVES

The Regional Statistics Program aims to understand and support high priority emerging needs for regional statistics by providing relevant analyses, products and services. Regional data may include data relating to cities, urban, rural or remote areas. Activities undertaken under the program include improving access to, and dissemination of, ABS data and data from other sources and developing new indicators.

The activities of the Regional Statistics Program are led by the Rural and Regional Statistics National Centre, and are delivered through collaboration with many areas of the ABS which contribute regional data or analysis on a wide range of topics across economic, environment and social statistics. The program assists policy analysts and researchers to understand the characteristics of regions and change in regions across Australia, with current issues centring on regional population sustainability, local economic development, and service or infrastructure access in regions. All three tiers of government require regional data so ABS actively engages with the Australian Government and state and local governments to understand and support regional data needs. One key focal point for engagement is with the regional development and local government policy portfolio within the Australian Government. The ABS also engages with a wide range of data users to provide professional advice to help them undertake regional data analysis and to understand statistical issues that may arise in regional analyses (e.g. time series or data quality issues).

Over the next four years, a particular focus of this program will be on improving access to regional data through the use of administrative data maintained by Australian, state and territory government agencies with the potential to improve availability of regional data. The centre will continue to support users in the transition to the new ABS standard geography, the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS), and in making the best use of the 2011 Census of Population and Housing and other regional data sets to support regional policy analysis.


OUTPUTS

The main outputs of the program are:

• the National Regional Profile (cat. no. 1379.0.55.001), a web-based suite of statistics for regions containing data spanning five years and updated at least annually
• estimates and indicators from administrative data, such as the Australian Taxation Office personal income tax data, and data on customers of Centrelink and other agencies
• Estimates of Personal Income for Small Areas (cat. no. 6524.0.55.002) and Wage and Salary Earner Statistics for Small Areas (cat. no. 5673.0.55.003) - these publications provide annual regional statistics on personal income.

• actively engage with key data users to understand emerging priority data needs for regional statistics, with key priorities for the medium term being: regional economic data needs; service access in regions; and information requirements for regions undergoing significant population change and/or flows (e.g. internal migration, long distance commuting such as fly-in-fly-out workers, and tourism) - ongoing
• build collaborative working arrangements with users and producers of regional statistics - ongoing
• improve ABS dissemination of information about regional data access and availability through the Regional Topics @ a Glance page on the ABS website, the Data by Region navigator and other appropriate avenues, such as through client networks, conferences, seminars and workshops - ongoing
• deliver improved National Regional Profile outputs by progressively building in more flexibility for users to more easily access and use whatever data is available for the regions they are interested in - ongoing
• provide analysis and guidance to demonstrate how the new ASGS can be applied to a range of different regional analysis – such as analysis of local economies, social conditions or service access - ongoing.