Australian Bureau of Statistics
Celebrating the International Year of Statistics 2013

FINDING LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA DATA


Finding data for your Local Government Area
Wyndham Local Government Area - An example
Product development - Give us your suggestions
Finding the National Regional Profile on the ABS website
Other publications


FINDING DATA FOR YOUR LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA

Want to find out how many people live in your local government area (LGA)? What is the birth rate? What is the average taxable income? How many people have access to the internet at home? All this information, and much more, can be accessed through the National Regional Profile (NRP) on the ABS website.

There are around 300 data items in the NRP available under the broad topics of Economy, Population/People, Industry and Environment/Energy.

Data for individual regions are available in a variety of formats, discoverable through an easy to use mapping interface. You can choose a region from the lists on the left of the map, drill down into the map, or type the region name into the address search box. Once you have found your region, click on 'Get Data' to open the profile in a new window.

Profiles can be viewed as web pages or downloaded in Excel one region at a time, or click on the 'Compare Regions' button on the map page to access all data for all regions in SuperTABLE and CSV formats.

The next issue of the National Regional Profiles is expected to be released in April 2013, for local government areas and Statistical Areas 2 and above.

For a summary of the new data expected to be released in the NRP, see a summary in the 2013 edition of the What's New in Regional Statistics newsletter.

WYNDHAM LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA - AN EXAMPLE

The LGA of Wyndham in Victoria is used here to showcase some of the information available in the NRP. Covering an area of 541.8 km2, Wyndham LGA is on the south west fringes of Melbourne, and partly bordered by the coastline of Port Phillip Bay.



Population/People

In the twelve months to 2009-10, Wyndham's population grew by 12,694 (8.8%) to a total of 156,573 persons. This increase was more than five times the rate of Australia’s population growth for the same period.

The most prominent age group in Wyndham was 0 - 14 years, comprising 24.1% of the region’s total population in 2009-10.

Economy

Wyndham's Average Wage and Salary income in 2008-09 was $46,318 - higher than the corresponding Victorian level ($45,246).

In 2008-09, 27.0% of Wyndham's Wage and salary earners were aged 25 years to 34 years. In occupation terms, the largest proportion (19.4%) of all Wage and salary earners were 'Clerical and Administrative workers', followed by ‘Professionals’ (15.5%), and ‘Tradespersons and Related workers’ (12.4%).

Industry

In 2009-10, the number of new private sector houses approved in Wyndham was 5,262, an increase of 1,768 (50.60%) from 2008-09.

Environment/Energy

Wyndham had an area of 3,000 ha irrigated in 2005-06, which is 7.1% of all agricultural land in the area. The total water use for farms in Wyndham in 2005-06 was 9,925 ML, or 0.4% of all water used on Victorian farms in that year.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT - Give us your suggestions

The ABS is continually refining the NRP, seeking new, valuable data sets that could be added. If you know of 'untapped' local government datasets that may be available across all jurisdictions, please forward your suggestions to our data development team, for further investigation. Similarly you may have ideas on how to make the NRP interface more user friendly. Please contact us by email at regional.statistics@abs.gov.au.


FINDING THE NRP ON THE ABS WEBSITE

For more information, refer to the National Regional Profile 2006-2010 (cat. no. 1379.0.55.001), which can be accessed on the ABS home page from the left hand side of the page under the heading 'Regional Statistics'.


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

For more information on what other publications output data at the local government area level, see the Local Government web portal.