1. For further information about the data, including updates or changes, see the Explanatory Notes section of this issue and the related Appendices such as Data Quality Issues.
2. Short-term arrival movements are based on a sample and are subject to sampling error. See paragraphs 10 and 11 of the Explanatory Notes section of this issue.
3. Occasionally situations occur that necessitate breaks being applied to the trend series. For an overview of the breaks currently included in the trend series, see paragraph 29 of the Explanatory Notes section of this issue.
4. In July 2017, the Australian Government Department of Home Affairs introduced changes to the incoming passenger card. The change was to capture the main reason for journey for both residents returning, and visitors arriving in Australia. The ABS has noted changes in the distribution of responses to the question on main reason for journey for short-term visitor arrivals in recent months, notably an increase in the number of persons reporting that the main reason for travel was visiting friends and relatives and a decline in the number of persons reporting the main reason was a holiday. Investigations by Home Affairs has made changes to the process of coding main reason for journey from the new incoming passenger card, and to further assist in improving quality the imputation for main reason for journey was reviewed and improved by the ABS.
5. In June 2018, the ABS identified a data quality issue with the country of residence of Bangladesh being implausibly high for short-term visitor movements. There was a corresponding decrease for Singapore and Malaysia. To fix this issue Home affairs implemented a procedural change in September 2018. For the period from April to August 2018 the ABS have identified the affected records and amended them by assigning to either Malaysia or Singapore. The amendments were based on historically observed distributions for travellers on visa subclass 601, stratified by country of embarkation and country of citizenship. Revised OAD data from April to July 2018 has been released in this issue. All time series spreadsheets and data files have been revised. For further information, see the end of Section 7 of the Data Quality Issues (Appendix 2) in the left hand side navigation bar under the Explanatory Notes tab.
Quality Declaration 
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