Life Course Data Initiative

The 2023-24 Commonwealth Budget delivered a $199.8 million package to target entrenched community disadvantage with a focus on intergenerational disadvantage, and improving child and family wellbeing.  The Treasury and Department of Social Services are leading the implementation of the package, with the support of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Further information on the Targeting Entrenched Disadvantage Package is available.

As part of the Budget commitment, the Australian Bureau of Statistics received $16.4 million to deliver the Life Course Data Initiative (LCDI), commencing July 2023. The LCDI is a four year program that will create a data asset and associated data insights to inform long term policy responses to address entrenched disadvantage. The LCDI focuses on improving data coverage over the early years of Australians’ lives, particularly ages 0-14, to better understand and target intergenerational disadvantage.

The LCDI is expected to help:

• researchers understand how and why intergenerational disadvantage is more prevalent in some geographic locations than others, and
• inform public policy response to alleviate place-based intergenerational disadvantage.  

The LCDI has not determined a single definition of entrenched disadvantage to be used for the initiative. The ABS will seek advice from experts to inform research and data priories related to entrenched disadvantage and will consider this from a cross domain perspective.

The ABS will partner with the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government to deliver the pilot LCDI. Over the next four years, the ABS will work closely with the ACT across all aspects of the pilot LCDI, including data integration and broader data sharing, governance processes, research and understanding community data needs. This will include safely linking data about a range of ACT Government services to the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA) and building research partnerships to demonstrate its value in addressing entrenched disadvantage. 

The ABS will also work with the South Australian Government to link the Better Evidence Better Outcomes Linked Data (BEBOLD) asset to PLIDA to extend research opportunities for the pilot LCDI. This collaboration will provide important additional insights about entrenched disadvantage in regional and remote areas.

• The LCDI is initially being run as a pilot between the years 2023-24 to 2026-27. The pilot phase will leverage the existing Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA).
• The Pilot will link five data assets and/or datasets to PLIDA including from the Commonwealth and state and territory governments.
• It will facilitate longitudinal, spatially-enabled analysis for a single birth cohort born in 2006-07. It will intend to follow this cohort for 14 years.
• It will incorporate enhanced family and household linkage methodology to facilitate family-level and household-level analysis.
• Whilst the pilot will focus on data from selected jurisdictions, it will aim to establish frameworks and processes for potentially expanding the asset to all jurisdictions in the future. The pilot will begin with five research projects: two led by the initial jurisdictional partners, one led by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to publish statistics, and two led by other research organisations.

• The LCDA Pilot will be created and protected under the Census and Statistics Act 1905, and comply with the Privacy Act.
• Research undertaken with the LCDA will occur within the Five Safes framework.
• Researchers will be required to undertake ABS safe researcher training and sign relevant undertakings prior to accessing any data for research purposes. Aggregate data from the pilot will be made available on the ABS website.
• All unit record level data will be held within the secure DataLab environment only.
• An independent Privacy Impact Assessment will be completed for this initiative and published on the ABS website.

For more information about the LCDI, email our team.

Additional information:

How the ABS Manages Privacy

Five Safes Framework

Entrenched disadvantage package-Department of Social Services

Entrenched disadvantage- Parliament of Australia