AUGUST KEY FIGURES

		Aug '18	Jul '18 to Aug '18	Aug '17 to Aug '18
		'000	% change	% change
Short-term visitor arrivals
	Trend	783.3	0.7	4.8
	Seasonally adjusted	794.4	2.6	..
	Original	741.7	..	..
Short-term resident returns
	Trend	934.3	0.3	6.0
	Seasonally adjusted	935.9	1.1	..
	Original	916.2	..	..
.. not applicable

Visitor arrivals, Short-term

Resident returns, Short-term

AUGUST KEY POINTS

SHORT-TERM VISITOR ARRIVALS TO AUSTRALIA

• Trend estimates: Short-term visitor arrivals during August 2018 (783,300 movements) increased 0.7% when compared with July 2018 (777,800 movements). This followed monthly increases of 0.6% for June and 0.7% for July 2018. The current trend estimate for arrivals is 4.8% higher than in August 2017.
• Seasonally adjusted estimates: During August 2018, short-term visitor arrivals (794,400 movements) increased 2.6% when compared with July 2018 (774,100 movements). This followed increases of 0.8% for June 2018 and 0.3% for July 2018.
• Original estimates: There were 771,700 short-term visitor arrivals to Australia in August 2018.

SHORT-TERM RESIDENT RETURNS TO AUSTRALIA

• Trend estimates: Short-term resident returns during August 2018 (934,300 movements) increased 0.3% when compared with July 2018 (931,600 movements). This followed monthly increases of 0.5% for June 2018 and 0.3% for July 2018. The current trend estimate for returns is 6.0% higher than in August 2017.
• Seasonally adjusted estimates: During August 2018, short-term resident returns (935,900 movements) increased 1.1% when compared with July 2018 (925,200 movements). This followed a monthly decrease of 2.1% in June 2018 and a monthly increase of 1.0% in July 2018.
• Original estimates: There were 916,200 short-term resident returns to Australia in August 2018.

NOTES


FORTHCOMING ISSUES

ISSUE	Release Date
September 2018	19 November 2018
October 2018	17 December 2018
November 2018	18 January 2019
December 2018	19 February 2019
January 2019	15 March 2019
February 2019	11 April 2019
March 2019	13 May 2019
April 2019	12 June 2019
May 2019	12 July 2019
June 2019	15 August 2019
July 2019	11 September 2019
August 2019	15 October 2019

DATA NOTES

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. From investigations by Home Affairs changes were made to their 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.

REVISIONS

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.

This release contains overseas movement data which should not be interpreted as 'persons'. See paragraph 7 of the Explanatory Notes for more detail.

The statistics in this release have been rounded. See paragraph 33 of the Explanatory Notes for more detail.


INQUIRIES

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