Archive for May, 2012
One of the questions we get asked most often at .id training sessions is how to get the data, charts and text out of the .id websites and into your working documents and presentations. This blog will step you through it.
Perth is Australia’s 4th largest city, and contains the bulk of Western Australia’s population. Perth is a very remote city, at over 2,000km from Adelaide and over 3,000km from the east coast, and in many ways is quite different to the rest of Australia. This post looks at Perth’s 2011 population, how it has changed, where it has grown and what the future holds.
.id has undertaken a set of highly detailed population forecast for New South Wales and the ACT over the last 12 months. This work has given us a great insight into some of the planning challenges for urban development across NSW and the ACT, most notably in Sydney. One of the most interesting results of this forecast work is the constraints on future residential development in Sydney and the implications for policy-makers. We expect population in Metropolitan Sydney to increase from about 4.6 million in 2011 to just over 6.1 million by 2036 – where will these people be housed?
The pundits enjoy talking about Queensland and Western Australia for their population and employment growth potential, but for sheer scale and size, New South Wales is the winner. We have had the ‘pleasure’ of modelling population futures for just over 12,400 areas across NSW and what an effort this has been. Here’s what we discovered…
A case study of the impacts of service delivery on population outcomes.
Wanganui District Council became the third New Zealand council to take on .id’s community profile, and I recently spent time in this soulful and very beautiful part of New Zealand training with staff and community groups. Wanganui District Council and the wider community were, at the time, grappling with a difficult issue. The District Health Board had proposed shifting some of Wanganui’s local Child and Maternal Health Care services to Palmerston North, some 45 minutes away. The local newspaper was running headlines on it, and it was the old story of centralisation versus local services.
I recently wrote a blog where I made the point that the largest group attracted to greenfield developments in growth areas were younger families with parents typically aged 20-34 years. This prompted queries about the mix of housing achieved within newly developing areas.
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. This has never been more true than in the case of the US Census of the late 1800’s, which in many ways set the wheels in motion for the development of the modern computer.
I was recently forwarded an article published on the BBC website, which outlined calls by the Conservative Government in the UK to scrap the Census in its current format. The premise of their argument is that it has become too expensive and that the data can be obtained from other sources. Having worked with Census data for many years, I’ve certainly come across this argument many times. But how true is this? Can the data be obtained elsewhere? And can the argument come down to mere dollars? Let’s have a closer look at some of the issues.
In a previous article I looked at the baby boomers, those born in the post-war baby boom, and discovered that it actually started well before the end of World War II. This article looks at the generations which came after them, commonly known as generation X and generation Y, and asks “Have we gone too far in assigning letters to generations?”
Sydney, Australia’s largest city and oldest European settlement, is also known as Australia’s world city, and the “city of cities”. It is the entry point of most new migrants to Australia, has the busiest airport in Australia, and iconic locations like the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. This post looks at Sydney’s 2011 population, how it has changed and what the future holds for Sydney.
