Australian Census infographics

August 9, 2011 3:48 PM

It's Census time in Australia. Watch Australians age, lose religion and get divorced with these interactive infographics based on historical data. Then play with the Australian Bureau of Statistics' neat tool that puts a personal touch on the data.

The ABS's refreshingly human Twitter account is also worth a look.

posted by puffl (48 comments total)

Holy shit I love stats ...
posted by LoudMusic at 4:02 PM on August 9, 2011

Where's the rugby vs aussie rules breakdown?
posted by GuyZero at 4:04 PM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Wow, this is pretty awesome. Nice work ABS!
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:14 PM on August 9, 2011

Where's the rugby vs aussie rules breakdown

The Murray.
posted by pompomtom at 4:17 PM on August 9, 2011 [10 favorites]

Is that Sean Micallef doing to voiceover?
posted by pompomtom at 4:19 PM on August 9, 2011

s/to/the/
posted by pompomtom at 4:19 PM on August 9, 2011

There was no question for AC/DC vs Midnight Oil vs You Am I

the big thing going around my Facebook was reminding the non-religious to mark No Religion on the census instead of making a joke like 'Jedi', which I dutifully did. I hope the end the decades of oppression our atheist prime minister has put us under.

Apparently I'll get fined if I don't fill it out, so I hope I filled it out correctly.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 4:34 PM on August 9, 2011

What happened with divorces in 1976?
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 4:36 PM on August 9, 2011

No fault divorce arrived with the 1975 Family Law Act (Cwth).
posted by Trivia Newton John at 4:41 PM on August 9, 2011 [3 favorites]

Or now that I look at the site, exactly what it says on the timeline. Sorry.
posted by Trivia Newton John at 4:44 PM on August 9, 2011

ABS is actually quite amazing with their non-census work as well.

Also, in the demographic profile chart that shows Australia's aging population, if you slide the ruler all the way to the right (year 2100), the chart looks like a pot-bellied man with a penis.
posted by vidur at 4:44 PM on August 9, 2011

I've enjoyed their tweets for a few weeks, but I hadn't seen the spotlight thingy. It is WAY cool! Thanks, puffl.
posted by malibustacey9999 at 4:48 PM on August 9, 2011

Happy Censusmas everybody! (yes, I'm a day late.... I'm on time if you consider the 95% confidence interval though)
posted by kjs4 at 4:51 PM on August 9, 2011 [2 favorites]

Damn, that ABS spotlight tool is awesome. You can make your own personal infographic at the end!

Also, your twitter link is broken.
posted by Georgina at 4:52 PM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Wow, those graphs are really quite nice. So clean, and the interface is so smooth and clever. Whenever I see a link to an infographic, I'm usually thinking, "Oh God, what now?", but these were a pleasant surprise.
posted by -jf- at 4:53 PM on August 9, 2011

Sorry, here's the correct Census Twitter link. (Thanks, Georgina.)
posted by puffl at 5:02 PM on August 9, 2011

From the twitter feed: "You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth! Well the truth is there are 2507 Church of Scientologists in Australia."
posted by vidur at 5:04 PM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

I can see the exact moment I moved from Brisbane to Melbourne and became left Catholicism for Atheism. Nice one Australian government. thanks for being big, controlling, providing, stable and safe - from a white, well educated middle age guy with three kids a lovely wife and a nice house.
posted by the noob at 5:07 PM on August 9, 2011

"More than 90 eCensus forms are being submitted per second. That’ll show the Canadians!"

</Canadian sadface>

I'm quite impressed and jealous with this. Hopefully we can point to it as a good reason to re-implement our own Census.
posted by Lemurrhea at 5:23 PM on August 9, 2011

Very neat. When a Department manages to present important information in an interesting way, it's a win for everyone. Really very encouraging to see some of the fruits of Gov 2.0.

Now someone just needs to go and fix the horror show that is the normal ABS website.
posted by kithrater at 5:46 PM on August 9, 2011

Now someone just needs to go and fix the horror show that is the normal ABS website

What's wrong with it? Serious question. I use it all the time to pull trade figures, and haven't had any problems yet.
posted by vidur at 6:08 PM on August 9, 2011

I like this response on their Twitter.
posted by exogenous at 6:14 PM on August 9, 2011 [6 favorites]

What's wrong with it? Serious question. I use it all the time to pull trade figures, and haven't had any problems yet.

Terrible search functionality if you don't know exactly the series you want, poor comparison of different sets in regards to time produced, usually no logical way to click through to the topic you want, some of the more useful data sets buried in hundred-page .pdfs.
posted by kithrater at 6:22 PM on August 9, 2011 [2 favorites]

Aha. I'm obviously not in that category. I know exactly what I want from ABS.
posted by vidur at 6:56 PM on August 9, 2011

I had a problem with the eCensus form. I currently share my house with a single housemate. She wanted to privately fill in her own form so we asked for two of the eCensus envelopes. It was then confusing as to how to do these separately. I filled mine in and put myself as person 1 and her as person 2 and that she would be filling in her own form. I then answered all the questions for person 1 and the questions about the dwelling. When she went to do her form I assumed that she would mirror my form and put me as person 1 and her as person 2. But the form did not allow this. So she had to put herself as person 1 and me as person 2 and complete all the dwelling questions again. This seems fairly stupid. Unless there was some other way to do this? If there was, I couldn't find it and had my brain warped by reading the answer to this question in the FAQ:

When completing your eCensus form, on the Welcome to your eCensus form, please add two (2) to your response to the number of people present to include the first and second persons from the paper Census form in your household. This enables the ABS to link the household together.

If you are making something mandatory by law then I feel that you have a very strong responsibility to make the process of complying with it as simple and intuitive as possible. I feel the eCensus form failed here from the perspective of multiple people filling in forms privately within one household.
posted by Pranksome Quaine at 7:13 PM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

time for the parade of alienation!

"0.31081% of people in Australia were born in United States of America, too."

"Approximately 0.02418% of the population has the same ancestry that you do. "

"1,527 people in Australia have the same job that you do"

this place is tiny!
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:49 PM on August 9, 2011

No, my friend, you're just very, very special. ;)
posted by obiwanwasabi at 7:52 PM on August 9, 2011

(Hrm...that 2 metre birthday cake looks quite doable.)
posted by obiwanwasabi at 8:01 PM on August 9, 2011

If you are making something mandatory by law then I feel that you have a very strong responsibility to make the process of complying with it as simple and intuitive as possible.

And to think, they had all the awesome form-designing powers of the ATO at their disposal, had they chosen to use them.
posted by UbuRoivas at 8:10 PM on August 9, 2011

obiwanwasabi, I was just thinking that.

Only 834 people share my birthday. I could totally have them around for some cake.

Let's see. A 2m diameter cake gives an area of 3.14159m². That's 0.00376689448m² per person, or approx 37cm². So everybody gets a piece just over 6cm x 6cm.

Not bad at all, especially if it's good cake. I may need a larger oven.
posted by Georgina at 8:21 PM on August 9, 2011

Pranksome Quaine: The census form has allowances for non-related, non-paired housemates. There's no need to do two forms. Doing two forms for one residence is redundant, hence all the redundancies you're spotting.
posted by Jilder at 8:23 PM on August 9, 2011

Did anyone else claim to be a Mongolian-Luxembourgish theatre director from Tuvalu?
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 9:49 PM on August 9, 2011

Jilder, you missed where I said my housemate wanted to keep her answers private. The official instructions in such a case are to fill in a second form. Here's their FAQ if you want to check.

UbuRoivas, funny how the ATO also came into my head when typing that comment.
posted by Pranksome Quaine at 10:04 PM on August 9, 2011

Not only IS it Sean Micallef doing the voiceover, but I would have given anything for him to have read it in the guise of David McGahan.
posted by cerulgalactus at 10:29 PM on August 9, 2011

Recommendations for a simpler Australian Census form: the "religion" question

Q: So, whadda youse reckon about God, an' stuff, ay?

[Please mark one answer]

(1) Fucken no worries, I reckon.
(2) Fuck, God? Fucken hell, ay. I mean ... fuck, it's all like fucken fucked, ay?
(3) Fucken fuck mate. Are youse fucken fucked in the head? Fuck off ya fucken fuck.
(4) Yeah no but.
(5) Jedi.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 1:54 AM on August 10, 2011 [3 favorites]

(6) Wally Lewis
posted by UbuRoivas at 2:31 AM on August 10, 2011

I was thinking today about how big Malcolm Norman Meninga AM is. Like, he is surely visable from the moon now, right? Actually, he could grab the fucking moon right out of its orbit and bite a hole in it and spit it out and then take a dump on New South Wales and there's not a goddamn thing anyone could do about it.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 2:58 AM on August 10, 2011

"visible", I mean.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 3:00 AM on August 10, 2011

I can pretty much guarantee that not a single other person in Australia has the same job as me (or at least described it the same way). Sadly, the infographic made me select from a list which I had difficulty fitting myself into, so it doesn't reflect that fact. Which is a bugger; I would really have liked my infographic to say I'm extremely special.
posted by andraste at 3:21 AM on August 10, 2011

I did the ecensus thing last night and was struck by the contrast between how smooth and fast the question-answering interface was (for an online government form, anyway) and how totally worthless the non-answers provided by the "more information" buttons and "census guides" were. Oh well, they'll get there one day.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 3:44 AM on August 10, 2011

Hey LiB, I'm part of that 0.3% too :)

And Pranksome there was an option for doing separate forms online for each person.
posted by Joe Chip at 4:14 AM on August 10, 2011

It was pretty funny watching my Twitter list give a running commentary as they filled out their forms. What do you put for language for a 2-week old baby? Why isn't there a multi-lingual option as well as bilingual? Does walking the dog count as housework? What if the dog finds & rolls in faeces and you have to wash him? Where the hell did we live 5 years ago anyway? They dont want an honest answer for daily tasks at work, do they? Does HTML count as a language? Etc etc for several hours.
posted by harriet vane at 5:32 AM on August 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

It was pretty funny watching my Twitter list give a running commentary as they filled out their forms. What do you put for language for a 2-week old baby? Why isn't there a multi-lingual option as well as bilingual? Does walking the dog count as housework? What if the dog finds & rolls in faeces and you have to wash him? Where the hell did we live 5 years ago anyway? They dont want an honest answer for daily tasks at work, do they? Does HTML count as a language? Etc etc for several hours.

I'd love to see how many Australians are on Twitter and FB... seems like we're more Twittered up than the rest of the world. I blame Q & A.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 4:31 PM on August 10, 2011

"White collar workers push Hindu numbers ahead of the pack" says a headline today. Without Googling, can you guess which newspaper this is from?
posted by vidur at 7:29 PM on August 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Not only IS it Sean Micallef doing the voiceover, but I would have given anything for him to have read it in the guise of David McGahan.
posted by cerulgalactus at 10:29 PM on August 9 [+] [!]

What do you mean 'guise'???
posted by Hello, I'm David McGahan at 9:55 PM on August 10, 2011

(6) Wally Lewis

So we'll have to print up separate forms for Geelong?
posted by pompomtom at 10:55 PM on August 10, 2011

Only 834 people share my birthday. I could totally have them around for some cake.
How can that be, were you born in Smarch?
posted by bystander at 4:14 AM on August 14, 2011

> How can that be, were you born in Smarch?

I assume it means day + month + year. I was surprised it was so low, too.
posted by Georgina at 2:13 AM on August 15, 2011