About

Data & methodology

Every figure on Gazetteer resolves to a source within one click. The list below is generated automatically from content/sources.json — attribution strings and licence terms are not hardcoded anywhere else in the codebase.

Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Gazetteer treats Indigenous Census variables as outcomes of colonisation, not overlays of difference. Where a number describes a community, the framing credits that community. ABS Census 2021 was released under CC BY 4.0 for public use; the responsibility for respectful framing is editorial, not legal.

Sources

ABS Census 2021

Australian Bureau of Statistics (Commonwealth Government of Australia)

Full name: Australian Bureau of Statistics — Census of Population and Housing 2021
Home: https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/datapacks
Alt: https://data.abs.gov.au/
Retrieval: Primary: DataPacks CSV download (General Community Profile + Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Profile) at SA2 geography. Fallback: ABS Data API at data.abs.gov.au for ad-hoc queries.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Coverage: All Australia. Available at SA1 / SA2 / SA3 / SA4 / LGA / SAL (Suburb and Locality) / POA (Postal Area). Gazetteer ingests at SA2.
Geography standard: ASGS Edition 3 (Australian Statistical Geography Standard, 2021).
Geography units: ~2,310 SA2s nationally; median population ~10,000.
Refresh: 5-yearly (Census). 2021 is the current edition; next release expected ~2027–2028 following the 2026 Census.
Attribution: Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing 2021. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Caveats

Small-count suppression: ABS replaces counts <3 with zeros / randomised perturbation to protect privacy.
Population floor: SA2s with population <200 are excluded from gazetteer rankings to reduce noise.
'Not stated' responses inflate denominators for percentage fields — affects unemployment rate, % no internet, % born overseas, etc.
Census cadence means refresh is essentially one-shot until the 2026 Census release lands.
Indigenous status undercount is documented by ABS — figures are 'persons who identified as Indigenous in the Census', not a comprehensive count.
Some SA2 boundaries shifted between 2016 and 2021 ASGS editions — gazetteer uses 2021 boundaries throughout for consistency.

Fields

population (persons)

Total population

Method: G01 — Selected Person Characteristics by Sex

median_age (years)

Median age

Method: G02 — Selected Medians and Averages

median_household_income_weekly (AUD/week)

Median household income (weekly)

Method: G02 — Selected Medians and Averages

Equivalised total household income excluded for v0; raw weekly median used as the visceral number.

median_rent_weekly (AUD/week)

Median rent (weekly)

Method: G02 — Selected Medians and Averages

unemployment_rate (percent)

Unemployment rate

Method: G43 — Labour Force Status by Age by Sex

Derivation: ABS's own Percent_Unem_loyment_P column from G43 (unemployed / labour force). Excludes 'not in labour force' by construction.

pct_renting (percent)

Households renting

Method: G37 — Tenure Type and Landlord Type by Dwelling Structure

Derivation: R_Tot_Total (all rental subcategories summed by ABS) / Total_Total (all tenure types including 'not stated').

avg_persons_per_bedroom (persons/bedroom)

Average persons per bedroom

Method: G02 — Selected Medians and Averages

v0 overcrowding proxy. ABS-published median; values >1.0 indicate more persons than bedrooms on average. Will be superseded by overcrowding_rate (G32 / CNOS) once a dedicated resolver lands.

overcrowding_rate (percent)

Overcrowding rate (Canadian National Occupancy Standard)

Method: G32 — Number of Bedrooms by Number of Persons Usually Resident

Derivation: Households requiring one or more additional bedrooms per CNOS / total occupied private dwellings.

pct_no_internet (percent)

Dwellings with no internet connection

Method: —

pct_no_car (percent)

Dwellings with no motor vehicle

Method: G34 — Number of Motor Vehicles by Dwellings

pct_single_parent_families (percent)

Single-parent families (share of all families)

Method: G29 — Family Composition

Derivation: OPF_Total_P (one-parent families, all persons) / Total_P (all families).

pct_no_post_school_qualification (percent)

Adults (15+) with no post-school qualification

Method: G49 — Non-School Qualification: Level of Education by Age by Sex

Derivation: Persons 15+ where qualification is 'no qualification' or 'not applicable' / total persons 15+ excluding 'not stated'.

pct_indigenous (percent)

Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander population

Method: G07 — Indigenous Status by Age by Sex

Cross-checked against the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Profile (IP01) where available. Framing per Indigenous Data Sovereignty principle: outcomes-of-colonisation, not 'Indigenous presence as overlay'.

pct_born_overseas (percent)

Persons born overseas

Method: G01 — Selected Person Characteristics by Sex (Birthplace aggregate)

Derivation: Birthplace_Elsewhere_P / Tot_P_P. Sourced from G01 rather than G09 (which splits countries across files A–G); G01 carries the Australia/Elsewhere aggregate directly.

languages_top_3 (language names + counts)

Top 3 languages used at home (other than English)

Method: G13 — Language Used at Home by Sex

Derivation: Top 3 by speaker count, excluding 'English only', 'not stated', and 'inadequately described'.

ABS ASGS Edition 3 (2021)

Australian Bureau of Statistics (Commonwealth Government of Australia)

Full name: Australian Bureau of Statistics — Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3, 2021
Home: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/standards/australian-statistical-geography-standard-asgs-edition-3
Retrieval: Bulk shapefile / GeoPackage download for SA2 boundaries (and SAL for label rendering). Convert to GeoJSON, then to PMTiles via tippecanoe for serving from Cloudflare R2.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Coverage: All Australia. SA1 / SA2 / SA3 / SA4 / GCCSA / STE / LGA / SAL / POA boundaries. Gazetteer renders SA2 polygons as the primary unit; SAL labels for human-readable suburb names.
Refresh: Updated with each Census cycle (5-yearly). Edition 3 is the current standard; Edition 4 expected post-2026 Census.
Attribution: Boundary data: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3, 2021. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Caveats

SA2 boundaries are designed for statistical purposes, not administrative — they don't always align with how locals perceive 'suburb' boundaries.
SAL (Suburb and Locality) layer provides the human-readable suburb names but doesn't tile cleanly to SA2 — gazetteer uses SAL only for labelling, SA2 for data joins.
Coastline polygons include very large SA2s for sparsely populated regions — visual choropleth needs careful classification (quantile or natural breaks) to avoid the map being dominated by empty outback SA2s.

PlanningAlerts

OpenAustralia Foundation (Australian non-profit)

Full name: PlanningAlerts.org.au — operated by the OpenAustralia Foundation
Home: https://www.planningalerts.org.au/
API docs: https://www.planningalerts.org.au/api/howto
Authorities: https://www.planningalerts.org.au/authorities
Retrieval: REST API, JSON responses. Free Community plan API key required (sign up at planningalerts.org.au). Rate limit: 1,000 requests / day. Pagination: 100 results / page. Endpoint pattern: GET /applications.json with bbox or lat/lng/radius parameters. Gazetteer paginates the AU bounding box daily to refresh a 90-day rolling window.
Licence: Code: Apache-2.0. Data: per contributing council — published under terms set by each council, typically CC BY or equivalent open licence. Aggregator status: OpenAustralia Foundation is the redistributor, not the source-of-truth.
Coverage: 100+ Australian councils via a single API. Canonical authority list at the url_authorities link above. Coverage is not all-AU — gaps exist where councils have not been onboarded. Gazetteer publishes coverage state at /about/coverage so users can see which councils contribute.
Geography: Each DA carries lat/lng. Gazetteer attributes DAs to SA2 via point-in-polygon overlay against ASGS 2021 SA2 boundaries.
Refresh: Daily via GitHub Actions cron. Each refresh fetches DAs lodged or updated in the last 90 days.
Attribution: Development Application data sourced via PlanningAlerts.org.au, operated by the OpenAustralia Foundation. Original DA data is published by individual Australian councils.

Caveats

Coverage is council-by-council, not all-AU — absence of DAs in an SA2 may mean no development OR may mean the council does not contribute to PlanningAlerts.
DA descriptions are free-text from council planning portals and vary wildly in quality and detail.
DA status (lodged, approved, refused) is a snapshot — councils update on different cadences.
PlanningAlerts API rate limits constrain backfill: full historical reload takes multiple days at 1,000 req/day. Gazetteer uses rolling 90-day windows to stay under limits.
Some councils only publish summary data without precise lat/lng — these DAs are dropped from the spatial overlay and noted in the coverage page.

NPI 2023-24

Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), Commonwealth Government of Australia

NPI: pending data verification — see methodology.

Full name: National Pollutant Inventory — Reporting Year 2023-24
Home: https://www.npi.gov.au/
Retrieval: PENDING VERIFICATION at pipeline implementation time. DCCEEW portal timed out during design-phase audit. Expected: bulk CSV download per reporting year, per-facility records with substance, quantity, lat/lng. Fallback: data.gov.au search for 'NPI'.
Licence: Expected CC BY 4.0 (DCCEEW default for open data). Verify on retrieval.
Coverage: All Australia. Per-facility point data (lat/lng) for facilities meeting NPI reporting thresholds. ~4,000 facilities reporting in recent years.
Geography: Per-facility lat/lng. Gazetteer attributes facilities to SA2 via point-in-polygon. Per-facility ranking ('Top 10 polluters by state') is independent of SA2 aggregation.
Refresh: Annual. NPI reports on Australian financial years (July–June); 2023-24 release published in early 2025.
Attribution: Emissions data sourced from the National Pollutant Inventory, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), reporting year 2023-24.

Caveats

PENDING VERIFICATION: do not render NPI data on the live site until the endpoint is confirmed and a sample retrieval succeeds. About page should render 'NPI: pending data verification' until then.
NPI captures facilities above reporting thresholds only — small emitters are excluded by design.
Self-reported by facility operators; quality varies. Substance categories follow NPI's own taxonomy (~93 substances).
Emissions are annual totals — no temporal granularity within a reporting year.
Some facilities aggregate multiple sub-sites into a single report at one lat/lng — geographic precision is operator-dependent.

Attribution grammar

Every per-field stat on the site is stored as a triple { source_id, method_id, retrieved_at }. When a stat is tapped or hovered, that triple surfaces and links back to the relevant entry above. This keeps attribution honest: no number appears without a source, and no source appears only on the About page.