ACT sales manager of electronic products with a laptop that can replace the reams of paper series that are put out by the Bureau of Statistics……
It is a thin slice of the whole of Australia taken on census day in 1991 and put on to a CD. This information is very valuable stuff _ because it is packaged the right way.
The blank CD is worth about $2. Stacked with the census information and more importantly some powerful extractive software it retails for $10,500 from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. (It includes training.)
A whole lot of information is useless. A whole lot of information organised, tabulated and indexed on paper is worth a lot more. But information on CD with correlation software is worth a lot more.
The user decides with great precision what he or she wants to know about Australian people.
Sitting at a PC in the office or home you can map dozens of characteristics about the population (age, sex, employment, income, education, ethnicity, etc) according to state, electoral boundary, postcode, suburb, down to 200 households in the smallest statistical unit.
Where should child-care centres be built? What would be the potential audience of my new radio station in Wangaratta? What is the age and income profile of the audience? The social and commercial applications are endless. The strength of the information and the program is that users can create their own correlations very quickly for their own purposes.
The mapping elements are extremely versatile. Instead of selecting according to the names of an area you can click the mouse and drag it on a map to form a circle, the radius in kilometres of which appears in a window as you drag the mouse.
Having selected the circle you can extract information about the people in it. The maps can include main roads, schools, shopping centres, police stations etc at the user’s selection.
If you don’t like the circle, you can compile an irregular map from postcodes, suburbs, towns and cities.
There are clearly privacy implications, especially when this information is intersected with the Telecom’s Australian White Pages on CD. To meet those concerns, the Bureau of Statistics has a minimum statistical unit of 200 households and destroys the names.
The ACT sales manager of the bureau’s electronic products, Jack Harries, says the bureau is adding and improving to its 1991 census CD product and as it does so, existing clients get free updates. And their discounts for extra copies. More information is being added with reference to the working population, with reference to past censuses and with reference to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population.
The bureau’s more immediate electronic product is PC Ausstats. For a flat $2500 a year you get access 24 hours a day over the phone via modem to the bureau economic time series. It includes some statistics not available on paper.
The main statistics are the labour force, company profits, demography, national accounts, the current account, retail prices etc. You can call them up with the latest addition on the computer in your office the second they are released on paper. It includes the explanatory notes.
Or you can look at any of the series anytime. For example, you can get monthly unemployment or balance of trade every month back to the 1970s in graphable form.
PC Ausstats comes with some elegant selecting software to cut down or expand the series before pasting it to a spreadsheet program. For example, the retail sales series starts in the 1970s and includes all states and territories. You might want only the past fives years, ACT and national figures and a comparison. You can quickly cut the early material and the unwanted states and you can add a line creating the ACT figure as a percentage of the national figure.
You then paste the result into Excel or Lotus and make a pretty graph for your industry association magazine or whatever.
PC Ausstats does not include all the bureau’s publications, just the main 20 or so economic a demographic series and their sub-series (male, female, age, states etc right down to clay-brick and red-meat production, for example). In total 2000 time series.
The main advantages over paper delivery are:
It is instant (no-one has to collect it).
No storage space is needed.
No-one has to index, catalogue and put the paper in order on the shelf.
You can manipulate the data.
The data you manipulate is accurate because it has not been transcribed from paper.
And the disadvantage, of course, is cost.
For more information, phone 2526205.