Mapping Australian social diversity

In July I published a set of four maps presenting social diversity in the State of NSW. My post also included basic outline of the concept behind Socio Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) - a measure developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to describe socio-economic diversity of population residing in various localities throughout Australia. Today I would like to share the results of yet anther experiment with Google’s Fusion Tables – SEIFA indexes for all of Australia on a shareable map.

Mapping the distribution of values of different SEIFA measures gives quite an insight into the composition of population in various localities around Australia. Such maps could be used for all sorts of customer, market, business and policy analysis. Data is getting dated but is still the official version until the results from Census 2011 are released in the second part of 2012. Explore and see how your postcode is ranked against the neighbourhood!



Links to individual maps:
SEIFA’06 - Advantage/ Disadvantage
SEIFA’06 - Index of Disadvantage
SEIFA’06 - Index of Economic Resources
SEIFA’06 - Index of Education/ Occupation

For description of “what it all means”, please refer to may earlier post: Mapping social diversity in NSW.


I am testing Fusion Tables capabilities for creation of dynamic choropleth maps (ie thematic maps) so this time round, the shading of polygons is generated on the fly based on SQL query of attributes. Fusion Tables are quite responsive once it is all setup properly. There are still some issues with creating Fusion Tables with complex geometries and from several input files but that’s a topic for a separate post. I will only mention some frustration with data getting corrupted in Fusion Tables, even if they are not edited – I had to recreate all the boundaries since previous input table suddenly became “full of holes” with no apparent reason.


[UPDATE: Census 2011 version of SEIFA]

Related posts:
Postcode Finder featured by Google
Making maps with Fusion Tables
Shp data and Fusion Tables
Fusion Tables yet to ignite