Group items tagged

Christopher Pyne has overstated how well Australia is performing on jobs and growth compared to other major economies. IMF estimates for 2016 on GDP growth had put Australia ahead of the G7 countries. But the latest available data - which are actual figures as of the third quarter of 2016, not estimates - show that Australia's cumulative growth in 2016 so far is at the level of the G7 and not higher. So Australia is performing in line with the G7 and slightly worse than the OECD average.

Most of the poor people in the world are women. In no country on earth are women economically equal to men, and Australia is no exception. Research from Acoss and the University of New South Wales last year showed that a higher share of people living in poverty in Australia are women. The experience of living below the breadline in our very wealthy nation is a gendered one, for reasons that are complex and intertwined. As women progress through life, they encounter a series of barriers and setbacks that simply do not encumber men in the same way. The cause of gendered poverty is structural. It is entrenched in our workplace settings, and embedded in our personal relationships. It is at play at every stage of a woman's life, from childhood to the grave, making its mark on our education, our employment, our homes, our familial responsibilities and our retirement options. At its heart is the simple fact that women do the lion's share of caring for others. Caring is women's work, and our society does not value women's work.

Very cool visualisation, showing the power of thinking in manageable numbers. If Australia were just 100 people, what would it look like? New census data gives us an opportunity to find out, and provides some surprising insights into the state of the nation.

Almost one in four cancers detected in men were overdiagnosed in 2012, according to our new research, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia. In the same year, we found that approximately one in five cancers in women were overdiagnosed. Overdiagnosis is when a person is diagnosed with a "harmless" cancer that either never grows or grows very slowly. These cancers are sometimes called low or ultra-low-risk cancers and wouldn't have spread or caused any problems even if left untreated. Cancer overdiagnosis can result in people having unnecessary treatments, such as surgery, radiotherapy and hormone therapy. Being diagnosed with cancer and having cancer treatments can cause physical, psychological and financial harms.

'Middle Australia' earns much less than the government would have you believe and women continue to earn much less than men. ...The 2014-15 taxation statistics released last week revealed that the median taxable income of the 9.95m Australians with a taxable income was just $54,543. If you earned more than that, then you earned more than at least half of Australians.

How do we measure illegal activity? How do we estimate the size of the 'black economy'? Some nice visualisations in this report. The Australian government has announced a taskforce to "crack down on the black economy", with a panel reportedly to consider measures such as removing the $100 note from circulation and limiting cash transactions above a certain limit. One estimate of the underground economy from 1999, which only considered cash transactions and excluded illegal activities, put the size of the underground economy at around 15% of gross domestic product. However, a more recent estimate by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2013, which encompassed proceeds from illegal activities as well as other areas, estimated the size to be far smaller, at only 2.1% of GDP.

As the author of this FactCheck, I was asked to review the facts on Australia's foreign aid spending from the Menzies era to 2016-17. Sir Robert Menzies was prime minister from 1949 to 1966, which is the Menzies era for present purposes. (Menzies also served as prime minister from 1939 to 1941.) I examined the evidence for and against this statement: Aid was at its highest under Menzies, at 0.5% … when per capita income was much lower. - World Vision Australia Chief Advocate Tim Costello, quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald, December 28, 2016. I found the statement to be incorrect, strictly interpreted, though Costello's broader point is valid. The ratio of Australia's aid to its gross national income has never exceeded 0.48%, and that level was achieved slightly after the conclusion of the Menzies era, in the financial year 1967-68. Below, I explain how I arrived at this conclusion, providing more detail than could be accommodated in the FactCheck itself.

The Guardian datablog has a set of visualisations https://www.theguardian.com/technology/data-visualisation and a set of stories focused on the Australian context; useful for exploring how data analysis and visusalisation are used to tell a story.

As students from privileged backgrounds flock to schools that were supposed to be the ultimate symbol of egalitarianism, experts fear they may be reinforcing class and cultural divisions

The New York Times has run a couple of pieces comparing university tuition fees in America with the US, UK, and other systems around the world. These pieces look at the advantages and disadvantages of the different systems (with Australia coming out as having some clear benefits)

The eBook contains 16 short stories about brilliant Australian research data projects that have led to real-life impacts for Australia and beyond. It is intentionally very punchy and image-led. The stories were collected during ANDS' #dataimpact campaign which ran through 2016.

How does the "smashed avo" hook shape this discussion? Look at how statistics are used in this report to inform the debate and critique a narrow perspective. There's no doubt there are differences between the experiences and opportunities of young people compared to their parents. But when you enter the smashed avocado debate of baby boomers versus millennials, you overlook the inequality between members of the same generation. This also misses other ways inequality is perpetuated, such as through the intergenerational transfer of wealth. It's uncomfortable for many to admit but Australia is a hugely unequal society, both in terms of incomes and wealth. Australian households in the top 20% account for half of the income stream, that's about 12 times more than the bottom 20%. At the far ends of the distribution, the average weekly after tax income of the top 5% is 13 times that of the bottom 5%. But this isn't just an artefact of wealth in different generations. There are multiple ways we can glean this, most notably in relation to poverty.

Bald-faced lies are, thankfully, fairly rare in Australian politics. Being caught in an outright fib or blooper is still seen as shameful. The problem in Australia is that facts and statistics are frequently twisted to paint a misleading picture. Weasel-words, cherry-picking and overstatements are common. Our politicians and lobby groups are masterful at disguising opinion and ideology as fact, and making statements that, ultimately, aren't checkable. These tactics are harder to spot, but equally dangerous. FactCheck: Is 30% of Northern Territory farmland and 22% of Tasmanian farmland foreign-owned? Election FactCheck: are many refugees illiterate and innumerate? Election FactCheck Q&A: has the NBN been delayed? Election FactCheck Q&A: is it true Australia's unemployment payment level hasn't increased in over 20 years? And more...

You may have heard the advice for pregnant women to avoid eating soft cheeses. This is because soft cheeses can sometimes carry the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria, which can cause a mild infection. In some cases, the infection can be serious, even fatal, for the unborn child. However, the infection is very rare, affecting only around 65 people out of 23.5 million in Australia in 2014. That's 0.0003% of the population. Of these, only around 10% are pregnant women. Of these, only 20% of infections prove fatal to the foetus. We're getting down to some very small numbers here. If we talked about every risk factor in our lives the way health authorities talk about soft cheeses, we'd likely don a helmet and kneepads every morning after we get out of bed. And we'd certainly never drive a car. The upshot of this example is to emphasise that our intuitions about risk are often out of step with the actualities. So journalists need to take great care when reporting risk so as not to exacerbate our intuitive deficits as a species.

Every year in Australia, the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results show Indigenous school students are well behind their non-Indigenous peers. Reducing this disparity is a vital part of Australia's national Closing the Gap policy. ... Using an updated version of our equivalent year levels metric, introduced in Grattan Institute's 2016 report Widening Gaps, we estimate year nine Indigenous students in very remote areas are: five years behind in numeracy six years behind in reading, and seven to eight years behind in writing. In other words, the average year nine Indigenous student in a very remote area scores about the same in NAPLAN reading as the average year three non-Indigenous city student, and significantly lower in writing. But it would be a big mistake to see this only as a problem for isolated outback communities. Most Indigenous students live in cities or regional areas. So, even though learning outcomes are worse in remote and very remote areas, city and regional students account for more than two-thirds of the lost years of learning.

or those of us who can't stand the thought of creepy crawlies or who jump at the sight of a shadow in the ocean, summer in Australia can be a challenging time. Deadly snakes, sharks and spiders - you name it, we've got it. But just how deadly are these creatures and how disproportionate is our fear of them? To find out we compiled a list of deaths commonly associated with summer.

Australia should revamp how it selects major transport projects, so that governments can better know which new roads and railways are worth building and avoid squandering billions of dollars of public money on the wrong projects. The 'discount rate' Australian governments have applied to assess the value of proposed projects has been stuck at 7 per cent since at least 1989, even though the price of money has fallen from about 8 per cent to 1 per cent since then.

Wrapping your head around the scale of a global pandemic is not easy, and the volume of stats and data can be bewildering. What, for instance, are we to make of the fact Australia recorded just 109 new cases in its daily count for April 6? Given this figure peaked at around 400 new cases per day, does this mean the rate of infection is now tapering off? And what, apart from sadness, are we to make of more gruesome statistics, such as the 969 COVID-19 deaths reported in a single day in Italy on March 27? To help interpret and understand the mountains of COVID-19 data, we'll look at five commonly used methods, and explain the pros and cons of each.

Interesting discussion of how we perceive risk, and the risks of everyday activities! So let's answer the first question: how likely is a fatal shark attack for an Australian? To get a crude estimate of this, averaged across the whole population, you would divide the number of people who have died due to a shark attack each year (on average three to four each year based on recent data) by the population of Australia (approximately 24 million). This yields a risk of approximately one in eight million per year, which is thankfully very low. Does this assuage your fear? If not, the reason is probably that the imagery of a shark attack is so terrifying. Any unusual and dramatic event has a huge impact on our psyche and this distorts our perception. Also, it's not that easy for us to interpret what a risk expressed as a relative frequency truly means.

House prices rise, affordability expected to worsen despite property slowdown later this year: CBA By business reporter Michael Janda Updated about 3 hours ago Auction sign on house replaced with sold sign Photo: Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart led gains for the month, quarter and year. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore) Related Story: Property investor borrowing drives credit surge Related Story: Property investors lead home loan surge Related Story: Wealthiest suburbs among most vulnerable to mortgage stress Map: Australia If you thought it was hard to get into the housing market, it may yet get worse unless the Federal Government changes tax policies to reduce investor demand. Key points: Sydney home prices up 16pc over 12 months, Melbourne up 11.8pc CBA economists call for "gradual reforms to both supply and demand issues" Bank regulator likely to intensify investor loan crackdown That is the warning of economists at Australia's biggest mortgage lender, the Commonwealth Bank.