Australian Politics (Page 2)

Black Lives Matter – Australia’s statistics

On: June 6, 2020

In: Australian Politics, Feature, Statistics

As Australians rally across the country to protest against mistreatment and deaths of Indigenous people, inspired by the week of protests following the death of George Floyd in the US, I’m comparing the statistics in the two countries. It saddens me to find, as I expected (I’ve blogged about this before), that Indigenous people are treated overall much worse by the police and prisons in Australia’s judicial system than black Americans are by theirs.Continue Reading

Covid19 Reflections #10

On: March 30, 2020

In: Australian Politics, Covid19, Statistics, Work and life

Today’s insight I’ve previously written that the number of positive tests in any country is not necessarily a good measure of how prevalent Covid19 is in that country. It really depends on how much of the population is being tested, and how many of those tests are positive. I hadContinue Reading

Covid19 Reflections #4

On: March 24, 2020

In: Australian Politics, Covid19, Statistics, Work and life

Today’s Insight In my first Covid reflections, I mentioned the difference in timing between infection, being infectious, having symptoms, testing positive, and recovery, or serious illness and/or death. I said that a positive test captures an event (the infection with Covid19) that happened between 4 days and 2 weeks beforeContinue Reading

Covid19 Reflections #3

On: March 23, 2020

In: Australian Politics, Covid19, Life, Statistics, Work and life

Today’s Insight Several people have asked me about how we should compare ourselves to Italy. There are quite a few ways, and I’m going to go through them. Yesterday (22 March) the number of confirmed cases in Australia was 1,363. In Italy, the point where that number was reached wasContinue Reading

Covid19 Reflections #2

On: March 22, 2020

In: Australian Politics, Covid19, Life, Statistics, Work and life

Today’s Insight Something that I find somewhat cheering in all the news is that here in Australia, we seem to be doing quite well on testing. The graph below, from our world in data (currently my favourite overall source) shows that we are high on the list of total testsContinue Reading

How many children die from family violence in Australia?

On: February 29, 2020

In: Australian Politics, Feature, Life, Statistics

The shocking murder of a woman and her three children by her ex-husband (and the children’s father) in Queensland this week has led to a lot of discussion of the statistics of family violence. The statistic I want to look at today is the deaths of children. The Drum onContinue Reading

Closing the Gap? Not this year

On: February 20, 2020

In: Australian Politics, Statistics, Work and life

Last week was the annual release of the Closing the Gap report. As the report describes: In 2007, Commonwealth, state, territory and local governments made a commitment to work together to close the gap in Indigenous disadvantage. This led to the National Indigenous Reform Agreement, a significant step toward moreContinue Reading

Latest statistics on actuarial pay – is there a gender pay gap?

On: April 14, 2019

In: Australian Politics, Feminism, Work and life

Recently the ATO released its annual statistics for the most recent tax year. You can find all sorts of statistics in the release here. I decided it was about time I updated anything I could find on actuarial pay, and particularly gender gaps. A couple of years ago, Julia LessingContinue Reading

School students and drug and alcohol use

On: March 3, 2019

In: Australian Politics, Life, Risk management, Statistics

I went to a talk this week at my son’s school by Paul Dillon, from Drug and Alcohol research training Australia. I had heard great things about Paul as a speaker, but not the thing that impressed me most – he had great statistics! So time for a blog postContinue Reading

Private and public schools: An update

On: February 11, 2018

In: Australian Politics, Education

The Sydney Morning Herald published its annual analysis of public and private school enrolments last week. So I thought I’d have a look behind the stats to see if there is more nuance when you dive a little deeper. The Herald’s key message was: An annual stocktake of the nation’sContinue Reading