Worlds Apart: Postcodes with the Highest and Lowest Poverty Rates in Today's Australia

This paper aims to add to existing research on poverty and regional diversity by exploring the extent of poverty in small regional areas. Poverty analysis on a regional basis has previously been severely hampered by a lack of suitable data. The unit record files from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) household expenditure and income surveys allow analysis at state and very broad regional levels. However, such disaggregation results in small sample sizes and the two Territories are usually collapsed together by the ABS, so that results cannot be derived for either the ACT or the Northern Territory. While the national population Census provides data for small regions (down to Census Collector District level – about 200 households), income data are limited to gross household income ranges. Gross household income is not generally regarded as the best income measure for poverty analysis, with most analysts preferring an after-tax income measure, adjusted by an equivalence scale to take account of varying needs due to differences in household size and composition (for example, ABS, 1998; Saunders, 1996; Harding and Szukalska, 1999). A second problem with the Census data is that, because the income data are in ranges, the ‘poverty line’ has to be set at the boundary of one of the income ranges.