ABS Census Data

I am pretty mad with the ABS at the moment. I am trying to get some data from the last Census which I think is pretty reasonable.

Basically what I want is for each Local Government area in Melbourne and Sydney data on the number of cars owned by the size of the household. For example, how many 3-person households have 1 car vs 2 or 3 cars. This seems a reasonable thing to want.

However, for some reason, the ABS is fixated with *dwelling* structure, rather than *household* structure. In the "Basic Community Profile" data, which is widely available electronically, they insist on breaking down car ownership by dwelling type. For some reason they think people want to know how many cars families that live in separate houses have compared with families that live in units or semi's or flats.

Now the data that I want actually *is* available. It is in the "Expanded Community Profile", where they breakdown car ownership by dwelling type (again) but also by household size. However, there are still problems.

The most useful source of census data is CData2001, which is the GIS system that the ABS has sold to various libraries. It takes a while to understand, but once you do it is very powerful. Unfortunately, the Expanded Community Profile is an 'add on' pack that none of the libraries that I have access to (Murdoch, UWA, State Library WA) have purchased.

The alternative is to go to the ABS website. For a long time, this data was available, but at a cost. Recently, they have stopped charging, which is good. What is *really bad* is that in the last few months they have redesigned the website. Instead of having all the data organised hierarchically with simple drill down to the right level and then save to Excel one by one, they have put in a funky search engine. Now for each LGA I have to (a) type in the name (correct spelling, of course) and then click half a dozen times in different places to get the right data for my spreadsheet, then save, then return to the top and do it all again for the next LGA. What used to take 10 seconds to set up then 5 seconds for each spreadsheet (plus download time) now takes at least 30 seconds for each, plus download. Given that I will be downloading about 100 overall, I am not happy. I have written to complain, but I doubt they will do anything.

I hope the results will make it all worth while!