Data Dump

This is a supplement to the post above. This does not count towards my limit of one post per week, and should be read in conjunction with the post to which it refers.

So, it's been a little while since I last did a data dump. This week's will be a little different to before, because the maps were largely derived from the ABS maps provided last week. Apart from these maps offering ranges rather than pure figures (and thus some inherent errors in this week's maps precision) this meant making assumptions wherever the boundaries did not match up - i.e. that each ABS division was homogenous and that its population was evenly distributed across the area.

Instead, I have the separate layers used to make the combined maps for you to ignore, and the raw data for working out how much was earned per person targeted by an initiative in the budget (and thus each layer's opacity for map 3).

Layers:

Superannuation – Benefits to Retirees


Demographic Distribution for Recipients of the Pension Increase

School Funding – Benefits to Parents of School-Aged Students

Demographic Distribution of School Aged Students

NDIS Benefits

Demographic Distribution of People Living with a Disability

University Indexation

Demographic Distribution of Tertiary Students

Baby Bonus Impacts

Demographic Distribution of the Parents of Young Children (as a Proxy for Expecting Parents)

 

Data:

 #  Pensioners will gain $35.50 per fortnight (source) which is around $925 per person annually. Note that couples pension increases by less (same source).

 # Schools are gaining $9.8 billion over 6 years (source), which is an average of $1.6 billion per year. With around 3.5 million school students (source) $1.6 billion a year is roughly $450 per student per year. Government funding schedules always seem to ramp up over time, so this is probably less initially.

 # The National Disability Insurance Scheme, which will support a projected 410,000 disabled people, carers and the like (source, p.6), costs $8 billion per year (source), or roughly 19,500 per person assisted.

  # I estimated the University Indexation to be around $3400 per student. Of course, the students aren't directly paying for all of this, that is just the financial cost of the services they would otherwise have had. (Note: this is not the cost of financial services lost, since university funding will still increase -- see last week's post for details -- nor is it the loss in value in real terms, since university numbers will increase sharing the burden but also straining resources.) This was based on a $2.8 billion dollar reduction (source) divided among roughly 830,000 domestic students in universities (source).

To be fair, not all of the tertiary education indexation is aimed at universities. Also, I could not find any data as to how many years this reduction was going to take place over, so I factored it all into a 12-month period from January. If this is a 5 year reduction, the per-student cost will drop per year. Further per-student drops in this impact may be calculated if you include foreign students or non-uni students who will share in some of the losses.

 # For the Baby Bonus, the cut is the whole $5,000 per child born (source). Also, this article suggests less than 30,000 families would have benefited in the next year. With a voting population of 16 million (source) last election, if each was in a relationship there would be 8 million couples. 30,000 of these expecting a child is around 0.4%. This is well below the minimum 5-10% of the population who actually had children born between 2002 and 2006 from last weeks census data. Part of this could be accounted for by twins, and part by the fact the census is data gives us the number of parents who had children over 4 years, as opposed to over a one year time span. And then there are parents who have two children within four years. And, of course, not everyone of voting age is in a relationship.

But all of this is irrelevant to some extent since the psychological effect (i.e. the effect which would play out during voting) is not to do with who will have a child -- and indeed anyone curently expecting will still receive the bonus -- but who might have a child. That includes parents trying for a child, or who plan to start a family in the near future. Whether or not this pans out in the long term these people will feel that they will lose out on the $5000 next electoion.

Both approximations (ABS data used and statistical number of actual births) are poor indicators of the voting demographic for hopeful parents, but in the absence of better figures this is the best I can offer. Treat the Baby Bonus data as a VERY rough guide. Considering how even the distribution on that map was, I don't think it had much of an overall effect, though.