Trends, change and the role of alerts

Exponential improvements in access to Census and other national and regional statistical data via the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have proved a boon to planners. For example, we can now show with considerable ease where an application for more gaming machines, a licensed premises, or development of an exclusive gated community is proposing to locate these hard by an area with a high proportion of low income households. Using the ABS resource, we can even show it on a simple map. Like all blessings, this one comes with a need for caution on the part of the planning profession. The Census and the other instruments used by the ABS only collect a certain spread of data. You can do interesting things with this data, you can use it with some confidence and often you can compare it year to year, Census to Census, or area to area. But it does tend to stay focused on the same variables—age, country of birth, level of education achieved, and so on. This creates an admirable consistency on which the planner can rely, and when all else fails, data-wise, there is always the ABS. To the ABS can be added other national data, for example on employment, state sources of crime statistics and some public health data, to name a few. This boom in data availability, however, creates its own hazards and one of these is the risk of treating these online sources of summarised data as the social data on which to rely. This risk might coincide with a person's preference to stay at the desk, a preference to stay with data whose validity in terms of collection method is not likely to be questioned, and/or a preference for quantitative over qualitative data. Whatever the motivation, staying with these data alone narrows the scope of any social assessment, frequently to the point of significantly undermining its usefulness. There are two main reasons for this. The first reason is that using these kinds of national and state online data usually means that the analyst must engage in extrapolation—whether from large area trends to a small area, or single site, or simply from the past into the future. Often such extrapolation cannot be done with any confidence without further research and the further research required usually involves face to face, or at least person to person meetings and discussions, consultation processes as well as qualitative surveys.This time consuming and often confronting work requires the planning practitioner to have survey research skills on the one hand and facilitation and communication skills on the other—to be able to put together a succinct and focused questionnaire and manage a meeting of angry stakeholders, for example. Only by going to a place and talking to a diversity of people is it possible to acquire the rich flavour and local detail of life as it is experienced there. Its easier to extrapolate from the desk and that is often what happens.