I’m going to be voting Yes in the referendum about the Voice to Parliament. Making decisions about people without giving them a say is not a great way to make great decisions. And it hasn’t worked.
To illustrate, I’m going to talk about a measure I do know a lot about – mortality. The life expectancy of indigenous people in Australia is much lower than for all Australians. And the gap is growing.Continue Reading
Annually, the government here reports on whether it is “closing the gap” betwen indigenous and non indigenous Australians. A key measure is mortality, and the gap between indigenous and non indigenous mortality rates is widening, rather than narrowing.Continue Reading
What factors seem to lead to higher or lower vaccination rates in NSW? I’ve adjusted the NSW location vaccination rates for the age mix of each location. The strongest correlation is with income levels – the higher the income, the more likely the population is to have had at least one dose of vaccine. Surprisingly, the percentage of the population who speaks a language other than English doesn’t seem to make much difference. Continue Reading
In many countries, population mortality statistics have revealed a much worse Covid 19 epidemic than is being shown by the case and official death statistics. Australian statistics have not been released for 2020 until this week (with data up to the end of March). They suggest that it is possibleContinue Reading
Depending on how you measure it, Australia is generally in the top 5 countries in the world for life expectancy. And we continue to improve. But Australia shamefully has an enormous gap in life outcomes between indigenous and non indigenous people. And over the period that of these statistics, while both indigenous and non indigenous mortality has improved, the gap has widened, with standardised indigenous death rates going from 164% of non indigenous rates to 172% of non indigenous rates between 2003 and 2017. So we may be the lucky country, but we certainly aren’t lucky for everyone.Continue Reading
Factfulness, Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think by Hans Rosling (with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund) Hans Rosling is the person who introduced me to Ted Talks, with this classic talk on visualising the world through statistics. I’ve used it aContinue Reading
Prompted by a friend, I’ve been taking a look at the data for NSW school suspensions, particularly for aboriginal students. You have to get deep into the NSW Board of Education website to do this (and convert pdfs into excel spreadsheets!) but it is worth it. In Australia, we haveContinue Reading
Last week Ross Gittins wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that the decades long drift from public to private schools has ended. Figures released by the Bureau of Statistics last month show that 65 per cent of our 3.8 million students went to public schools in 2016, the same proportion asContinue Reading
I’ve been challenged by my fellow blogger Geek in Sydney to write about the recent public and private school data from the ABS. The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that the Exodus from public to private schools stops. They report, According to new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics released on Thursday, 65.2Continue Reading
Late last year, there was a flurry of mainstream interest in mortality statistics – here is the New York Times reporting on a study by two economists (Ann Case and Angus Deaton) The paper: documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United StatesContinue Reading