The first results from the 2021 census are due to be released on Tuesday, and in Ballarat, they're expected to reveal exactly how the city has changed through the pandemic.
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Anecdotally, there have been stories of thousands of people leaving Melbourne for the regions, backed up by limited data samples, but the census should provide the clearest picture for how Ballarat has grown.
The last census, in 2016, showed 101,686 people living in the Ballarat local government area, with a median age of 38.
There were 45,115 private dwellings, with an average of 1.8 motor vehicles each, and the median weekly household income was $1160.
However, in the years since, Ballarat's population is estimated to have jumped to more than 113,000 and growing.
City of Ballarat mayor Daniel Moloney said many decisions made by council and other organisations and levels of government were based on census data, and that's now five years out of date - think allocations for schools, hospitals, and roads, each of which are bursting at the seams.
FROM 2016:
"It's interesting to put some hard figures to what our population really is, the problem is that you speak to 10 different people and they've got 10 different answers right now," he said.
"The census data, even though there's a massive lag, it's the most real data we've got.
"The interesting thing is the potential from there, because a lot of different people look at those figures, and I don't think we appreciate how important it is to demonstrate that ongoing growth."
Cr Moloney is keen to overlay other datasets council and other organisations have collected to build a more complete picture of how the city is changing - while the census is comprehensive, it doesn't measure everything.
Council has previously run "hackathon" events, sharing open-source datasets with experts.
"There are weird things that come out of that, like we had an unusually high number of bulldogs registered in Ballarat and we thought that was interesting, with our Bulldogs partnership," Cr Moloney said.
"We had people using open-source data that matched up where people had indicated on a map where they felt unsafe, and overlaying tree and streetlight data to draw conclusions out of that.
"There are really clever people who can match up different datasets and come to conclusions that lend substance to things that we might have already suspected is the case."
Importantly, that bigger picture should make it easier for the city to successfully lobby for grants and upgrades, with evidence backing each request.
"There are bureaucrats, including councillors, making decisions based on often very limited information, and only seeing one piece of a much bigger puzzle - ultimately, it's steered at the direction of whoever lobbies the best," Cr Moloney said.
"That's the big takeaway from my year and a half as mayor, is that there are some people who are good at lobbying who get what they want, versus others who don't have access to that sort of data, and there's that old adage that information is power, so I think we have to better share information to make the right decisions at every level of government."
The City of Ballarat is "slowly" improving its collection of and public access to data, he added, but the more datasets that can be accessed will improve the insights - he used the example of anonymised banking data from CBD businesses pointing to spending patterns at Easter this year, which indicated more visitors than residents were spending money despite many businesses closing.
"This year (council's) going to start releasing traffic counter stats online in a raw data form, so people can tab into that and see how vehicle numbers are changing on council-owned streets - and when the magic really happens is when you can overlay that with other datasets, such as Google's traffic map projections or VicRoads vehicle registrations, and match up where people are going to and from," Cr Moloney said.
"We kept hearing during the pandemic in particular Medicare data was often the best to keep track of what a population's figures really look like, because people tend to update their addresses when they go to the doctor's, and that with vehicle registration is quite useful.
"We don't need to know the private details, it's completely anonymised that shows us the age brackets and suburbs where people live, and that's enough for us to make better decisions.
"I'd love to know where people are coming from - there is a perception that there has been strong migration from Melbourne to the regions, but do we really know that? I'm not sure we do.
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"It'd be fascinating to understand the percentage of people coming from overseas or interstate, or inter-regional.
"It matters in terms of the employment we're attracting, and for some of the expectations that people have for the events and services we offer.
"I just find this stuff incredibly fascinating, it'll create insights and that'll provoke further research and mixing of data to figure out how we direct our future budgets."
The 2021 census data will be released on Tuesday - keep an eye on The Courier for deep dives and analysis all week.
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