Frustrations - blogger and statistical

Yesterday I came home to put up some posts and found blogger was down. It was still down when I got up early this morning. Frustration.

Then, today, I was looking at demographic statistics because I thought that it might be interesting to pen picture of the demographic changes that have been taking place across New South Wales and, more broadly, Australia. More frustration.

Governments change things all the time for their own convenience. So they change local Government boundaries because bigger local councils are meant to be more efficient. That's fine, but these changing boundaries then destroy the continuity of key statistical data, making analysis of trends very hard.

I remember when I was foundation chair of Tourism Armidale. I worked out that in the twenty years before I became chair there had been some five state sponsored tourism organisations, each with different boundaries and themes. Is it any wonder that public recognition of the New England Tablelands collapsed? I was appalled when I saw the survey data.

I was also frustrated that the state based tourism data collections meant that while Canberra had details of overseas visitors to Cockington Green, a model tourism village, the broader New England (population many times greater than the ACT) had data only for Coffs Harbour and the Lower Hunter, making it very hard to develop any form of integrated tourism strategy.