From where we work to what we spend, the ABS knows more about us than ever before: here’s what’s changing

• That’s the change that month in what the Bureau of Statistics calls the consumer price index “excluding volatile items”.
• The items it excludes (because they are often affected by supply disruptions) are fruit, vegetables and fuel.
• Up until late 2022, the consumer price index was calculated only four times a year, and even that was a herculean feat.

A ten-fold increase in data

• But in the last few years the use of supermarket scanner data, “web scrapping” to collect online prices, and data feeds direct from the computers of rental agents and all sorts of other businesses have cut costs enormously and increased the number of prices collected each quarter almost ten-fold to 900,000.
• That’s just one of the ways in which an explosion of previously-inaccessible data is transforming the way the bureau goes about its job and is set to make statistics that used to be only fairly reliable suddenly very reliable.

Retail figures set for the chop

• And the retail survey was always a pretty rough-and-ready way to find out what we spent in shops.
• It covers far more retail outlets than the retail survey ever did, as well as spending on services and spending overseas, and it divides spending into categories based on the type of merchant.
• It’ll replace the retail survey from the middle of next year.

Millions instead of thousands

• While payroll numbers can’t tell us everything the employment survey does (they can’t yet tell us the hours people work and whether are looking for work) they cover millions of Australians instead of thousands, and come out weekly.
• For more than a century it has surveyed farmers to find out what they are growing.
• Read more:
  You can't fix it if you can't see it: how the ABS became our secret weapon

Big data, timely insights

• A lot of the so-called administrative data provided to banks and other organisations isn’t sorted in a way that makes it useful.
• The more it succeeds, the less it will need to bother us and the better the information it will produce.
• In February, the consumer price index excluding volatile items did not change, meaning in that particular month, inflation was zero.

Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation.