This incredible little creature is a tardigrade, otherwise known as a water bear. Although tiny in size (about 0.5mm), it can withstand all kinds of normally un-survivable conditions including air deprivation, dehydration, starvation and even radiation, making it one of the most resilient creatures on Earth.

In 2020, we’re facing our own tough conditions — lockdown, jobs losses and economic uncertainty, and at times like these we need to find the resilience in our economies that will help to steady the course into 2021.

Spendmapp 2020 is launched, but happy as we are, we won’t be celebrating any time soon…

My colleague Matt Benson recently pointed me to a paper by a European think tank on cultured meat: a topic I had not given any thought to since it hit the headlines in Australia about 6–7 years ago. The paper he sent was making bold claims about cultured meat making beef cattle farming in the US unviable by the end of the decade.

With a healthy dose of scepticism about think tank prognostications, I dug a bit deeper and, to my surprise, cultured meat has come a long way since Mark Post ate a quarter of a million dollar beef…

Population Growth in NSW

In 2019 Geografia collaborated with Dr Tom Wilson from the University of Melbourne to build Australia’s most complex and comprehensive population forecasting models. Used by the NSW State Government, it is a complex systems-based forecasting tool developed on a Python open-source platform. The model is specifically designed to test how different housing and infrastructure investment trends and economic shocks will affect population growth across NSW, by region and by local government area.

We all know population growth is going to slow down, especially as Net Overseas Migration (NOM)¹ drops. The Federal Government has already done some…

White-collar workers usually commute to large employment hubs, but not now, which means there has been a substantial contraction in spending in employment hubs (on lunch, coffee, and so on). Some of this spending has been redirected back into residential neighbourhoods. For the top 20 dormitory suburbs in Greater Melbourne, that could mean $1.65 million a day for local goods and service providers. And even if just a small proportion is retained in a post-COVID-19 landscape, it could be enough of a catalyst for creating a real 20-minute city.

In 2019 I wrote a post about commuter discretionary expenditure in…

Last week our Geospatial Analyst, Alex Wycherley, mapped the location of vulnerable elderly residents of Greater Melbourne with the location of public hospitals (using the measure of bed count for hospital capacity). We wanted to show the spatial pattern of at-risk residents during this difficult time. Alex found a few concerning hotspots, particularly a corridor out towards Ringwood; and the Mornington Peninsula (see Figure 1). These are places with the greatest difference between the number of local hospital beds and the number of elderly residents in need of assistance.

Now we’re looking at the rest of the metropolitan areas in…

There are some positive signs in Latrobe City’s economy. That makes it a good time to make some transformative changes.

Changes to Australia’s economy makes places Like Latrobe vulnerable

Latrobe City (150km east of Melbourne) is often in the news for the wrong reason. The stories are about an economy in a parlous state, waiting for the expected closure of more power stations that have underpinned the region’s economy and provided many of its jobs for decades.

And it’s true that, for maybe 20–30 years, Latrobe’s economy, while not shrinking in absolute terms, has shrunk relative to the rest of…

In 2017 the AFL commenced games at a refurbished football stadium in the regional city of Ballarat, west of Melbourne. We took a look at how much new money the first game brought into the City. Rather than just guestimating, based on spectator numbers, we used bank transaction data to find the actual spending. It turned out there was a statistically significant spike of $300,000 additional visitor spend on game day. Not bad for a City of around 100,000 residents, with an average daily visitor spend (over the last two years) of $1.4 …

When public funds are directed towards putting on events, the intention is usually to stimulate local economic activity and, to demonstrate the value of this investment, an economic impact study is usually commissioned.

Unfortunately, there’s an incentive there for the event proponent to encourage the people doing the study to produce the biggest possible value. And the methods we often use to measure event impact make it easy to do this. This might include ‘inflationary models’ that overestimate flow on effects; opaque methods that can’t be scrutinised; and even rubbery survey figures. Of course, we don’t have to do this…