Six of the 10 most disadvantaged areas in Australia are in Queensland, Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas rankings reveal

Six of the 10 most disadvantaged Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Australia have been identified in Queensland, new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals.

Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) assesses relative advantage and disadvantage for LGAs around the country using Census data.

The 2021 LGA Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage ranks 547 Australian regions, with the latest analysis based on results of the last nationwide survey from 2021.

Queensland's highest-ranking LGA — Brisbane, with a population of more than a million people — doesn't crack the top 50 most advantaged LGAs in Australia.

SEIFA found that the 10 most relatively disadvantaged LGAs in the country are all in either Queensland or the Northern Territory — six in the Sunshine State and four in the Top End.

Woorabinda, west of Gladstone, was ranked the most disadvantaged LGA in the country, followed by Cherbourg, about an hour west of Gympie in the state's south.

Yarrabah, Kowanyama, Wujal Wujal and Doomadgee, all in the state's north, were also ranked in the 10 most disadvantaged areas in Australia.

The last SEIFA data release in 2018, based on 2016 Census data, had seven Queensland LGAs in the 10 most disadvantaged, including Aurukun, Palm Island and Napranum.

In 2021 those areas were ranked 12th, 16th and 24th most disadvantaged in Australia respectively.

Caroline Deans, the Australian Bureau of Statistics's Head of Census 2021 data, SEIFA is a measure of the average and approximate experience of a designated area — not a person or people.

"What we want to do is come up with indexes that people can use as a way of simplifying a concept of advantage or disadvantage," she said.

"An individual who is quite advantaged, who maybe earns a high income and works as a professional, could be living in an area of relatively high disadvantage. So that one individual is not disadvantaged like the area score.

"The Indigenous communities that we see out in regional and remote Queensland, as well as the Northern Territory, do score much higher on disadvantage, for sure."

Population geographer and demographer Elin Charles-Edwards says it's not impossible for area rankings shift, but it can be extremely difficult to break out of the lower end of the relative scale.

"These place-based measures really do demonstrate how disadvantage can be quite embedded in communities," Dr Charles-Edwards said.

The other end of the scale

Woollahra, in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, tops the list of areas with the highest relative advantage release after ranking third in the previous analysis from the 2016 Census.

Of the 10 most advantaged LGAs, six are in New South Wales, three are in Western Australia and one is in the NT.

One of the key things almost all of the top 10 most advantaged LGAs have in common is a water view — the ABS says nine of the 10 most advantaged LGAs are on waterfronts or close to water, including Sydney Harbour, the Darwin waterfront and Perth's Swan River.

In the national rankings, Queensland's highest-ranked LGA is Brisbane — ranked at 490, compared to top-spot Woollahra's 547 — followed by Weipa, the Gold Coast and Noosa.

When comparing LGAs though, the Brisbane LGA averages the responses of about 1.2 million people compared to Weipa's roughly 4,000.

Ms Deans says this is where the population size of the LGAs analysed really comes into play when interpreting the rankings.

"I'm sure there's a lot of people who only are in Weipa because they're employed in the mining sector, so that's probably inflating the level of employment or making the level of employment in that particular area look higher," she says.

Zooming in on the Sunshine State

Taking a closer look at Queensland's rankings by statistical area rather than LGA, regions and suburbs are compared by much closer population brackets (sorry Weipa — that sends you much further down the list). 

The rankings of Queensland's statistical areas on the Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage also reveal more of the discrepancies between suburbs within the south-east corner.

The riverside suburb of Fig Tree Pocket in Brisbane's inner-west tops Queensland's list of most advantaged statistical areas.

But just 10 minutes down the road is Wacol, which sits among some of the most relatively disadvantaged areas in the country.

Of the 52 areas in Queensland's most disadvantaged 10 per cent, about a third are in the south-east corner, including the likes of Marsden, Goodna, Beenleigh, Slacks Creek and Inala.

Of the most advantaged 10 per cent, almost all fall within the Brisbane region.

How do they come up with these numbers?

According to the ABS, SEIFA combines data on things like income, education, employment, occupation, housing and family structure from responses to the latest Census to summarise an area's socio-economic characteristics.

It uses four indexes — the Index of Relative Socio-economic Advantage and Disadvantage, the Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage, the Index of Education and Occupation and the Index of Economic Resources — to come up with a "score" of relative advantage or disadvantage compared to other areas.

Because SEIFA rankings are relative and each area is scored on its level of advantage or disadvantage compared to other areas, it means there will always be someone at the bottom.

Ms Deans says a low SEIFA ranking isn't necessarily representative of every individual in the community's experience.

"I know, having worked a bit with Indigenous communities, that what the Census doesn't capture is a great sense of culture and storytelling," she explains.

"So while an area like Cherbourg or Woorabinda might be low in measure of socio-economic advantage and disadvantage, it's probably got a lot of other positives about it that we just don't capture in the Census.

"It (SEIFA) is a tool or a measure that can be used by local areas when they're applying for funding for example, or it could be service providers, or people making policy might look at that, and might think this area actually needs a little bit more support because showing up as being more disadvantaged.

"It's reflecting a point in time by these particular measures that we've got as socio-economic advantage and disadvantage, but it can lead to positive outcomes."

Why do these rankings matter?

Dr Charles-Edwards says it can tell more of a story about an area's level of advantage, disadvantage or need rather than just looking at average incomes, employment or accessibility on their own.

"If we just rely on person-based measures of disadvantage, we can really miss the context in which people live," she says.

"Disadvantage isn't just about not having enough income, it's also about access to services, it's about the general milieu in which you live.

"It depends on access to education, level of education of the community, there can be ties to crime for example and vulnerability to crime. Understanding the sorts of places that might make it harder for people to get a leg up is, is really, really critical."

Ms Deans says metrics like SEIFA are also when investigating connections between relative advantage or disadvantage with other traits or trends.

"We see it used a lot by researchers who may be looking at another variable, they've got something else of interest that they're researching and they just want to add a socio-economic lens to it," she says.

"I find it's a nice, simplistic tool that people can use in their analysis to make those comparisons. It's not about the individual person or individual household, it's about the average for the area."