Rich suburbs, poor suburbs? Small area poverty estimates for Australia's eastern seaboard in 2006

There is increasing interest in Australia and internationally about geographic differences in advantage and disadvantage. This paper describes the use of spatial microsimulation techniques to examine differences in income poverty at a small area level in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory. The spatial microsimulation methodology used in this study involves reweighting data from income surveys to small area benchmarks derived from the Australian census. This paper provides details of this methodology, along with some initial results demonstrating substantial geographic differences in the distribution of income poverty. The paper concludes by outlining future extensions to this work.