Australia

Most statisticians will only ever light up the Twittersphere in their wildest dreams. But for census staff at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), those dreams became a nightmarish reality as the country’s first digital census bombed spectacularly, earning its own hashtag, #censusfail. Every five years, Australians sit down on a designated ‘census night’ and […]

For as long as I can remember, January 26 has been one of my favorite days of the year: Australia Day. Typically, I, and many other Aussies, spend the day with family and friends overloading BBQs with meat, carefully extracting beer and wine from ice-filled eskys, playing backyard cricket, and listening to Triple J’s Hottest […]

Most Australians today accept that the mining boom of the mid-to late 2000s, which reshaped the country, is largely over. But an overlooked segment of history is that the end of the stunning run in bulk commodity prices came as a rapid and unexpected shock to most of the nation. Despite predictions of weaker Chinese […]