Our Nation

Our Nation generates scenarios based on economic and demographic trend data modelled by the Allen Consulting Group for the Property Council of Australia. The app aims to further stimulate discussions about short, medium and long-term prospects for Australian communities.

By better understanding population growth and settlement patterns, we can examine potential scenarios of demand for community services and supporting infrastructure. We can also explore the implications of critical trends in ageing, labour force growth and dependency ratios as well as the potential impact on Australia’s longer term fiscal capacity – our collective ability to finance evolving community needs.

Our Nation examines:
· the potential size of Australia’s population;
· possible settlement patterns of Australians across 41 major cities and towns (of more than 30,000 people);
· software demands – the basic demand for essential community services, such as housing, schooling, child care, health, aged care, retirement living, energy, water and transport, as well as office and retail space
· hardware demands – indicators of the infrastructure required to deliver essential community services
· economic and social indicators – such as, dependency rates, labour market distributions
· fiscal implications – the potential cost of servicing an ageing community, health care needs along with their taxation implications.

Our Nation offers a wide range of outputs:
· Projection scenarios – estimates of absolute numbers of people, as well community hardware and software needs, for selected locales;
· Comparisons by locale – the app allows users to compare indicators for two locations over time (indexed to 100);
· League tables – the app offers two types of league table:
- a ranking of all locales by selected indicators in absolute numbers;
- a ranking of all locales by selected indicators in relative terms;
· Fiscal data – estimates of project cost per capita for Australia in relation to health care, pensions and taxes (with and without budget balancing).

Our Nation provides users with options to customise several criteria, including:
· Immigration – users can change the annual net overseas migration assumption using a slider at the side of the screen;
· Time Frame – users can select a continuous forecast period between 2011 and 2050;
· Multiple cities – users can combine locales when forecasting absolute numbers by various indicators, as well as selecting individual locales, all capital cities or all of Australia (which includes cities under 30,000 people).

Finally, Our Nation includes articles that analyse interesting features of the model outputs.