PM&C’s Central Analytics Hub exemplifies the theme for Innovation Month this July: Test. Fail. Learn. Deliver.

Good data is vital for good public policy. The Central Analytics Hub (CAH) is doing fantastic work to support informed policy decisions through the Data Integration Partnership for Australia (DIPA)—creating new insights into important and complex policy questions through data integration and analysis.

The Central Analytics Hub is also driving cultural change in the use of public data by establishing partnerships with academic researchers and pursuing new data integration projects that will answer questions we have previously been unable to answer.

Through the Multi Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP), the CAH recently investigated data from several agencies to gain a deeper understanding of gender pay gap.  The data will help to better target future policies. Although the data was from 2011, it still provided important insights—female dominated industries tend to have lower full-time salaries for all workers, a significant majority of industries pay women less than men for the same job, the largest wage gap was in mining industry administrative and clerical roles.

The CAH-led National Drought Map aims to get meaningful support to drought affected farmers and communities and makes it easier for the public to access drought data.. Australia is a vast country and governments, the private and non-profit sectors are all generating a wealth of data about the drought. To bring this data together CAH worked collaboratively with Data61 (CSIRO) and the Joint Agency Drought Taskforce to create the National Drought Map using the TerriaJS open source platform.

The CAH is currently working on a number of other projects to support whole-of-government priority policy issues to inform taskforces, policy development and other government processes. More information is available on the Central Analytics Hub webpage.