Local Government Areas

Disclaimer

Geoscape Australia believes this publication to be correct at the time of printing and does not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of the information herein. Readers should rely on their own skill and judgement to apply information to particular issues.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of Geoscape Australia.

Overview

Local Government Areas is a spatial representation of the administrative divisions that local governments are responsible for across Australia defined by State and Territory governments. Local Government Areas aggregates the representations unique to each jurisdiction into a consistent seamless representation of the local government areas of Australia.

Geoscape welcomes your feedback on the Local Government Areas product. We also publish regular product development updates on our website ( www.geoscape.com.au ).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 19 February 2024 with data extracted on 12 February 2024.

  • This release is a full national data population for Version 2.0 of the Local Government Areas product, described by the Local Government Areas Product Guide v2.0.

Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.

Change Notifications

Esri Shapefile width increase - Cancelled

In the previous release report, we mentioned that the width of numeric fields within Esri Shapefiles would increase by one for this current release. A recent bug fix in our packaging application has been applied to make this change not necessary. No change to Shapefile field widths has been applied for this release.

Removal of the ‘Documents’ folder from data packages

From November 2023, Geoscape will be progressively moving product descriptions, guides and reports online to https://docs.geoscape.com.au

Commencing with the May 2024 release, data packages will no longer include the Documents folder.

Updates

New and Retired

New

There were no new LGA’s within this release.

Retired

There were no LGA’s retired this release.

Spatial Changes

There were no Spatial changes (area) greater than 1 km2.

Other Updates

There were no other updates.

Issues

New Issues

No new issues.

Resolved Issues

No resolved issues to note.

Known Issues

Un-enclosed gaps between Local Government Areas in NT

There are three un-enclosed gaps present in the Local Government Areas data in NT. These gaps are not valid and do not represent rivers. Below, the un-enclosed gaps can be seen between polygons when they are dissolved together.

Image of Un-enclosed gaps between LGAs in NT

SA coastline generalisation for The DC of Grant

Jurisdictional changes to the coastline geometry have resulted in polygon generalisation for ‘The DC of Grant’ LGA in South Australia. This has reduced the number of vertices in the polygons resulting in geometry differences and, in some scenarios, the creation of new polygons for the LGA. Below is an example where the previous Admin Boundaries LGA outline (blue) can be seen compared to the new Local Government Area product representation (red area).

Image of coastline generalisation in SA

Geoscape is currently investigating this generalisation with the SA jurisdiction.

Single VIC lga_locality linkage not made

The LGA named ‘Mount Buller Alpine Resort (Unincorporated)’ (lga_pid = lga69dad94a9718) does not link to the ’Mount Buller’ locality (locality_pid = ‘loc8688ba223de1’) record despite new rules which allow small LGAs that are contained within, or have large overlap with, a locality.

Future Considerations

This section outlines enhancements or changes under consideration, but not planned into a specific release. For further details on future initiatives, please contact Geoscape Support.

Annex A – Release Counts

Additional, retired and total Local Government Areas counts and the percent change to the previous release have been listed in the table below.

TABLE

ACT

NSW

NT

OT

QLD

SA

TAS

VIC

WA

TOTAL

lga

Additional

0

30

0

0

19

17

4

50

52

172

Retired

0

30

0

0

19

17

4

50

52

172

Updated

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Total

0

198

800

3

209

173

533

92

201

2,209

% Change

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

lga_locality

Total

0

5,030

318

3

3,345

2,076

888

3,339

1,753

16,752