Postcode Boundaries

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

The Postcodes Boundaries dataset is Australia’s most definitive set of Postcodes developed by Australia Post and Geoscape Australia. The Postcode Boundaries dataset represents postcodes as both a polygon (postcode boundaries) and a point (postcode centroid). For more information, please refer to the Postcode Boundaries Product Description. Geoscape welcomes your feedback on the Postcode Boundaries product. We also publish regular product development updates on our website ( www.geoscape.com.au ).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 20 November 2023 with data extracted on 06 November 2023.

  • This release is a full national data population for the Postcode Boundaries product, described by the Postcode Boundaries Product Description.

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

Change Notifications

ESRI Shapefile width increase

Commencing with the February 2024 release, the width of numeric fields within Esri Shapefiles will increase by one. This is due to a bug fix in our packaging application. This change only impacts Shapefile metadata, the values and precision remain unchanged.

New data download portal

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our new customer collaboration portal called Geoscape Hub ( https://hub.geoscape.com.au ).

Geoscape Hub brings the experience for both our dataset and API customers together into one unified platform.

A notification announcing the launch of Geoscape Hub, with instructions on how to access and use the new portal, was sent out to data customers on 13 September. If you did not receive this important communication, please contact our Support team (support@geoscape.com.au).

From 13 September, all users navigating to the ‘Datasets’ page in geoscape.app have been redirected to Geoscape Hub.

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

General

  • The QA process highlighted the existence of multi-part Postcode polygons, some of these spanning significant distances.

  • A small number of gazetted localities were identified that do not currently have postcodes assigned. These will be submitted to postcode allocation and if successful, included in future updates.

  • A postcode polygon is considered to have changed if its geometry has changed by ‘0.00005’.

  • A few localities, each of them is serviced by multi-Delivery offices, have not been allocated postcodes, for instance, “Blue mountains National Park” in NSW.

New South Wales

  • The locality of Mingoola (locality_pid = ‘locd3b85a5cd511’) has changed postcode from ‘4380’ to ‘2372’.

  • The locality of Back Creek (locality_pid = ‘loc365c9229b366’) has been amalgamated into the locality of Mongarlowe (locality_pid = ‘loc1db45efffad9’) and is no longer represented in the locality_postcode table.

Northern Territory

  • The locality of Miniyeri (locality_pid = ‘locdf5f04f3236a’) has changed postcode from ‘0852’ to ‘NA’.

  • Marine parks near Darwin have not been allocated postcodes. These are non-delivery areas and will only serve to overstate the total area covered by the postcode and any “per square km” statistics generated from them.

Queensland

  • Some localities in QLD are unable to be allocated postcodes at this time. Examples include “Upland”, “Ward” and “Selwyn”.

  • Marine parks have not been allocated postcodes. These are non-delivery areas and will only serve to overstate the total area covered by the postcode and any “per square km” statistics generated from them.

South Australia

  • As the South Australian land authorities have not gazetted the north-western part of the state there will not be any postcodes generated on locality basis in this area.

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

The volume of updates applied in this release is included in the table below.

TABLE NAME

ACT

NSW

NT

OT

QLD

SA

TAS

VIC

WA

TOTAL

LOCALITY_POSTCODE

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

2

POSTCODE

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

POSTCODE_POINT

26

68

2

0

65

21

2

226

54

464

POSTCODE_POLYGON

26

140

3

0

93

251

8

545

116

1182

Note

Edits to the Postcode Points and Postcode Polygons theme are generally geometry recalculations required after the geometry from associated locality boundaries were edited.