Wards

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

Wards is a spatial representation of the gazetted ward districts, which are a subset of Local Government Area boundaries defined by State and Territory governments. Wards represent distinct areas within a local government area that relate to the election of councillors for the related local government. Wards aggregates the representations unique to each jurisdiction into a consistent seamless representation of the wards of Australia. Geoscape welcomes your feedback on the Wards 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 13 February 2024.

• This release is a full national data population for Version 1.0 of the Wards product, described by Wards Product Guide v1.0.

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 Wards within this release.

Retired

There were no new Wards 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 Wards in NT

There are two un-enclosed gaps present in the Wards 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.

SA coastline generalisation for Central Ward

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

Geoscape is currently investigating this generalisation with the SA jurisdiction.

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 Wards 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
wards	Additional	0	0	0	0	0	20	0	0	61	81
	Retired	0	0	0	0	0	20	0	0	61	81
	Updated	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
	Total	0	0	829	0	0	155	0	313	226	1523
	% Change	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%