Thursday 24 November 2016

Analysis of Australian government spending across all states (part 1)


I'm doing a Udacity course on data visualisation (highly recommended) and part of it involves making my own visualisation. I've decided to create a visualisation of combined state and federal government spending across different sectors. I can't find consolidated charts anywhere and think it could be quite interesting to see what the picture looks like as a whole.

Questions I want to answer with these visualisations:
1. As a country, how much do we spend on education vs military spending?
2. Which states invest more in justice than education?
3. How does spending per capita compare across states?

Above is a rather grainy visualisation of the NSW government budget for 2016-17 generated using RAW, a quick and dirty tool for turning data into SVG charts.

It's kinda cute but the bubble charts don't really add much value. I want to make interactive visualisations that let you slice and dice the data.

What I'll need to do is:
1. Collect budget data from every state government (not super easy - the datasets are not categorised very well)
2. Recode the data so that the categories are the same across every jurisdiction
3. Do some exploratory data analysis
4. Build interactive charts using D3.js

Let's see how I go :)

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