Regionalisations of Australia

A regionalisation of Australia is a system by which Australia is divided into regions. There are a great many different regionalisations, created for a range of purposes, including political, administrative, statistical and biological.

Political and administrative regionalisations

The most prominent regionalisation of Australia is the division into the various states and territories. For electoral purposes, the Australian Senate uses states and territories, but the Australian House of Representatives breaks the country into Divisions. Each state is similarly divided into electoral "regions", "districts" or "provinces", each of which elects members to the house or houses of the state's parliament. Finally, the country is divided into Local Government Areas, each of which is administered by a council.

Other administrative regionalisations may exists within each state. For example, the whole of mainland Western Australia other than the Perth metropolitan area, is divided into regions for the purposes of administration of the Regional Development Commissions Act 1993.

Statistical regionalisations

For the purposes of statistical geography, the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses the Australian Standard Geographical Classregionalisation, a heirarchical regionalisation whose coarsest level is the states and territories, then statistical divisions, statistical subdivisions, statistical local areas, and finally, census collection districts.

Biogeographical regionalisations

Until recently, most biogeographical and phytogeographical regionalisations of Australia were individually defined for each state and territories; for example: Gwen Harden's botanical regionalisation of New South Wales; Orchard's "natural regions" regionalisation of Tasmania; and Beard's division of Western Australia into Botanical Provinces and Botanical Regions.

More recently, two regionalisations that cover the entire country have been put in place. The World Wildlife Fund's regionalisation of the world into 825 terrestrial ecoregions created 40 ecoregions in Australia. Within Australia, however, the defacto standard regionalisation is now the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia (IBRA). This divides Australia into 85 bioregions, which are further divided into 404 subregions.

Others

There are a range of other regionalisations of Australia, including:

• meteorological regionalisations, as defined and used by the Bureau of Meteorology;
• catchment areas;
• geological regionalisations