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"This paper investigates the connection between national immigration policy and a society's attitudes towards immigration. It argues that a country's immigration policy framework plays an important role in the formation of attitudes towards immigration by shaping the local national context of the receiving country. It examines the influence of a country's immigration policy framework by contrasting two countries - Australia and Germany - that developed remarkably different immigration policies in response to large immigration movements during the post-war period. We explore attitudes towards immigration on four dimensions: (1) the national economy, (2) the labour market, (3) the national culture, and (4) the level of immigrant influx. The analyses reveal three main findings. First, people in Australia tend to display more positive attitudes towards immigration than in Germany. Second, in both countries, attitudes towards immigration tend to be influenced in a similar way by an individual's socio-economic background and feelings of national identity (in the form of nationalism and patriotism). Third, immigration policy represents a strong indicator of attitudes towards immigration. We found that the planned integrative immigration policy in Australia supports the formation of more positive attitudes towards immigration by influencing people's perception on the economic and socio-cultural impacts of immigration." (author's abstract)

In 2011 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) introduced a radical new statistical geography for Australia. It then prepared a time series of Estimated Resident Populations (ERPs) by age and sex at the local scale (termed SA2 areas) back to 2001 on the new boundaries. However, a longer time series would be valuable to researchers. The aim of the work reported here was to extend the SA2 area ERPs back to 1986. A combination of small area census counts, official ERPs, look-up tables linking different statistical geographies, one-dimensional scaling, and iterative proportional fitting were employed to produce population estimates for SA2 areas of the new statistical geography. Population estimates for census years 1986, 1991 and 1996 by sex and 5 year age group were produced for SA2 areas. In combination with the official ABS ERPs for 2001, 2006 and 2011, these constitute a data set of spatially-consistent local area population estimates covering a 25 year period. The data are available in an Excel workbook accompanying this paper.