- 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 theAustralian 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 exist 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 ".tatistical regionalisations
For the purposes of
statistical geography , theAustralian Bureau of Statistics uses theAustralian Standard Geographical Classification , a hierarchical regionalisation whose coarsest level is the states and territories, thenstatistical division s,statistical subdivision s,statistical local area s, and finally,census collection district s.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 ofTasmania ; andJohn Stanley Beard 's division of Western Australia into Botanical Provinces and Botanical Districts.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 terrestrialecoregion s created 40ecoregions in Australia . Within Australia, however, the defacto standard regionalisation is now theInterim 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 and climatic regionalisations, as defined and used by theBureau of Meteorology ;
* catchment areas and drainage systems;
* geological regionalisations
*cadastral divisions of Australia
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.