Broadcasting Licence Areas

The Broadcasting Services Act 1992 mandates that Commercial and Community broadcasting services are licensed to serve specific geographic areas. These geographic areas are referred to as Licence Areas, and are determined by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in Licence Area Plans (LAPs). The ACMA defines Licence Areas in terms of areas defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for the purposes of the Australian Census. The smallest area unit currently defined by the ABS is the Collection District (CD).

This dataset comprises the collection of current broadcast Licence Areas, and is made available in five forms:

• the list of Australian Bureau of Statistics CD numbers making up the Licence Area definition, distributed in a comma separated value (CSV) format text file;
• a translation of the ABS CD numbers into the names of the Local Government Areas (LGAs) and Statistical Division (SDs) within the area boundary, known as the Licence Area Description, rendered as an HTML page;
• a geographic map displaying the Licence Area, distributed as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file;
• a spatial dataset for use in GIS software, distributed as a ZIP archive containing ESRI Shapefile Format data files; and
• a Google Earth Placemark (.KMZ) file viewable in the Google Earth application and other software that can display Placemark data.