Which communities will be most impacted by this week's interest rate increase? Which communities will be most impacted by this summer's bushfires, Trump's tariffs, cuts to immigration, artificial intelligence, another pandemic, or an economic downturn?

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We now know the answers to these questions.

Enter the Australian Resilience Index: an index we at Mandala developed with the insurance company, Zurich, and Australia's top pollsters, RedBridge and Accent, over the last year.

What do an economics firm, a global insurance company and pollsters have in common? Amazing data. More than 2 million data points, to be precise, which we have brought together into a single model.

Our objective was simple: understand how resilient Australia's 2500 communities are, both in aggregate, and across four specific dimensions: financial, health, social and environmental.

Our motivation is obvious: risks are uncomfortably high at the moment. People face multi-dimensional risks, which are more correlated than ever.

Single data points will no longer cut it. We need a holistic measure of resilience across multiple of these dimensions if we are to properly understand how risks will impact Australians.

This is what our Resilience Index delivers.

So, what are the results? Millions of public and proprietary data points mean there are plenty of insights. But one insight is particularly hard to miss: it's great being in Canberra.

The haters will roll out the usual trope: Canberra is pumped full of cash by the public service, so of course they would be more resilient.

This is not what the data shows.

Canberra doesn't win because of financial resilience. In fact, when we rank Australian communities by financial resilience, Canberra doesn't even........

© Canberra Times