487 million tons

of coal were mined in Australia in the 2008/2009 financial year, roughly 100 times as much as in NZ. Of that, about 261 million tons were exported, making Australia the biggest exporter of coal in the world.

Quite a few of the Bowen Basin coal mines in central Queensland are bigger than the entire NZ coal mining industry: they really are huge mines.

4.6 million tons

of coal were mined in NZ last year.

Let's hope for some good news from Pike River in the next day or two.

Honda

Is the biggest-selling brand of motorcycle in Australia. Third quarter 2010 sales total: 15446. Which is roughly 5000 per month. Compare that to yesterday's figure for the leading brand in NZ. I know Australia is bigger, but it's certainly not that much bigger.

I suspect dirtbikes might not be included in the NZ figure, but are included in the Aus figures or something like that.

Suzuki

Is the most popular brand of motorcycle in NZ... according to this. But then again, that's based off a monthly value, with a total of 56 Suzuki sales in the entire country. I guess it's a small market.

0 posts

Have been posted here in the last month. I guess I've run out of random statistics for now and maybe I should rename this blog g-s-o-t-m or something similar (insert "month" or "millenium" depending how charitable you feel)

140000 lambs per day

that's how many are born each day around this time of year, just in Otago and Southland, according to this article, which sounds about right considering the number of sheep around there. Putting the numbers like that makes for a pretty astounding figure!

1 day in the last two weeks

did not get at least 1mm of rain. This is in Ruakura, Hamilton (the closest weather station). I'm now thoroughly sick of the rain...

Since the beginning of August, i.e. 51 days, there have only been 12 days without rain. That doesn't sound all that bad at first, but it does mean more than 3 out of every 4 days has been raining.

Rainfall variability...

I know, I'm back to the weather. That's life.

Hamilton, in general, is pretty much guaranteed to have a wet winter - that's just the way it is. Rainfall really is quite reliable here: between 1990 and 2010, the lowest monthly rainfall in June was 86mm in 2005, the highest 222mm this year. In other words, June will always be wet. You can register with NIWA if you're really keen!

Brisbane on the other hand, as with most of Australia, tends to have rather variable rainfall year to year. In just the last 10 years, the total rainfall in June has varied between 6mm this year to 121mm in 2008. Interestingly though, Brisbane's total rainfall tends to roughly even out - the lowest annual rainfall in the last 10 years was 652mm in 2007, the highest 1240mm in 2008, which isn't an extreme variation like the monthly totals can be. Numbers from BOM

85200 cars...

were stolen in Australia last year. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it.

Source: ABS (again!)

1.13 million Kiwis...

Headed over the ditch to Australia in the past year, for "short-term visits", i.e. a holiday. Fairly remarkably, almost the exact same number of Aussies (1.12 million) headed over this side of the ditch. They're both each other's biggest sources of tourists, which is kind of understandable seen as they're a long way from most other countries.

Sources: Tourism NZ and ABS

P.S. I wonder how many of those "tourist numbers" are actually business trips... I imagine there's an awful lot of them, considering how close Aus and NZ are economically...

Nissan Silvia

Is apparently the most commonly stolen car model in NZ...

Source

First day of spring!

Well, this isn't really a statistic, but it is noteworthy!

Hopefully I'll get back to some more statistics one day soon...

18kg of apples

Is what the average New Zealander consumes. Apparently that's a lot more than Australia - over the ditch they only consume between 6 and 9kg per person. The NZ apple industry is out to change that...

1587758 km2

is the size of the Division of Durack, Western Australia, the largest Federal electorate in Australia. That's about 30% bigger than the whole of South Africa. Still not as big as the old electorate of Kalgoorlie (which has been abolished for the upcoming election) - it was about 2.3million km2, which is only marginally smaller than Algeria, the largest country in Africa.

Less than 1% of NZ students

Are home-schooled. Doesn't seem that way to us sometimes.
Source

161 "problem" crocodiles

have been removed from various places around the Northern Territory so far this year, mostly Darwin Harbour. A "problem" crocodile is pretty much any crocodile in urban areas, or one that's attacked people.

A 4.1m specimen was the biggest of the year so far... that's a pretty hefty croc.

Source

The average Finn...

Consumes 12kg of coffee each year. In fact, the Nordic countries take up 5 of the top 6 spots (the Netherlands is the 6th).

Is that to keep them awake in the darkness of winter?

Source

The average Czech...

consumes 156.9L of beer per year. That's an awful lot of beer. Australia comes 4th on this list, with 109.9L per person. That's still a lot.

Source

47% of NZ's vineyards

Are sauvignon blanc. It's what NZ wine is most famous for, hence the overwhelming dominance.

Source

8 goals

Is all Spain scored during the 2010 World Cup. It was enough to win, but was also the least goals scored by a winning team in World Cup history.

US$408 billion

Is Wal-Mart's revenue from last year. That's roughly the same as the total gross domestic product of Sweden. Apparently it's the world's biggest company by revenue.

Source and Source

1109 million transistors...

Just in the CPU and GPU of our new desktop computer. Of that, about two thirds is in the graphics processor, not the CPU.

Wherever they are, that's an awful lot of transistors...

2000 hours

is how much sunshine Hamilton gets each year, on average. We're a little sun-starved compared to somewhere like Brisbane (2700 hours), but then again, we can be glad we don't live on Macquarie Island down south of Tasmania - total sunshine hours = 840.

322 cows...

is the average size of a dairy herd in NZ. That's significantly bigger than in the UK: the comparative figure there is 137 cows.

(Stat inspired by the objections to "factory farming" in the UK...)

France and England

Are the only teams to have won the football World Cup only once. All other winners (across the 18 times that it's been contested) are multiple winners.

Turns out that England have also won the Rugby World Cup once, and managed just one win in any sort of worldwide cricket competition (last year's World Twenty20).

Source

$6.3 billion

Is how much NZ's dairy exports are worth. It's NZ's biggest export earner... apparently about 95% of dairy products are exported, which is a far higher proportion than any other country.

Source

4.2 million dairy cows

In NZ. 1 cow for every man, woman and child in the country. (That's not including beef cattle, or the breeding bulls).

Source

80 million trays of kiwifruit

Are exported from NZ each year. NZ's biggest horticultural export apparently. That's an awful lot of green stuff...

Source

101.3 million sheep

live in Australia. Not NZ - there's "only" 39.2 million in NZ apparently. So, roughly 5 sheep per person in Australia, 10 per person in NZ.

Still not as many sheep as in China though: they have 157.9 million of them.

Source

Romney

is apparently the most popular sheep breed in NZ. It's got coarse wool, useful for things like making carpets. There's about 25 million of them around NZ...

(apperently there's only about 2 million Merino in the country... kind of surprising to me!)

Source

(Due to request, we'll have a week of agricultural stats... you asked for it, Mel :) )

13.7 degrees Celsius

Is Hamilton's annual average temperature. In other words, average over the entire year.

For comparison, Brisbane's average is 20.5C, Cape Town's is 16.8C, Cairns is 24.5C and Dunedin is 10.5C.

Source and NIWA

(Do I have a fascination with weather? And I'm not even English...)

18,442mm of rain

Is the record for the wettest year anywhere in NZ. Where? West Coast of the South Island, of course! Hokitika to be precise. You wouldn't have wanted to be there in 1997-98.

Source

614 cubic metres per second

Is how much water flows out of the Clutha River in Otago, on average. It's the biggest river in NZ by annual discharge... I can't actually find a comparable figure for the Waikato River, but I imagine it's reasonably close.

For comparison, the "mighty" Murray River in Aus averages 767 cubic metres per second, but drains a slightly larger area of around 1 million km2 (as opposed to the Clutha's ~22 thousand km2!).

15% tax on wine

That's the alcohol excise rate here in NZ. It's 25% in Australia, hence why grog's a little cheaper over here...

Source

NZ$116000 for a Camry?

Yep, that's how much you have to pay. If you live in Singapore that is. There's a 40% duty, along with a 150% tax, along with tens of thousands of dollars for a Certificate of Entitlement, etc.

Summary: if you ever want to buy a car in Singapore, forget it.

Price from here.

9 hours, 32 minutes.

That's how much daylight we get today - on the winter solstice. It's actually only one of a few days of very similar length (i.e. within a minute of each other). Sunrise is at 07h34, sunset at 17h06.
For comparison, Brisbane gets 10 hours, 24 minutes of daylight today.
Just as well we're not in Invercargill - they only get 8 hours, 40 minutes of daylight today!

55% of cars in NZ

are second-hand imports, the vast majority of which come from Japan. Well, that was the proportion of cars registered in 2008 that were second-hand imports anyway. That figure has been coming down over the last few years (It reached a peak of 60% in 1999).
Source
Some background: As of the late 1990's, there's been no vehicle manufacture or assembly in NZ, along with no import tariffs. That means that second-hand cars from Japan are very cheap - and being generally only around 5 years old are attractive options for most people. So, NZ ends up with relatively few new cars, but also relatively few really old cars (because 5 year-old imports are so cheap).

38,295 people

attend each AFL match, on average. That's an awful lot. Comparative figure for rugby league: 16979.

Source

63 Days...

is the average number of days of ground frost that Hamilton gets each year. I'm assuming that doesn't mean the air temperature necessarily drops below zero.

NIWA tells me so.

70% of NZ's electricity...

Comes from renewable sources.

14 degrees Celsius

Is Hamilton's average maximum temperature for the month of June.
Compare that with Brisbane's average maximum of 20.9C! Yes it might get cold at night in Brisbane, but it almost always warms up...

1% of people in China...

live in Shanghai. Roughly anyway. That's really not a large proportion of the population in the largest city. Compare that with some other countries:
- New Zealand: (30% live in Auckland)
- Australia: (20% live in Sydney)

Or even large countries:
- USA: (5.8% live in New York City)
- Japan: (10% live in Tokyo)

10 000 000 000 songs

That's how many songs were downloaded from the iTunes store by 24th February 2010. It's probably a billion or two more by now. Give or take.

599,000 hectares

The size of Australia's largest sheep station, which is in SW Queensland apparently.

Just how big is that? Slightly bigger than the entire nation of Brunei, as it turns out.

23% of men in NZ...

...have had a vasectomy. Apparently it's the highest rate in the world...
Source

(In honour of NZ's PM, John Key)

Welcome...

As the saying goes, "there's lies, and statistics". But they certainly can tell a picture. And for someone like me, who has an inquiring mind (or a twisted engineer's brain, you might say), statistics are fascinating. So, this is a place to post random tidbits of pure trivia that I happen to have come across, and found interesting.
Or sought out, just because I was wondering.
I'll see how often this gets updated - the goal is once a day, but I'll see about that!