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DSAU13 Dashboard Week: Day 4

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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For our last day of dashboard week we were given this data on the world prosperity index, we can do absolutely anything we want with it. We only have half the day to create a dashboard and present it this time though so it’s essential we do data discovery and find insights as quickly as possible!

The federal election is not far away and politicians are always making claims about their party being better managers than the other so I thought this would be a great opportunity to put them to the test.

To start I researched the years which each political party was in government then I simply created a group from the “year” field from the prosperity data and grouped each year according to each political party.

One of the fields in the data is “Pillar Name” (eg. education, health, economy), I wanted to compare each party’s avg score for each pillar to find out which party is better in which areas. To visualise this I decide to create a simply side-by-side bar chart so I drag pillar name and political party onto rows and MEDIAN(Score) onto columns. The Coalition represent themselves with a blue colour and Labor with red so I drag “political party” onto the colour card and select the colours accordingly. Because the political parties are now represented with colour I can hide the rows header to reduce clutter.

Next I wanted to investigate the median rank by year. I build a line chart by dragging the “year” field onto columns and the MEDIAN(Rank) measure onto rows and the “Political Party” group onto the colour card. This is a very simple chart so I increased the size of the lines to exaggerate the data. Here’s the final result:

Insights:

  • Labor has a better avg score and rank overall
  • Line chart shows downward trend in overall rank for Australia
  • Living conditions pillar bucks the overall downward trend. coalition has the better rank but is trending down since first term
  • Coalition spruik that they are better economic managers but labor actually have a higher avg score and rank

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