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ment, housing affordability, livability, and sustainability.

He said the government would use the report’s findings to analyse its investments into cities as part of the Smart Cities program and in particular the Cities Deals.

The intergovernmental partnership is aimed at making cities a better place to live and do business.

But at the end of the report was a long list of indicators which were excluded due to issues of data availability, measurement and comparability.

Among those were emer- gency services response times, the compliance rates of councils to their own policies and how many homes are in disaster prone areas.

Cr Van Styn said many indicators were excluded because the necessary data was not collected by groups such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics or in the Australian Census.

“The object of the Cities Reference Group is to use data that has been collected and you can’t retrospectively collect data.

“The data collections points are a matter for the ABS and government departments.

“It’s a resourcing issue and different states have different priorities for collecting data.

“We would call on there to be more data collected.”

Cr Van Styn said the report was starting to measure things like livability and sustainability in cities.