Australian households experienced approximately 1.6 million incidents of malicious property damage from July 2008 to June 2009.

This publication presents first results from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) redesigned national Crime Victimisation Survey, conducted from July 2008 to June 2009 using the ABS Multipurpose Household Survey (MPHS). The publication includes data about victims for a selected range of personal and household offences, whether victims reported these incidents to police, characteristics of victims and characteristics of their most recent incident, and people's perceptions of safety and problems in their neighbourhood. Unless otherwise specified, differences between data items noted in the Summary of Findings are statistically significant. See the Technical Note (paragraph 12) for further details.

The survey forms part of a commitment by the ABS to present a comprehensive view of crime and the criminal justice system in Australia. The survey focuses on selected categories of more serious crime and high volume crimes. The MPHS is conducted throughout Australia as a supplement to the Labour Force Survey and interviews are conducted predominantly by telephone. One randomly selected person per household, aged 15 years or over, was asked about whether they or their household experienced selected personal or household crimes, providing information about incidents that occurred over a 12-month period before the date of interview during 2008-09. Sexual assault data were collected from people aged 18 years or over.