Aussie Data MCP

What it does

Ask Claude how Sydney rent has moved against the cash rate and it normally answers from memory, which is out of date and sometimes just wrong. With this installed, it pulls the actual series from the ABS and the RBA, works out the change and draws the chart. The video above is that question, start to finish.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard way to give Claude and other AI tools new abilities. This server gives them ten tools for Australian data.

What's in it

• Inflation by item and capital city from the ABS monthly CPI, with the older quarterly CPI behind it for history
• Unemployment, participation and jobs by state from the ABS Labour Force survey
• The cash rate, home loan rates and exchange rates from the RBA, plus a way into any other RBA table
• Sydney's Friday commuting gap from Commute Pulse
• Search and fetch across the ABS's whole catalogue, for questions the other tools don't cover

How I tested it

I wrote 20 plain-English questions and ran each one through Claude with the tools switched on. A script checks two things: that Claude called the right tool, and that the number in its answer matches the live data. It passed all 20, and I read every transcript to make sure the passes were real and not a lucky number somewhere in the text.

I wrote those questions knowing how the tools work, so they were on the easy side. The next round is vague questions, things the server can't answer, and comparisons across several sources, to find where it actually breaks.

What I learnt building it

• Check the real data first. The ABS has moved the CPI to a new monthly series that only goes back a few years, so anything about 2022 would have come back short. The server now adds the old quarterly CPI as separate, labelled series instead of stitching two different index bases together.
• Do the maths for the model. Every tool returns the latest value, the starting value and the change already worked out, so Claude quotes numbers instead of doing arithmetic on a long list.
• Errors are instructions. When a query is too broad or a code is wrong, the tool says what to fix in plain English, and Claude fixes it and tries again.

Try it

It's on npm. In Claude Desktop, go to Settings > Developer > Edit Config, add this, then restart Claude. You'll need Node.js installed. No API key - the ABS and RBA data is free and open.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aussie-data": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "aussie-data-mcp"]
    }
  }
}