Safest suburbs in Ballina

Skennars Head is Ballina's safest ranked suburb. Cumbalum and East Ballina follow.

Each eligible Ballina suburb is scored on three risks, crime-led: 60% recorded crime, 20% recorded bushfire history, and 20% flood overlays. Each is turned into an inverted percentile within Ballina — a suburb with the lowest recorded crime scores highest on the crime leg — then blended. Crime leads because it's the risk most people mean by 'safest'. NSW publishes no suburb-level flood overlay, so flood does not separate suburbs here; the order comes from crime and bushfire history.

It's the rate of recorded offences per resident from state police data, ranked against other suburbs in the same state. Two important limits: it counts reported offences, not your personal risk, and different states record and categorise crime differently — so we only ever compare suburbs within the same state, never across state lines.

A suburb only appears if it has crime data and at least 1,000 residents. Suburbs without a crime record are excluded rather than shown as risk-free — otherwise a data gap would masquerade as a perfectly safe suburb. In states where suburb-level crime data isn't published, this ranking isn't produced at all.

The top 15 is recomputed whenever the underlying risk data refreshes — crime data on each state police release, and bushfire and flood as their mapped hazard overlays update. See the footer for the last computed date.