Family and Community Services. It is managed by a group based at the Melbourne

HILDA) Survey, a major new household panel study, was conducted. While the coverage of the HILDA Survey is broad-ranging, one of its three principal areas of interest is household formation, and especially the changing role of families in Australian society. This article examines the potential for this new survey to contribute to research on families in Australia. It begins by summarising the case for yet another survey. It then moves on to provide brief summaries of the survey design and sample selection process, the type of information being collected, and the outcomes from wave 1. The paper then concludes with a discussion of the sorts of family issues that could be explored with these data. The need for household panel data The obvious question that many may ask is do we really need yet another survey. The HILDA Survey, however, is distinctly different from most other surveys conducted in Australia in that it is a panel, or longitudinal, survey. That is, it involves re-surveying the same persons over time, whereas most surveys are simple cross-sections and hence provide a snapshot at a single point in time. This distinction is critical for understandin