1.Historicaly For how long has there been offical inflation rates  
published in Australia.

Hello bluekat

The main measure of inflation in Australia is the Consumer Price
Index:

" The CPI ... now provides a general measure of price inflation for
the household sector as a whole and is used by the Reserve Bank of
Australia as the official measure of inflation for evaluating monetary
policy."
" No CPI is compiled for Australia as such. For general statistical
purposes the equivalent of an all-Australia index is the series for
the weighted average of the eight capital cities."
However, the original calculations were for only six cities, with
Canberra added in 1964 and Darwin in 1982.

The Consumer Price Index was first compiled in 1960.  It was preceded
by a number of other indexes:
1912-1938 A Series Index, covered only food, groceries and house rents
1925-1953 B Series Index, designed to replace A Series for statistical
purposes but was never used for wage adjustment.
1921-1961 C Series Index, covered food and groceries, house rents (4
and 5 roomed houses), clothing, household drapery, household utensils,
fuel, lighting, urban transport fares, smoking and some miscellaneous
items.
1933-34 D Series Index, which was derived by combining the A and C
Series Indexes and was compiled especially for wage adjustment
purposes.
1954-1960 Interim Retail Price Index, covered a wider range of items
than the C Series and was based on post war consumption weights.

Information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics
http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookupMF/84CC1048AECA8EF7CA256BD0002861C1

Search strategy:  "inflation rate" historical 
This led me to http://inflationdata.com/ which in turn gave me the
Australian link

thankyou, good work