Australia by numbers
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Dale
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David Dale's biography and other articles by this writer
It was an embarrassing moment, probably the most embarrassing moment experienced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this century. On a Friday in December 2004, the bureau was forced to reissue a report it had published two days earlier. In deceptively bureaucratic language, the revised version began thus: "Note the following change has been made to this document on 10/12/2004. Original text, published on 8/12/2004: ‘In 2003 there were 106,400 marriages registered in Australia, an increase of 3300 (3 per cent) when compared with 2002, and the first increase in registered marriages since 1999.' "Correction
on 10/12/2004: ‘In 2003 there were 106,400 marriages registered in Australia, an increase of 960 when compared with 2002, and continuing the increase in the number of marriages since the low of 103,130
in 2001.' "
If any media pundits had reacted instantly to the December 8 report, they'd have been tempted to pontificate about the significance of that 3 per cent marriage jump. It could have been a monumental social shift, signalling a return to traditional values and filling Tony Abbott with optimism. Except that it was a misreading of the data.
Two days later the pundits would have been back-pedalling, because the real rise of less than 1 per cent is within normal annual variation and does not alter the 20-year trend away from marriage and childbirth that has alarmed Australia's conservatives.
The marriage mix-up was the bureau's second great embarrassment of the 21st century. The first was its admission that it had been unable to find 500,000 Australians in the 2001 census. But that sin was more understandable. Every census in every nation misses people – they're out on the night, they're homeless, they're avoiding official contact, they live in areas too remote for the collectors. Any damage that might have caused to the bureau's reputation was ameliorated by its impressive ability to estimate from other sources how many people it had missed.
The marriage mix-up was the bureau's second great embarrassment of the 21st century. The first was its admission that it had been unable to find 500,000 Australians in the 2001 census. But that sin was more understandable. Every census in every nation misses people – they're out on the night, they're homeless, they're avoiding official contact, they live in areas too remote for the collectors. Any damage that might have caused to the bureau's reputation was ameliorated by its impressive ability to estimate from other sources how many people it had missed.
The marriage mix-up came as a shock to those who follow the daily data flow from the ABS, because it demonstrated that the god of information has moments of fallibility. Before a society can improve itself, it needs to understand itself. And to understand itself,
it needs reliable data. That's why the ABS was established 100 years ago. If you can't trust the ABS to tell you how the nation is changing, who can you trust?
Journalists are bombarded daily with so-called "research" purporting to offer insights into Australian behaviour, much of it concocted by PR companies to promote particular products, and most of it based on "surveys" that break all the rules of reliability. They are also bombarded with assertions by politicians about what "the average Australian" wants, needs, worries about and won't stand for. The bureau's reputation rests on its ability to gather all the facts instead of merely sampling, or, if it does undertake a survey, to use a sample size large enough to ensure the margin for error is negligible, and then to report the facts in enough detail to show that averages are usually meaningless.
We can imagine that a few heads rolled in the bureau's hatch-match-dispatch division as a result of the misreading of the marriage figures, or maybe a senior statistician had to face ritual humiliation before a panel of his peers, or at least somebody was required to get a new pair of glasses.
I think we should, for the sake of continuing this discussion, forgive the bureau its trespass and accept it as the best possible source of insights into the state of the nation in 2005. My aim is to pull from the thousands of green and white booklets issued by the bureau every year a picture of the diversity of Australia.
THE BIGGEST FACT THE BUREAU OFFERS IS THAT THE POPULATION of Australia is 20.3 million, and rises by one person every two minutes and nine seconds. The statisticians are confident about this figure because they get quarterly reports on births, deaths and immigrant arrivals. They've worked out that, on average, there is one birth every two minutes and five seconds, one death every three minutes and 54 seconds, and a net gain of one international immigrant every four minutes and eight seconds.
In 2003, for the first time, the gain from immigration was greater than the gain from births over deaths.
Our population growth of 1 per cent a year is among the slowest in the world. Indonesia is growing by 1.3 per cent a year, Malaysia by 1.9 per cent and Papua New Guinea by 2.2 per cent. But then again, we're the same as the United States, and way ahead of Japan (0.1 per cent), Britain (0.3 per cent) and Italy (which is actually declining by 0.1 per cent a year).
The bureau projects that we'll reach 25 million in 2050, and then decline, unless we drastically boost immigration and start breeding like bunnies right now. Environmentalists such as Tim Flannery think we're already bloated, because the continent can't sustain many more than 10 million people. Entrepreneurs such as Kerry Packer think we should aim to reach 40 million, which is the tipping point to make us a world economic player. The bureau says neither of those scenarios can be achieved this century.
If your idea of fun is to watch big numbers changing, go to www.abs.gov.au and click on "Australia's population". There you'll find the bureau's nifty people clock.
NOW LET'S TRY TO MAKE SOME USEFUL DISTINCTIONS among the 20.3 million people around us. About 51 per cent of the population is female. The difference happens because men die younger than women – in any year roughly 69,000 men will die compared with 65,000 women.
The life expectancy of a boy born this year is 77; and a girl is likely to live to 83 – unless they are Aborigines, who are likely to die more than a decade younger at 60 and 65.
The bureau tells us that women are more likely than men to be old, living alone, at the movies, using a library, seeing a doctor, in a botanic garden, sexually assaulted, walking for exercise, suffering arthritis and asthma, and using contraception. They are less likely than men to be murdered, beaten up, robbed, in jail, watching a sporting event, playing golf, deaf or injured in an accident.
Half the population is over 36. The gerries are winning the numbers race: while kids under 15 are 20 per cent of the population and people over 65 are 13 per cent, by 2020, both age groups will be 17 per cent. We'd better start turning our schools into nursing homes.
In Malaysia, the median age is 25. In Japan, it's 43. Back in 1971, our median was 27. But this ageing process applies only to whitefellas. The median age of Aborigines is 21 and the fastest growing community niche is the indigenous teenager.
INDECISIVENESS IS ONE OF OUR FAVOURITE FAITHS. The bureau says that in the 1996 census, 9 per cent of Australians did not "adequately describe" a religion, while in 2001, 11.7 per cent were in this confused condition – a growth rate of 30 per cent.
Over the same period, people who boldly declared "no religion" fell from 16.6 per cent to 15.5 per cent. The non-believers had spread rapidly over post-war decades (0.3 per cent in 1947 and 8.3 per cent in 1976) but levelled off in the '90s.
Between the 1996 and 2001 censuses, Buddhists soared by 79 per cent, Hindus by 42 per cent, Muslims by 40 per cent and Jews by 5 per cent. That's not to say there are lots of them: Buddhists make up 2 per cent of the populace, Muslims 1.5 per cent, Hindus 0.5 per cent and Jews 0.4 per cent.
Christianity seems to be split between a mainstream in decline and a radical fringe in flight. Overall, 68 per cent of Australians called themselves Christians in the 2001 census. But while Anglicans slumped from 22 per cent of the populace to 20.7 per cent between '96 and '01, and Catholics slipped from 27 per cent to 26.6 per cent, the category called "other Christian" grew by 18.4 per cent (to 2.7 per cent of the populace), and the Pentecostals were up 11 per cent to 1 per cent of the total.
Among foreign-born residents, the pattern differs. The major faith among New Zealanders is "no religion" (26 per cent, compared with 19 per cent Anglican and 15 per cent Catholic); 43 per cent of UK-born Australians say they are Anglicans; 58 per cent of Vietnamese-born Australians are Buddhists; and 98 per cent of Italian-born Australians are Catholic.
Whatever we might believe in, most of us do it passively. In the ABS General Social Survey, only 26 per cent of women and 20 per cent of men said they had actively participated in religious activities in the three months before being interviewed. You could hardly call us a nation of god-botherers.
ONLY 46,000 AUSTRALIANS – LESS THAN 3 PER CENT OF THE POPULATION – can really call themselves locals. The remaining 19.8 million on the continent come from carpetbaggers who blew in sometime in the past 217 years. What the bureau calls the indigenous population is growing at twice the rate of the rest – though the boom from census to census may be partly attributed to a greater eagerness on the part of Aborigines to acknowledge their heritage.
TABLE 1
Some segments of Australia's population
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics
About 23 per cent of the present population was born outside Australia (the same proportion as in 1901, but way up on the 10 per cent proportion in the 1947 census). A further 26 per cent had one or both parents born in another country. The main sources for overseas-born Australians have been Britain, New Zealand, Italy, Vietnam and China, but India is about to replace Vietnam as the number-four source country for new immigrants.
The 1 million British-born residents (6 per cent of the population) have a median age of 52. The 356,000 New Zealand-born residents (2 per cent) have a median age of 37. The 155,000 Vietnamese-born Australians have a median age of 38. The 219,000 Italian-born residents (1.5 per cent) have a median age of 62 – so don't expect to be buying genuine handmade pasta for much longer.