Annexure 1
AUSTRALIA’S
DIVERSE SOCIETY: A STATISTICAL OVERVIEW [1]
Overseas-born
- In the 2001 Census about one-fifth of Australia's population stated that they were born overseas. At June 2002, overseas born residents in Australia comprised of 4.6 million people, remaining at approximately 23% of the total population.
- Within the western world, Australia has a high proportion of overseas-born persons (23%). This is higher than New Zealand (18.7%) and Canada (18.4%), and much higher than the United States (11.4%).
- At the 2001 Census, of the overseas-born population, most came from the United Kingdom (25.4%), New Zealand (8.7%) and Italy (5.4%).
- Western Australia has the highest proportion of residents born overseas (28.5%). New South Wales and Victoria have almost equal proportions of overseas-born people (24.8% and 24.6% respectively) followed by the ACT (22.6 %) and South Australia (21.2 %), Queensland (18.0 %), NT (15.5 %) and Tasmania (10.5%).
Ancestry
- In 2001, there were 3,477,189 Australians with one or both parents born overseas (25% of population).
- In the 2001 Census, the three most common ancestries that people identified with were Australian (35.9%), English (33.9%) and Irish (10.2%).
- Other common ancestries included Italian (4.3%), German (4.0%), Chinese (3.0%), Scottish (2.9%), Greek (2.0%), Dutch (1.4%), Lebanese (0.9%) and Vietnamese (0.8%).
Language
- In 2001, 16% of Australians spoke a language other than English in their homes. This represents an increase of 8% since 1996.
- Collectively, Australians speak over 200 languages. In 2001, Italian (with 353,605 speakers) was the most popular language other than English spoken at home followed by Greek (263,718), Cantonese (225,307), Arabic (209,372) and Vietnamese (174,236).
Religion
- Christians make up 68% of the population. Two major Christian denominations (Anglicans and Catholics) account for almost half (47.3%) of the population. Buddhism is the largest non-Christian religion and accounts for 1.9% of the population. Islam is the second largest non-Christian religion at 1.5% of the population. 15% of Australians said they had no religion.
[1] Taken from HREOC Publication Face the Facts 2005, 2005, p21
