2001 CENSUS REVEALS THE MOSAIC THAT IS AUSTRALIAThis is now a country where every second home has a computer, and one in three households surf the Net at night. Median incomes have risen by almost a third in five years, yet the median mortgage bill is up only 11 per cent.
More than 70 per cent of teenagers have a PC at home, but 20 per cent no longer have two parents there.
Only 9 per cent of people aged over 65 use a computer at home, but their generation now makes up one in eight Australians.
Welcome to Australia, as revealed by 2001 census data released June 19th, 2002: a land of rising incomes, rising education and rising inequalities. Increasingly it is a mosaic of different ethnicities, religions, incomes and ages, in which it is becoming harder to define anything as typically Australian.
Christianity remains as central as anything. But only 68 per cent of Australians now define themselves as Christians, down from 76 per cent 20 years earlier. Anglicans alone have shrunk from 26 to 21 per cent of the population in that time, while 2 per cent of Australians today are Buddhists, 1.5 per cent Muslims and 0.5 per cent Hindu.
Australians are claiming an increasingly diverse ethnicity. More than 10 per cent now define themselves as being of Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry. One in every 30 Australians has at least one Chinese ancestor, and 20 per cent define their origins as at least partly Italian, German, Greek or elsewhere in continental Europe.
Their numbers were swamped by the 37 per cent of census respondents who said their ancestry was English, but they too were outnumbered by the 39 per cent who defined their ancestry as simply Australian. (People were allowed more than one answer.)
For all that, there was surprisingly little growth in the number of Australians born overseas. They now comprise 23.1 per cent of the population, up from 22.8 per cent at the previous census.
The number of Australian residents born in Asia (from Pakistan to Japan) rose by just 15 per cent to 982,519, according to the census count. That is just 5.5 per cent of the population overall, although mostly concentrated in the big cities.
For example, the census recorded 267,030 Asian-born people living in Melbourne, almost 8 per cent of the city's population. But in the rest of Victoria there were only 10,395, or less than 1 per cent of its mosaic of people.
The census depicts a nation growing steadily richer. The median income of Australians - young and old, man, woman and child - jumped 30 per cent from $298 to $386 a week.
Despite Melbourne house prices almost doubling over that time, median mortgage payments rose comparatively little. The census recorded the median monthly bill for home buyers last August 6 as just $915 in Melbourne, up 13.5 per cent from $806 five years earlier. The average mortgage bill in Sydney shot out to $1265.
Source: The Age, "Census reveals mosaic that is Australia" , Tim Colebatch, Economics Editor
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