Australia's population..
Age is a key difference between metro and rural/regional
Looking at Australia, or any country for that matter, as a whole hides too much detail. Our population has recently passed 27 million people (September 2024). But that tells us little of who these people are, where do they live, what are their needs? To be useful we need to drill down and look at the detail behind that headline number. In many ways the age of the people within a region are its defining characteristic. Our age tells so much about us, in education, working, retired are all age related, so if you understand age demographics of a region you can understand the region itself.
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Australia is 85% urban, and that's one of the highest percentages in the world. So even though Australia has so much space, our population crowds into small number of large cities. There are many differences between Urban, Rural and Regional Australia and that is a key to our Demographics analysis.
One of the key determinants of an area is the age of those people who live there. Overall the rural and regional Australians tend to be older, less diverse, and with lower levels of education. We have rapidly increased the number of young people going to university so this makes sense.
As a result regional australia becoming less economically active, and this situation has changed quite markedly over the last 20 years. We've analysed data from the last 4 census, from 2006 to 2021 and it's clear that as we're getting older the impact on rural/regional Australia is much higher.
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The Median age in Australia nationally has only increased by 1 year from 37 to 38 since 2006, in Victoria it's the same story. However, as we get further out from the major cities the age increases go up.
Aging in Rural and Regional Australia
Median Age increases as you get further from Australia's cities
Regional Australia (with the exception of Very Remote), is already older than the cities and rural/regional is aging more quickly.
A younger population is typically more economically active, they are generating wealth, and our the foundation of a vibrant community. That's the story of our cities, our regions are aging and I suspect they are becoming less economically active.
We have all the data to examine this in more detail and will be testing some hypotheses over the next few months.
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How do the demographics affect my region?
What part of Australia are you interested in? Let us know and we'll share and explain your local demographics.
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Is your population aging, or do you buck that trend?
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What is the ratio of working age to school and retirement age?
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Is your region up and coming, growing or have you plateaued.