SCAM ALERT: We will never contact you requesting money. Learn more.

Complaints

Multiculturalism paper - Annexure 1

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