Census 2011 data is out!

Earlier today Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released a first set of information about Australian population and housing based on data collected during a census night on August 9th 2011. Details are fascinating and you could spend hours trawling through thousands of data items describing demographic characteristics of our population - on a national level as well as down to small communities.

Here is some trivia for your information:

• Total persons counted: 21,507,717
• There are more females than males: 10,873,704 to 10,634,013  (50.6%/ 49.4%)
• Median age: 37 (unchanged)
• The most common ancestries in Australia were English 25.9%, Australian 25.4%, Irish 7.5%, Scottish 6.4% and Italian 3.3%. Proportion of people with Australian ancestry decreased from 29% in 2006…
• While the proportion of people born in Australia remains steady at 69.8% (70.9% in 2006), proportions of those born in New Zealand increased by 0.2% to 2.2%, China (excluding SARs and Taiwan) by 0.5% to 1.5%, and India 0.7% to 1.4%.
• 76.8% of people only spoke English at home. Other languages spoken at home included Mandarin 1.6%, Italian 1.4%, Arabic 1.3%, Cantonese 1.2% and Greek 1.2%.
• The median weekly personal income for people aged 15 years and over in Australia was $577. For families, median weekly income was $1,481.
• There were 9,117,033 private dwellings counted and average number of people per household now stands at 2.6 persons.
• There was a staggering number of unoccupied dwellings on the census night: 934,471 or 10.7% of all dwellings. A lot of people on holidays…
• Proportions of people owning a dwelling outright decreased to 32.1% from 34% in 2006, and there were proportionally more renters in 2011 than 5 years earlier: 29.6% and 28.1% respectively.
• Proportions of dwelling with 4 or more bedrooms increased from 28.1% to 30.3% in 2011. One bedroom dwellings are also more popular: 4.7% in comparison to 4.4% in 2006.
• The median weekly rent was $285. For 10.4% of households, their rent was more than 30.0% of their income. The median monthly mortgage repayment was $1,800.

You can explore more interesting facts with this interactive application published by The Courier:

Census 2011: In depth and interactive

But where are the maps, you may ask!? More on this later… here are just a few examples:

SBS: Census Explorer
ABC: Census 2011
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