Updated June 27, 2017 17:55:35

If Australia were just 100 people, what would it look like? New census data gives us an opportunity to find out, and provides some surprising insights into the state of the nation.

Here are 100 dots: each one represents 1 per cent of the Australian population — that's 240,000 people per dot.

Let's take a look at how the population divides between genders — it's pretty even as you'd expect.

But the population as a whole looks pretty different from those who represent us. If our politicians were 100 people, here's the breakdown.

If you think that looks unbalanced, just take a look at what the nation's CEOs look like as 100 people.

We can't all be CEOs but over recent decades, Australia's education standards have been reshaped.

More than half of the population is now educated to a year 12 level or above.

If you break that down and only look at older generations, you can see that far fewer of them completed year 12.

At the same time as we've gotten better educated, we've become much less religious.

The latest census data shows 'no religion' has overtaken Catholic as the biggest single grouping.

Back in 1954, that 'no religion' figure was so small it doesn't even make up a single dot.

The census puts our population at 23.4 million people — but where do we all live?

Well, about two-thirds of us are in the capital cities, which are growing twice as fast as the rest of the country.

That's partly because if you look only at migrants over the past 25 years, eight in 10 settle in the capitals.

Turning to the generation gap, the census suggests Australia is developing a case of middle-age spread.

There's a fairly even split between Gen X, Gen Y and the baby boomers. But there are fewer of what's sometimes called the silent generation, those born before 1945.

But it's a very different split if we only look at home owners: baby boomers are clearly over-represented.

Looking at Australians' place of birth, we remain very much a nation of immigrants, with more than one in four born overseas.

Drilling into that a little further, the UK is the largest single source of residents born overseas, followed by India and New Zealand.

Looking back to 1901, we see fewer people were born overseas, and most of our immigrants came from just a few countries.

What about the first Australians? Looking at the population now, three out of every 100 people identify as Indigenous.

Zoom in a little and you see that if the Northern Territory were 100 people, nearly a third of people are Indigenous.

But in NT prisons, Indigenous people are vastly over-represented.

Numbers can never tell the whole story but one thing that is clear is that Australia is a changing nation.

What's also clear is that from gender to age to race, which dot you are still makes a difference.

Notes

• Data was taken from the 2016 census Basic Community Profile.
• For the indigenous status, school education and religion categories, the people who did not state an answer were excluded from the calculation of proportions for each group.
• The number of federal MPs by gender came from the Parliament of Australia website, and the CEO gender data from the ABS gender indicators survey, August 2016.
• Historical data was taken from the 1954 census and the ABS Australian historical population statistics.
• Northern Territory prison population statistics came from ABS prisoners in Australia 2016.
• The number and age of homeowners came from the ABS housing occupancy and costs 2013-14.
• The generations were defined according to common definitions and matched as closely as possible to ABS age categories: kids (0-24), Gen Y (25-44), Gen X (45-54), Baby Boomers (55-74) and the Silent Generation (75 and over).
  

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Topics: population-and-demographics, community-and-society, australia

First posted June 27, 2017 09:05:46