Kyodo World Service, June 27th, 2007
Australians are getting older, but the number of babies is on
the rise and Hinduism is growing as a religion, the latest
statistical snapshot of the country released Wednesday shows.
The 2006 census is the latest five-year, comprehensive national
survey compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The results show the median age of Australians has risen from 34
to 37 in the decade to 2006.
During the same period, the proportion of people aged over 65
has increased from 12.1 percent to 13.3 percent. The proportion of
children under 15 has fallen from 21.6 percent to 19.8 percent.
The bureau calculated Australia is set to reach the 21 million
population milestone in just two days time, on Friday.
And a baby boom has helped draw the date nearer.
There were 266,000 births in 2006, the highest number since 1971
and the second highest in Australian history.
The number of Indigenous Australians is also growing, at a
seemingly higher rate than the rest of the population.
In the past decade, the number of Aboriginals or Torres Strait
Islanders grew by 29 percent to 455,000, accounting for 2.3 percent
of the population.
The rise can be put down to natural population increases, better
data collection methods and people identifying their Indigenous
origins for the first time, the bureau said.
On religion, Christianity remains the dominant faith in
Australia, although fewer people identify themselves as Christians
than are being converted.
The number of Christians has grown from 12.6 million to 12.7
million since 2006, but as a proportion of the population the number
fell from 71 percent to 64 percent.
At the same time, Hinduism was the fastest growing religion,
more than doubling to 150,000.
The number of Buddhists doubled during the same period to
420,000.
Altogether, non-Christian faiths are followed by 5.6 percent of
the population.
Married couples are still the norm in Australia, but are less
common than in 1996, down from 53.3 percent to 49.6 percent.
And the traditional family roles are still holding true when it
comes to housework, with the survey showing women do more than men.
On average, women do between five and 14 hours of housework,
compared to less than five hours for men.
