Australia is increasingly ethnically diverse. Recent statistics reveal that Indian migrants increased by 217,963 in the years 2016 to 2021, an increase of 47.9 per cent. The 2021 Census showed Nepal, Philippines, China and Vietnam followed behind India as the most common countries of birth.

Social commentator Bernard Salt, The Demographers, believes Anglo Australia was left behind three generations ago.

Census reveals Australia’s diversity

“Today about 8 million out of Australia’s 25 million population are immigrants – that’s about 30 per cent. There’s been an almost fourfold increase of Nepalese people – primarily foreign students in Sydney, for instance.”

Bernard Salt was talking to franchise executives earlier this year about the future of Australia.

“Australian business relies upon foreign skills and labour,” he said.

Across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, about 70 per cent of the cities’ populations have come from overseas, predominantly Asia and the Subcontinent.

The Census showed Australia’s diversity in languages. Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Punjabi were the languages other than English most commonly used at home. In 2021 62.7 per cent of people who spoke Mandarin at home were born in China.

Duncan Young, GM of the Census said, “It is the suite of cultural diversity questions in the Census, such as ancestry, country of birth, English proficiency, languages spoken, citizenship status, year of arrival and religious affiliation, which allows us to better understand the increasing complexity and growing cultural diversity in Australia.

“The ancestry variables in the Census provide a self-assessed measure of ethnicity and cultural background. When used alongside the country of birth of individuals and their parents, Census data provides a good indication of the ethnic background of all Australians”.

Immigrants seek to prove themselves

Australia is a highly diverse mix of people, Bernard points out, comparing statistics in a local town with a typical industrial city in the US.

In Horsham, 20,000 people (or 10 per cent of the regional city’s population) were born outside Australia. On a percentage level, that’s higher than Pittsburgh, which has an immigrant demographic of 4 per cent.

So what impact does this have as we move through the 2020s?

“If you come from the other side of the world, you want to prove yourself, to attain symbols of prosperity,” says Bernard. And that fits with the lifestyle-oriented Aussie way of life.