Census 2021: Boom! It’s the march of the millennials

Australia is undergoing a generational shapeshift with those born between 1981-1995 catching the baby boomers as a proportion of the population.

Melburnian millennials Nick Murnane, 29, and Ellen Russell, 26, with their dog Peanuts, are taking baby boomers by storm in the latest census. Picture: Aaron Francis

Move over boomers, the millennials are on the march.

Australia is undergoing a generational shapeshift, the latest census reveals, with those born between 1981 and 1995 catching the baby boomers as a proportion of the nation’s population.

Back in 1966, the boomers – those born between 1946 and 1965 – accounted for almost two in five people living in Australia. As recently as 2011, it was one in four.

Now both boomers and millennials account for 5.5 million people, or 21.5 per cent each of the total population, despite the younger cohort having five fewer birth years available to count.

Having already topped generation X (those born between 1966 and 1980) at the 2016 census, the millennials – their increase driven by migrants coming to Australia in their most productive years – are becoming a bigger part of the national picture.

This generational shift is just one of the myriad ways Australia is changing, according to the 2021 census, the snapshot of the nation taken last August. We are growing, becoming more culturally diverse, and are increasingly living in households where there are no children.

More of us are apartment-dwellers. There are more than a million one-parent families for the first time. And we are rapidly losing our religion.

The majority of Australian residents are now first or second-generation migrants, the data shows, with 51.5 per cent either born overseas or having a parent born overseas in 2021, compared to 49 per cent in 2016.

Melbourne couple Ellen Russell, 26 and Nick Murnane, 29 face the same issues as many in their millennial generation, including struggling to get into the housing market. But they recognise they live at a time and in a world of ­immense opportunity.

Ms Russell, who has worked in start-ups since finishing her degree in 2017, said social media and the modern day workforce had unlocked new channels for creative individuals. “It’s exciting, and creates lots of new opportunities for people who are creative-minded,” she said.

Mr Murnane, who worked as a nurse before returning to univer­sity to study exercise science, said his generation had it tough when it came to buying a house in the big city.

“By the time my parents were my age, they had three kids and had paid off their house already,” he said. “Buying a house isn’t cheap; having kids isn’t cheap. We want to be settled before we decide to have kids.”

The first tranche of the 2021 census has a raft of data on how Australians live, work and play.

It reports the total population now sits at 25.5 million (not including overseas visitors), more than double the 12.5 million reported in 1971 and up by over two million since 2016.

More than a million of them have come from overseas since 2017, although Covid-19 restrictions dramatically slowed the ­influx, with more than four in five of them landing between 2017 and 2019.

India has now moved past China and New Zealand to ­become the third largest country of birth for Australians, behind Australia and the UK.

This diversity flows through into language, with more than 5.5 million people speaking a language other than English at home, up by 800,000 since 2016. Mandarin is the most common, with Punjabi the fastest growing. More than 850,000 people say they do not speak English well or at all.

The census also reveals that the number of people identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait ­Islander has jumped over 25 per cent since 2016 to more than 800,000, or 3.2 per cent of the total population, as people increasingly identify as First Nations.

And it shows Australia is increasingly secular, with almost 40 per cent of respondents reporting “no religion”, up from 30 per cent in 2016 and 22 per cent in 2011.

Those identifying as Christian have fallen from 60 per cent in 2011 to 44 per cent now. Age is a significant factor in religious affiliation, with nearly 60 per cent of baby boomers reporting a Christian ­religious affiliation, compared to 30 per cent of millennials.

And Islam has grown to 3.2 per cent of the Australian population. Our households are differently configured too. For the first time, the census recorded more than one million single-parent families, with four out of five of those ­parents being women.

The proportion of couple families that don’t have children living with them has steadily grown to 47 per cent of all couple households, the data reveals, up from just over 40 per cent in 1996.

Our choice of housing is changing, as well. More than half a million people now live in high-rise apartments, defined as those nine storeys or higher.

More than 10 per cent of Australians live in an apartment, ­nearly 60,000 people were living in a caravan on census night, and almost 30,000 were in a “cabin or houseboat”.