If car ownership keeps growing Australians will be outnumbered

Imported cars wait in a compound at Glebe Island, Sydney.

We may not be making them any more, but Australia’s car population is growing faster than our human population. According to the motor vehicle census the number of registered passenger vehicles in Australia has increased by 43 per cent since the turn of the century. This compares with an increase of just 27 per cent in the human population.

If the trend continued, cars would outnumber people in Australia sometime next century. Beware! Carmageddon is coming.

And what better way to track the rise and the distribution of Australia’s car population than through last year’s census, which asked how many motor vehicles owned or used by householders were parked at or near private dwellings on census night. Hipsters, take note — and offence. The census’s car coverage specifically and wilfully excludes consideration of scooters. Scooterism is rampant within the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

More than 90 per cent of the Australian population lives in a household with access to a car. Car ownership peaks in the late 30s and extends throughout the child-rearing years of the 40s and 50s. Cars are central to our way of life and to raising a family.

The time in the life cycle when we are least likely to live in a household with access to a car is 23, which predates marriage, mortgage and children.

Oddly, or completely coincidentally, 23 is also the time in the life cycle when we are least likely to believe in God, according to the census. No kids, and parents and even grandparents still alive; at this age everyone thinks they’re immortal. Godliness increases ­directly and proportionately with the rise of car ownership. God wants you to drive a car.

By the 60s and into the 70s car ownership levels diminish, presumably as motor skills (no pun intended) fail or because there is less requirement to commute to work, although last year’s census results show a surprising uplift in today’s retirees, who appear to be clinging to their car-based mobility.

 

Between 2006 and last year the number of cars per 1000 population increased by 6 per cent but for the 70-something age group this increase exceeded 10 per cent. The 70-somethings of the 2016 census were born in the late 1930s and early 40s and predate the baby boomer generation. It is this generation that changed the convention of only men doing the driving in a household.

It may seem odd to us today but there was a time when it wasn’t common for women — in particular wives and mothers — to drive. This meant these women in retirement were dependent on the ­licence and the motoring skills of their ageing, fading, partners. Not any more. In the past decade the last vestiges of the pre-boomer men-only drivers club has given way to a new breed of mobile retirees of either sex.

Dad may hitch up the caravan for a spot of grey-nomad adventure but the driving is now far likelier to be shared with Mum. Across the decade to last year the number of men aged 65-plus with access to a car jumped by an average of 45,000 a year, whereas the increase in the number of women with access to a car averaged 49,000 a year. Female drivers are making up for lost time.

A little more than one-third of households have access to one car; a further 54 per cent have access to between two and four cars. Two per cent of households (178,000) have access to five or more cars.

Car ownership is very much the norm throughout Australia, although there are some recalcitrant postcodes where locals buck the car trend.

In the City of Melbourne, 76 per cent of households (mostly apartments and terraces) report having no car. In the Sydney CBD including Haymarket and The Rocks the no-car community comprises 57 per cent of all households. In the Adelaide CBD this proportion is 40 per cent while in central Brisbane it is 35 per cent.

The Manhattanisation of Australia’s city centres is introducing a bold new life form into our heartland: people who are completely and utterly carless. Are they devoid of the kind of car-nal desire that drives (get it?) Australian humanity?

 

At the other end of the car-ownership spectrum are the suburbs that contain the car faithful: postcodes where five or more cars were owned by, or garaged or parked near, the household on census night.

This is not so much a lot of Aussie households owning five cars (although I am sure there are many that do); rather, it is more likely to reflect big households with adult kids and their car-driving partners “staying over” on census night. In fact, it’s kind of like Darryl Kerrigan’s place in The Castle, which accommodated a Datsun, a Corolla, a Kingswood and more.

The undeniable peak-car household place on the continent lies an easy-driving 42km west of the carless (and I may say godless) Sydney CBD at Horsley Park, where 17 per cent of households report ownership of five or more cars, which is eight times the national average.

The equivalent place in Melbourne is Narre Warren North, where 13 per cent of households reported five or more cars on census night. If the number of cars on the continent is indeed growing faster than the human population then surely the spiritual source of this emerging Carmageddon are these two suburbs.

Our cities are supporting two divergent but emergent faiths. In the centre there be hipsters and students and educated elites being all sophisticated and global and connected and agile — and without a car in the world.

Then there are the edge communities replete with not one, not two, not three but with multiple vehicles, with multiple owners, all coming and going and driving and parking together in a single glorious suburban celebration of the motoring kind.

Here in the outermost reaches of our galaxy’s McMansion zone there live a different people with a different belief system who adhere to a single motoring deity known as “car”.

It’s almost as if metropolitan Australia is diverging between the scooterist centre and the motorist edge. Here is an unholy planning battle between the core’s Parisian arrondissements and the periphery’s Texan beltways.

And between these two iterations of the modern Australian lifestyle there lie millions of ordinary people living ordinary lives, and being pulled I suspect in both directions.

Who will win? The blunt Texan Carmageddonists of Horsley Park or the effete Parisian scooterists of Haymarket and The Rocks? Only time, and Sydney’s infernal hell of congestion, will tell.

Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group. Research by Simon Kuestenmacher.

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