Australian Census 2016 – An Indian Snapshot

In One Decade Indian Population in Australia increased from .8% to 1.9%


Over the last 10 years, the proportion of the Australian population who were born in the United Kingdom decreased from 5.5% in 2006 to 5.0% in 2016. Conversely, the proportions increased for people born in New Zealand (from 2.1% to 2.5%), China (from 1.2% to 2.2%) and India (from 0.8% to 1.9%).


Persons born in India increased 10.7% in last 10 years


In terms of Australia’s population growth, for the top 50 countries of birth (excluding Australia) at 30 June 2016, persons born in Nepal had the highest rate of increase between 2006 and 2016 with an average annual growth rate of 27.8%. However, this growth began from a small base of 4,400 persons at 30 June 2006. The second fastest increase over this period was in the number of persons born in Pakistan (13.2% per year on average), followed by those born in Brazil (12.1%), India (10.7%) and Bangladesh (8.9%). Of the top 50 countries of birth, the fastest decline was for persons born in Malta, with an average annual decrease of 1.5%, followed by persons born in Poland (1.3%).

There are 468 800 people of Indian origin in Australia.  Victoria had the largest number of Indians with 169,802 followed by New South Wales at 143,459. Queensland and Western Australia have Indian population 49,145 and 49,385 respectively. There are 27,594 people born in India in South Australia, 10,414 Indians in ACT and 3,598 Indians in Northern Territory. Tasmania has the smallest Indian population in Australia at 1,980 people


Languages


There have been increases in the proportion of the population speaking Hindi (from 0.5% to 0.7%). A total of 159,652 people speaks Hindi in Australia.

Number of people speaking Indian Languages at home

Hindi – 159,652

Punjabi – 132,496

Tamil – 73,161

Urdu – 69,293

Bengali – 54,566

Malayalam – 53206

Gujarati – 52,888

Telugu – 34,435

Marathi – 13,055

Kannada – 9,701

Konkani – 2416

Sindhi – 1592

Oriya – 721

Kashmiri – 215


Religion


2016 census reveals that Australia has 440300 Hindus (1.9% of population) and 125900 Sikhs (.5% of population. Christians constitute 52.1% of the population and Muslims comes second at 2.6%. 30.1% has no religion.


2.8% of people claims Indian Ancestry


Ancestry represents the cultural or ethnic group that a person most closely identifies with, rather than just their place of birth. In 2016, the Census identified more than 300 different ancestries in Australia. Our 10 most common ancestries were:

  • English (36.1%)
  • Australian (33.5%)
  • Irish (11.0%)
  • Scottish (9.3%)
  • Chinese (5.6%)
  • Italian (4.6%)
  • German (4.5%)
  • Indian (2.8%)
  • Greek (1.8%)
  • Dutch (1.6%).

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