MULTICULTURALISM has won the battle for Australia. The 2011 census reveals that Australia has become a melting pot of races, with more than one in four Australians having arrived here as migrants, while almost one in eight have Asian ancestry.
Less than 40 years after the White Australia policy was buried by the Whitlam government, the census results unveiled yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveal a land of many cultures, many ancestries and many religions.
In the decade to 2011, the growth in Australia's population was mostly among people of Asian ancestry. From just 982,519 in 2001, the number of Asian-Australians has swollen to 2.4 million in 2011 - or from 5.5 per cent of us to 12 per cent.
Even in Melbourne, where Italian and Greek migrants transformed the city in the post-war generation, more residents now speak Chinese or Indian languages at home than Greek or Italian - and almost one in five Melbourne residents is of Asian ancestry.
Diversity has won the battle for Australia. It has become a country where - for better, or for worse - more and more people are abandoning the old cultural norms. More parents and live-in partners are unmarried. Only 61 per cent of Australians now call themselves Christians, down from 68 per cent a decade ago.
For the first time, most Australians aged 25 to 34 are no longer Christians. Just 49 per cent identified with any Christian denomination - almost half of them Catholics - while 10 per cent declared themselves for Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or Judaism, 3 per cent professed other beliefs, 29 per cent said they had no religion and 9 per cent gave no answer.
Catholicism is resisting the tide, but the main Protestant denominations are seeing their numbers erode away. In 1981, 26 per cent of Australians said they were Anglicans; in 2011, just 17 per cent were. The Catholics have lost some ground among the young, yet in sharp contrast to the Anglicans' fate, 25 per cent of Australians still call themselves Catholics.
Marriage too is losing ground. The census found fewer than half of Australians over the age of 15 are married. The Prime Minister and the First Bloke were among almost 1.5 million Australians living in a de facto relationship - almost 10 per cent of the adult population. More de facto relationships now include children. In a decade, the number of children living with de facto families has swelled almost 50 per cent to 526,000: one in 10 children.
Seven in every 10 children still grow up in traditional families, with two married parents. But with more than a million dependent children living with single parents, and half a million living with unmarried parents, the old social mores are now deeply fractured - particularly among those born in Australia, rather than overseas.
The census found 548,368 Australians now identify themselves as indigenous, up 34 per cent in a decade. Their median age is just 21, compared to 37 for non-indigenous Australians, which helps explain why so many are footballers.
In the decade, Australians have grown richer, but even more in debt. While the median household income rose 57 per cent since 2001, the median mortgage payment swelled by 108 per cent, and the median weekly rent was up 97 per cent. Only 33 per cent of us own our own home outright, down from 42 per cent.
At least those homes are now wired. Even before the NBN started reaching us, 72 per cent on census night last August had broadband at home, and 80 per cent had some form of internet connection. Would you believe that a decade ago, the 2001 census found only one in three Australian homes was connected to the net?
