Australia People Profile 2012

In 2020 the people is expected to surpass the 25 million mark – representing an increase of 48.0% since 1990. Although amount age groups will see strong increase, the increase is being driven by huge increase in the people aged 65+. The foreign-born people is expanding at a faster rate than the Australian-born, and the foreign-born are expected to account for 33.9% of the total people in 2030.

It is estimated today that Australian Aborigines were 350,000 when Europeans arrived 1788. In 2006, 455,031 people in Australia say they are Aborigines. Although this is a additional rural people than the general people-thirds of Aborigines live in cities. New South Wales and Queensland have half the Australian Aborigines. In Tasmania, the Aborigines were exterminated in nineteenth century.

The majority of the Australian people is descended from immigrants of the nineteenth and twentieth century: British of amount origins: English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. Although the Australian colonies were founded as penal colonies (except South Australia and Western Australia), the arrival of British convicts to Australia stopped gradually between 1840 and 1868. During the Gold Rush ("Gold Rush") from the late nineteenth century, the convicts and their descendants became a small minority compared to the hundreds of thousands of settlers from the British Isles.

An example of the mass arrivals: in 1850, the total number of immigrants arriving in New South Wales and Victoria is the equivalent of 2% of the total people of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The Australian people has additional than doubled since the end of the Second World War, encouraged by an ambitious postwar immigration. In the nineteenth century, Australia put in place strong measures to prevent the immigration of non-white (the White Australia policy). Since 1945, the immigrants from Greece, Turkey, Italy and other nations accrurent the country's cultural diversity. In 1973, Australia began formally end the discriminatory immigration policy, and much Asian immigration appeared. In 1988, approximately 40% of immigrants came from Asia and, in 1997, Asians made up 5% of the people. The indigenous people - the Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander people - form 2.2% of the people (2006 census). In 2001, the election campaign was dominated by issues of immigration and national security.

A lot of Australian citizens (950,000 in 2004) lives abroad. This number (almost 5%) is much higher than other nations. It is only recently that the subject has attracted government and media, but the term diaspora in Australia is now part of the Australian vocabulary.

Australia's indigenous inhabitants, a hunting-gathering people collectively referred to today as Aboriginals and Torres Straits Islanders, arrived additional than 40,000 years ago. Although their technical culture remained static--depending on wood, bone, and stone tools and weapons--their spiritual and social life was highly complex. Most spoke several languages, and confederacies sometimes linked widely scattered tribal groups. Indigenous people density ranged from person per square mile along the coasts to person per 35 square miles in the arid interior. When Captain James Cook claimed Australia for Great Britain in 1770, the native people may have numbered 300,000 in as a lot of as 500 tribes speaking a lot of different languages. In 2006 the indigenous people was approximately 517,200, representing about 2.5% of the people. Since the end of World War II, the government and the public have made efforts to be additional responsive to aboriginal rights and needs, most recently with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's historic apology to the indigenous people in February 2008 which included a pledge “to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.”

Immigration has been vital to Australia's development since the beginning of European settlement in 1788. For generations, most settlers came from the British Isles, and the people of Australia are still predominantly of British or Irish origin, with a culture and outlook similar to those of Americans. Non-British/Irish immigration has increased significantly since World War II through an extensive, planned immigration program. Since 1945, 7 million migrants have settled in Australia, including 700,000 refugee and humanitarian entrants. About 80% have remained; 24%--almost in--of Australians are foreign-born. Britain, Ireland, Italy, Greece, New Zealand, and the former Yugoslavia were the major sources of post-war immigration. In the year to June 2009, New Zealand was the major source country for permanent migrants to Australia, with Britain, India, China, and the Philippines making up the rest of the top. Australia's humanitarian and refugee program of about 13,000 per year is in addition to other immigration programs. In recent years, refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia have comprised the major element in Australia's refugee program.

Although Australia has fewer than three people per square kilometer, it is of the world's most urbanized nations. Less than 2.5% of the people lives in remote or very remote areas.