In the early hours of Tuesday, Australia’s population clock will tick over to 24 million.
The milestone follows record overseas migration, which made up more than half Australia’s population increase in the year to July 2015, says the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
“Australia had record levels of migration about five to seven years ago,” a bureau forecaster, Andrew Howe, said. “That has slowed down a little bit in the past two or three years.”
There has also been a small decrease in the number of children born: the fertility rate sits at 1.8 children for each Australian woman.
“In terms of trends, that’s actually come down a little bit over the past few years, but compared to 10 to 20 years ago that’s actually higher,” Howe said.
Australia’s population increases by one person every one minute and 31 seconds after accounting for births, deaths and international migration.
There were nearly twice as many births (304,000) as deaths (155,000) last financial year.
Howe said Australia’s annual population growth rate was 1.4%, relatively high compared with the rest of the world.
New Zealand and the United States both have a growth rate of 0.7%, Britain 0.6% and China 0.5%.
Japan’s population decreased by an estimated 0.2% last year.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion