Australia’s population grew at its fastest rate in more than 13 years in 2022, in part due to a post-pandemic migration boom.
But while the figures are significant, demographer Dr Elin Charles-Edwards warned that a large portion of the migrants were only in Australia temporarily to address critical labour shortages and the numbers would fall over the coming years.
According to new data released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australia’s population grew by 1.9% in 2022.
ABS’s head of demography, Beidar Cho, said this was the highest growth rate seen since 2008.
“Our population at 31 December 2022 is 26.3 million people, after we recorded an increase of 496,800 people over the year,” she said.
“There were 619,600 overseas migration arrivals and 232,600 departures, resulting in Australia’s population growing by 387,000 people from overseas migration.”
Cho said a recovery of international student arrivals was driving the net overseas migration rate to “historic highs”, while departures were lagging behind levels typically seen during the past decade.
“This pattern is expected to continue as international students return following the reopening of international borders, however there are fewer students ready to depart because very few arrived during the pandemic,” she said.
Charles-Edwards said the figures looked shocking on first glance but were more nuanced due to the timing of international borders reopening and the composition of migrants coming to Australia.
“[They] are largely temporary migrants, international students and holidaymakers,” she said.
“We’ve got really historically low unemployment still [and] there are labour force shortages in many industries. So while inevitably there will be some pressure on the housing system, there’s also a lot of positives having these groups back.
“It’s a rebound effect, it’s not a figure that I expect to be carried forward for years and years because once those people who are on a temporary basis have been here for a couple of years, they’ll start departing.”
According to the data, all states and territories had positive population growth last year.
Western Australia had the fastest growth rate at 2.3%, followed closely by Queensland at 2.2%. Meanwhile, Tasmania had the slowest growth rate at 0.5%.
Net overseas migration was the major contributor to population change in all states and the Australian Capital Territory, whereas natural increase was the major contributor to change in the Northern Territory.
In terms of the short-term housing impact, Charles-Edwards said populations may be concentrated in certain areas, such as around universities and inner-city areas.
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“So there’s going to be quite sort of spatially concentrated impacts,” she said.
“Some of these areas … their rental vacancies went up quite high during Covid and we’ve got this sort of adjustment period again happening. What we might see in some of these areas is a shift to group housing and a shift away from lone-person households, which really is something that we did see during Covid in those inner-city areas.”
The natural population increase was significantly lower in 2022, down 23.4% from the previous year.
There were 300,700 births and 190,900 deaths recorded during 2022, marking a natural increase of 109,800 people. Deaths increased by 11.1%, and births decreased by 4.6%.
Nick Parr, a demographer, said the relatively low birthrate in 2022 could be directly linked to a spike in births in 2021.
“The link comes from the typical patterns of differences in ages of the children that people have,” he said.
“The more common gaps in age between children are two and three years, and it’s relatively rare to see two children that are having an age gap of less than one year. So what we’re seeing is for those large numbers of mothers that gave birth in 2021, in 2022, they were in that period when it’s unlikely that they would have a next child.”
Charles-Edwards said in the long-term with fertility data she is expecting fertility to continue declining.
“We’ve sort of maxed out the age at which women are having babies, women delayed having babies for a long time, so there’s not that much scope for growth.”
According to the data Covid-19 mortality was the main contributor to an increased number of deaths and lower natural increase.