A Multicultural Northern Territory: Statistics from the 2016 Census

Andrew Taylor

Last week we gave a seminar hosted by the Northern Territory Department of Families, Office of Multicultural Affairs on results of a report detailing the growing demographic, economic and social importance of our diverse cultural backgrounds. We identified a few key points which I've summarised as:

• Greater Darwin is now more multicultural that Australia as a whole based on the proportion of residents born overseas at 29% compared to 28% for Australia as a whole
  
• In 2016 in the Territory, and for the first time, England was not the largest overseas born community in the population having been replaced by the Filipino community with around 6,000 residents in the NT
  
  
• As well as the Filipino community, several ‘new migrant communities’ have emerged from the shift in source nations for overseas migration from being ‘European centric’ to ‘Asia centric’ and from the ‘big shift’ in the national migration intake towards skilled migration which commenced under the Howard Government during the 1990s
  
  
• New migrant communities are sustaining population growth in the Northern Territory and north of Australia in face of low growth. They bring many social, cultural, economic and demographic benefits to our communities
  
  
• Other prominent and growing communities include those from Indian, Nepal, China and Indonesia. New Zealand migrants continue to make up a large share of the Australian and Northern Territory permanent migrant arrivals

The seminar was part of a larger project reporting on the Multicultural make-up of the Northern Territory. The report is a series of files enabling you to access a large amount of data on key indicators about the Territory’s multicultural make-up like birthplace, ancestry and languages. Files are being progressively released on the following web page http://www.cdu.edu.au/northern-institute/multicultural-northern-territory

 

 

   

demographyNorth