With all the lockdowns happening in Australia, it is very hard to keep a positive, optimistic, future-focused perspective. Of course we need to remember that compared to all other areas of the globe we are managing pandemics extremely well. Oceania has 35 COVID deaths per 1 million residents. This compares to around 15,000 COVID deaths…
Articles by Simon Kuestenmacher
Simon Kuestenmacher is one of Australia’s leading demographers, co-founder of The Demographics Group, a regular media commentator, a columnist for the Australian and one of the world’s Top 50 Influencers in Data Science.
www.SimonKuestenmacher.com
Recently we saw some fantastic looking employment figures published about the state of the Australian economy. We have a record-high 13.2 million people employed — that translates into a laughably low unemployment rate of 4.6%. Average wages for full-time employed Australians went up to record highs, the highest ever recorded numbers. This must all be…
Here’s a quick data update about net internal migration figures in Australia. These are migration figures that do not take into account overseas migration, and that does not look at natural increased deaths over births. So we are just looking at the population movements from one Australian state to the next, from one Australian capital…
Our inner cities, our central business districts are suffering during the pandemic, aren’t they? High vacancy rates, people working from home, no major events — you’ve heard all the arguments of why the CBD is suffering. So, should we just lock up the towers and let nature take over,? Think of Will Smith in ‘I…
15The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated! Mark Twain We need to talk about the death of Australian manufacturing. It’s a story that is often being told in the news. “Yet another factory closure! “Ford leaves the country! “No manufacturing jobs are left in Australia! “At the heyday of manufacturing in Australia in the…
Today the 7.6 million Millennials in Australia are the largest demographic force. As a generation, they outnumber Gen Z and Gen X by about a million people. They outnumber the large Baby-Boomer generation by about two million people now. There’s no other generation that will have such a huge impact on the 2020s as the…
Australia went in no time at all from worrying about high unemployment rates due to COVID, to facing a big skills shortage. Essentially, we got used to the UberEats model of filling jobs. If we were hungry for a new job, we just ordered it with UberEats. We put it on these skilled occupations list…
Australia won’t see high population growth at pre-COVID levels for years. This is a problem for many sectors. Our education system is underwritten by international students, our residential construction sector depends on a steady stream of new residents needing to be housed and all the highly skilled jobs that our economy created couldn’t possibly have…