Apparently 21,727,158 people were counted in Australia on Census night in 2011, with 219,440 overseas visitors included in the count.

That’s a whopping 8.3% increase on 2006.

Go you good things. Sing it….

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD3SkTyXzcE]

Where do you fit in?

I slip into a bracket of 40 – 44 year olds, with 1,542,879 others, which equals 7.2% of Australians.

I also moved from the divorced group, now 8.4% of Aussies, to help bolster the married group again to 48.7%.

If you want to find out where you fit in, check out the quickstats here: http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0

Three big shifts and questions for you to ponder

  • ‘Australian ancestry’ was down from 29% to 25.4%. Does that mean “I am Australian” is losing it’s relevance? And what are you doing as marketers about it? Are you reassessing your market segmentation?
  • ‘No religion’ was up from 18.7% to 22.3%. Do we need religion or simply a moral code and values to live by?
  • ‘University or tertiary educated’ was up from 12% to 14.3%. Are we getting smarter? Is it becoming harder to maintain consumer loyalty?

The biggest statistic…

For me, the biggest statistic was that more than 2.6 million households, roughly 30%, submitted the Census forms via the web-based eCensus application.

This was a big jump from 2006, when only 778,000, or 9.1%, used it.

The biggest insight…

Australians are thirsty for digital solutions and are bandwidth hungry. And with the rollout of the NBN, and Telstra claiming that they have sold over 300,000 4G devices (note, there have been 27M 4G devices sold globally) we’re a nation (and a planet) rapidly becoming a digital economy. However, a few words of warning.

Let’s hope that we don’t lose our heart. Remember that statistics are simply numbers. It’s the meaning we give to them that’s more important.