Can ordinary Australians please stand up

[mr friendly guy]

All 6000 of them

Ordinary’ Australia probably isn’t where you think it is

(Because it doesn’t really exist)

By the Digital Story Innovations team’s Inga Ting

If politicians and headlines are to be believed, “ordinary” Australians are doing it tough. They’re losing out. And every political party stands accused of being out of touch with them.

Now we can add one more problem to the list: their numbers are shrinking. They’re so low, in fact, it has left some experts astonished.

If “ordinary” Australia has a capital, it would be Baking Board in Queensland, 300 km north-west of Brisbane. At 3 per cent, the tiny locality has the highest percentage of residents matching at least 10 of the most common demographic characteristics.

To put that in perspective, three of Baking Board’s 97 residents fit the bill. It’s not many, and that’s the point. As Australia becomes more diverse, the proportion sharing the most common characteristics across key measures is falling, census figures show.

For example, the 2016 census found 67 per cent of the population was born in Australia. Two generations ago, it was 81 per cent.

The trend is the same for religion, language spoken at home, marital status, family type — even the sort of home you live in and the number of cars per household.

In short, the most common type of Australian — the “ordinary” Australian — is becoming less common.

So who, exactly, is an ‘ordinary’ Australian?

If you match the description below, then you are the statistically “ordinary” Australian, according to at least one set of measures:

You speak only English at home
You were born in Australia
Your parents were born in Australia
You’re Christian
Your family has English ancestry
You’re in a registered marriage
You live with your spouse and two children
Your home is a free-standing, three-bedroom house, which you own with a mortgage
You have two cars
Your family income is $2,000–$2,999 a week (or $104,000–$129,999 a year)
These were the most common answers (known in statistics as the “mode”) to key questions in the 2016 census.

But like all statistical measures, the mode can mask substantial variation.

The coloured bars in the interactive below show the distribution of suburbs for six broad descriptions of the most common or “ordinary” Australian.

They are placed according to the percentage of the population that match that description: the darker the colour, the more locations cluster at that percentage. (Tap/hover over the bars to see the numbers.)

Overall, the spread of suburbs is largest for religion and marital status, and smallest for dwelling type and family income.

In Greater Sydney for example, just over half the population is Christian, but there’s a huge difference between Haymarket in the inner city (the lowest, at 16 per cent) and Gilead, close to Campbelltown in the south-west (the highest, at 85 per cent).

Similarly, nearly half the population aged over 15 is married but the percentages range from 14 per cent in Darlington to 73 percent in Bungarribee, near Blacktown, in Sydney’s west.

Ancestry and family vary less. Just one per cent of Haymarket residents share the most common birthplace and ancestry, compared to 37 per cent in Hardys Bay, on the Central Coast; while Greenhills Beach had the highest percentage of typical families, also 37 per cent. Several suburbs, including Doyalson North and Patonga on the Central Coast, had no typical families.

Here’s how it looks on a map. (Select a map to see a bigger version.)

Most cities show a clear contrast between the inner city and outer suburbs. Others show a stark north-south divide.

In Adelaide, the City of Churches, inner city residents are roughly half as likely to be Christian as those in the city’s north-east and three times less likely to live in a typical dwelling as those in the city’s south.

Why ‘ordinary’ is actually extraordinary

This is what happens across the country when we add all the characteristics of ordinariness together.

The map shows how the percentage of people who match the profile of “ordinary” falls as we combine these traits, one at a time.

When all these common characteristics are merged, only 5,782 Australians fit the description of an “ordinary” Australian. That’s roughly 0.02 per cent of the population.

Taking the crown for Australia’s most ordinary “suburbs” are Baking Board in Queensland (population 97) and Boomanoomana in NSW (population 99), each with three “ordinary” residents. But it was in Dianella, Western Australia, that the ABC found Brie Treasure-Hilder, one of the rare Australians matching all the criteria for “ordinary”.

“That only 6,000 Australians fit all of those characteristics is just astonishing,” Carol Johnson, professor of politics and international studies at the University of Adelaide said.

“It absolutely shows that if the ‘ordinary’ Australian is conceived in that way, then the ‘ordinary’ Australian just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Fatuma Mohamed, 40, lives a few suburbs away from rare “ordinary” Australian Brie Treasure-Hilder in Perth. Ms Mohamed migrated to the country 17 years ago from Somalia as a refugee and has six children. She ticks none of the “ordinary” boxes, but said that didn’t affect how Australian she felt.

“My kids they’re saying they’re Australian, because they grew up here, they study [here] … we are Australian, I feel Australian.”

Which may be part of the reason politicians have long resisted the exercise we started with — defining the “ordinary” Australian.

“Politicians use the phrase ‘ordinary’ Australian to try to create a conception … that fits into their political narrative,” Professor Johnson said.

“They don’t actually spell it out because that might alienate people. They use it as a broad, vague concept that they hope people identify with … even if they’re not really included.”

The decline of ‘normal’

Economic and demographic shifts mean even broad notions of a “typical” or “ordinary” Australian are losing their appeal as they become decreasingly connected to people’s lived experiences.

Large-scale immigration, the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, and mass education have all led to seismic shifts in social attitudes and greater freedom in how people should think and behave. Add to this, globalisation, the trend towards “small government” and the rise of a neoliberal worldview in which individuals are ultimately responsible for their own success or failure — all of which have eroded the power of group identity and the notion of a “normal” or “typical” way of life, La Trobe University political sociologist Anthony Moran said.

We see it not only in the breaking down of traditional expectations, but also in the declining influence of mass institutions such as unions, churches and community organisations.

“Communities have become less meaningful to individual lives. Society is much more individualised,” Dr Moran said.

“Young people today have many more options when it comes to lifestyle, career, family, even sexual and gender identity … There is, I think, a modern pressure to be individual, to carve out your own biography.”

Why this matters for cities

Researchers have already coined a term for this explosion of diversities, University of Sydney urban geographer Kurt Iveson said.

“With global cities like Sydney and Melbourne, we now talk about “super-diversity”, and this is a good statistical picture of that,” Associate Professor Iveson said.

Where is Australia’s most ‘ordinary’ place?



A tiny locality of 97 people is home to the most “ordinary” Australians in the country, according to census data. And it doesn’t even have a pub.

Super-diversity recognises the differences within communities that were previously seen as internally similar or consistent. It is the central challenge in how we think about organising our cities, he said.

“This idea of super-diversity ought to be front and centre but the way we think about planning and infrastructure for cities still tends to have an ordinary citizen in mind.”

He points to the maps of typical dwelling and typical family. “If you pick your average family — a couple with two kids — they’re more concentrated in suburban areas than in the inner city. Is that a pattern of preference or a pattern of exclusion?

“It might be that all these apartments going up in the inner city are one- or two-bedroom because that’s how developers make money, and there’s not enough three- or four-bedroom apartments. Or even if there are, your average family can’t afford to live in them.”

A strategy that embraced super-diversity would recognise not just different family types but different lifestyle preferences within those family types, he said.

“We seem to be clinging to this idea that there’s a sea of ‘normal’ with islands of diversity. But actually, it’s more and more the other way around … the everyday, the ordinary condition of life in Australia is diversity.”

Data notes

For privacy reasons, the Australian Bureau of Statistics introduces small random errors to Census data. This can reduce the reliability of small numbers and produce minor discrepancies in totals and subtotals
“Ordinary” ancestry means a person of English ancestry who speaks only English at home, was born in Australia and whose parents were born in Australia
“Ordinary” dwelling refers to a free-standing house with three bedrooms and two cars, owned with a mortgage
“Ordinary” family means a married couple with two children
Maps were created in Tableau Public
Credits

Data, maps and reporting: Inga Ting
Digital production: Mark Doman and Clare Blumer
Development: Ri Liu and Nathanael Scott
Video: Alex Palmer and Inga Ting
Audience development: Michael Workman

The first five characteristics ie You speak only English at home, You were born in Australia, Your parents were born in Australia, You’re Christian, Your family has English ancestry certainly seems about right to be when talking about the stereotypical "ordinary" Australian, at least certainly when I first migrated in the 1980s. The others seem to be referring to the stereotype Aussie Battler, although some of them like "family income is $2,000–$2,999 a week (or $104,000–$129,999 a year)" seems a bit of a stretch.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. I mean, this is an incredibly bankrupt way to analyze a dataset. While the first five traits are at least correlated, the next five seem to exist purely to decrease the number of Australians who qualify as "ordinary." I mean, if you write a biography of the typical "ordinary" Australian, you can be damn sure they weren't married with two kids and living with their nuclear family in a three-bedroom house their whole life. The "ordinary" Australian grew up as a child, went to school, got entry-level jobs, got married, and had those two kids- but it took them decades to do so. By the standard of this article, they didn't become "ordinary" until their second child was born, and automatically stop being ordinary as soon as their eldest moves out of the house. Or if their income increases or decreases. It's ridiculous.

...

I'm reminded of a study done by the US Air Force shortly after World War Two (or possibly during; I forget what). Previously, pilot seats had been designed to fit the 'average pilot,' that is for a pilot whose body measurements matched the modal value in each of ten traits: height, arm length, and so on. The problem was, naturally, nobody found the seats comfortable. Then someone used a bit of common sense and realized the problem.

Suppose 50% of the population is the right height for your seats. 25% is short enough to be uncomfortable, 25% is too tall.

Suppose 50% of the population has the right arm length. 25% has arms too short to reach the controls, 25% has arms long enough to make reaching the controls more awkward.

Suppose 50% of the population has the right shoulder width for your restraints, and 50% has the right hip width to fit in the seat comfortably, and so on for all of the ten body measurements.

Now, an utter idiot might assume that this means the seats will fit 50% of the population. This is not, in fact, the case. Think about it. To be in the lucky 50% of 'right height' people I have to, in effect, win a coin toss. To have the right arm length, another coin toss. Right shouder width, another coin toss.

What are the odds that someone will actually be comfortable in a seat narrowly tailored to fit the "average man," that is to say a man whose measurements are all very close to the mode of the distribution? Well, about the same as the odds of winning ten coin tosses in a row- roughly one in a thousand.

The Air Force started making adjustable seats for pilots.

...

The problem isn't "there's no such thing as the average man." The problem is that it's stupid to define "averageness" by deliberately excluding 99.9% of the population through requiring them to win a coin toss ten times in a row. Especially when your pretext for doing so is something that a person has no control over or cannot possibly sustain throughout their entire lives. I bet those "average Australians," few though they are, will be VERY surprised to learn they stop being 'average' when they retire!

[mr friendly guy]

I suspect the "ordinary Australians" part is the idealised version which politicians use when they talk about ordinary Australians. I suppose the study had to define some income range to at least match what the politicians were talking about. That being said, there were clearly features which are now no longer the majority, for example being a Christian.

Now if you look on some of the charts the link has, if you just use the first five, the map of Australia shows Australians with these five traits are already pretty small. Add in those other traits like married and 3 bedroom house, the number of Australians with these characteristics are already very few even before you add in the ridiculous income range.