New Population Projections

Report – ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, 11 August 2022

Working Paper 2022/11 – New population projections for Australia and the States and Territories, with a particular focus on population ageing

Introduction

The Covid pandemic has caused – and continues to cause – substantial disruption to Australia’s demographic trends. Fertility, mortality and migration have all been affected. The closure of Australia’s international border from March 2020 until late 2021 (for Australian residents) or early 2022 (for overseas visitors) not surprisingly resulted in an abrupt decline in net overseas migration (NOM). In the 2018-19 financial year net overseas migration totalled 241,000; by 2020-21 it had fallen dramatically to -88,000 (i.e., there were more people emigrating than immigrating) (ABS 2022a). This was the first negative NOM balance recorded since the 1940s. In terms of mortality, Australia’s death toll from Covid over the first two years of the pandemic was limited, in contrast to the devastating rise in mortality in many other countries. In fact, the available data indicates that Australian mortality during the 2020 calendar year was lower than expected (Canudas-Romo et al. 2022). However, recent preliminary mortality data show above-average numbers of deaths during much of 2021 and a big surge in deaths in early 2022 (ABS 2022b). The effect of Covid on fertility occurred against a backdrop of over a decade of gradually declining fertility rates and cannot be easily disentangled from that longer-term trend. However, the incomplete data available to date indicates a temporary dip in conceptions at the start of the pandemic and therefore lower fertility in late 2020, followed by a modest and short-term recovery, and then a resumption of lower fertility most recently (Gray et al. 2022).

The ongoing impacts of Covid on fertility, mortality, and migration present considerable challenges for the preparation of population projections. Because global pandemics are not a common occurrence, we have little past data and theory with which to inform assumptions about the future of fertility, mortality, and migration. The short-term assumptions for these demographic processes are therefore unavoidably speculative. Nonetheless, there are at least two main reasons why it is useful to prepare new population projections for Australia at this time. First, because demographic trends have been changing relatively quickly over the last two years, the last official population projections, launched from 2017, are now out-of-date (ABS 2018), as are other more recent projections prepared in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic (Wilson et al. 2021; Charles-Edwards et al. 2021). New projections which take into account the emerging demographic realities of Covid are needed for planning and policy purposes. Second, the recent release of 2021 Estimated Resident Populations based on the 2021 Census (ABS 2022a) provide good quality data on which to base new projections.

This working paper summarises population projections for Australia and the states and territories from 2021 to 2041. The projections are launched from the 30th June 2021 preliminary rebased Estimated Resident Populations (ERP) published by the ABS in June 2022 (ABS 2022a). Projections were created for 30th June in each year of the projection horizon by sex and single years of age. Projections data is available for download from the 5 Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) Population Ageing Futures Data Archive at https://cepar.edu.au/cepar-population-ageing-projections. Following this introduction, section 2 describes input data, projection assumptions and projection methods. Selected features of the projections related to population ageing are presented in section 3, while section 4 contains summary profiles of projections for Australia and each of the states and territories.

Read the full paper here: https://cepar.edu.au/publications/working-papers/new-population-projections-australia-and-states-and-territories-particular-focus-population-ageing.

Excerpt – Tasmania