Last week Anthony Albanese floated the idea of granting New Zealand residents in Australia voting rights before they had received Australian citizenship. Following on from a previous post, I decided to take a look at data from the 2016 census to get a sense of how Australia’s electorate differs from its population when we consider someone’s country of birth. My finding is that NZ-born Australians are the most disenfranchised group in Australia, when looking based on country-of-birth.
Methodology and disclaimers
My methodology is similar to my previous post in this series. I’m using 2016 census data, and comparing the place-of-birth for the population as a whole to the electorate. By “electorate”, I mean people over the age of 18 who indicated on the census that they were Australian citizens. As I indicated in that previous post this is a problematic approach, but I think we can probably learn something by applying it.
I should also point out that I don’t really have any training or expertise in working with census data or, frankly, in data analysis or statistics. I can’t be particularly confident that my approach here is free of obvious or glaring errors. If you see anything obvious please let me know on Twitter. The source code for the charts is available on Github.
Findings
First, we can take a look at what the population and electorate look like based on region of birth1.
Obviously those born in Australia make up a large majority of both the population and the electorate. But we can already see that some of these regions have large differences between their share of the population and their share of the electorate.
We break this down explicitly in the next chart, which shows the difference between a region’s representation in the population and the electorate.
This makes the difference particularly clear. Australian-born Australians are overrepresented in the electorate by about 4 percentage points. Conversely, North-East Asia, New Zealand and Southern and Central Asia are underrepresented. If we break this out by country, we can get a big more detail:
So we can see here that Australian-born Australians are substantially overrepresented in the Australian electorate. Those born in New Zealand, China and India are underrepresented. The difference between representation in the population and in the electorate is greatest for Australians born in New Zealand.
Taking this further
I’m looking forward to running this again once the 2021 census numbers are available in TableBuilder later this year. Currently my assumption is that anyone over the age of 18 who records themselves as a citizen in the census is part of the electorate. But there are other rules (incarceration, British citizens on the roll before 1984), and it would be good to at least have a structured think about how this might affect my reasoning.
Notes
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“Region” here is based on the ABS’s Standard Australian Classification of Countries (SACC), but I’ve broken out Australia, the UK and New Zealand given their prominence in the data. ↩