What’s Changed in Hilltops Over the Last Five Years?

IMAGE: The Census 2021 data for Hilltops makes for interesting reading.

The Census 2021 data for Hilltops has now been released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and makes for interesting reading, especially when compared with Census 2016.

For starters, our population grew from 18,498 in 2016 to 19,254 in 2021. But the real surprise comes when we look at the populations of our major towns in 2021:

Boorowa: 1,888 people (1,641 in 2016, an increase of 15 per cent)
Harden-Murrumburrah: 1,900 people (2,030 in 2016, a decrease of 6.4 per cent)
Young: 11,004 people (7,170 in 2016, a massive increase of 53 per cent)

The percentage of people who identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander has grown in Hilltops from 4.4 per cent in 2016 to 5.1 per cent in 2021 (compared to 3.4 per cent in NSW and 3.2 per cent of all Australians).

Some of the 2021 findings are no surprise:

We are an older population, with our median age being 45 (the median age in NSW was 39, and the median age in Australia was 38)
Still on age, 31.3 percent of Hilltops residents are 60 years of age and over (23.5 percent of the NSW population is 60 years and over; 23 percent of Australians are aged 60 years and over).
The percentage of people in Hilltops professing the Christian faith has fallen:
- 29 percent are Catholic (34.4 percent in 2016)
- 20.8 percent Anglican (25.9 percent in 2016)
- 3.7 percent belong to the Uniting Church (4.6 percent in 2016).
- 15.7 percent of Hilltops residents said they had no religion in 2016. This increased to 25.5 percent in 2021.

Areas of potential concern include:

Our median weekly household income in 2021 was $1,175, compared to $1,829 in NSW.
The percentage of people currently attending university or other higher education was 4.8 per cent, compared with 15.3 percent in NSW.

The good news is that we can harness and promote our housing affordability, with 42.4 percent of Hilltops adults owning their home outright. This can be compared favourably with 31.5 percent of adults in NSW, and 31 percent of adult Australians.

The Census 2021 data is used by councils, governments, community groups and businesses to plan for and make decisions about services that affect us all.

You can access the Census 2021 data for Hilltops and your town by visiting abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/search-by-area