Facts and figures: on Muslims in Australia

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/maralynparker/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/the_curse_of_being_muslim_australian/

Ms Maralyn Parker, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s education writer, provided in her column today some interesting data on Muslims living in Australia, including data on educational attainment, unemployment and living standards:

Professor [Riaz] Hassan raised his concerns yesterday when I interviewed him about a paper he presented at last year’s National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies Australia conference on the 2006 census data. When he crunched the numbers from the census he came up with some unexpected figures.

Muslim Australians are more likely to be university educated than non-Muslim Australians. Twenty one per cent of Muslim Australians have degrees compared to 15 per cent of non-Muslim Australians _ a statistic which challenges the stereotypical view of Muslim Australians.

But the bad news is that higher achievement in education does not translate into jobs.

In the 19 to 24-year-old bracket the unemployment rate of Muslim Australians is 18 per cent, compared to 9 per cent of non-Muslims.

And it just gets worse from there. The older Muslim Australians become the more likely they are to be unemployed than non-Muslims. By age 65 it is four times more likely.

In all other socio-economic comparisons, Muslim Australians fare badly. They are less likely to own their own home and more likely to live in rented premises.

The most shocking statistic is 40 per cent of Muslim Australian children live in poverty _ about twice the rate for non-Muslim Australian children.

[…] In the 2006 census there were 340,391 Muslims in Australia and the vast majority, about 38 per cent, were born in Australia, followed by Lebanon (9 per cent), Turkey (7 per cent) and Afghanistan (5 per cent). Only 1.7 per cent of the overall Australian population are Muslim, but a staggering 40 per cent of Muslim Australians are under the age of 20, compared to about 27 per cent of the non-Muslim population.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Simeon, Bishop, Martyr, A.D. 2009