Given the current interest in population growth, in the third of my articles I’ll take a look at forecast population growth in Greater Western Sydney councils.

To reiterate, the projections I’m discussing are based on forecasts released by the NSW Government Bureau of Transport Statistics (BTS – formerly the Transport Data Centre) and the usual caveats apply about their reliability or otherwise.

In the last article I discussed the 14 Sydney councils that will have populations over 200,000 in 2036, compared to the two we had in 2006. As I noted, no less than nine of these councils are located in Greater Western Sydney (GWS). However, the story of forecast growth in GWS does not end just with these “mega-councils”.

The table below shows the projected population increases and growth rates across the 14 GWS councils. In total, the BTS forecast predict that the region will grow by over a million people or over 58%, significantly higher than the projected Greater Metropolitan Area (GMA) growth rate of just under 38%. This will result in GWS having over 40% of the total metropolitan area population, compared with 35.5% in 2006.

GWS Councils population forecasts

It should be noted that the GMA includes the Hunter and Illawarra; if these are excluded, Greater Western Sydney would hold about half of Sydney’s population by 2036.

Not surprisingly, the councils with populations over 200,000 each will experience the lion’s share of the region’s growth and in fact the average size of a GWS council would be just over 209,000 by 2036. Five of these councils (Blacktown, Camden, Campbelltown, The Hills and Liverpool) will also experience growth rates above the metropolitan average – in the case of Camden, Liverpool and Blacktown, substantially so.

Of the five councils not expected to grow to over 200,000 by 2036, Auburn, Wollondilly and Hawkesbury will still experience growth rates above the Sydney average. Only Blue Mountains and Holroyd are expected to reach neither 200,000 nor an above-average growth rate, though Holroyd’s forecast growth rate is only just under the metropolitan average.

I’ll discuss the implications of the high rates of growth in Greater Western Sydney and elsewhere in a future post.

Given the current obvious interest in “Big Australia”, big cities and all things to do with population I thought I’d take a further look at the so-called “mega-councils” of Sydney’s future that I identified in my last post.

To reiterate, the projections I’m discussing in these articles are based on forecasts released by the NSW Government Transport Data Centre (TDC – now renamed the Bureau of Transport Statistics) earlier this year and the usual caveats apply about their reliability or otherwise. I should also stress that I’m not taking a position about population issues or the optimum size of councils, but just pointing out some of the more interesting implications of the distribution of Sydney’s growth as forecast by the TDC. 

In the last article I noted that if we accepted the TDC’s projections based on the current boundaries, the number of councils in Sydney with populations over 200,000 would grow from just two in 2006 (Blacktown and Sutherland) to 14 in 2036. OK, so which councils will be over the 200,000 mark by then? 

The following table identifies the councils in this group and their projected growth over the 30 years from 2006 to 2036. Its important to note that the “top 14” in 2036 were not necessarily the largest councils in 2006 and they are not all necessarily the fastest-growth Sydney councils – although their average rate of growth is well above the Sydney average of around 38% and the average forecast numerical increase is almost 50,000 more than the average for Sydney councils. Combined, they will house just over half of Sydney’s population in 2036.

Councils forecast to be over 200,000 in 2036

The other interesting aspect is their location. All but Sydney City Council are in outer-ring – or at least on the outer edge of the middle ring – suburbs. They form a “donut” around the city from Wyong and Lake Macquarie to the north, through Greater Western Sydney (where nine of the 14 are located) to Sutherland and Wollongong to the south. 

In summary, the 14 councils forecast to have over 200,000 people each by 2036 will: 

• Be home to over 1.2 million additional residents, or nearly 62% of Sydney’s overall growth;
• Grow by an average of 50% or over 87,000 people, compared to a city average rate of around 38% and 37,300 per council, with Camden set to grow by a staggering 390%;
• As a result, accommodate over 3.6 million people or over half of the city’s forecast population of just under 7.19 million.
• Have average populations of nearly 260,000 each (almost double the forecast Sydney average of 135,600), though this figure is skewed by the projected size of Liverpool (over 324,000) and Blacktown (over 48,1000)
• With the exception of Sydney city, be located around the city’s middle to outer suburban ring, with nine of the 14 in Greater Western Sydney. 

I’ll explore a few more implications of Sydney’s projected population growth at the council and regional levels in future posts.

If you were told that by 2036 the number of councils in Sydney with populations of more than 200,000 would be seven times the number today, you might be forgiven for thinking that these forecasts were based on some fairly strong assumptions about council amalgamations. 

In fact, as somebody pointed out to me recently, if Sydney’s population grows in the way that State Government forecasts suggest, the mega-councils, or at least the reasonably large councils, will come to us without a single boundary change or amalgamation. 

A check of the latest forecasts from the NSW Transport Data Centre (TDC – in the process of becoming the Bureau of Transport Statistics) makes this clear. These assume that the population of the Sydney Greater Metropolitan Area (GMA, which also includes the Hunter and Illawarra) will grow by almost two million people, from 5.21 million to 7.19 million, an increase of around 40%. The TDC has also made forecasts of Local Government Area (LGA) population growth based on the current council boundaries. 

Before I go on I should make all the usual qualifications – population forecasting this far out, especially at the LGA level, is an inexact science, reliant on all sorts of assumptions about factors such as migration and decentralisation policies. Lately some of these factors have come under intense scrutiny as part of the “Big Australia” debate. 

These forecasts are also based on another fundamental presumption – that the current council boundaries will not change at all in the next 25 years. However, it is instructive to run with this and see what happens if the current boundaries are left intact. 

First, a 40% increase in Sydney’s population would mean a similar substantial increase in average council size, from 98,300 to 135,600. Naturally this growth rate will not be uniform across all councils but even if it is, the outcomes in numerical terms are obviously going to be much more noticeable in the larger councils. 

The graph below shows the distribution of councils in 2006 and 2036 in population bands starting with zero to 50,000, 50,000 to 100,000 and so on. Councils with over 200,000 have been grouped together in a single band. The number at the bottom of each column is the number of councils in that band for either 2006 or 2036. 

Sydney Councils: projected growth by population bands, 2006-2036

It should be noted a similar number of councils in 2006 and in 2036 in a particular band does not necessarily mean that these are the same councils. Some 2006 councils may have increased in population to the extent that they have moved into a higher band, to be replaced by councils increasing in population from the band below. 

With that qualification in mind, let’s have a look at the estimates. The middle bands, 50,000 to 100,000 and 100,000 to 150,000, remain relatively stable both in terms of the number of councils and population. However the number of councils under 50,000 is halved from 12 to 6, while the number of councils in the 150,000 to 200,000 band decreases from 11 to 6. Both bands will also experience similar proportional declines in total population. 

The story for the 200,000 councils is a marked contrast. In 2006 there were only two (Blacktown and Sutherland), totalling just under half a million. By 2036 there could be 14 such councils with a combined population of over 3.6 million. 

It can be argued that most of the projected 12 additional members of the “200,000 club” were in the 150,000 to 200,000 category in 2006 and that this change is merely one of degree. To an extent this is true, but there are a few interesting exceptions. Campbelltown and Wyong leapfrog from the 100,000 to 150,000 band into this group, but the most spectacular change is that projected for Camden, which is estimated to grow from under 51,000 to nearly 250,000 in this period as a result of the development projected for Sydney’s south-west. 

It also has to be acknowledged that the forecast overall increase in the proportion of Sydney’s population in the largest councils, at around 2%, is relatively incremental. However if the overall population projections prove to be accurate and council boundaries remain unchanged, there could be some interesting challenges and opportunities in having 14 councils of this size collectively responsible for providing local services and infrastructure to over half of Sydney’s population by 2036.

In my last post I looked at the snapshot of Sydney’s 33 largest employment centres provided by the NSW Transport Data Centre (TDC) in its Employment and Commuting in Sydney’s Centres, 1996 – 2006, based on the Metropolitan Strategy centres hierarchy. The TDC report also discussed employment growth in the period 1996 to 2006, which is the topic of this post (note: the qualifications about the data I mentioned in my previous post also apply to the statistics below).

The report shows 71,350 new jobs were created in Sydney between 2001 and 2006, with 26,600 (37%) of these jobs in centres. There was a growth rate of 4% for both employment centres and the Sydney statistical division (SD) generally. However, employment grew much faster between 1996 and 2001, when it increased in centres grew by 13% and across the Sydney SD by 9%.

As I said earlier, whilst the TDC report is a great metro-wide overview, digging deeper on a regional basis provides another perspective. To do this I restructured the graph in the TDC report showing centres growth in the 1996 to 2001 and 2001 to 2006 periods into two graphs for eastern and Western Sydney (graphs 1 and 2) and a summary table for the period 2001 to 2006 (table 1). This affirms the extent to which growth rates slowed in 2001 to 2006 across both regions, but also reveals that there was considerable variation between eastern and Western Sydney.

Graph 1:

Graph 2:

TABLE 1: SYDNEY EMPLOYMENT GROWTH BY REGION SUMMARY, 2001-2006

Source: based on NSW Transport Data Centre data

* Eastern Sydney – all Sydney LGAs outside Greater Western Sydney

** Western Sydney – the 14 LGAs comprising Greater Western Sydney

In both regions and most centres there was strong growth between 1996 and 2001. However in 2001 to 2006 the pattern diverged. In eastern Sydney the CBD grew by over 5% and centres such as Ultimo/Pyrmont, Macquarie Park, Rhodes, Randwick and Sydney Airport also experienced considerable growth. Meanwhile other areas such as Surry Hills/Kings Cross, St Leonards/Crows Nest and South Sydney lost jobs. Overall, centre-based employment grew by only 1.8% and growth was higher outside the centres than within them in eastern Sydney.

The story in Western Sydney was quite different. Employment growth across GWS centres in the period 2001 to 2006 of 12.5% was much stronger than the average in eastern Sydney centres and stronger than employment growth overall in the Sydney SD. It was also stronger than in areas outside the main employment centres.

This growth was also more widely spread across the key centres. Only Wetherill Park showed a significant loss, although Bankstown decreased marginally. Norwest, Eastern Creek, Castle Hill, Olympic Park, Westmead, Huntingwood and Campbelltown experienced much stronger growth. Unlike eastern Sydney where the CBD experienced strong growth, there was only a marginal increase in employment in Sydney’s second CBD, Parramatta.

All this would seem to suggest that strategies to concentrate employment are having more success in Western Sydney. However, there are some major qualifications. The increase in employment in the GWS centres has come off a very low base, with the result that centres-based employment still makes up only 25.3% of all employment in the region and a mere 7.8% of Sydney’s overall employment. Furthermore, much of this growth has occurred in centres such as Norwest and Castle Hill which are very poorly served by public transport (Norwest alone accounted for 37% of the growth in centre-based employment in Western Sydney).

In the next few posts I’ll consider the relationship of employment to population growth and the resulting transport implications.

In December 2008 the NSW Transport Data Centre (TDC) released Employment and Commuting in Sydney’s Centres, 1996 – 2006, which detailed employment and commuting statistics for Sydney’s 33 largest employment centres based on the Metropolitan Strategy centres hierarchy. This came out around the same time as the research conducted by the University of Western Sydney (UWS) Urban Research Centre in developing the Western Sydney employment strategies for WSROC. These studies complement each other and deserve further attention.

The TDC report notes that in 2006 there were 1,923,900 people employed in the Sydney statistical division (SD) in 2006, with 716,500 jobs (37%) located in the 33 centres. Between 2001 and 2006, 71,350 new jobs were created in Sydney, with 26,600 (37%) of these jobs in centres. The report also notes that employment growth was much higher between 1996 and 2001 than in the 2001 to 2006 period. Between 1996 and 2001 employment in centres grew by 13% and across the Sydney SD by 9%, whilst between 2001 and 2006 employment slowed to a growth rate of 4% for both employment centres and the Sydney SD.

Whilst the TDC report provides a great overview, further analysis based on centre locations shows that there are strong regional variations. In this post I will start with a snapshot of employment in 2006. Before we start, a word of warning: the following figures which have been derived from this TDC report should be viewed with some caution. There is a significant degree of undercounting and failure to answer census questions specifically related to employment. For example, we don’t know where around 6% of the Sydney workforce works and another 4% have no fixed location. I have left these “location unknown” workers out of most of the following statistics.

Another complication is that changes between the 2001 and 2006 censuses which make it difficult to compare them. For example, the TDC report notes that 2006 journey to work data uses place of usual residence, while previous in years the place of enumeration was used for home location and trip origin.

In addition, I have used LGA-level data from another TDC journey to work table, which has slightly different employment totals to those in the centres report. Also, whilst the TDC centres are based on those in the Metropolitan Strategy, the data is not directly comparable to the figures in the Metro document. Above all, this material does not take into account the impact of the many changes that have occurred since 2006, including the global financial crisis. All this means that the following analysis should be seen as a guide and no responsibility is taken for its accuracy.

With the warnings out of the way, let’s have a look at the stats. Eastern Sydney obviously has the majority of employment and the majority of centres as defined by the TDC – 20, compared to 13 in Western Sydney. Of the people employed in centres, only 21% work in Greater Western Sydney (GWS) Within eastern Sydney (for these purposes, the area covered by the rest of the councils in the Sydney Statistical Division but outside the GWS region), over 230,000 people are employed in the CBD alone.

In fact, the CBD accounts for 12% of Sydney’s total employment – this makes up nearly a third of all of Sydney’s centres-based employment and over 20% of eastern Sydney’s jobs. Almost another 30% of eastern Sydney jobs are in other centres, which means that just under half the east’s employment is centre-based (table 1).

TABLE 1: SYDNEY EMPLOYMENT BY LOCATION, 2006 – Eastern Sydney and Western Sydney

Source: based on NSW Transport Data Centre data

*  Eastern Sydney – all Sydney LGAs outside Greater Western Sydney

** Western Sydney – the 14 LGAs comprising Greater Western Sydney

#  Not in centres totals based on TDC LGA employment tables

The story in Western Sydney is very different. Employment is much more dispersed – only just over a quarter of the region’s centre-based jobs are in TDC-defined centres and no one centre dominates. Parramatta, with just over 34,000 jobs, is Western Sydney’s biggest employment centre but accounts for under 6% of the region’s employment, with 19.6% of the region’s jobs located in other centres (table 2 and graph 1).

TABLE 2: SYDNEY EMPLOYMENT BY REGION SUMMARY, 2006

Source: based on NSW Transport Data Centre data

 * Eastern Sydney – all Sydney LGAs outside Greater Western Sydney

** Western Sydney – the 14 LGAs comprising Greater Western Sydney

#  Not in centres totals based on TDC LGA employment tables

Graph 1:

In my next post I’ll look at changes in employment centres from 2001 to 2006.

Recently the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the estimated resident population figures for states, local government areas (LGAs) and statistical local areas (SLAs) as at 30 June 2008 (see ABS publication 3218.0). These figures have major implications for governments, councils and community organisations.

The ABS reported that the NSW population in 2008 was 6.98 million people, an increase of 79,200 people, with a growth rate for 2007-08 of 1.1%. This was higher than the average annual growth rate for the five years to June 2008 (0.9%). Most of this growth occurred in Sydney with the population increasing by 55,000 people (or 1.3%) to 4.4 million people. Sydney now has around 63% of the state’s population.

SLA POPULATION CHANGE, SYDNEY – 2007-08 (source ABS)

The ABS figures indicate that almost all local government areas in Sydney experienced growth and that nine of the ten LGAs with the state’s largest population growth were also in Sydney (see map and Table 1). The top four were all in Greater Western Sydney: Blacktown (5,300), Parramatta (4,000), the Hills (formerly Baulkham Hills – 3,300 people) and Liverpool (3,200). 

The ABS also reports that over half of Sydney’s LGAs experienced a growth rate higher than average NSW rate of 1.1%, with around one in five recording rates of 2.0% or more. The top two were in Greater Western Sydney: Auburn, (3.1%) and Parramatta (2.5%). 

TABLE 1: LGAs WITH LARGEST POPULATION GROWTH, SYDNEY (source ABS)

From a strategic planning perspective, the population growth estimates make interesting reading. Despite the majority of Sydney’s population living in eastern Sydney, a majority of the growth occurred in the three sub-regions that comprise Greater Western Sydney (GWS), which increased by 29,781 compared to eastern Sydney’s 25,266. The top two and fourth sub-regions in terms of total growth were in GWS: West Central (12,227), North West (11,664) and South West (5,890). The third, South (8,097), was in eastern Sydney (see table 2 and graph).

In terms of growth rates, GWS grew by 1.6% compared to eastern Sydney’s 1.0%. At the sub-regional level West Central grew the fastest, at 1.8%.

 TABLE 2: SUB-REGIONAL POPULATION GROWTH, SYDNEY (based on ABS data)

The upshot of this is that population growth has accelerated in Greater Western Sydney over the 12 months to June 2008 with over 54% of Sydney’s growth, compared to just under half of total growth in the five-year period to 2008 (table 3).

Growth rates were particularly low in the Inner North (0.5%) and North East (0.2%) which had a combined growth of less than 2,000 people. All eastern Sydney sub-regions had growth of less than 3,000 people each, with the previously-noted exception of South Sydney which grew by more than 8,000.

 TABLE 3: EASTERN AND WESTERN SYDNEY GROWTH RATES (based on ABS data)

However, a significant proportion of this growth has occurred as urban consolidation in the well-established suburbs of the West Central LGAs, particularly Auburn and Parramatta but also Bankstown, Fairfield and Holroyd which experienced growth of around 2,000 people each. Growth also occurred in the North West sub-region LGAs which have a mixture of established and new release areas, such as Blacktown, Baulkham Hills and Penrith, as well as in Liverpool in the South West.

These results need to be carefully considered by everyone involved in planning and providing infrastructure and services, not to mention those seeking to increase densities in established areas, particularly in eastern Sydney. GWS has done much of the “heavy-lifting” in accommodating Sydney’s growth and if this pattern continues, the point at which Greater Western Sydney surpasses eastern Sydney’s population will occur sooner rather than later.

 In future posts I will look at rural growth patterns as well as the implications of these figures in the context of changes in employment patterns and infrastructure provision.

Alex Gooding

If you want further analysis of current ABS demographic and other data and its implications for strategic planning, please contact the author at info@goodingdavies.com.au.