With international students flying home and some residents leaving locked-down cities for regional areas, Melbourne's population has shrunk by 60,500 in a year, more than any other Australian capital city.
According to The Age, Melbourne Mayor Sally Capp will actively lobby the next federal government to offer international students a more attractive olive branch: 4-year visas, PR Pathway.
According to Sally Capp "This will help make Australia a more attractive and favorable destination for international students and allow us to retain bright global talent and address the current workforce and skills shortages."
Home Affairs data shows about 72,000 applications for post-study work visas were lodged in 2020-21, compared with only about 37,000 so far this financial year.
In a $13.7 billion education sector in 2019, they contributed $1.15 to the state economy for every $1 they paid in tuition fees.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics released population data for the 2020-21 financial year on Tuesday, showing the number of residents in Greater Melbourne fell by 1.2 per cent, to about 5.1 million Sydney's population also fell, but only by 5150, or 0.1 of its population %. Both Brisbane and Perth saw their populations grow by almost 1 per cent.
The biggest drag on Melbourne's population was the loss of international students and working holidaymakers, with 54,367 migrating overseas, but no new arrivals to fill the vacancies.
In the absence of the pandemic, Melbourne was destined to overtake Sydney as Australia's largest city by 2026, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' demographic report. But for now, the federal government still expects Melbourne to outpace Sydney, but the time to achieve that goal has been delayed until 2029-30.
In the six months to 2020 before the outbreak, Melbourne's population was still on an upward trend, rising 1.6 per cent to 80,088. But this is already the smallest annual increase since 2011-12. In 2018-19, Melbourne's population grew by 113,500 people, a growth rate of 2.3 per cent.
Marcus Spiller, founder of SGS Economics & Planning, said, “In part, population growth means that people have confidence in the future of cities and their economies, and they are willing to support that, people are not flocking to There is no future city."
Everyone knows what happened later. Melbourne has experienced the world's longest lockdown, with a stay-at-home order of up to 267 days.
The Australian suburbs with the biggest and fastest population declines last year were all in the greater Melbourne metropolitan area, with the CBD population down 5900 people, or 11 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This is mainly due to the migration of 5,700 residents overseas.
Melbourne's suburbs near universities recorded the biggest population declines. Clayton, near Monash University in the south-east, lost 2700 people, or 9.4 per cent of its population. The inner suburb of Carlton, which has a large international student population, lost 2600 residents, a 10 per cent drop.
Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp said before the pandemic, international students made up 38 per cent of the CBD population and 39 per cent of Carlton residents.
The Mitchell Institute's Dr Peter Hurley said about 27,000 international students had returned to Victoria since international borders opened in mid-December. At its lowest point in December, there were only 68,000 people in Victoria on international student visas, down from 180,000 before the pandemic.
To help attract traffic back to Melbourne's CBD, Melbourne City Council has been offering stamp duty concessions to new residential properties worth less than $1 million that have been on the market for more than a year.
However, the population of regional Victoria has risen to a certain extent after the epidemic, with Geelong's population increasing by 1.8 per cent to an increase of 4725 people. The Bass Coast region added 1386 residents, an increase of 3.7 per cent. Even a small community like Mansfield, which has added 268 people this year, is feeling the increase in population.
Peter Ghin, a research fellow at the Future of Work Lab at the University of Melbourne, said the data proved the coastline area was continuing to attract population growth.
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