The old folks at home

There has been a fair bit of commentary on the Mallacoota Community Facebook page about the need for ages care facilities in this area.  Having worked, in various roles, on censuses for the last 17 years of my career I thought I'd see what the 2016 Census had to say about the persons of mature years.  (I hate the term 'seniors" and "old fogies" seems disrespectful.)

The data was accessed through the excellent - and free - Table Builder online facility from ABS.  I have used information on a usual residence basis (so anyone unwise enough to be camping in town in August 2016 isn't included).  Perhaps more importantly, anyone using Marshmead would be excluded as they are not usually resident.

Geography is quite important in such matters and I used two approaches to the matter,  I began at the Local Government level, where East Gippsland is appropriate.  I then went to the State Suburb (SSC) level looking at Mallacoota  (which includes Karbeethong).  Gipsy Point (18 residents) and Genoa (55 residents) are excluded.  The three SSC areas are shown in this map from Table Builder (I have assumed that anyone reading this knows which area is what).

A cautionary note

In what follows I will be quoting exact numbers (for example 16454 people aged 60+ in East Gippsland).  However two factors should be noted about such numbers:

1. It is known that the Census misses a few people (and possibly double counts a lesser number ) so there will be more folk than that in the area; and
2. To preserve confidentiality the Census adjusts the outputs where are very small numbers in a cell.  This means that doing the same table twice can produce different answers (or even one table can include illogical results as will be shown below).

So, do not rely on very small cells nor get concerned about small differences.  Neither of the above affect significant data.

Local Government area

There are 82 Local Government areas in Victoria (or at least there were in 2016).  Looking at the number of persons aged 60+, East Gippsland had 16,454 residents aged 60+ and 8,509 aged 70+.   In terms of ranking this gives the shire 

• the 17th highest proportion of people aged 60+ (18.89%); and 
• the 9th highest proportion of people aged 70+ (6.45%).

State Suburb Level (SSC)

This is the official statistical level which (IMHO) comes closest to what people would think of as their local area.  It covers the whole state which gives rise to a couple of small issues.

• Some (117)  SSCs have no usual residents  Typically they will be nature reserves and similar areas.
• Rather more SSC areas have very small populations so that the confidentiality adjustment make the data unreliable or illogical.  As an example of the illogicality, Chiirip appears to have 18 people aged 60+ but only 8 in total.  I have decided that the data for anywhere with less than 100 usual residents is too unreliable to be considered in this project and have excluded the 1170 SSCs with populations that small.  (It is merely coincidence that this is 10X the number of zero population SSCs.)

On that basis Mallacoota, with a total resident population of 1060, had 489 people aged 60+ (46.13%) and 242 people aged 70+ (22.83%).  In terms of "rankings" we are:

• 47th highest (out of 1646 SSCs) for people aged 60+; and 
• 57th highest for people aged 70+.

The podium for SSCs for people aged 70+ is occupied by Bangholme (345 antique residents; 43.89%); Rosebud West (1786; 36.35) and Sorrento (576; 36.16). These areas are shown in shades of red in the second map.

Bangholme (68.19%) is also the champion for 60+ while the other two SSCs drop to 6th and 18th,  For the 60+ group Portsea (67.84%) on the very tip of the Mornington Peninsula and Bearii (64.63%) with a small population on the Murray, take the minor placings.