Australians born overseas by Sarah C Gall Ltd

This visualisation looks into which countries the 1 in 3 people who live in Australia were born in. It also explores the types of government and the level of freedom that those countries have.

The inspiration for this work came following discussions on whether Australia should change from a constitutional monarchy to a republic.

One particular statistic that came up from the republican side was the 1 in 3 Australians were born overseas. They concluded that Australia is therefore more diverse and no longer has the same British connection that it once had.

I was therefore interested to see where exactly these people came from.

The data visualisation shows that 1 in 4 of these people were born in a country that has King Charles III as their monarch (the same as Australia) and that while 2 in 3 came from a country which is a republic, most of these countries lack civil liberties and/or political rights.

This latter point aids in the monarchists' view that many of the 1 in 3 born overseas are coming from, largely, undemocratic countries and that they migrate to Australia in part because they are attracted to its stable and healthy democracy (provided by a constitutional monarchy).

To create this piece, I used R to process the data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Freedom House. I also used R to create the Voronoi tree map using the voronoiTreemap package. I then used Adobe Illustrator to do the rest.