FORECAST REVIEW
The Gold Coast
Sustained population growth and a forecast shift from the greenfield development that has driven growth in recent years: in this update, we unpack these and other insights from our latest population forecasts for the Gold Coast region - the first in our South East Queensland series.
Forecast version 4.0.0
Released January 2022
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Johnny Barnard
Principal forecaster
Liza Ivanova
Population forecaster
Richard Thornton
Population forecaster
Chris Jones
Population forecaster
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Oliver Bowering
Population forecaster
John O'Leary
Forecast modelling
Since the 1970s, Queensland has been the beneficiary of a growing trend of interstate migration, typically at the expense of New South Wales. This trend has strengthened since Covid-19; with only three-quarters of data released so far, Queensland is on track to receive 30,000 net interstate migrants for the 2021 financial year.
Different regional roles and functions
The regions of South East Queensland each play a different role and function in terms of the population they attract, the housing markets they service, and the demographic drivers of population change in each area.
This demographic view of population drivers informs how we distribute the forecast population in age-specific cohorts to different regions of Queensland when we produce State to SA4 forecasts.
The Gold Coast, in particular, attracts high numbers of young adults and young families from interstate, compared to other regions of Queensland.
The Covid impact
Our forecasts for the Gold Coast account for the impact of border closures resulting from COVID-19. While the Gold Coast doesn't rely on overseas migration to the same extent as some parts of Victoria and New South Wales, it has been an important part of what's driven population growth in recent years, so has been accounted for in our forecasts.
As we haven't previously produced forecasts for the regions of Queensland, we can't conduct a pre- and post-covid comparison for analysis of as we have in other states to quantify the impact of the pandemic on the Gold Coast region. At the national level, we forecast Australia's population in 2041 will have 1.9 million fewer people than were forecast prior to the pandemic; around 371,000 fewer across the state of Queensland in the same period.
This is caused by the immediate loss of population from the overnight border closures in March 2020, but is compounded by the fact many of those migrants would have been in family-forming age groups, so there is also a significant impact on the number of children who are expected to be born in the coming years. Our Demographic delays eBook goes into these impacts in more detail.
These macro-demographic impacts aren't evenly distributed across Australia, but disproportionately impact the areas that attract high levels of overseas migrants. As demographers, we use these patterns to apportion the population impacts of border closures in the top-down phase of our forecasting.
We assume a return to normal levels of Net Overseas Migration (NOM) in 2023, which is consistent with other sources including the Federal Treasury's Centre for Population.
Queensland is still forecast to grow
- From the early 1970s to the 2010s, Queensland grew at a faster rate than Australia
- The impacts of COVID are not felt as strongly in Queensland as they are in the rest of Australia
- Our forecast assumptions have Queensland returning to a 1% annual growth rate, growing slightly faster than Australia overall
The chart below clearly shows the decline in dwelling growth in the greenfield SA3 of Ormeau-Oxenford as forecast developments come online and it reaches its identified capacity. This forces us to find alternative sources of new dwellings to distribute the sustained population growth forecast for the Gold Coast beyond 2030. This is evident in the growth of dwellings expected in the coastal SA3s of Southport, Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach-Burleigh, which start to increase from the early 2030s.
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