Australians are staying married for longer

AUSTRALIANS are ditching the seven-year itch and staying married for longer.

The divorce rate has fallen to its lowest point in a decade, ABS Social Trends Statistics released yesterday show.

The divorce rate per 1000 people has fallen from 2.8 in 1997 to 2.5 in 2006 after hitting a decade-high of 2.9 in 2001.

In the past decade the number of divorces has fallen from 51,4000 nationally in 1996 to 51,300 in 1996.

In 1996 we were married an average of 7.7 years before separating, but we now stay together for 8.9 years - a decade-long high.

But divorce continues to have a major impact on kids - with around 50,000 children involved in divorce every year. However women are having fewer babies, and having them at a later age.

In 2006, 11 per cent of women in their mid 40s had four or more babies, compared to 35 per cent of women this age in 1976.

In 2006 more than one-third of women in their early 30s had not had any children.

Between 1995 and 2005 the number of women having their first baby at 35 increased from 5 per cent to 10 per cent.

In 1976 women had an average of 3.1 children each, but by 2006 they were having just 2.0 babies, which is below the population replacement level.

Women are increasingly swapping babies for briefcases, entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers. In 1976, 55 per cent of women worked outside of the home, but by 2006, 70 per cent of women had a paid job.

Australia's Muslim women are having more babies, the figures also reveal.

They have 2.9 babies each on average, compared to just two for non-Islamic Australian women, but there is little difference between the birth rates of Catholic and Anglican women.

Women from those religions average 2.1 babies each.

West Brunswick mother of two-year-old twins, Emilia Berryman, reflects the trend towards older mums. She is now 38 and had Jack and Thomas when she was 35.

"I guess I met my husband later in life, but it was after I had done a lot of travelling and other things," Ms Berryman said.

They now plan to have a third child. She has taken redundancy to become a full-time mum.

Aussies lack literacy skills: ABS

Almost half of all Australians aged 15 to 74 had literacy skills below the minimum level required to "meet the complex demands of a knowledge society", new statistics show.

The latest Australian Social Trends report shows that to 2006, on a scale of one (lowest) to five (highest) in literacy competence, 47 per cent of people had document literacy levels below level three, while 46 per cent had prose literacy skills below that level.

More than half had numeracy skills below level three (53 per cent).

Three quarters of people surveyed scored below the level three average in at least one category - prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy and problem solving.

Just over a third (36 per cent) were below average in all four categories.

People who did not complete schooling to year 12 or spoke English as a second language made up 83 per cent of those with poor prose literacy skills.

Just over half of Australians aged 14 to 74 had not completed school to year 12.

This group was more than twice as likely to have poor prose literacy skills than those who completed year 12 (63 per cent, compared with 29 per cent).

In 2006, 70 per cent of people aged between 25 and 34 had completed secondary studies, compared to only 18 per cent for 65 to 74 year olds.

First mortgages doubled in a decade: ABS

The amount first home buyers borrowed to make their housing purchase doubled in the 10 years to 2005-06, new statistics show.

The average loan per household rose to $213,000, according to the latest Australian Social Trends.

During the same period, the average value of first-buyer homes rose to $310,000.

But the proportion of first home buyers purchasing new houses fell to 14 per cent, from 23 per cent.

More popular were townhouses and apartments which made up 27 per cent of purchases, up from 15 per cent.

Over the past decade, a slightly higher proportion of Australian households rented their homes (28.5 per cent), up 1.5 per cent.

And perhaps not surprisingly, they moved around a lot more than owner occupiers.

More than a third of all renters had changed address in the past year, three times the rate of their occupiers.

But the profile of renters varied substantially with age, with the average age of renters being 37 years, 15 years younger than the median age for owner occupied households.

And the decision to rent rather than own mattered a lot if the household had a sole parent.

Sixty per cent of lone parent households with dependent children were renting, almost three times the rate of couples with dependent children. The ABS says this reflected relatively lower incomes for single parent families.

Nearly 30 per cent of households were renting their homes and the biggest renting age group was 35- to 44-year-olds.

The majority of renters were young adults and low-income families.

Australia's growing ... except for NSW

Australia is growing steadily, its cities are growing faster than country regions, but NSW continues to lose its population faster than any other state.

Australians also like to volunteer their services, with one in five adults undertaking a voluntary task each fortnight, and they're more likely to volunteer if they're healthy.

And they're more likely to have visited a naturopath, acupuncurist or chiropractor over the past few decades.

While the number of alternative health practitioners had almost doubled since 1996 top 8600, visits have increased by 50 per cent to around three quarters of a million in the same period. Almost a quarter of a million people had visited an alternative health practitioner in a sample two- week period.

Welcome to Australian Social Trends, the annual snapshot of national life produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The survey is drawn from a mass of data - some of it already published but much unpublished - taken from the five-yearly ABS census and aimed at looking at contemporary social issues and areas which concern public policy makers.

Over the past decade, the nation swelled by 2.5 million people to 21 million by June 2007, with the greatest increase in population - 315,700 - happening in the past year. It's expected to reach 28 million by the middle of the century.

Public transport is becoming a more familiar way for adults to get to work, but it's still a minority of citizens who use buses, trains and trams. Nineteen per cent of city-based workers now use public transport daily, compared to 16 per cent a decade ago.

And internet access at home has ballooned over the past decade, with just under two thirds (64 per cent) of households with access, up from 16 per cent in 1998.

"Some government services, such as E-tax, child support and a range of Medicare functions, are now available online," according to the ABS.

"News services, internet shopping, and personal communications such as email, instant messaging and social networking sites are also increasingly a feature of people's daily lives."

While it's predominantly a younger age group which uses the internet at home, there have been significant increases in people aged over 55 using the internet.

In 2004, around 40 per cent of people aged between 55 and 64 used the internet, but within two years the takeup rate had lifted to 55 per cent.