In the preferred analogy of leading demographer and statistician Simon Kuestenmacher, a city like Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane is an egg, and COVID-19 is a massive spatula.
Commuting into the yolk by car every day - especially from the far edges of the egg white - is “the most soul-destroying thing you can do in your life”, says Mr Kuestenmacher, a co-founder of the Melbourne-based Demographics Group. “Because you sit in a machine that can go 200km/h, and you’re doing 12.”
That means people can now prioritise factors such as lifestyle, proximity to family and personal preference rather than just distance to the office. “It was almost like we took a spatula to our fried egg, and we turned it into a scrambled egg city,” he said. “That’s what more and more people are doing,” Mr Kuestenmacher says. “That’s why the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, Geelong are the fastest growing areas in Australia. These are the big pandemic winners of the Australian population reshuffle.”
“This is simply the largest population cohort in Australia, the Millennials, who procrastinated for many, many years, finally reaching the family formation stage,” Mr Kuestenmacher says.
Regional areas were the 'winners' With a huge and sudden influx of city people financially unaffected by the pandemic flooding small country towns, driving up rental prices to the point where people who's families have called the area home for a hundred years or more are all