Seachangers Move In, Residents Out

THERE are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics, as the old saying goes, and this may pertain to Australia's most popular sea-change destinations, such as Port Douglas, which are actually shedding full-time residents.

Despite regular complaints that coastal areas are bursting at the seams, the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Urban Centre and Locality figures show many actually lost full-time residents between the 2001 and 2006 censuses.

Rolled-gold villages such as Lorne in Victoria and Byron Bay in northern NSW officially lost full-time residents between the two censuses, while Port Douglas in Queensland recorded a drop of almost a third in population.

Demographer Bernard Salt wrote in The Australian on Thursday that the figures were best explained by the mobility of many of those snapping up houses in the towns: cashed-up baby boomers, for example, acquiring weekenders while calling elsewhere home.

"Houses that once accommodated a permanent resident have been sold to a seachanger who is absent on the midweek mid-winter night the census is taken," Salt wrote.

"Sea change is a powerfully motivating force for Australians, but then so too is proximity to a major city, as is evidenced in this analysis of high-growth towns in Victoria. And in fact some seachange and tree-change towns have been so prized by well-to-do part-time baby-boomer residents that they're now pushing down the permanent population of selected communities."

Byron Bay dropped almost 1000 residents between 2001 and 2006, and is now officially home to 4981 people.

Loch Sport, near Lakes Entrance in Victoria, dropped 27per cent, Surf Beach-Sunderland Bay on Phillip Island officially shed 20per cent, and Lorne lost 14per cent.

Families such as the Goudies in Port Douglas illustrate the anomaly. The young couple from Melbourne initially lived in Port Douglas part-time, flying south several times a year where they were officially classed as residents.

"We just loved the lifestyle and wanted to get out of the rat-race a bit," Shannon Goudie said.

"We were both working long hours in Melbourne and wanted to move up here and take it easy."

Since Mr Goudie, 30, and his wife Amy, 31, made the move permanently, their parents have moved up, as well as a few of their siblings and their children.

Mr Goudie, who left behind a high-pressure Collins Street job and now works part-time, said: "That's probably what made the move easier, just having family up here. We didn't want to wait until we were 65 to enjoy this kind of lifestyle. So we just bit the bullet. The hardest thing was leaving friends behind, but it's paid off."

Port Douglas Chamber of Commerce chairman Ken Dodds was surprised to hear the town had officially lost 30per cent of its residents. "I can say for certainty those figures are wrong," Mr Dodds said. "If anything, we've got too much growth, and that's across the board. We've got increased houses, increased tourists and increased residents."

A spokesman for Cairns Regional Council was almost incensed at the suggestion the region was shedding residents.

"You only have to drive around Port Douglas or Mossman away from the tourist area to see new residential houses being built," the spokesman said.

"The census is more a statistical aberration compared with the realities of what is occurring on the ground."