Victoria’s Twenty Largest Clusters of Disadvantage

7 min readMar 18, 2020

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In this post, I’ve mapped out Victorian disadvantage in a different way to the usual postcode-based approaches.

Postcode-based reports like Dropping Off The Edge are commonly used by policy-makers to analyse socioeconomic disadvantage. However, they can be misleading due to the arbitrary nature of postcode boundaries. Below is an example. The first panel shows the levels of disadvantage across Werribee. The red patches on the left are the low-income neighbourhoods around the former Heathdale Housing Commission estate. They are home to about 7,000 people. The second panel shows the levels of disadvantage when averaged by postcode. The disadvantaged parts of Werribee disappear within the large ‘3030’ postcode, which has a population of 100,000 and includes the high-income areas of Point Cook. Meanwhile, the tiny ‘3026’ postcode (Laverton North) emerges as the area’s apparent priority for disadvantage, even though it has virtually no residents — it’s an industrial estate with a caravan park in one corner.

In the list below, I’ve addressed this issue by mapping disadvantage at the most detailed level available: the ABS’s ‘SA1’ level. It divides Victoria into 14,000 neighbourhoods of roughly 150 households each. I’ve classified these areas as ‘disadvantaged’ if they’re in the bottom 10% of the ‘SEIFA’* Index of Relative Socioeconomic Disadvantage, and grouped them together if they’re adjacent or within a kilometre of each other. Because of the concentrated nature of disadvantage, the twenty largest such clusters account for most of the state’s disadvantaged neighbourhoods — approximately 70% of the total. The remainder are mostly found in small country towns. For more details, see the notes at the end.

*Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (ABS 2033.0.55.001)

1. Braybrook — St Albans (77,300 people)

This area is heavily multicultural, and heavily Vietnamese in particular. Over 70% of households speak a language other than English. A lot of the housing was built for factory workers in the mid-20th century.

2. Springvale — Dandenong (69,800 people)

This area is also heavily multicultural, with large Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese communities. Major factories like Heinz, General Motors and International Harvester opened in the 1950s. Public housing estates at Doveton and Dandenong were built to accommodate the workers. Heinz and GM closed at the end of the 20th century.

3. Broadmeadows — Thomastown (63,500 people)

This area is also heavily multicultural, though with a different migrant mix to the first two areas. More households speak Arabic and Turkish (16% and 11% respectively) and less speak Asian languages. In the post-war period, the Housing Commission built its largest estate here, comprising 8,000 dwellings between Glenroy and Campbellfield.

4. Corio — Norlane (21,800 people)

The Corio/Norlane area is similar to the first three areas but more regional in nature. It has a lower number of migrants and a lower number of people who have completed year twelve. The suburb of Norlane is particularly disadvantaged, with the state’s highest concentration of neighbourhoods in the bottom 2% of the index.

5. Central Shepparton (12,900 people)

Central Shepparton is very multicultural for a regional location. Roughly a third of households speak a language other than English. The area’s orchards and food processors have long attracted immigrant workers, with the first major wave of Greeks and Albanians arriving in the 1930s.

6. Central Mildura (10,200 people)

Mildura has a similar profile to Shepparton. It is a major fruit-growing centre with a significant Aboriginal population and a long history of migration, including Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavians, Turks and more recently Hazara refugees. Central Mildura differs from all the previous areas in that it has no major manufacturing tradition.

7. Heidelberg West — Reservoir (10,100 people)

Heidelberg West was famously the site of the 1956 Olympic Games athletes’ village. After the games, it was converted to public housing.

8. Central Melton (9,800 people)

Despite its proximity to Melbourne’s western suburbs, Melton has a demographic profile more like Shepparton or Mildura. It has an older population, a lower proportion of university qualifications, and a lower number of non-English speaking households. Road transport is a major industry.

9. Redan — Sebastopol (8,800 people)

Ballarat has two significant areas of disadvantage: the Redan-Sebastopol area in the city’s south and the smaller, more concentrated area in Wendouree West. In contrast to the previous areas on the list, most people in Ballarat’s disadvantaged areas are Australian-born to Australian-born parents.

10. Morwell (8,600 people)

The State Electricity Commission (SEC) transformed Morwell into Victoria’s power generation heartland when it opened the Morwell coal mine in 1949 and the Hazelwood power station in 1964. Extensive public housing was built to accommodate the SEC workers. The Maryvale pulp and paper mill has been a major local employer since 1937.

11. Frankston (7,600 people)

The pine plantation at Frankston North was converted into a public housing estate in the 1950s.

12. Northern Werribee (7,300 people)

The Werribee neighbourhoods around the former Heathdale estate (also known as the ‘Birdsville’ estate) have low average incomes and a high proportion of blue-collar workers. About 40% of households speak a language other than English.

13. Moe (7,100 people)

Like Morwell, Moe was the site of extensive public housing built for State Electricity Commission workers.

14. Central Wodonga (6,900 people)

Wodonga has a lot of blue-collar workers but relatively few migrants (despite being the site of the renowned Bonegilla migration centre, which processed 300,000 migrants between 1947 and 1971). Public housing estates were built in the Birallee area in the 1950s and 1960s.

15. Eaglehawk — Long Gully (6,400 people)

The gold rush origins of the Eaglehawk-Long Gully area can be seen in its twisted road network. The area is blue collar but not especially multicultural. It has similar demographics to the disadvantaged areas of Ballarat and Wodonga.

16. Newcomb — Whittington (4,200 people)

The eastern suburbs of Geelong are another area with a long history of both manufacturing and public housing. The Alcoa smelter at Point Henry opened in 1963. It was one of the state’s largest regional employers, with over 1,000 workers at its peak (including my dad!). It closed in 2014.

17. Southern Wangaratta (3,700 people)

The public housing estates in Wangaratta were built for textiles workers in the 1950s. The Yakka factory closed in 2000. The Bruck factory continues to be a significant local employer.

18. Rosebud (3,400 people)

Rosebud is the oldest area on this list. Over a third of its population are aged over 65. Its disadvantaged areas include parts of ‘The Avenues’ and parts of Rosebud West, which was renamed ‘Capel Sound’ in 2016.

19. Maryborough (3,200 people)

Maryborough is another area with a higher proportion of over 65s. Its local manufacturers include True Foods and McPhersons printers.

20. Hastings (3,100 people)

Hastings is home to a number of large industrial facilities, including BlueScope Steel, the Esso gas processing plant and the Port of Hastings. AGL are building a gas import terminal at Crib Point.

Notes on the Data

As a general rule, we don’t have a lot of good, up-to-date data on socioeconomic disadvantage. One of the silver linings of the COVID-19 crisis is that it has prompted the development of some more detailed and timely datasets (see for example the ABS list here). Below are some notes on the far-from-perfect data used in this post…

Most of the figures are from the 2016 census, except the unemployment rates (see below).
The areas of disadvantage only include SA1s that have a population of more than 100 and are located within an Urban Centre and Locality (UCL). This is because large, low-density SA1s can be misleading when mapped. This made very little difference in the end: 99% of SA1s in the bottom 10% of the index were high density and within a UCL.
The variables for the Index of Relative Socioeconomic Disadvantage are set out in the table below (taken from the technical paper).

Note that the variables are proportions. Obviously not everyone who lives in a disadvantaged area is disadvantaged. For example, roughly 25% of the households in the clusters in this list earn more than the Australian median household income of $85,000 a year.
There is a known issue with the census data in Robinvale, which has a large seasonal workforce. Based on non-census estimates, Robinvale could have approximately 3,500 people living in the bottom 10% of the index, which would put it in a similar position to Maryborough.
The estimated 2019 unemployment figures were calculated using a two-stage process. First, I looked at the change in unemployment between 2016 and 2019 for each SA4, using the SA4 results from the census and the twelve-month averages from the December 2019 release of the ABS Labour Force Survey. Second, I looked at the change in unemployment for each SA2, using the 2016 and 2019 averages from the Small Area Labour Markets (SALM) product. For each SA1 in a disadvantaged area, I assumed the change in unemployment since the census was the average of the SA4 change and the SA2 change. The reason for averaging the figures, instead of just using the SALM data, is that the SALM data isn’t complete and there are debates about its reliability (because it uses a mix of administrative and survey data). The table below shows the intermediate calculations.

Estimated unemployment rates using the SA4 data from the Labour Force Survey and the SA2 data from the Small Area Labour Markets product

The ‘bottom 10%’ threshold for classifying disadvantaged SA1s was obviously arbitrary. Roughly speaking, it captured the parts of Victoria that have experienced persistent double-digit unemployment in recent decades. If you bring the threshold down significantly, to 5% or 2%, you tend to get quite a different list that contains only the most highly concentrated pockets of disadvantage: the inner-city towers, Norlane, Broadmeadows, West Wendouree, Moe, Morwell, etc.
The one-kilometre threshold for grouping SA1s was similarly arbitrary. It was designed to group together areas that were essentially contiguous but might be separated by a park or transport corridor. But I had to cheat a little, insofar as I excluded two areas that technically met the threshold: ‘Carlton-Richmond’ and ‘Flemington-Footscray’. Both these areas are home to large numbers of people who live in the public housing towers, and those towers are within a kilometre of each other. However, they are separated by areas with high incomes, so it’s hard to describe them as ‘clusters of disadvantage’ in their entirety. If they had been included, they would have been 6th and 7th on the list, with populations of 12,000 and 10,500 respectively. See the map below.

The ‘Carlton-Richmond’ and ‘Footscray-Flemington’ areas. The dark red blocks are the public housing towers (plus the Ascot Vale Estate and the St Vincent’s residential facility).

The graph below shows the total populations of the twenty clusters of disadvantage (noting again that not everyone who lives in a disadvantaged area is disadvantaged).