The Stats Guy: Why modern Australia is less socially cohesive and how to fix this
From the two major political parties to the Greens, One Nation and independents, a quick search online uncovers endless recent quotes about the need to create a more unified Australia again.
Everyone seems to agree that social cohesion matters.
Is social cohesion actually getting worse though? Let’s look at the available data instead of purely speculating.
The best data probably comes from The Scanlon-Monash Index of Social Cohesion (SMI). Australia’s longest-running annual survey (since 2007) of how well we hold together as a society tracks five core dimensions: Sense of belonging, social justice and fairness, participation in civic and community life, acceptance or rejection of diversity, and trust in institutions and other people.
The uncomfortable takeaway is that nearly every component has indeed trended downward over time.
Australians today report lower trust, weaker belonging and more perceived division than they did in the late 2000s.
Academic research differentiates five main trends leading to a decline in social cohesion.
First, when material inequality rises (or when people feel the system is rigged), trust and cohesion tend to fall.
A big strand of literature links rising economic inequality (this very much includes housing affordability) with increased social segregation and ultimately lower social cohesion.
In Australia, the rich and poor are increasingly segregated geographically.
Add to this the growing private school sector and your kids are hardly ever exposed to kids from families that are significantly richer or poorer than your own.
Second, if people lose trust in public institutions or think that corruption/favouritism is at play, social cohesion erodes. This is a core mechanism in the institutional-trust literature.
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Australia-specific work finds political trust has fallen markedly in the past two decades.
This is exactly the kind of trend that shows up as “we’re more divided” in survey results, in the highest share for third parties in Australian history, in low trust in banks etc.
Third, political scientist Robert D. Putnam popularised the idea of social capital (the trust and networks that make societies function). In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, he argued that as people participate less in shared civic life (clubs, unions, churches and community groups), societies lose the everyday cross-cutting ties that keep politics from turning tribal.
His core message is simple – when civic participation falls, trust declines and division rises. In Australia, we are left with sport clubs providing the lion share of social life as other institutions (church, community groups) struggle.
Fourth, social cohesion gets stressed when changes to the demography, culture and collective identity of a country occur faster than it can absorb.
Diversity itself isn’t automatically bad for social cohesion, but rapid change can stress cohesion if integration pathways, housing, labour markets and local social infrastructure don’t keep pace.
A common criticism of our high migration scenario is that it occurred too fast and that we must catch up.
As a demographer concerned with a rapidly aging society that faces a prolonged skills shortage, I very much understand the need to fill up the shrinking workforce with overseas talent. The challenges towards social cohesion still remain though.
Necessary migration is fuelling radical elements of our society. Photo: AAP
Fifth, we lack collective myths and shared cultural expression.
Everyone lives in a different information universe now and consumes niche programs on YouTube and on social media.
Gone are the days of everyone watching the same movies in cinema, the same programs on TV, listening to a small range of music.
Our news consumption is even more fragmented. Instead of reading a few big newspapers, Australians now get their news from fragmented sources and hear very different narratives.
It is wonderful that we have more choice, that we have access to entertainment and news that better suit our individual interests, but research shows that fragmented media ecosystems amplify perceived threat, outgroup hostility, and zero-sum thinking.
How to fix it
What levers can we pull to improve social cohesion in Australia?
One of the most reliable “repair mechanisms” for social cohesion comes from Contact Theory, first articulated by social psychologist Gordon Allport in 1954.
The idea is disarmingly simple and backed by decades of data – when people from different backgrounds interact regularly (as equals and under cooperative conditions) prejudice tends to fall and trust rises.
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Meta-analyses covering hundreds of studies consistently show that intergroup contact reduces bias and strengthens social cohesion.
The theory also helps explain why anti-migration sentiment is often highest in areas with fewer, not more, migrants.
Research shows cohesion improves when people interact regularly, as equals, and toward shared goals; one-off awareness events can largely be ignored.
In practice, this means co-housing local and international students at universities; sprinkling social and affordable housing into wealthier neighbourhoods (shown in Europe to lift cohesion); cross-background workplaces and apprenticeships; well-designed citizens’ forums; and shared public spaces that enable repeated low-stakes interaction among diverse groups.
In short, projects that create meaningful everyday interaction between otherwise segregated groups (international and local students, rich and poor, different ages, genders and religions) aren’t fluffy nice-to-haves. They are evidence-based nation-building.
Material security and perceived fairness are foundational for social cohesion too. In Australia that typically points to housing affordability, access to services, and smoothing sharp geographic inequality. Ouch, these are hard things to fix.
Providing more young people and more low-income earners with truly affordable housing options allows them to feel part of the big project that is our nation.
An often-overlooked lever for social cohesion is rebuilding institutional trust through “boring competence” and visible impartiality.
People cooperate far more readily when they believe the rules apply equally and public services actually deliver.
The Epstein saga in the US merely confirmed what many already suspected – the rich and well-connected operate to a different playbook than everyone else.
For Australia, the lesson is straightforward – social cohesion depends on a widespread sense of fairness. That means billionaires and multinational companies paying their fair share of tax, resource exports translating into broad public benefit and regulators enforcing rules consistently rather than selectively.
I suspect that the general public would welcome some sort of tax that is clearly and openly targeted at the people on the very top of the pyramid (think the thousand or so wealthiest Australians).
The practical tools are not glamorous, but they work – strong integrity and anti-corruption bodies, transparent procurement and lobbying registers, reliable service delivery from Centrelink to Medicare, simpler tax and licensing processes, and fewer Kafkaesque administrative hurdles that make citizens feel punished for honest mistakes.
In short, cohesion grows when institutions are predictably fair, visibly competent, and treat ordinary people with the same respect as the powerful.
A further lever for social cohesion is creating deliberative “pressure valves” for hot-button issues.
When contentious topics are channelled into well-designed citizens’ assemblies or deliberative forums, research shows they can lift legitimacy and trust because people feel heard rather than ignored.
The key is design – randomly selected participants, clear rules of respect, access to balanced expert evidence, and genuine pathways into policy rather than token consultation.
Practical examples include citizen juries on housing density or transport corridors, local assemblies on renewable energy projects, school-zoning panels or community budget forums where residents help decide how a slice of council spending is allocated.
These processes don’t magically erase disagreement, but they turn shouting matches into structured conversations – and that alone can lower the political temperature.
Social cohesion has indeed been trending down, but improving social cohesion is not beyond our control.
The research is remarkably clear – let’s build fair institutions, reduce material stress and create more everyday contact between Australians who live in parallel worlds.
A nation’s most important infrastructure isn’t just roads and rail, it’s the invisible network of trust that allows strangers to cooperate and feel as part of the same nation. And unlike highways, that infrastructure grows every time people actually meet and work together on eye level.
Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact Australia. His podcast, Demographics Decoded, explores the world through the demographic lens. Follow Simon on Twitter (X), Facebook, or LinkedIn.
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