Spatial mobility and opportunity in Australia: Residential selection and neighbourhood connections

Households choose places from a hierarchy of options defined by social, economic and environmental contexts and these choices are conditioned by economic contexts and family status. While we know a good deal about the choice processes, we know somewhat less about the spatial outcomes of these decisions apart from the well-established finding that most residential changes involve relatively short distances. Recent research has begun to fill that gap and in this paper the research is extended by using data from the survey Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) to construct matrices of socio-spatial movement and consider the relationship of community in-flows and out-flows and the probability moving above and below the diagonal of the matrix. The research shows that there is substantial movement across the matrix of opportunities defined by an Index of Advantage and Disadvantage (Seifa). Economic resources and social status improves an individual’s chance of moving up, as expected, and there is little evidence of polarisation and isolation of the lowest decile communities. It is true that there is substantial within-decile movement but there is also movement away from the diagonal. The analysis suggests that the opportunity matrix is still open in Australia.