The Stats Guy: Something nice about each state and territory
It’s easy to fall into interstate rivalry and to argue who has the best beaches, the best coffee, or the most “real” Australians. But according to Simon Kuestenmacher, each corner of this continent contributes something essential to the national story.
My favourite part of any televised political debate is when the moderator asks the two candidates to say something nice about each other.
After having told the audience that their opponent is the devil in disguise, these forced compliments are an awkward comedic relief to me.
I now want to provide the demographic equivalent of these compliments and say something nice about every state and territory.
NSW is Australia’s everything-bagel – a little bit of every landscape, economy, and lifestyle packed into one overachieving state.
It’s where 8.4 million people live and more than 120 million visitors spend over $55 billion each year. Sydney alone offers the iconic Opera House and Harbour Bridge, fantastic beaches, high-rise glamour, banking capital and enough real estate drama to fuel three reality shows.
But NSW isn’t just Sydney. It’s the alpine snowfields, the Hunter Valley vineyards, and national parks where you can hike through subtropical rainforest by morning and ski by nightfall.
It’s also home to Australia’s largest commuter rail network and the nation’s busiest cruise ship port welcomes over a million visitors each year.
If you want a state that plays every role from tech hub to surf haven, NSW is your Swiss Army Knife. Since the Blue Mountains’ signature haze comes from light scattering through eucalyptus oil droplets, NSW is also home to nature’s Instagram filter.
Victoria gets a lot of negative press these days for being the broke state. Let’s focus instead on the insane diversity in art, sport, coffee, and weather competing for our attention.
Melbourne serves the best espresso in the southern hemisphere (no official award, but every Melburnian will tell you it’s true).
By now the brand of Melbourne is globally established, thanks to world-class events like the Australian Open and the formula one grand prix.
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This state loves a crowd – it has more festivals per capita than anywhere else in the country and the world’s largest tram network.
Within a single hour’s drive, you can go from graffiti-covered laneways to vineyards, surf beaches, or snow. The weather will change five times along the way, but to Victorians that just adds a little charm (much like a fake chimney).
Victoria has more small wine regions than any other state. From the Yarra to the Mornington Peninsula to the Grampians – you are never far away from a fancy yet somewhat hipster cellar door.
Queensland doesn’t do subtlety. It does bright sunshine, colourful coral reefs, luscious tropical islands and a seemingly unending coastline.
It’s the state that invented “holiday mode” and never switched it off. It’s the state that gave us the nation’s most entertaining politicians, Steve Irwin and the real-life setting for Crocodile Dundee.
It produces most of Australia’s sugar cane, hosts the world’s largest coral reef system and gets more sunshine hours than almost anywhere else on Earth. It’s where Australians go to defrost, dive, or disappear for winter.
The state is so popular among retirees that it coined the old real estate joke: “Oh, he died so young that he hadn’t even moved to Queensland yet.”
Queensland is home to more than 1900 beaches and 1000 islands. It’s basically one big swimming pool with a mining sector attached.
Talking about mining, Western Australia is a bit of a forgotten gem that many Australians never visit.
WA takes up one-third of the continent, is bigger than western Europe, and yet home to only 11 per cent of the national population.
It’s our mineral powerhouse and our mining exports overwhelmingly come from WA. It’s a place of extraordinary natural beauty and the destination for many a 4WD enthusiast.
Perth is the sunniest capital city in Australia and the wildflower bloom across the south-west each spring turns half the state into a living postcard.
From Ningaloo Reef to the Kimberley, WA offers more coastline, more emptiness and more sunsets than you can count.
As I first learned in Bill Bryson’s travel book Down Under, WA’s remote Shark Bay is home to stromatolites. That’s these lumpy, rock-like mats of microbes that quietly built Earth’s first breathable atmosphere billions of years ago. Pretty nice of Western Australia to have given us an atmosphere.
South Australia is the introvert among Australian states. A quiet achiever who turns out to be the most interesting person in the room. It’s the only state founded without convicts.
Adelaide is the driest capital in the country and is becoming more and more edgy by hosting the Fringe, WOMADelaide, and the Adelaide Festival each year.
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Beyond the city lie wine regions that rival any in Europe – the Barossa, Clare and McLaren Vale.
As a German, I appreciate the Disneyesque version of my homeland – Hahndorf is good fun.
Drive a few hours north from Adelaide and you’ll find yourself in the desert around Lake Eyre, Australia’s largest salt lake. If you don’t like to cut corners, you will enjoy the fact that South Australia boasts the world’s longest stretch of straight road. Across the Nullarbor, a hypnotic 146 kilometre-long-stretch road is just straight – absolutely insane.
Tasmania is where you go to breathe, eat and feel small in the best possible way.
It claims the cleanest air on Earth, measured at Cape Grim, and more than a fifth of its land is protected wilderness. The place feels like another world – dolerite cliffs, glacial lakes and forests older than European civilisation.
But there’s also MONA (the Museum of Old and New Art) where visitors alternate between awe and confusion.
Food and drink are an art form here too. Tasmania has more craft breweries and distilleries per capita than any other state.
Despite its tiny size, Tasmania has more than 3000 named lakes. It also has the highest rate of roadkill per kilometre, because even the wildlife wants to live there.
The Northern Territory is less a state (well, it literally is a territory) and more a feeling of being in the real Australia.
It’s red dust, monsoonal storms, crocodiles and ancient rock formations that defy time. It’s where you truly sense the age of the continent.
Darwin is closer to Bali than to Sydney and that’s what the city feels like – tropical, relaxed, and culturally mixed.
The NT is home to Uluru, Kakadu, Arnhem Land and some of the most linguistically diverse Indigenous communities on Earth. It’s vast, spiritual and stubbornly real.
Every single crocodile-related incident in the NT somehow ends up in German news – we obsess about NT crocodiles for some bizarre reason.
The ACT is our mini-Washington DC. Canberra gets teased a lot, mostly by people who’ve never been. But Australia’s capital is a beautifully designed city surrounded by bushland.
It offers the ultimate mix of civics and scenery. You can visit Parliament House in the morning, the National Gallery at lunch, and still have time for a bushwalk and river swim by evening.
The ACT has the most museums per capita, the best-planned parklands and the shortest commute to nature anywhere in Australia. It’s where power, art, and lake-side cycling all coexist.
It’s easy to fall into interstate rivalry and to argue who has the best beaches, the best coffee, or the most “real” Australians. But each corner of this continent contributes something essential to the national story.
If forced to say something nice about all of them, I’d say this: Australia only works because every state brings its own superpower to the table – even if we love to argue about who does it best.
Did you find any backhanded compliments above? If so, I am clearly ready for political candidacy.
Did you get a sense that each state and territory well and truly has wonderful uniqueness on offer? That’s even better and is exactly what I wanted to remind you of – Australia, as a whole, remains a wonderful and desirable place.
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.
