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They may reside in some of Brisbane’s trendiest suburbs but they are working for the privilege.
The riverside suburbs of Newstead and Teneriffe have the highest share of full-time workers in Brisbane, employment data from the most recent census shows.
About 80 per cent of workers in the inner-city suburbs – which feature expensive apartments in the converted woolstores and gasworks complexes, cafes, craft breweries and leafy riverwalks – worked full-time.
It was a tale of affordability, KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley said.
“In those areas, many households need to be working full-time to afford living there,” he said. “It’s a real housing affordability and stage of life story.”
University student Milana Pan, 21, does not live in Newstead, but works there part-time, serving coffee to the members of luxe fitness club Total Fusion – and the gig comes with perks.
“I get a free membership at Total Fusion, and I don’t have to pay for a gym membership,” she said.
Diners at one of the restaurants along Vernon Terrace, below the converted woolstores in Teneriffe. Credit: Markus Ravik
Pan also works at Yonder Espresso in St Lucia, not far from where she studies criminology and psychology at the University of Queensland.
“I like the flexibility of working part-time,” she said. “I like having the two places – it makes things a bit more interesting.”
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St Lucia, traditionally dense with students, has the highest percentage of part-time workers in the city.
About half of St Lucia’s working population (50.6 per cent) is employed on a part-time basis.
The other suburbs with the highest proportion of part-time workers are also university suburbs: Kelvin Grove, which houses a Queensland University of Technology campus, and Robertson, Sunnybank and MacGregor, which border Griffith University’s Nathan Campus.
The overall proportion of part-time jobs across the economy has grown steadily since the late 1970s, although the disruptions of the COVID pandemic briefly reversed that trend.
Across Greater Brisbane, about 34 per cent of workers are employed part-time (a little lower than the national share of 36 per cent), while 66 per cent work full-time.
However, in a cluster of south-eastern suburbs, including Bulimba, Hawthorne, Balmoral, Morningside, Cannon Hill, Murarrie and Hemmant, the share of full-time workers increases to about 70 per cent.
Houses on the Brisbane River at Bulimba.Credit: iStock
The census, collected in August 2021, asked people to estimate how many hours they worked across all their jobs over the previous week, although some results might have been affected by the disruptions of the COVID pandemic at the time.
Some jobs tended to have shorter hours during the winter months, which affected the data.
Lifeguards rank 18th when it comes to having the highest percentage of part-time workers, but if the census had been done during the height of summer, the results might have been different.
About four in every five fitness instructors worked part-time, a much larger proportion than for most jobs.
Other occupations with a high share of part-time workers were waiters (88 per cent), university tutors (88 per cent) and cafe workers (87 per cent).
Jobs with a low share of part-timers included police officers (3 per cent), school principals (5 per cent) and miners (7 per cent).
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