Sutherland: Sydney’s friendliest neighbourhood

Nearly three quarters of Aussies don’t feel like they know their neighbours anymore, with many avoiding saying hello and even sending passive aggressive messages.

Exclusive data from Real Insurance and MyMavins reveals Australians are socialising less with the people they live near, highlighting a generational gap in behaviour when it comes to a sense of community.

One of the biggest discoveries from the report was that 72 per cent of people nationwide feel Australians are less interested in knowing their neighbours compared to 20 years ago. Meanwhile, a whopping 62 per cent of Aussies admitted they’d lived next to someone for more than six months without ever having met them.

Among Gen Z and Gen Y Australians, that number rises to 71 and 70 per cent respectively.

Most Aussies don’t know their neighbours.

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Psychologist and founder of the Happiness Institute, Dr Tim Sharp, said many of 2025’s neighbourly habits came from a changed relationship with how people socialised.

“For Gen Z and Gen Y, community isn’t always next door,” he said. “It’s often online, interest-based, and built in comment threads and DMs rather than driveways and cul-de-sacs.”

“That community is not so much defined by geographical boundaries, but more by other things like passions, interests … the need for connection hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s an inherent part of being a human.”

The data, taken from the Real Neighbours Report 2025, was collected from interviews with more than 5,000 Australians aged 18 and over.

The biggest complaint about neighbours was noise.

The report calculated the country’s happiest neighbourhoods, using a scoring system that ranked friendliness, likability, helpfulness, community spirit and noise.

Australia’s top three areas include Sutherland in Sydney, Cairns and South Australia’s south east. On the other end of the scale, Central West NSW, Ballarat and inner Melbourne were ranked with the lowest scores.

The number one source of judgment between neighbours is noise level: with 48 per cent of Aussies judging neighbours for their volume.

That Judgement is not always invisible, either. One in four Aussies have received passive-aggressive messages from the people around them, with that number jumping to one in three among Gen Z responders.

Sutherland has been ranked the friendliest neighbourhood.

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To make matters worse, more than a third of Aussies have felt their privacy was invaded by a neighbour, from observation without their consent to even entering their property without permission.

It’s not all doom and gloom for Australian mateship in the data, either. 48 per cent of people surveyed said that a casual conversation had eventually led to friendship with a neighbour.

Around 2 in 3 Australians see their neighbours to be overall helpful and likeable, and 80 per cent consider good neighbour relationships to be important for safety and emergency reasons.

Jo Taranto, founder of community outreach group Good for the Hood, said she often saw online groups being made for people to connect within their suburb, using social media apps such as Facebook.

Some Aussies said a casual conversation with neighbours led to friendship.

“Online groups are great to supplement and support existing relationships, as well as create new connections for events that are coming up,” she said. “[They] have a really positive place to build local identity and support local activities.”

Beck Thompson and her husband first became friendly with their neighbours during Covid,

communicating across their balconies and dropping food to each others doors.

Shortly after, the couple and their son made the decision to move to Batemans Bay, a town where they had no connections.

“We have shared land where we hang out our washing, so we got to know our neighbour who is a single mum with two kids,” she said.

Beck Thompson and her husband have made friends with their neighbours.

Developing a close friendship, now their kids play together, while they also help each other with babysitting or school pick ups.

“She’s now our emergency contact,” she said, encouraging others to make the effort to get to know their neighbours.

“I think people are getting over online, they want to meet people in real life, (start by) saying hi or smiling, (my neighbour and I) learnt about each other before we entered each other’s houses, you talk on the periphery, there’s small ways to build that connection.”

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