22% of Australians Related to Criminals

This is interesting:

JOHN Howard and Kevin Rudd share something in common – both have a convict ancestry.

As a federal election looms and the nation’s political leaders attempt to differentiate themselves, an ancestry website revealed that the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader both have ancestors who arrived on Australia’s shores in chains.

Mr Howard and Mr Rudd are part of an estimated 22 per cent of the Australian population who have a distant relative with a criminal past.

They and other Australians will now be able to trawl through the records of most of the 163,000 convicts who arrived in Australia from England, Ireland and Scotland thanks to a new collection of records which has been launched on the ancestry website Ancestry.com.au.

Considering the countries convict past, the vast majority of Australian I talk to are immigrants rather than decendants of convicts and this statistic seems to confirm this.