It’s hard to believe, but in only week, the Albanese government has broken three world records for poor economic management and declining living standards.
Last week, The AFR’s Michael Read revealed that Australian households suffered the largest decline in real per capita household disposable incomes of any advanced economy over the past year:
Then, Bloomberg reported that Australia has the lowest rental availability among peer nations:
Now, The Economist has ranked Australia number one for entrenched inflation:
“In Australia, our worst performer, the labour market is on fire”, The Economist reports.
“Over the past year labour costs, measured by how much employers pay workers to produce a unit of output, have risen by a chunky 7.1%—faster than in any other country sampled”.
“Nor does anywhere else have more “inflation dispersion”, which we define as the share of consumer prices across the economy that are rising by more than 2% year on year”.
“In the past year or so English-speaking countries have also received lots of migrants, which in the short term can be inflationary, because new arrivals compete for housing and drive up rents”.
“Estimates by Goldman Sachs, a bank, imply that Australia’s current annualised net-migration rate of 500,000 people is raising inflation by around half a percentage point”.
The prospects facing Australian households remain poor, given that housing debt servicing costs had already reached all-time highs prior to last week’s interest rate hike from the RBA:
The jobs market is also set to weaken as record immigration swells labour supply at the same time as demand is slowing across the economy:
Combined with soaring rental costs, this means that Australian households will be confronted with a prolonged period of real income declines due to wages persistently lagging inflation.
Australians, therefore, face a prolonged period of declining living standards amid a severe per capita recession, declining real wages, escalating mortgage repayments and rents, and overburdened housing, infrastructure, and services.
Never before have we seen a federal government wreck the joint so quickly via lunatic levels of quantitative peopling:
Another three-year term for this nutcase government, and Australia will be halfway to becoming another Argentina.
