Australian Economy

Goldman with an important note.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released the monthly CPI indicator for July, which reported a sharp jump in both headline and trimmed mean CPI inflation.

Westpac with the note.

Recently a case was made that the Reserve Bank and the Albanese government did not deserve to be blamed for the deterioration in Australian living standards and real wages, due to the fact that similar trends were present throughout much of the developed world.

The state of Victoria has the highest unemployment rate in the nation.

The Australian government has cancelled the use of the word “immigration” internally, including at supposedly “independent” entities such as the RBA and PC.

Goldman with the note. As we flagged in a note earlier this year, spending on the NDIS has risen from 0% of GDP a decade ago to almost 2% of GDP currently (~A$50bn), around double initial projections, with the overshoot largely driven by higher take-up rates among children with autism and psychosocial conditions.

Australian consumers have been trapped in a recession.

Independent economist Chris Richardson published the following chart on Twitter (X) showing that Australia has experienced one of the poorest increases in living standards over the past decade among advanced OECD nations.

By Lucinda Jerogin, Associate Economist at CBA It was a relatively quiet week locally.

The Productivity Commission (PC) was never the same after Gary Banks departed as chair in 2013, after leading the organisation from its inception in 1998.

With the release of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) latest Statement on Monetary Policy last week, the media focus was swiftly placed squarely upon the RBA’s forecast that productivity growth would be anaemic 0.7% per year on a long-term time horizon.

Recent data from Jobs & Skills Australia (JSA), published in The Australian, showed that there were an abundance of applicants per job, suggesting that concerns around labour shortages are overblown.

Below is a brilliant guest post from MB reader Erin Rolandsen, CEO of Angelassist: The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the questions we ask.

I have argued from the outset that this week’s productivity summit in Canberra will fail because it won’t address the two most important factors that are wrecking the nation’s productivity: excessive immigration and expensive energy.

I suppose you can only ignore the number one input into the immigration-led economy for so long. Even if the Productivity Commission can produce five enormous reports (which are going to be roundly ignored) without mentioning it.

Since the pandemic first arrived in Australia at the start of 2020, the confidence level of the nation’s households has been an absolute rollercoaster ride.

The Australian recently published Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) data showing that there is an abundance of applicants per job.

It took Melbourne 165 years to hit a population of 3.5 million at the turn of the century.

South Australia is held up as the nation’s renewable energy leader with the highest penetration of wind and solar generation in the nation.

Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, then Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Chairman, Rod Sims, delivered a speech on the growing concentration of Australian industry. New research undertaken by Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) economists has concluded that increased market concentration in some sectors of the economy has weighed on productivity.

Earlier this year, Matt Bell of The Australian wrote an article based on the Hays 2025 Skills Report, saying that Australia was experiencing a skills crisis, with businesses struggling to recruit staff with the necessary abilities.

The AFR is in full panic mode about AI.