Evidence keeps piling up, showing Australians are enjoying sustained expansion of wealth and incomes, as Alan Austin reports.
REAL WAGES PAID to Aussie workers – that is, salaries adjusted for inflation – are rising strongly, after years of going backwards under the Coalition.
The Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed last Thursday that average weekly earnings for full-time adult workers hit a record $2,083.70 in May 2026. That’s up 3.67% on May last year, 8.33% above May 2024 and a thumping 13.36% higher than the $1,838.10 earned in May 2023.
These must now be adjusted for inflation to calculate what economists call real wage rises — or falls.
Real wages rising steadily
The ABS showed prices overall increased 9.74% from June 2023 to June 2026 (which is near enough to May for our purposes). Hence, over the last three years, real wages have risen by 3.62% (13.36 – 9.74).
This is the mean average for full-time adults. Obviously, some workers will have gained more and others less. Fortunately for lower-income workers, the strong rises in the minimum wage mean their gains have been substantially higher than the average. The weekly minimum wage increased by 16.66% from $812.60 in May 2023 to $948 in May 2026, much better than the average and well ahead of inflation. It has jumped since May by another 6% to $1004.90.
(We know calculations from May to May are unusual given most outcomes are measured for years or quarters ending in March, June, September and December. But for some reason, the ABS presents wages data biennially, to May and to November.
And yes, we know that compounding wages and inflation annually will give a slightly different result from the above approximations. The differences are minimal.)
Comparison with the Coalition
Calculations for the Coalition period under Scott Morrison show clearly when the cost-of-living crisis the mainstream newsrooms are obsessed with actually raged.
From May 2020 to May 2021, wages grew just 1.35% while inflation increased by 3.85%. From May 2021 to May 2022, wages rose a puny 1.88% while inflation was 6.14%. Then from May 2022 to May 2023, wages increased by 3.86% while inflation jumped 6.03%. Disastrous declines in real wages!
In the Coalition’s defence, some of those years were impacted by the COVID pandemic. But whatever the causes of the price increases, it is crystal clear that living standards collapsed under Coalition policies — not Labor’s.
Confirmation of higher living standards
The strong real wage increases since May 2023, when Labor’s first budget took effect, explain why virtually all indicators of quality of life have lately advanced.
We saw here last week that household spending on luxuries hit new records in each of the last three years.
Parallel impressive outcomes include record numbers of overseas flights, of home loans, of students attending expensive private schools, of electric car sales, of light aircraft registered, of enrolments in riding schools, of attendance at live concerts, and participation in costly sports such as yachting, gliding, hot air ballooning and scuba diving.
Last Friday’s ABS report on overseas travel showed Australians took 12.71 million flights in the financial year to 30 June. That’s a record both in number and relative to population.
Through the 1990s, all rich Australians could travel overseas whenever they wished. Between 119 and 171 per thousand citizens did so. The rate today is now up to an extraordinary 457 per thousand, confirming flying abroad is enjoyed by far more than just the wealthy.
Wage rise global comparisons
Australia’s 3.67% wage rise from May 2025 to May 2026 compares favourably with other developed countries.
Advanced economies with weaker annual wage rises include Belgium: 0.9%, France: 1.7%, Germany: 1.8%, Switzerland: 1.8% and New Zealand: 2.1%. In contrast, high wage growth economies include the Netherlands: 4.1%, Norway: 4.4%, Spain: 4.9% and Poland: 5.9%.
This is relevant here as graphs appear frequently in newspapers and on social media showing Australia lagging other economies on living standards. These are false.
Most suffer from the fatal flaw of mashing together the disastrous last three years of the incompetent Coalition and the excellent first two years of the Albanese Administration — then blaming Albo for the net decline.
A classic example is the November 2024 article in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) titled ‘How Australia became the world’s biggest cost-of-living loser’.
Its intro reads:
‘Australians have experienced the sharpest decline in living standards across the OECD since 2019. Voters overseas have turfed out governments for much less.’
Living standards indeed declined between 2019 and 2024. But all that decline was attributable to the policies of the previous Coalition, not the current Labor Government, which the AFR wants to destroy.
The AFR repeated this mendacity in last month’s “story”, ‘Australians suffer sharp decline in living standards: OECD’. They are shameless liars.
Press Club’s terminal decline
Finally, sadly, the National Press Club has become a bunch of shills for right-wing parties, along with most mainstream newsrooms.
Several hundred influential Australians have valuable insights to share. Coalition Shadow Minister for Housing Andrew Bragg is not among them. His own colleagues immediately disowned his chaotic diatribe last Wednesday.
Other conservative non-entities invited to address the club recently for no good reason include former MP Christopher Pyne and current senators James Paterson and Pauline Hanson.
Hanson’s notoriety has been elevated only by bizarre opinion polls by Redbridge Group, which routinely gets results spectacularly wrong.
We shall see in the Secret Harbour by-election on 29 August how close the One Nation candidate gets to 31% of the primary vote, which is what Redbridge’s recent polling claims is the party's current support.
That will be a test for all parties and may also indicate who voters blame – or thank – for their current living standards. Bring it on.
Alan Austin is an Independent Australia columnist and freelance journalist. You can follow him on Twitter @alanaustin001 and Bluesky @alanaustin.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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