Australian living standards plummet below OECD

The Guardian’s Greg Jericho has done a good job showing the extent by which growth in Australian living standards, as measured by real per capita household disposable income, has fallen behind the OECD. Australia’s underemployment rate is also the highest in the OECD:

Whereas from 2007 to the end of 2013 the real disposable income of Australian households outgrew the OECD average in 18 out of 27 quarters (ie two thirds of the time), since then in just five out of 22 quarters we have done so.

Since the start of 2014, the annual growth of Australian real household disposable income has always been lower than the OECD average.

That’s five and a half years of underperformance:

The faltering of our living standards compared with the rest of the OECD is made clear when we look at the growth since 2007.

You can see that we soared through the GFC compared with everyone else, and yet we have utterly failed to take advantage, and now over the past 12 years the OECD has on average seen household incomes grow by more than ours:

And what we see is that while our level of unemployment is slightly below the OECD average, our level of underemployment is the highest among advanced economies:

Most importantly for our flat household income growth over the past six years, while we have often had higher levels of underemployment compared with other OECD nations, there has been a significant widening of the gap since 2013:

Conveniently, Jericho leaves out the fact that Australia’s population has grown at roughly 2.5 times the OECD average, driven by our mass immigration policy:

And that net immigration has risen strongly over the past five years:

Moreover, the April Budget projected the strong growth in net migration to continue:

That’s a whole lot of workers adding to labour supply, driving up underutilisation, and lowering wages. The outcomes are predictable, but ignored entirely by “fake left” commentators like Greg Jericho who are so preoccupied with race that they are happy to cheer on the reaming of Australian workers.