The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released the Q2 wage price index, which recorded a further decline in real wages.
Overall wages rose by 0.8% over Q2 to be 4.1% higher year-on-year.
Private sector wages rose by 0.7% in Q2, whereas public sector wages grew by 0.9%.
Deflating aggregate wage growth by the 1.0% rise in headline CPI inflation shows that real wages declined by 0.2% over Q2:
Indeed, Australian real wages are now tracking 7.2% below their June 2020 peak and are tracking at mid-2010 levels.
Not surprisingly, real per capita household disposable income has also collapsed:
The decline in real wages also follows the 6.2% rise in employee household cost-of-living recorded in the year to June 2024, which was well above the 3.8% increase in CPI inflation and the 4.1% rise in nominal wages:
Therefore, the typical Australian worker is going backwards in a financial sense.
It will be interesting to watch how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers try to spin these numbers.
