Greg Jericho is a Walkley Award winning columnist, known for his regular columns for Guardian Australia and social media presence as Grogs Gamut. He is the Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.
The OECD’s annual employment outlook confirms that not only did profits drive Australia’s inflation in 2022, but that growing profits are also behind the most recent increases in prices that led to the Reserve Bank raising rates.
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It’s not surprising the Christopher Nolan of all directors would be the one to tackle the Odyssey. He seems particularly fit for the literature of dead white males and the grand narrative of great men.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released the unemployment figures for May. Unemployment in May dropped from 4.5% to 4.4%, which is good news. Although, for now, the broader trend seems to be one of increasing unemployment.
Today, the ABS has released its latest survey on barriers to work, and more than a quarter of women aged 18-64 who were not retired but would like to work, or would like to work more hours, cited child care as the main reason for not doing so.
According to the Australian Financial Review (AFR), Tania Constable, the head of the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), was in Canberra yesterday ‘launching a “Hands off our Fuel” online messaging blitz’. Unsurprisingly, the mining lobby's ads are full of misleading, or downright false, claims.
Each year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) puts out its 'Australian Industry' figures, providing a detailed snapshot of how different sectors of the economy are performing. This year’s figures cover the 2024-25 financial year. And the sector with the highest profits margin (by a sizeable margin) was the oil and gas sector.
One of conservative media's favourite stories is finding property and fund manager researchers to speculate about how much house prices will fall. When you look at the data though, maybe it's time to calm the farm about these falling house prices.
It might surprise people to realise just how little a majority of Australians earn. We are often told about average earnings and even average full-time earnings. But averages are not “the middle”. They are merely the sum of all earnings by all people working in Australia divided by the number of those workers.
The latest annual taxation statistics from the ATO reveal that the gender pay gap remains very real and spans almost every occupation. Once we remove the 34 occupations where 10 or fewer men or women work (which distorts the averages), men have a higher average salary in 96% of the remaining 1,067 occupations.
In 2023-24, according to the ATO, 90 Australians who earned more than $1m in income paid no tax. The figures also reveal that the changes in the budget targeting the reductions in the discount for capital gains tax and trusts are very much affecting the richest Australians.
