Cities and metropolitan areas of the United States

• Every day the higher price of seemingly everything is mentioned in the news or in conversations with friends and acquaintances.
• So what is the cost of living and how is it measured?
• The “cost of living” refers to the prices people need to pay to meet their needs in their everyday lives.
• The most commonly cited measure is the Consumer Price Index compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Not all prices rise at the same rate

• Some prices rise fairly smoothly in line with the overall CPI.
• But some prices have increased much more.
• Prices of other goods have gone up much less, especially after Australia cut tariffs and started importing more from low-cost producers.
• House prices are now more than 50 times as high as in 1972, a much larger increase than the CPI.

My inflation is not the same as yours

• About half of households will have experienced a higher increase in the prices they pay, and half will have seen a lower increase.
• Retirees tend to spend more on health care and less on childminding.
• A higher proportion of the spending of lower income households goes on necessities rather than luxuries.
• The main reason for the difference was that interest rates increased and employees are more likely to have a mortgage than are retirees.

Cost of living problem

• The cost of living becomes an increasing problem when incomes, notably wages, fail to keep up with it.
• The economy becomes more productive over time and the gains flow to both workers and companies.
• Read more:
  Underlying inflation has slipped below 6%, but is the slide enough to stop the RBA pushing up rates further?
• As well as an income for workers, wages are a major cost for businesses.
• The bank’s goal is to have the cost of living rising by around 2-3% per year and incomes a bit more than this, so living standards steadily improve for all Australians over time.

• Additionally, the growing demand for organic and natural baby food products in the Asia Pacific is driving the demand for baby food products.
• The prime factor that is predicted to drive the growth of the Asia Pacific baby food market is the growing population of infants and toddlers.
• In recent years, the Asia-Pacific baby food industry has experienced a tremendous surge in demand for milk-formulated baby food products.
• This trend highlights the increasing demand for milk-formulated baby food products in the Asia Pacific region.

• Planning for the August 2026 census is, however, well under way at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
• On Thursday, the ABS released results from the first round of consultations, and gave an indication of likely directions for the 2026 census.
• The ABS flagged there could be changes to topics such as income, ethnic identity, gender and sexual orientation.

Balancing act

• Governments, researchers, the media and community organisations all rely on data from the census, so changes don’t happen lightly.
• Dropping a question from the census can have serious impacts on our ability to track changes in outcomes and leave a gap in what we know about our nation.

Potential removals

• What that would mean is a census record would be supplemented with tax and social security data.
• Data linkage to the census is done routinely in other countries, and has a certain appeal.
• Plus, there’s more and more administrative data on income that can be linked to the census, which is increasingly being used in research.


It isn’t that these topics aren’t interesting, but the ABS thinks there are alternative data sources available. There will undoubtedly be people who see the census as still the best method of collection for these topics, but they’re going to have to make a strong case for their retention.

What about additions?

• However, the ABS is concerned there are differences in how people interpret the term “ethnicity”.
• It’s seeking feedback on whether to add an additional question, or whether to replace ancestry with ethnic identity.
• The ABS is also exploring whether and how to ask questions on gender, sexual orientation, and variations of sex characteristics.
• For the first time, in 2021, the ABS made available the option for non-binary when people were asked about their sex.

What you can do

As the next phase of consultation is open, people are encouraged to identify whether the potential new topics might be helpful, and what the risks might be in dropping or changing existing topics. All Australians benefit from having a robust and relevant census. The more Australians able to give their views to the ABS, the better the census will be, and the better the decisions that will flow from the data.

• But that’s an easy and somewhat cheap criticism to make.
• Notably, the Treasury document reports “little change” in overall life satisfaction based on statistics from 2020, and “stable” psychological distress, based on statistics from 2018.
• It’s as if the newspaper wants to find fault with the document, labelling it “a pitch to progressives” and a “fad”.

We’re late to this party

• But the need to shift away from using the blunt instruments of national income or gross domestic product (GDP) to measure progress has long been recognised.
• Even the inventor of GDP, Simon Kuznets, said a nation’s welfare can “scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income”.
• New Zealand, Wales, the United Kingdom, India and Canada are all ahead of Australia in adopting wellbeing frameworks to shape their budget decisions.

The problem with ‘average’ Australians

• The measures for health, for example, include life expectancy, mental health, prevalence of chronic conditions, and access to health and support services.
• As Paul Krugman put it, if Elon Musk walks into a bar then the average person there becomes a billionaire.
• But not all Australians are sharing in this.
• For example, the national Carer Wellbeing Survey shows that unpaid carers have much lower wellbeing compared to the average Australian.

Regional wellbeing

• Some aspects of wellbeing – such as social connection – are often higher in rural areas.
• For example, the University of Canberra’s Regional Wellbeing Survey, conducted since 2013, has consistently shown that Australians living in outer regional and remote areas report poorer access to many services, including health, mobile phone and internet access.
• But many other indicators don’t have specific data for rural regions, and don’t provide insight into the often large differences in wellbeing of different rural communities.

The importance of up-to-date data

• Yes, the data in some areas is outdated, such as the cost of rent or mortgages and financial security, which come from 2020 – predating the surge in rents and higher interest rates.
• This should include ensuring a sample of the many groups known to be at higher risk of low wellbeing but often under-represented in national data collections.
• But while Measuring What Matters is limited by the scope of the data available, it is a step in the right direction.