You’d never guess we are among the richest people on the planet

It’s taken a Pom to point out that we are richer – much richer – even than countries we think of as our peers. But it’s not something we really grasp let alone celebrate.

Why are Australians so bloody miserable?

From all the constant talk of a ‘cost of living’ crisis in which people are ‘doing it tough’ you’d never guess we are among the richest people on the planet.

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to point this out, as the new deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank Andrew Hauser did recently, when he told a Sydney audience “it can be easy to forget just how prosperous modern Australia is.”

As a newcomer, Hauser, who moved here from England earlier this year, felt the need to point out that while the distribution is far from uniform, measures of relative affluence, such as GDP or wealth per head, regularly place Australia in the “top echelon” of global wealth.

New deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia Andrew Hauser.

That we are richer – much richer – even than countries we think of as our peers is something we don’t really grasp let alone celebrate.

According to the World Bank Canada’s GDP is around $53,000 a US dollars a head, New Zealand’s is $49,000.

Australia’s is about $65,000.

As a Pom, Hauser is acutely aware these gaps matter.

“Coming as I do from a country whose GDP per head has been more or less static since the global financial crisis and lies between one-quarter and one-third lower than Australia’s, I can tell you that cross-country gap feels very real,” he said.

It goes without saying of course that no politician planning on getting re-elected would dare to tell us we should take a look out the window before we start complaining.

The last national leader who went close to telling us to get a grip was Malcolm Fraser who once warned Australians “life is not meant to be easy” and never lived it down.

The problem Albo faces after a bit more than two years in office can be summed up in two stories which appeared in the press in the last week.

The first, which appeared in the Australian Financial Review at weekend, revealed that although Australians might still be almost the richest people in the world, they are much poorer than when he was elected.

Indeed, according to the paper, the fall in our household disposable income has been the largest across the whole OECD over the past two years, dropping by a whopping 8 per cent between March 2022 and March this year.

At the last election Scott Morrison, consciously or unconsciously channelling Fraser warned “it won’t be easy under Albanese”.

Scott Morrison warned ‘it won’t be easy under Albanese’. Picture: David Clark

It might have flopped as a slogan but two years later it’s an indisputable fact and likely to get another run in the lead up to the next election.

The other piece which illustrated beautifully the Government’s predicament was Simon Benson’s story in last week’s Australian which revealed Angus Taylor has identified $100 billion in savings the Coalition plans to make.

Normally you’d assume an opposition promising spending cuts of that size would be asking for trouble.

But what struck me looking at the list, was despite the size of the proposed savings, how little political impact axing most of the spending would have.

Take the $10bn Housing Australia Future Fund, not only has none of this money been spent yet, the people who are likely to benefit from 20,000 new social housing dwellings and 10,000 affordable homes are almost all likely Labor voters anyway.

Likewise cutting the $20bn Rewiring the Nation program isn’t going to have the same impact on punters as making them pay to go to the doctor is it?

Have you got your hand out for a loan or an investment from the $15bn National Reconstruction Fund?

What about the $22bn Future Made in Australia program, the bulk of which will be used for production tax credits for critical minerals and green hydrogen production?

Sounds nice I agree but would you really miss it?

In other words the charge that this is a do-nothing government is unfair.

Its problem is that from the punters’ point of view, much of what it has been doing is either esoteric or likely to bear fruit in the distant future.

On the cost of living front the two big things it has done – subsidising energy bills and broadening benefits of the Stage 3 take cuts – it’s increasingly clear aren’t going to be enough to get it re-elected.

That ministers understand they are in deep trouble if the next election is a referendum on the past two years, can be seen from the way they have suddenly begun dialling up the attacks on Peter Dutton’s character.

Labor is dialling up the attacks on Peter Dutton. Picture: Tertius Pickard

We’ll know soon enough from the polling if these attacks are working.

If they don’t, Labor is going to need to come up with a reform to take to the election as Howard did in 1998 when he went to the public promising to introduce a GST.

Failing that they could run some ads on life in Manchester to make Australians understand how good they have it.

Originally published as You’d never guess we are among the richest people on the planet