Post-pandemic Australia: rushed, stressed, and lonely

Major research tracking 16,000 Australians finds an alarming paradox: we're working more flexibly but feeling more stressed, with household incomes now below 2020 levels.

Australians are working from home more than before the pandemic, but we’re still feeling time-stressed, according to the new Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. Picture: istock

Australians are working from home more and commuting less in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but we still feel rushed, stressed and lonely.

The University of Melbourne’s landmark longitudinal Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey has for the first time gauged the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis, tracking the same 16,000 people each year since 2001.

Using data collected in 2023, this year’s study reveals we’re more cash-strapped than we were before the pandemic hit – mean annual household disposable income has dropped below 2020 levels to $116,432, and we’re spending far more on childcare, rent and mortgage payments than we did two decades ago.

Even though wages increased from 2021 to 2023, prices rose rapidly and living standards declined in just about every family demographic, as shown by the fall in median equivalised income, a key measure that adjusts disposable income for a household’s “needs”.

Baby Boomers who bought a home cheaply decades ago and are retiring mortgage-free with a healthy nest egg are among the “richest cohorts of people in Australian history,” according to report co-author and economist Kyle Peyton. But there’s a growing group of renting retirees struggling below the poverty line.

Dr Peyton, a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, warns nearly a quarter of retirees could be renters by 2043 – up from 12 per cent in 2023 and 6 per cent in 2003 – as the chronic housing shortage bites.

“As a country we’re not prepared for what’s coming,” Dr Peyton said. “We’re not building enough homes to keep up with population growth, and we haven’t been doing that for many years. We need to build more homes. We’re currently building … 170,000 homes (a year). That’s frankly pathetic. We’re never going to get out of this situation if that’s all we can do.

There are a growing number of retirees who are renting, and a majority of those are struggling below the poverty line.

“You’ve got to make it legal to build things. We need to have a conversation about how much we really value the derelict pub down the road with a heritage overlay.”

Dr Peyton said about 60 per cent of retirees who rented were living below the poverty line and the situation would only get worse, driving the need to increase the Commonwealth Rent Assistance payment and take into consideration home ownership when calculating the age pension.

This year’s HILDA report finds about 35 per cent of Australian workers are doing some work from home.

Overall, older Australians feel time-stress less than people aged between 35 and 44, those experiencing the peak clash of work and parenting responsibilities.

While the pandemic delivered a dip in time-stress for all age groups, the relief was short-lived.

As always, there’s a stubborn gender gap when it comes to feeling consistently pressed for time: women declare “significantly higher levels of time stress compared to men, with the gap averaging around seven to eight percentage points”.

And as workers prioritise shorter commutes and log on from home more often, this year’s HILDA questions whether people who work from home actually experience less time stress.

Immediately before the pandemic in 2019, the average weekly commute took about 4.6 hours, falling to 3.6 hours in 2021. By 2023, that had risen slightly to 3.8 hours a week or 52 minutes a day.

Pre-pandemic, about one-quarter of workers did at least some work from home and just 5 per cent reported being at home for the majority of work hours. After a spike during the Covid years, by 2023 about 35 per cent of workers did some work from home and 15 per cent worked from home most of the time.

“While working from home reduces commuting times, it may introduce new sources of time pressure, such as blurred work-life boundaries, workload intensification or self-selection into working from home by individuals with more demanding jobs,” the report says.

As we emerge from the pandemic, we’re seeing less of our co-workers in the office, and less of our friends – and the HILDA report reveals Australians feel they have fewer friends than they did two decades ago. The proportion of people socialising with friends or relatives several times a week has fallen from 32 per cent to 20 per cent between 2001 and 2023.

For the first time since the HILDA project began interviewing Australians in 2001, men have indicated they want fewer than two children.

The average desired number of kids for Australian men has fallen from 2.22 in 2005 to 1.99 in 2023, and women also want to have fewer children (2.35 in 2005 to 2.09 in 2025), as traditional attitudes towards marriage and family fall away.

As childcare becomes more expensive (the median weekly cost has increased from $72 in 2002 to $171 in 2023) and Australians increase the number of hours their kids are in paid care (almost an extra eight hours a week between 2005 and 2025), the most important factor when deciding to have a child is cost.

“Among both genders, costs and concerns relating to child-bearing have become more important over time, whereas the social and emotional benefits of having children have become less important (or at best have remained stable),” the report says.