We elect politicians to watch the road ahead, see the trouble coming, and steer us around it, or fix it if we hit it anyway.
Here is what happened instead, in five charts.
Pay did rise since 2021. Prices rose faster, every single year, so the average wage now buys about 5 per cent less than it did. And this measure leaves the mortgage out, so anyone paying one off has gone backwards further than the gap here shows.
Same house, same loan, nothing changed but the interest rate. The repayment on the average new loan has gone from about $2,950 a month to about $4,500. That is an extra $18,000 a year out of a household that did nothing differently.
Renters copped it a different way. The typical New South Wales rent has climbed from about $450 a week a decade ago to about $670 now, roughly $11,000 more a year for the same roof over your head.
This is who the system looks after. Australia is one of the biggest gas exporters on earth, yet the tax the gas companies pay on it comes in below what we raise from beer. And over the past four years, $149 billion worth of gas left the country without a dollar of royalty.
Put all of it together and this is what it does to the country. Since 2015 the inner cities have edged ahead while the outer suburbs and the regions have gone backwards. The same nation, pulling apart into three.
Yes the people we trusted to watch the road let this happen, in full view.
The system they operate in answers to someone else. The big end of town, the lobbyists and donors and the organised money, gets the meetings and sets the terms. We have watched it: gambling reform stalled for years, gas shipped overseas for next to nothing while our bills climbed, a housing fix that took three years to arrive and still will not start until 2027. Every time, the obvious popular thing lost to the organised well-funded thing.
We handed trust over on the understanding they would act for us. People do not need telling how that turned out. They live it.
So how do we turn the bus around? What is wrong with a system that lets the big end of town decide what gets done? Until that changes, with the donations, the lobbying, the comfortable jobs waiting on the other side, the next government will feel the same pull and mostly make the same choices, whatever colour rosette it wears.
Turning the bus around means changing who the system is wired to listen to, not just swapping the person at the wheel.
In practice that means tighter rules on lobbying and donations, daylight on who gets the meetings, and a press that asks the dull questions about who pays and who benefits. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is resisted, which tells you it would work.
We trusted them to see this coming. The least we can do now is refuse to look away from why they did not.
References
Prices vs pay
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index, Australia (latest release, April 2026)
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Wage Price Index, Australia (March quarter 2026)
- Reserve Bank of Australia, on the roughly 5 per cent fall in real wages since 2021
The mortgage
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Lending Indicators, for the average new owner-occupier loan size (around $736,000)
- Reserve Bank of Australia and APRA, for the move in mortgage interest rates from mid-2021
- Canstar and CoreLogic, for the current average monthly repayment
The rent
- CoreLogic, for the rise in median advertised rents over the decade to March 2025 and the current New South Wales median
Gas vs beer
- Australian Treasury and Senate Estimates figures for Petroleum Resource Rent Tax and beer excise revenue, 2024-25, as compiled by the Australia Institute
- The Australia Institute, on the value of LNG exported royalty-free
Three Australias
- RedBridge analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics Household Income and Wealth, the ANU Regional Living Cost Index, and the Productivity Commission (2024)
With thanks to Vivien Twyford, whose “how do we turn the bus around” question inspired this piece, and to David Cornish, who pointed me to the Three Australias graphic.
Further reading: Political Trust in the “Places That Don’t Matter”