Cost Of Living

The 2012 Salvation Army survey into the economic and social impact of cost of living paints a grim picture of life in Australia right now.

Even people with jobs and regular benefit payments are struggling to make ends meet. They can’t pay bills or send their kids to after school sport. And in the worst cases are forced to go without food and prescription medicine to keep their heads above water.

This is a modern crisis. And it’s growing. According to the Salvos the number of people relying on their charitable services increases every year. As the saying goes, thank god for the Salvos. But just how sustainable is this band-aid approach to financial stress?

Continue reading "Meet the new working poor" »

“Most of our people have never had it so good”, is what British PM Harold MacMillan bluntly told his country in 1959.

Maybe Harold was right, Britain had emerged from the gloom of the war years into a booming economy. But if you told Australians that today you’d get blank looks, if not downright hostility.

Every survey, and most of the anecdotal evidence I hear, show that cost-of-living issues are the main worry for the average Australian household. But last week someone challenged this and effectively told the country to stop whinging.

Continue reading "Job insecurity is a bigger stress than the cost-of-living" »

The biggest reader reaction I have ever had to a column involved a fight with the power company AGL, which had hit me with a baffling bill which had jumped by $700 in just one quarter.

The column examined the question of actual meter readings versus estimated readings, and the issuing of so-called “catch-up” bills by power companies which for whatever reason had undercooked an earlier bill, leaving them with no choice but to whack the consumer with a kind of one-off bill which would force you to sell one of your kidneys.

In researching the piece I was snowed with some largely (and possibly deliberately) confusing explanations from power providers as to how the meters were read by a different company which was at arms length from their business. Both the power providers and the meter readers seemed more than happy to blame each other for all the confusion, and the subsequent one-off impost.

Continue reading "The shocking truth about the Greens and power" »

Australia still has the haves and the have-nots, but more people now see themselves in the ‘have not’ camp. How else can you explain the hue and cry over cost-of-living pressures when Australia is, by all objective accounts, doing quite well? Are we becoming a nation of ‘must haves’?

Another report out today makes clear the blindingly obvious fact that prices will almost always go up, and it’s their relationship to incomes that matter – and on that front, the average Australian household has more disposable income than ever before.

The AMP.NATSEM Income and Wealth Report says the average Australian family is better of by $224 a week in real terms. You can read the full report here.

Continue reading "Good news, Australia! You’re actually doing just fine" »

There’s no doubt that tackling the escalating cost of living is central to keeping the all-important voters of Western Sydney happy. Sydney is one of the greatest cities in the world and that privilege shouldn’t come with an expensive price tag, especially for Western Sydney.

We need to make Sydney a place that’s once again affordable for all Sydneysiders. That’s the challenge for both the State and Federal Government. Any failure in this regard may spell disaster at election time for the Government of the day.

After years of neglect and poor planning decisions it’s clear that Sydney has lost some of its gloss and Sydney voters don’t like that. Sydney has become just too expensive for all those struggling Aussie families out there in voterland.

Continue reading "In Sydney pollies must go west to win the rest" »

There are sentences which in politics can sum up the mood of the times. In the United States in 1992 it was Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” which encapsulated the sense among voters that George Bush Snr was not focussed on bread and butter issues affecting family budgets.

For all the heat in Australia around issues such as border protection and gay marriage, the number one concern for put-upon families is the cost of living. It is simply staggering how expensive Australia has become. Once, tourists from the United States and Europe would come here and live like kings off the back of our low dollar; today they must think long and hard about whether a visit Down Under is affordable.

For those of us who actually do live here, the joys of a cheap holiday to the States, where you can do a year’s clothes shopping at stores like Gap for less than $200, in no way erase the often depressing budgetary reality of life in a country where the cost of power, real estate, petrol, clothes and food have been off the scale for the past few years.

Continue reading "Voters ready to shoot from the hip pocket" »

Your task is simple. Here is $115.50. It must last one week. You have no savings, no assets, but thankfully you’ve already paid your rent. That’s about $16 a day to cover food, bills, transport, entertainment and hygiene products.

We hope you like never going out, watching television and that none of your loved ones ever require a birthday present. Hopefully you’re not someone who requires much medication or needs to go the Doctor. We do hope you like basic carbohydrates or can cope with the embarrassment of having to ask a charity for a food parcel.

Welcome to the world of Australia’s depressed, stigmatised and disempowered Newstart recipients.

Continue reading "La dole cheque vita is not so sweet on $16 a day" »

News.com.au has today published the results of its exclusive Cost of Living survey, and the results are a major eye-opener. The take home message is this: a huge number of us say we’re struggling.

Reading the survey, which was taken by 30,000 Australians, you wouldn’t know that we’re one of the world’s 10 wealthiest nations in raw GDP per capita terms. Neither would you think we managed to surf out the worst of the global financial crisis. Or crises. Or whatever.

The national breakdown is as follows. Forty-eight per cent of us say we are “managing to get by”, 28 per cent of place ourselves on “Struggle St”, 17 per cent are “barely coping” while 7 per cent of us are on “Easy St”.

Continue reading "The long road that leads away from Struggle Street" »

In breaking news from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, apparently the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. On a cheerier note, there’s a bunch of us in the middle who are doing better than we were five years ago.

The ABS has released the results of its Household Expenditure Survey, a huge project it undertakes every six years. Read all the important guff here, and the news story from news.com.au here.

And here are five of the more interesting findings:

Continue reading "You’re probably doing fine. And drinking too much." »

A 20 cent piece is all that stands between the Gillard Government and electoral oblivion. Shorn of its complexities and its environmental intent and reduced to its most basic vote-driving element – its impact on the cost of living – the carbon tax proposition can be summarised as follows.

The average family will suffer a $9.90 a week increase in its cost of living and pocket $10.10 a week in tax relief. This leaves them 20 cents ahead.

The tax comes in on July 1 next year, about 12 months from the 2013 election. The Government is juggling the imposition of a new tax with the delivery of compensation and saying to average families: trust us, you won’t feel a thing. But if the cost of living impact has been underestimated, and instead of gaining 20 cents a week, families find themselves losing a few bucks, maybe 10 bucks or even 20 bucks a week, Labor will face an electoral drubbing the likes of which may never have been seen.

Continue reading "20 cents stands between Labor and electoral oblivion" »

Are you fed up with paying more and getting less for a whole range of goods or services? Are you getting annoyed with the constant increases you face on basic necessities such as electricity, gas water, mortgages, and even car parking?

With survey after survey revealing how much financial stress that Australian families are being put under, it’s time that all governments, starting with the Federal Government, start doing something about the escalating cost of living.

What can be done? Well, two things stand out. First, Governments need to make sure that they don’t increase taxes and charges and where possible they should be actually reducing taxes. The harsh reality is that struggling Aussie families are being bombarded by hikes in Federal taxes and fees and now face the prospect of new taxes such as the so-called carbon tax.

Continue reading "Time to get serious about escalating living costs" »

Are you fed up with costly political gimmicks by the Federal Government? Well, you should be as those gimmicks are costing you, the taxpayer, lots of money. We all know about the money wasted on Fuelwatch and GroceryChoice. While those debacles are long gone, they are not forgotten and serve as a constant reminder of how taxpayers’ money can be easily wasted.

That’s why we need to be vigilant to ensure that the Government doesn’t waste any more of your taxpayer money. Now there is one ongoing waste of money and that relates to the so-called Office of the Petrol Commissioner. Here we have a Petrol Commissioner at the ACCC that “watches” petrol prices.

You probably wouldn’t know, and perhaps don’t even care that we have actually had two different ACCC Petrol Commissioners appointed. The first left quickly, and the second one, Joe Dimasi, had been a long time ACCC staffer who was up-sized to a Commissioner title, with all the added costs to the taxpayer that a Commissioner title brings with it.

Continue reading "Sack the petrol commissioner - we’re paying too much" »

Lies, damn lies and statistics. Without denigrating the excellent, proactive work by the Herald Sun in commissioning NATSEM research showing Australian households are $23 better off per day than five years ago, this figure is a load of horse manure.

Every Australian knows it, not least Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, whose only common ground is the belief that Australians are doing it tougher than ever. Which we mostly are.

There is of course a legitimate line that many Australians delight in casting themselves as perennial battlers, even as they purchase ever bigger, flatter TVs and ever larger homes. Rampant consumerism can never be discounted in any measure of our material wellbeing. But as NATSEM’s figures show, it’s the essentials that are rising in cost, not the expendibles.

Continue reading "Tell us we’re better off when houses are affordable" »

There is a glossy protest poster which rural conservative MPs put up in their parliamentary offices in Canberra last month. It features a bag of groceries under the words “Can you afford to pay Labor’s carbon tax?”

It’s a fair question. Oddly it’s a question being put by the same group of people who are conspiring to make sure that we all pay much more than we need to for our milk.

The National Party and country Liberal MPs have been joined by consumer advocates and competition crusaders in denouncing the conduct of supermarket giant Coles in forcing a price war not only over milk but beer, petrol, even barbecued chooks.

Continue reading "Check out the hypocrisy in the war on supermarkets" »

The staggering rise in electricity prices over the past few years has been the single-biggest cost of living issue for average families trying to bring up kids and get into the housing market. The impact of these price rises, and the anger they have generated, has been seriously underestimated both by governments trying to remain in power and oppositions trying to win office.

The trickle-down effect of this explosion in the cost of living has not yet been fully examined. As one example, there were figures out on the weekend showing that the rate of home ownership in Australia had fallen from 71.4 per cent to 69.5 per cent, in defiance of trends across the OECD. You could validly speculate as to how many Australians who would love to shift from renting to owning are so tied up paying inflated bills that they simply can’t get a deposit together.

State governments have tried to quarantine themselves from any responsibility for the spiral, arguing that price rises are out of their hands and the result of external factors. Oppositions have been sluggish to make governments own the problem.

Continue reading "The bills that could cost our politicians power" »

What will Labor come up with next?  What grab bag of goodies will be used to distract voters from the futility and expense of Labor’s great big carbon tax?

What political stunts wait in store for us?  It’s remarkable how Federal Labor are looking more and more like NSW Labor everyday – desperate, directionless and laughable.

Across the weekend we had Julia Gillard declaring tax cuts were now a “live option” after Labor’s economic guru Ross Garnaut helpfully intervened.  Honestly, can she lead from any further behind on this issue?

Continue reading "Labor’s tax cuts just bread and circuses" »

Last weekend - while you were taking the kids to the beach, buying those extra back-to-school necessities, or for many, still counting the toll of recent devastating floods – unleaded petrol prices in capital cities rose an average 15 cents a litre at Coles and Woolworths outlets to a massive 143.9 cents per litre.  And those ridiculous rises were matched in part by the Independents and other chains.

So what’s the story?

On Saturday, the wholesale price of petrol actually dropped by more than half a cent, yet on the weekend we were hit with a massive 15 cent increase.  The size of the hike was described as “staggering” by FUELtrac general manager Greg Trotter.  He rightly pointed out that the prices we are now paying at the pump rival those records in 2008 when oil hit a peak of $US145 a barrel.  The big difference is that the current price of oil is only around the $US90 mark.

Continue reading "Labor is turning a blind eye to price hikes" »

Last week we asked the question - how much bad publicity can you buy for $801.91. That’s the amount I’d been charged by my power company for two months’ electricity in a one-bedroom apartment, extravagantly fitted with such turbo-charged items as a toaster and a radio.

The answer was a two-page bucketing in The Daily Telegraph. Given the equally ferocious reader response to the column, the bad publicity will now extend to a generous four pages, not (just) out of some vindictive sense of payback, but because there is a serious rort going on with our power companies.

It involves guess work around meter readings, which creates a gap when an actual reading is made at which a so-called catch-up bill is issued. When an actual reading is made, customers are billed at a new, increased rate for power they used months ago, before the price had gone up. 

Continue reading "Power to the people: the electricity backlash" »

Ban the bomb, no new mines, the three mines policy, additional mines, street marches, fear of nuclear terrorism and the existence of rogue states with nuclear power or weaponry have all been elements in the debate about uranium mining, processing or nuclear power for a long time.

Perhaps its time to get past emotion fear and inconsistency and concentrate on rational debate in a coherent manner.

We are a blessed continent with more than adequate supplies of coal, gas and oil. We are major exporters to the rest of the world in each of these commodities. As I write new sources of energy like coal seam gas, costing tens of billions of dollars have become mainstream in Australia.

Continue reading "Clinging to old nuclear fears stifles the power debate" »

I am not sure how much bad publicity you can buy for $801.91. If you based it on newspaper advertising rates you would get about an eighth of a page. To err on the side of generosity, here’s a couple of pages’ worth from Sydney’s biggest newspaper, aimed squarely at the miserable sods at the electricity company AGL.

To be clear from the outset, this isn’t some sly journalistic attempt to dodge a bill, albeit a ludicrous, unjustified bill. In my dealings with AGL – two convoluted telephone conversations and an email which they have not answered - I have not identified myself as a journalist. If their PR department tries to get in touch, they should save themselves the phone call as I’m paying this bill through gritted teeth, but writing about it here with a perverse degree of glee for two public interest reasons.

The first is that it simply shows the staggering increases in power prices which, while capable of being begrudgingly absorbed by an affluent person, would blast a hole in the budget of any normal family on the average wage.

Continue reading "Zapped in the hip pocket by the bright sparks at AGL" »

A utilities representative recently came to my front door offering a better deal on our gas and electricity prices if we changed to a different supplier. He was offering a larger discount than the existing supplier.

The visit prompted me to look back at the cost of electricity over the past few years. The results were startling. Last year, the costs were more than 50 per cent higher than five years ago. Our usage was about the same.

The price increases are being felt by households across Australia.  According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, power bills increased by 50 per cent. In the same period, total expenses only increased by 16 per cent. Since Labor has been in government, the prices have risen by more than 42 per cent.

Continue reading "Think energy costs now, just wait for the carbon tax" »

There is a squeamish message on the Cross City Tunnel website headed “Toll adjustment - 1st October 2010” which is notable for two reasons.

The first is that it reminds us how, in these jargon-addled times, things such as tolls never go up, jump or rise. They simply “adjust”. The second is that it demonstrates how the NSW Labor Government has abrogated much of its responsibility for protecting taxpayers from cost of living increases.

The construction of the Cross City Tunnel, as you may recall, finished behind schedule – but because of the contract between its operators and the NSW Government, where the price of the toll is linked to CPI, the toll actually went up before the road even opened.

Continue reading "Sydney pays a price for dysfunctional government" »