This is a very good post
Coming to Australia from growing up in the States I was struck by how uniform incomes are here. A shit kicker job here (in today's dollars) pays $25/hour - a good junior professional job (like graduate engineer or lawyer) pays the equivalent of $35/hour - a senior professional job like say Senior Manager at a big 4 pays the equivalent of only $75/hour, which is 3x bare bones min wage.
Even top jobs like IB, quant and surgery only pay around 8x min wage. And tax is punishing at level - you're paying 47% on over half your income, so what you net is about 5x min wage.
In the US, min wage (in today's dollars) is around $15/hour in most states, which translates to $30k a year, but a good grad job as an engineer is $100k a year and a big law job that you can walk into in your mid-20s is $180k a year. Straight away you are earning 6x min wage and you are just out of college. So it's so much easier to get ahead in the US. It's also much easier to fall behind.
Our min wage being high and our taxes being high also means that purchasing power at the top end is very low. 911s here are extremely expensive compared to US.
> To me it's a no brainier and I don't understand why people fall into the trap that is the Sydney rate race.
Many people either have families that anchor them to Sydney/Melbourne or are creatures of habit.
For a smaller number of people, their job anchors them to a large city and doesn't exist in smaller towns.
>It worked for a long long time but this was obviously never going to be sustainable and now everyone is being dragged down as the gap widens.
Sure, let's just completely ignore things like the policies that have incentivised leveraging debt to own investment properties for capital gains. This is *really* all just because we have a high minimum wage.
More equality *is* sustainable if we have the right policies in place.
I don't disagree with the thrust of the post, but we can acknowledge the role of enforcing fair wages while *also* still acknowledging that the reason things like housing is out of reach for the average Australian has as much or more to do with the policies we've had over the last several decades than it days minimum wage laws. Meanwhile, many companies seem to be pulling in record profits while still managing to pay the high wages required to conduct business. It's hard to argue with that, isn't it?
> policies that have incentivised leveraging debt to own investment properties for capital gains
That only works because you pay 39% tax over 120k and 47% tax over 180k. If we had American tax rates which are about ~10% lower at equivalent amounts the point of negative gearing would be blunted.
It's kind of the side effect of Australian policy.
Australian policy drums up demand through immigration and the types of immigrants it brings in while suppressing supply through not bringing in anyone to actual build.
Also lower land taxes than the US.
You got that the wrong way around. In 2022 the US had 2.6 million migrants, which is about 0.8% of their population. We had 518k migrants, which is 2% of our population.
Yeah but they have a better mix of immigrants, most of those are going to be providing labour to support population growth.
We bring in mostly white collar workers that simply add to demand.
Of course it is. When more and more people own 1 or 2 investment properties to rent out, including many who are AirBNBing them out instead of renting them out, then there are less properties available to be purchased, i.e. less supply. Your choices are to rent, or compete for one of the fewer available properties for actual purchase. Hence prices go up because demand stays the same but supply decreases.
When you have policies that incentivise people with a first property to leverage equity and debt to buy a second and third property, including through negative gearing, then you incentivise people to take purchasable properties out of supply. You also incentivise rent increases because all of those debt leveraged mortgages need to be covered if interest rates rise (as opposed to mortgage-free IPs which don't face the same pressure).
There's obviously more to it, but that's a large chunk of why property prices have gone up.
I’ve been saying that for a while. The migration problem is directed at specifically the housing demand, whereas the bigger issue is that the prerequisites for sponsorship or skilled visas are often high enough that domestic labour cost is kept artificially low. Over supply of skilled labour.
But….then you take away someone else’s opportunities.
The best way the describe it in non-immigration terms so most people will understand…
If tomorrow you took away all womens working rights, you would possibly cut the work force by 40%. Labour competition would be so high that companies would pay professionals extremely high wages (enough to support a family on 1 wage, perhaps with house and sending kids to uni), but then you would still sacrifice women’s human rights. That’s going backwards in society.
Companies already think the labour market is so tight and wages are so high that if you had no laws against children labour, 90% of companies would employ kids to do the menial labour tasks.
Exactly. The US also has the whole “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it comes to illegal immigration and paltry wages, that are critical to supporting large parts of the economy.
Drive past any Lowe’s or Home Depot on a Saturday morning (their version of Bunnings) and you’ll see crews of Mexican men happy to jump in your car to help around the house cash in hand. Likewise with cleaning etc both domestic and commercial.
The dirty secret is many of the consumer expectations in the US are only possible through this and under the table payments.
We’re doing our best to replicate it. People will swear black and blue about alignment with award wages, but go into any restaurant now and you can tell somethings amiss.
US is higher beta than here. If you do poorly, you really do poorly in the US. But there’s a much narrower band here, positive and negative.
What’s breaking down the contract here is all the funny money warping asset, namely house, values above and beyond what’s affordable for even the top earners.
Why don’t you do that math on the high end too and see if you have a point
Today $180k USD ~ $276k AUD
He’s pointing out the gap between high and low earners.
I agree the gap is larger in the USA and high skilled salaries are higher over there. I’m just saying that Australia doesn’t have higher wages for low wage labour.
>911s here are extremely expensive compared to US.
That has nothing to do with wages though. It's due to a lower value currency, import costs and taxes. Basically any 'luxury' car in Australia is super expensive.
This is perfectly and succinctly put.
The speed at which wealth grows for the asset class holders is incredible. The key thing is that the barrier to entry is so high that it excludes the vast majority of Aussies making middling wages.
>It reduces inequality.
This isn't the flex that you think it is. Society should provide a liveable life for those that fall through the cracks and try not to punish those who aspire for more.
There is a reason a lot of our smartest/most highly skilled people in the sciences, engineering, law and tech go overseas as soon as they can, after we subsidise their education to an extent.
We punish the fk out of highly skilled wage earners here and go suuuuper easy on landlords.
Imho it encourages mediocrity and a sense of ennui, hamstrings social mobility and is one of the reasons behind our low productivity figures .
We do not appropriately incentivise innovation, smart investments etc.
Aussies don't build wealth through high wages, they build wealth through property speculation for the most part. I don't fault them though, because the framework set up disproportionately encourages this.
Australia is a great country to live comfortably as a lower income earner, owing to our relatively high min wages (when compared to typical peer nations like the US). It's a freaking brilliant place to live in as a tradesperson due to the demand-supply shortfall for skilled blue collar work.... but it is only moderately attractive when it comes to skilled/high demand professional work. Our wages are contracted into a relatively narrow band (within 200k), as evidenced by our tax banding and the frequency distribution of income across the country.
While asset ownership allows for incredible tax avoidance mechanisms, income tax is fairly rigid. It also aggressively ramps up very quickly with the top tax bracket being quite low, leading to a fairly regressive impact on purchasing power given that state support for things like PPL, childcare etc are simultaneously (and aggressively) tapered back.
So, in essence, you get taxed way harder very quickly, while the support the taxes pay for, get withdrawn at an equally aggressive rate.
Does it though? Income inequality yes, but I think it entrenches wealth inequality.
The people I know in their 20s buying property or living it large aren't the ones in high paying professions, but those with wealthy parents. Reducing social mobility through income equality in some ways has entrenched a class system.
>It reduces inequality.
Probably not over the long term, given our economy now has the complexity of a developing country. It's really only resource extraction that has propped up the broader economy to date. The rest of the economy is selling international students degrees and each other services, neither make for a sustainable economy.
If incomes become too flat you will end up breaking industries like hospitality, where there elasticity of these markets are pushed beyond their upper limits.
Another example of this, specialist tech in HCOL areas (very similar living expenses compared to Sydney) would pay about 2x (or if lucky, 3x) our top end of market.
I suspect when the tech recovers (it's cyclical) we are likely to see a fair bit of talent draining from Aus companies, either through relocation or by moving to full remote US based firms.
I skim read before typing in the numbers and saw the graph. I came back again just to check. Nothing clearly explains this, how recent the data was, how thorough everything is.
It’s good for giving top-level idea, which I’m sure most already know anyway, but if you’re going to be pedantic, please provide link to detailed research.
In any case we all earn at least 250k in this sub, so my avo toast comment was a joke.
If you go to [https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i) and enter the numbers it has the methodology at the end
Because all the money I was saving 12 months ago is now going into mortgage payments.
The answer is to downsize if you can , reduce or eliminate your mortgage and free up lots of cash flow to change things up.
Stamp duty has remained the same despite the blow out in house prices, they’ll cancel your bracket creep tax cuts (stage 3) but no way are they changing the Rort that is stamp duty
"We have the highest minimum wage in the world".
California, which has a substantially larger population than Australia, has a higher minimum wage at current exchange rates.
"Our real estate is amongst the most desirable and therefore expensive in the world."
You forgot to mention the numerous tax incentives for property speculation and artificial supply constraints due to poor planning and NIMBYism.
What is true is that the Australian tax and economic system features a flat wage structure, which favors pre-existing wealth, particularly land ownership.
The claim was that Australia has the highest minimum wage in the world. If you want to compare numbers in different currencies, you have to use some conversion measure. If you don't want to use nominal exchange rates, that's fine. Here is a chart of PPP-adjusted minimum wages in 2022 in the OECD. Australia is indeed towards the top, but behind New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Belgium, Germany, and France are close behind.
[https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW](https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW)
Edited with data.
Homeowner grants, super saver schemes, and shared equity schemes all pump taxpayer money into the housing market, thereby driving up prices.
PPOR exemption from the pension assets test encourages people to buy bigger houses than needed and discourages downsizing.
Tax free capital gains on PPOR (including when passing on as inheritance) similarly encourages people to pour all their savings into houses instead of investing elsewhere.
Taxing labour heavily while barely taxing land at all similarly encourages people to invest in property as a path to wealth generation.
Then there's the two you mentioned.
Property speculation applies equally to PPOR as to IP. You can find posts on this sub nearly every day in which people ask what type of PPOR they should buy to maximise capital gains and their future financial position.
Yes, but I and the person I was replying to were talking about IP tax incentives. Not PPOR. And the tax incentives on PPOR are fine anyway. Why should you pay CGT on your PPOR?
The number of NDIS funded jobs that are grossly overpaid is crazy. Several family and friends with zero training or qualifications have moved from various shitkicker jobs to effectively adult supervision for more money than nursing family members earn who spent years training etc. Then you have the other parts that have a normal price and then the NDIS price which is 30-50% more. And the services that supply these things and take a good chunk of it as well. NDIS was sorely needed but poorly implemented and needs a massive overhaul.
I have a friend who has zero qualifications, didn’t even finish the HSC, and she works disability support with about 2 years of experience. Her Sunday pay rate is something like $60-70 an hour and if her client cancels her shift (which happens regularly) then she still get paid for the entire shift. So basically she’s getting paid $550ish to literally drive to her clients house and then immediately drive back home.
The NDIS wastes way too much money.
Bingo. This is incredibly common. You’ve just described the friends and family I was talking about. Meanwhile hospitals are short staffed and nursing homes have massively understaffed and not enough qualified staff issues and this is going on.
My question is why is stuff like gardening and cleaning not paid for out of their disability support allowance?
If I'm on an aged pension or new start and I need someone to mow my lawn for me I pay that out of my allowance and as it's my money I'm incentivized to find the most efficient and affordable service.
This approach of the government trying to set a fixed price for non-skilled labour is absolutely disastrous.
There's countless examples in history of where price fixing fails dismally - what the hell were they thinking
This is why a laugh, in a disappointed way, every time someone suggests the government should build more public housing directly.
And I hope my son doesn't read this. I only pay him $10/hr - well job actually. If he can figure out quicker ways to do stuff, more power to him.
I mean housing commission houses have never been known as good quality. But then again private builders have slipped massively as well. But throwing it out to the market to sort out via neg gearing hasn’t worked out either. So something has to happen.
Seriously.... a generation ago kids would mow lawns for pocket money....
And don't we have a disability support pension?
If I was on Newstart or the aged pension and I need someone to mow my lawn I pay that out of my government allowance.
The advantage with this system is that I have direct ownership of the pension the government gives me so it's in my interest to find the best person for the job at a competitive rate.
If that means being on good terms with the family down the road and paying $20-$30 cash to their child if they want some money for a light job then so be it.
The benefit here is I can the market set a reasonable price for the service.
What the NDIS has done is blow the cost of services out of the water astronomically which completely distorts the economy.
Government mandated price fixing especially for common unprofessional services never works....
> a generation ago kids would mow lawns for pocket money
And they didn't require insurance to do so and they didn't pay tax or super out of their income either. If you want to offer the neighbour's kid cash to do your lawn that's still your choice but the NDIS is not some random person, it's a government funded program with rules that suppliers have to adhere to
Yes but my point is that by having the government set the rate of these services it takes power of the market in being able to set a realistic price for the service.
In Sydney just maybe $50/hour is a reasonable rate for lawn mowing given the cost of living.... but in most regional areas and smaller capitals that's probably far too much.
Either way the market can determine far more efficiently what these sort of services should cost.
I'm guessing you have a vested financial stake in the whole thing. I'm sure you're happy as long as us mugs are paying for it - not that we have a choice.
They predict this thing will cost 100 billion a year by the end of the decade.
In 2 years that amount of money could fund a high speed rail from Sydney to Melbourne.
This is why we can't have nice things.... and our regional rail & infrastructure is run down and barely 2nd world..... why? because these brainless policies eat up all the government surplus and set us in debt just so a cohort of crooks get to grift the taxpayer and live like kings.
Meanwhile the rest of us are going backwards from the inflation this is causing - truly we are the stupid country....
Personally I'm furious about it.
> Yes but my point is that by having the government set the rate of these services it takes power of the market in being able to set a realistic price for the service.
The government only sets tne price for people using government money. You are free to offer whatever you want if it comes out of your pocket. If you think $15 an hour is a fair price to get your lawn mowed then you should post an ad offering it
> I'm guessing you have a vested financial stake in the whole thing
Nope I think the Ndis is a rort but that has nothing to do with the costs of business in Australia. Part of thr reason our standard of living is so high is the red tape we all have to jump through. We get minimum wage, guaranteed working rights, need insurance, have to abide by all sorts of environmental and safety laws.
If we did away with all that stuff we could start charging third world prices but then we'd have third world conditions too.
On a larger note this is why free trade is bullshit - we can't compete with countries that don't give a shit about safety or the environment.
you do realise that 50 an hour is overcharging and *not* a gov set price?
next its simply supply and demand bud, *i dont even have a car* and i earn 30 an hour gardening, once i get the car ill be at 45 minimum (up to 60, i work for wealthy people).
when you tell *an entire generation* that physical work is for drug users and morons what do you expect would happen?
oh and the NDIS, while a huge issue itself, is a complete non-issue vs the **10 trillion** Australians have sank into trying to bludge off each other (residential housing: the single least productive industry in the nation).
want to talk about overcharging? how about the fact that *Australias residential housing market is valued at* ***half*** *that of the US's.*
*they have 15 times the houses* and the lot of them are only worth *twice* what ours is.
Australians are lazy bludgers who want 'passive incomes'
I mow lawns, I would like to explain why this is false.
I am going to use someone I work with, who makes over $150/h doing yard maintenance, for my example. My wife feels exactly how you do and cannot understand how I can make a living mowing, even though she is my wife. She does not value having her lawn mowed, she can do it herself and isn't too fussed about it being perfect. She doesnt mind leaving it a week extra if the weather is too hot. She also isn't scared about strangers on her property so sees no value in paying a professional, if she were to pay someone she would pay some unsavoury character cash if it meant it was cheaper.
This guy who makes over $150/h tows his equipment trailer with a $12k ute, im not going to talk about the tow vehicle. This is what is on his towbar:
-12k custom equipment trailer
-Wright Stander B ($16,000 32" wide mower for residential yards)
-Bushranger 53AH6IMSP ($1,800 walk behind mower)
-Toro Z Master 6000 ($28,000 60" wide zero turn mower)
-Stihl trimmer x2, Stihl edger, Milwaukee multi, pole saw, stihl chainsaw etc (Another $7000)
-Fuel, chemicals, sprayer, backpack blower, tools, spares etc (Lets say another $2500)
He is professional, insured, does incredible work. He has a 21 mows per year deal with a VERY nice air bnb which is charged at $36,000 per year.. to visit 21 times per year.
His largest mower can do a standard residential front yard, assuming it has zero obstacles, in under 20 seconds, and the cut quality is amazing. If there were 25x 1000m blocks side by side with no houses on them he can trim the outside perimeter and mow the entire thing in around 1 hour.
Lets say you have a standard 1000m block in the suburbs. How much would be fair for him to drive to your property and trim and mow the front and back yard? $60? If he can do it in 20 minutes thats $180 per hour. He can do it in 11 or 12 minutes with the equipment he brings.
If you are a busy professional, with a really nice big place, maybe an acreage, and you want someone to show up every fortnight rain hail or shine and make sure the place looks amazing. If you want that guy to be a stand up professional, who wont steal anything or snoop around. Who always communicates with you when needed, who never needs to be reminded 'you missed a spot'. If thats who you are then you will pay what it costs. And if the guy brings the gear and gets it done fast AF then the hourly rate will NOT be $50.
Imagine this bloke has to get his limb amputated, and ndis send out little 12 year old Jimmy from down the road to mow his lawns for $10. He'd be furious.. 😂
People mowing for NDIS are doing an hours work and calling it 3 hours. The real rate for outdoor home services is way way way above $50.
You cant mow lawns for $50 hour you'd be losing money.
What's the plan when the government inevitably realizes that the ballooning NDIS budget to service a small population is not economically sustainable, and begins to curtail it?
For the record a skilled guy with good equipment is charging a fair market rate of around 180/h.
Most of what you are being charged for with mowing is equipment and some of it is hard work.
One key difference I have noticed in Australia is that people with in demand skills and higher education are doing quite well. But previously, people working casually as waiters, supermarket counter, bars, retail workers etc could afford to rent, go out and eat and drink and occasionally go on holidays etc
Nowadays, unless you have done some trade or in demand university studies you will struggle. And it will only get worse as we as a civilization keep increasing productivity.
As more goods and services get outsourced, I wish the govt in schools start giving honest advice to the students perhaps from year 10 regarding how life would be if they don't work hard and choose the correct profession.
The days when you can be unskilled and still have a good life are not going to come back regardless if there is immigration or no immigration.
Also I wish, more parents allow their children to live with them till they are 25-30 years of age. That will help even those on average wages to be able to afford to purchase a property by the time they are 30 plus more wealth will remain in the family.
Teacher here. We reiterate thisbto kids, parents don't. Because they got by, they rent and continue to, they never studied and they were fine. Average Aussies are getting out cultured by the Immigrant work ethic and the fact that their strong familial cultures support them thriving in Australia!
> The days when you can be unskilled and still have a good life are not going to come back regardless if there is immigration or no immigration
Wrong. We saw when borders closed that wages for unskilled workers went up while rents went down.
Yes and No. the price of each and every single item from lolly pops to labour, is subject to supply and demand. Everything.
The reason most retail/hospitality work is paid so low is supply and demand. It’s easy work and there are heaps of people not finishing school. The pool of labour is significantly higher so the cost for labour is cheap.
The opposite is true for accountants as an example. Because you have to sacrifice time and money to get a degree, there are less people doing accounting and the pool is smaller to choose from. Labour obviously higher.
Tradies usually have an on the job learning curve which is typically easier than (for example, law), but tradies work hard and in adverse weather conditions and with dangerous tools…so a lot of people avoid those jobs making them in demand and obviously more expensive.
If every kid at school, today, decides to study law and accounting and do so successfully…in 5 or 6 years time there will be that many lawyers that lawyers will be cheap. By comparison, the lack of retail workers might drive the value of them up.
>what's required to "get ahead"
My question is - why is getting ahead important? Or, I suppose, more specifically, why is it important to get huge distances further ahead?
Once you have "enough", why do you want to be further and further "above" the average?
My mum and dad had unskilled jobs (cleaner and babysitting/caring) when they bought a house at 20&24yo. I'm 28, with 2 degrees, and 10 years of work in a skilled career - I still can't afford my mum's house (she still lives there and had it appraised recently). We live in a regional town, not even the city. I earn above the average, and it's still not enough.
> Once you have "enough", why do you want to be further and further "above" the average?
because regardless of where people are currently, they only see other people ahead of them, and never the people behind them. So it always feels like they're "behind".
Realistically speaking, I don’t think many people predicate their life choices on the size of the income gap. That’s strange behaviour. It’s about what they want to be able to afford. If you asked me, I’d say I don’t need to be a billionaire. 5 million in today’s money, that’s enough for me to pack up and go travelling. Some people are happy to join an ashram forever, others want a mansion in double bay. It’s their life, neither right nor wrong.
Not sure how anyone would define "ahead" but to me, my ideal financial state is to have a passive income allowing me to work as I please and enjoy my time whether that's travelling or picking up new hobbies.
If I was able to achieve that, and not have to _worry_ about finances then I'd say Im ahaead
That's it. If you have what you need/want then you are ahead.
Is it important to have 10x more than minimum wage, rather than 5x? I kinda like income inequality being low.
I mean, 'greed' can be another way of phrasing it, too. You can be ambitious in terms of wanting to achieve things in life without that needing to involve "having lots more things and money compared to everyone else around you". When your 'ambition' is to get more money, then it's better classified as greed, in my opinion.
whats wrong with greed?
what is money but a store of value that shows you have provided value to many other people, while also not consuming over what you have produced.
So does that value naturally just decrease over time? Does the work you did at time X lose its value five years later? Because that's what inflation does, it reduces the value of the money you got for the labour you performed over time.
That should tip us off, I think, to the fact that money is a bit more than just a store of value to accurately reflect your productivity. There's a bit more going on perhaps.
As to what's wrong with greed, I think there are all sorts of responses to that question. Greed can be pathological, it can impact the normal function of a person's day to day life, taking them away from other responsibilities or enjoyment, etc. Greed can also destabilise an economic system. If you allow for the concentration of wealth in the hands of too few greedy people, then an entire economy can collapse, or it can operate sub-optimally in terms of society's goals for the system.
Greed is, I think by definition, an 'excess' of desire. It's wanting above and beyond what you need to be healthy and happy, because you place some intrinsic worth in "more for more's sake", rather than some genuine desire for more to serve a utility. I honestly think that's inherently pathological.
Depends what you define as getting ahead IMO.
If we assume you are starting off adulthood with no money, HECs debt, etc...you obviously want to work towards at least getting the kind of lifestyle you grew up with if not surpass it if you got more skilled/educated than your parents.
Likewise if getting ahead wasn't important to people, what's the reward for doing all the OT/studying/etc...?
Non-cynical answer, with the way this country is heading, if you are just happy where you are, you will be overrun by expenses.
There is no equilibrium. You either shoot for more, knowing everything will cost more and be harder to get in the near future, or stay where you are and get surprised when you can't get to a doctor, afford basic food and shelter and end up on the ever broadening fringes of society.
Because every time I 'get ahead', I sit down to redo my budget to see how much I can save. Et voila! In that time from last budget to now pay rise EVERYTHING has gone up so we're just breaking even again.
We are a species that thrives within hierarchies and getting ahead usually = climbing the hierarchy... Money is our modern token for resources, where as for our ancestors it would have been actual food / shelter / water etc.
The need to be top dog, king of the castle does seem fairly entrenched. And if you're not in that top 1% then you have to keep fighting? No matter what?
From what I have read on the subject, it has little to do with comparison to the 1% and a lot more to do with being the top of your peers / neighbours. People are happiest when they are relatively better off than those immediately around them.
This is why it's never enough, as someone moves up the income / wealth chain they are going to associate with social circles of similar or higher means and the cycle continues indefinitely.
Class systems mitigated this to a certain extent, you basically could only move up and down within your strata. It made people content with their place in the hierarchy knowing there was finite movement, We were quick to throw away these concepts in modern times, but it's possible they had merit and served an important societal purpose.
Several reasons including 1) it can be fun to keep score 2) generally getting ahead is not just about quantum but about speed. In Australia the earliest you can fatfire is really in your 40s. In the US you can do it in your 30s.
I suspect the best answer on that should come from evolutionary psychology. Not my domain but I'll take a swing.
- resource acquisition has always been critical for survival. To take a direct analogy from diet and nutrition: why are we all obease? Why don't our stomachs tell us we've had enough?
- Repodictive success, mate selection, and social influence.
- Competitive advantage. This one is a little awful to think about but in a world where resources are limited (or at least have been for most of our evolution), the more you have means the more that is denied to others.
I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that. But in short we are hard wired to want more.
I'm aware that I'm just stirring the pot with my comment.
Evolution? yes, definitely, but I'll still question the hundreds (millions? billions?) of people all striving to be the #1 silverback, when it's bloody obvious that a very large number will kill themselves trying.
With limited resources, yes it's good to be in the "have" group rather than the rock bottom, but there is still room for quite a number of people to have plenty, without having to continue to strive for out-hoarding everyone.
Literally the only thing that matters. It's not our absolute buying power that's causing this feeling, it's the direction and rate of change. Our buying power is actively going backwards in chunks of this country.
On top of that, the biggest changers in the cost of living aren't weighted appropriately (housing and energy) in the inflation basket of goods so the picture is even worse than data suggests.
For the average couple on a double income that’s renting.. to get a home loan.. they need to basically live like hermits. No socialising, no eating out, no drinking out, no concerts, movies, home delivery etc etc…
If you’re fine with renting and don’t have aspirations to own your own home and you’re blowing all your income… then you’re living relatively comfortably.. but you’re only one emergency away from being on your arse.
We don’t have enough cities. I’m being very serious. It seems to be less of an issue in, say, the US because people can go to a smaller and cheaper capital city that still has work opportunities and culture.
Australia is basically “every capital city is NYC and Los Angeles”. Even Adelaide is considered a bigger city in this context.
>we are all generally homogenously rich in a global context
Which is cool and all, but doesn’t really help pay the bills…
Unless you can work remotely and move to a country with a significantly lower COL. Then you could benefit from being rich in a global setting.
Spot on, the relativity of income is more important than the actual income itself. We seem to have this weird political philosophy of raising wages to fix living standards, when it doesn't actually deliver higher living standards long term.
In a couple of months the minimum wage will rise yet again, probably by 4%+, yet material living standards and our currency value will continue to decline.
I would respectfully disagree. The reason 6 figures isn’t what it used to is because the currency is being debased.
Government spends our money by printing more and diluting us and then have the added bonus(to them) of us sliding up the tax brackets .
Check this on max or the last
10yrs.
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/money-supply-m1
Everything looks like it’s getting more expensive but it’s just an illusion. It’s the dollar losing value. Cash is trash.
We have one of the highest, but it's not fair to say we have the highest.
California has a minimum wage of 16/hour USD which would be 24/hour AUD (just over 23.23). New York City has a minimum wage of 15/hour USD which would be exactly the same essentially as Australia (23.26). Norway has a basic minimum wage for unskilled workers of 164.8 AUK that coverts to 23.26 AUD. There are a few other wealthy countries with comparable wages.
You can't convert wage that way. Earn in AUD, spend in AUD. Similarly, earn in USD spend in USD. That's why purchasing parity/power metrics exist.
It's like a Singaporean telling a Malaysian that everything in Malaysia is cheap. I earn S$5,000 a month and pay S$1,000 (MYR3,000) a month for rent! You're only paying MYR2,000 a month for rent! That's only S$600 a month for rent, so cheap! Ignoring the fact that the Malaysian who also earns MYR5,000 a month is then spending 40% of their income on rent while the Singaporean is "only" spending 20% of their income on rent.
That said, because if the weaker AUD, we are likely spending a higher % of our income on luxury/imported goods than people in the US at the moment, but for most basic things like food, a person on minimum wage in Australia is probably faring better than a person on minimum wage in NYC or CA.
I just wanted to add Australia has very cheap coffee compared to other high income nations. So it's not a good example. $5.50 aud for a latte is cheap.
This all depends where you are in the economy. The biggest impact to why it feels like I personally can't get ahead is that when we put together a plan to buy a house in 2020 we were looking at a set of goal posts which was something like ~10km from work, 600m2 3bed double garage, some Reno's required in a somewhat gentrifying suburb. Since then prices have about doubled. Our rent has gone up 20% for the same place and there are other, identical townhouses in our complex going for 30% more than that.
Now we're looking at a 3/1 townhouse 40 km from work (1.25 hr drive home/45 min drive in) for 50k more than our original plan which had allowed for 4% compounding growth.
This is all with my income going up 15% due to a job change.
So yes Australians are probably well off comparatively and it might come across as whinging to some who are already on the property ladder but I've got whiplash at how quickly my picture of what I was heading for has changed. That's why it seems like my personal buying power has evaporated. Because it has.
Minimum wage earners also need to pay the same bills and expenses as everyone else. Can't have a 15$ minimum wage when rent is 40k a year for a basic house or apartment
So what's the solution? Have a poverty class of citizens while office jocks live it up? Would you take a pay cut to help out, you do know your wage has the same effect.
Everyone deserves a home and the ability to raise children and to retire even if they have worked minimum wage jobs their whole life.
i mean lowering the minimum wage would have literally no impact on cost of living, you *cannot* seriously believe business would just up and lower prices because their costs decreased.
its just doesnt happen in reality, they keep it as profit (no one expands unless demand increases and removing the minimum wage would *lower* demand).
maybe if we added compounding tax to all property, residential and commercial, there would be more competition resulting in lowered house prices.
imagine the boost to business if commercial RE values plummeted, some places are paying *5000 a week* in rent.
**there is a reason all the OG capitalists opposed landlords as parasites stealing value from productive industry.**
You aren't going anywhere because Australia is the best and easiest place in the world to make money for the elites. They will keep paying you well and charging you high for everything.
All this can continue to take place while Australians continue to grow their assets while experiencing massive decline in mental health.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion here on reddit where everyone these days claims to have some form of mental health disorder, but IMO unless somehow humans have evolved in a way that results in us having less resilience to adversity, younger folks these days (and I'm saying this as a Millennial) are trivialising mental health issues.
Having an absolutely rubbish day at work doesn't harm your mental health, nor does it make your job "toxic". It's normal. Likewise if your job isn't what you'd originally dreamed of or not being able to afford a holiday you'd once dreamed of because things have become expensive.
There are folks out there with genuine mental health issues that definitely need to get the help they need. Society treating it as a joke and a crutch for every setback doesn't help.
While I agree that sometimes the storyline of one’s life can be overly dramatised, there has to be some underlying force causing the widespread malaise.
Frankly I think these people may actually just be closer to seeing things as they really are, but at the same time holding on to an idea that they’re a failure because they can’t seem to make it work. The helpless feeling results from the conflict between the two.
Don’t you wonder how it could be that it’s getting harder to survive when productivity is higher than ever, we have better, more efficient technology, mass manufactured goods and highly optimised supply chains?
Shouldn’t we be able to get by with fewer and fewer workers each year, or less and less hours worked?
That’s not the case because any surplus is gobbled up by financial forces. Real estate is the standout example, how else can a decaying asset appreciate so much? Not that I believe there’s any malicious actor in charge, but the system itself converges that way. People are starting to see that, and opting out.
> It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society
100%.
I feel a lot of people don’t understand the difference between being sad and being depressed. Being sad sometimes is normal, being depressed is far worse, it’s totally debilitating in a lot of cases.
It's not very easy making money here for the 'elites' - the 47% tax rate sees to that, and our salaries are low in the global context. Lawyers get paid much better in the US for example. You could be a top 1% lawyer here and still barely make $400k which is not a lot of money after taxes.
If you think Australia is hard on your 'mental health' you have clearly never lived in another country. Go try it out.
The “elites” don’t have a effective tax rate of 47% - the elite aren’t those who sell their labour it is those that own capital and do not need to sell their labour to survive.
Once you own a sufficient level of capital you have the means to leverage that into whatever you want and bar a few minimal taxes like CGT (which is significantly lower than 47%) you’ll be living without a second thought for your effective tax rate: you’ll start to worry about what forms of corporate welfare you can scheme out of the States and the Commonwealth.
And if we are simply calling the elites the labourers with the highest remuneration rates, the wealthier you are in this country the easier to take advantage of tax schemes to lower your effective tax rate.
The only people who really pay the effective tax rate are the poor, and the lower middle class.
You do what (almost) every other global city does and have third world immigrants to do these not so great jobs on temporary, non renewable visas with no pathway to residency.
Too bad some nuffies are of the opinion that doing so is ‘modern slavery’. Slavery, right, earning 5x more than they would in the Philippines or Pakistan, which also have volcanic eruptions and earthquakes every so often. How come so many slaves want to come here?
> You do what (almost) every other global city does and have third world immigrants to do these not so great jobs on temporary, non renewable visas with no pathway to residency.
Which the forces the locals who would have done those jobs into poverty and creates a permanent underclass.
I like it how people on min wage complian they can't afford to buy in the most expensive city in the country. It's like walking into a Lamborghini dealer and going I can't afford the cheapest vehicle here.
Or when people think there is nothing beyond capital cities.
Work FIFO give it a crack do some big hrs save up yes it's bad for your mental health. But is working 9-5 in a office hand to mouth.
I'm sorry but this is a really bad take. The most expensive city in the country also requires minimum wage workers to live there. Are they doomed to rent for the rest of their life? Yes, most people eventually move onto better jobs but there are a lot of people who stay in that 50-70k mark (adjusted for inflation, obviously) for their whole careers.
If they work a min wage job then yes they will likely live a minimum standard of living.
I have nothing again min wage workers it's a great start but should be just that. If people put along do the bare minimum they can't expect to make in in the countrys move expensive cities.
You should be getting pay rises based on inflation as well as moving up the ladder.
If someone is happy flipping burgers there whole life with no plans to move up you can't expect them to be able to afford to buy.
While it may be sad it's ultimately true. Min wage is arround ~45k per year. Now if you want them to be able to afford in Sydney how on earth are you going to do that. Does a tradey on 150k afford to buy some thing 3 times the cost. What about outside the CBD what do you expect them to cost.
Ultimately if someone is min wage living in the city it's just a means to the end student or what else have you.
A salary is there to compensate you for your labour, and it rarely will make someone rich by itself.
To "get ahead", investing is more important than an education or job in most situations.
Our high minimum wage sets a baseline for costs across various sectors, impacting everything from daily expenses to business operations. and the demand for real estate, driven by factors like safety and lifestyle, contributes to the high cost of living. So achieving financial stability and advancement requires a deeper understanding of these dynamics and the ability to adapt to the evolving economic environment.
Not true at all, plenty of states in the US have minimum wage of $30.80 AUD p/h and their purchasing power is far larger than ours. Our min wage is only $23.23. 30% difference right there
Is this post written by Neoliberalism?
Our high minimum wages mean a better share for our workers, which turns out pretty goddamn well for all of us, given we're the workers.
It means we actually have (or had as it is declining) a middle class. It also means even people on minimum wage can participate meaningfully in society.
The reality is simply that the dollar (cad usd Au’s same shit really) is a shit thing to hold. Governments have been printing money for decades so if you’ve been holding dollars you’ve gotten fked. You basically have to hold some alternative risk asset in order to keep pace - stocks (etfs) and property have absolutely boomed as a result. If you don’t own either and have been majority allocated in cash then yes you will feel poor (because the dollar has been devalued with all the increase in money supply).
Don’t overthink it. The money is defective.
More and more money printed chasing the scarce assets, the houses prices only goes up in that unit of account. Forever.
Take a house’s price history and measure it in ounces of gold. In AUD you’ll see it go from $120k to $1.4m in like a few decades but it will still buy a similar number of ounces of gold. On mobile but last time I looked it was maybe 20% difference, however the cost of maintaining the house would be a lot more than the gold.
+1
It's anathema to most Aussies here though - they think being born justifies you to $20/hour and if private employers won't pay it then the government should.
This is the stuff that makes the roses grow. Manure.
There is a huge difference between the highest and lowest incomes. There is no direct or indirect link to the price of a burger and the hourly rate of pay for making such a burger et al, including housing. The link between incomes and productivity diverged decades ago.
Someone failed Eco 101 in secondary school.
This is a very good post Coming to Australia from growing up in the States I was struck by how uniform incomes are here. A shit kicker job here (in today's dollars) pays $25/hour - a good junior professional job (like graduate engineer or lawyer) pays the equivalent of $35/hour - a senior professional job like say Senior Manager at a big 4 pays the equivalent of only $75/hour, which is 3x bare bones min wage. Even top jobs like IB, quant and surgery only pay around 8x min wage. And tax is punishing at level - you're paying 47% on over half your income, so what you net is about 5x min wage. In the US, min wage (in today's dollars) is around $15/hour in most states, which translates to $30k a year, but a good grad job as an engineer is $100k a year and a big law job that you can walk into in your mid-20s is $180k a year. Straight away you are earning 6x min wage and you are just out of college. So it's so much easier to get ahead in the US. It's also much easier to fall behind. Our min wage being high and our taxes being high also means that purchasing power at the top end is very low. 911s here are extremely expensive compared to US.
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> To me it's a no brainier and I don't understand why people fall into the trap that is the Sydney rate race. Many people either have families that anchor them to Sydney/Melbourne or are creatures of habit. For a smaller number of people, their job anchors them to a large city and doesn't exist in smaller towns.
>It worked for a long long time but this was obviously never going to be sustainable and now everyone is being dragged down as the gap widens. Sure, let's just completely ignore things like the policies that have incentivised leveraging debt to own investment properties for capital gains. This is *really* all just because we have a high minimum wage. More equality *is* sustainable if we have the right policies in place. I don't disagree with the thrust of the post, but we can acknowledge the role of enforcing fair wages while *also* still acknowledging that the reason things like housing is out of reach for the average Australian has as much or more to do with the policies we've had over the last several decades than it days minimum wage laws. Meanwhile, many companies seem to be pulling in record profits while still managing to pay the high wages required to conduct business. It's hard to argue with that, isn't it?
> policies that have incentivised leveraging debt to own investment properties for capital gains That only works because you pay 39% tax over 120k and 47% tax over 180k. If we had American tax rates which are about ~10% lower at equivalent amounts the point of negative gearing would be blunted.
what policies in Australia incentivise it more than the US?
For starters interest on first 750k of primary residence mortgage is tax deductible in US. Can you imagine 😭
It's kind of the side effect of Australian policy. Australian policy drums up demand through immigration and the types of immigrants it brings in while suppressing supply through not bringing in anyone to actual build. Also lower land taxes than the US.
the USA has 7x more immigration per capita. wait my source might've been sus
You got that the wrong way around. In 2022 the US had 2.6 million migrants, which is about 0.8% of their population. We had 518k migrants, which is 2% of our population.
Yeah but they have a better mix of immigrants, most of those are going to be providing labour to support population growth. We bring in mostly white collar workers that simply add to demand.
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Of course it is. When more and more people own 1 or 2 investment properties to rent out, including many who are AirBNBing them out instead of renting them out, then there are less properties available to be purchased, i.e. less supply. Your choices are to rent, or compete for one of the fewer available properties for actual purchase. Hence prices go up because demand stays the same but supply decreases. When you have policies that incentivise people with a first property to leverage equity and debt to buy a second and third property, including through negative gearing, then you incentivise people to take purchasable properties out of supply. You also incentivise rent increases because all of those debt leveraged mortgages need to be covered if interest rates rise (as opposed to mortgage-free IPs which don't face the same pressure). There's obviously more to it, but that's a large chunk of why property prices have gone up.
Agree if someone want to earn high, Australia is not the place USA has better opportunity and better pay with low taxes
I’ve been saying that for a while. The migration problem is directed at specifically the housing demand, whereas the bigger issue is that the prerequisites for sponsorship or skilled visas are often high enough that domestic labour cost is kept artificially low. Over supply of skilled labour. But….then you take away someone else’s opportunities. The best way the describe it in non-immigration terms so most people will understand… If tomorrow you took away all womens working rights, you would possibly cut the work force by 40%. Labour competition would be so high that companies would pay professionals extremely high wages (enough to support a family on 1 wage, perhaps with house and sending kids to uni), but then you would still sacrifice women’s human rights. That’s going backwards in society. Companies already think the labour market is so tight and wages are so high that if you had no laws against children labour, 90% of companies would employ kids to do the menial labour tasks.
Agreed. Worked in London for 5 years and saved a 50% deposit on our house. That was back in the early 00s though
Don’t go back ha
Ah, the good old days when houses were affordable
Health professionals earn a lot more in Australia than in, for example, the UK.
Exactly. The US also has the whole “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it comes to illegal immigration and paltry wages, that are critical to supporting large parts of the economy. Drive past any Lowe’s or Home Depot on a Saturday morning (their version of Bunnings) and you’ll see crews of Mexican men happy to jump in your car to help around the house cash in hand. Likewise with cleaning etc both domestic and commercial. The dirty secret is many of the consumer expectations in the US are only possible through this and under the table payments. We’re doing our best to replicate it. People will swear black and blue about alignment with award wages, but go into any restaurant now and you can tell somethings amiss. US is higher beta than here. If you do poorly, you really do poorly in the US. But there’s a much narrower band here, positive and negative. What’s breaking down the contract here is all the funny money warping asset, namely house, values above and beyond what’s affordable for even the top earners.
There is definitely a significant illegal labour force in Australia. Plus the number of people who do "cashies".
Nowhere near the amount in the USA
Well said . Having spent half my life in both countries I know this is accurate.
15 USD is 23.22 AUD, the minium wage in Australia is 23.23. Low skilled wages are practically the same in both countries.
Why don’t you do that math on the high end too and see if you have a point Today $180k USD ~ $276k AUD He’s pointing out the gap between high and low earners.
I agree the gap is larger in the USA and high skilled salaries are higher over there. I’m just saying that Australia doesn’t have higher wages for low wage labour.
I really want a 911 as well 😭
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Oh god what have I done
Devoed about the 911 prices as a civil engineer will never afford in Aus. Only got v8 patrol money.
>911s here are extremely expensive compared to US. That has nothing to do with wages though. It's due to a lower value currency, import costs and taxes. Basically any 'luxury' car in Australia is super expensive.
OP isn't saying that it has to do with wages. He's saying that as an example of poorer purchasing power in Australia
And, I suspect, Porsche artificially maintaining resale value. There’s just too much of a difference between a 911 here and a 911 there.
A significant amount of it is cars in the US being particularly cheap, plus the LCT here in Australia.
To be honest I think this is a good thing. It reduces inequality.
It reduces wage inequality, sure. But the divide between the asset class and the wage class is only growing larger each year.
This is perfectly and succinctly put. The speed at which wealth grows for the asset class holders is incredible. The key thing is that the barrier to entry is so high that it excludes the vast majority of Aussies making middling wages.
Also the majority of people on higher wages
>It reduces inequality. This isn't the flex that you think it is. Society should provide a liveable life for those that fall through the cracks and try not to punish those who aspire for more. There is a reason a lot of our smartest/most highly skilled people in the sciences, engineering, law and tech go overseas as soon as they can, after we subsidise their education to an extent. We punish the fk out of highly skilled wage earners here and go suuuuper easy on landlords.
Yes, most of the really smart people I know in law went to HK, UK or US where the wages are much better. I'm very mediocre so I stayed here
This! The politicians themselves are property barons so they protect that world at any cost while punishing the shit out of everyone else
Imho it encourages mediocrity and a sense of ennui, hamstrings social mobility and is one of the reasons behind our low productivity figures . We do not appropriately incentivise innovation, smart investments etc. Aussies don't build wealth through high wages, they build wealth through property speculation for the most part. I don't fault them though, because the framework set up disproportionately encourages this. Australia is a great country to live comfortably as a lower income earner, owing to our relatively high min wages (when compared to typical peer nations like the US). It's a freaking brilliant place to live in as a tradesperson due to the demand-supply shortfall for skilled blue collar work.... but it is only moderately attractive when it comes to skilled/high demand professional work. Our wages are contracted into a relatively narrow band (within 200k), as evidenced by our tax banding and the frequency distribution of income across the country. While asset ownership allows for incredible tax avoidance mechanisms, income tax is fairly rigid. It also aggressively ramps up very quickly with the top tax bracket being quite low, leading to a fairly regressive impact on purchasing power given that state support for things like PPL, childcare etc are simultaneously (and aggressively) tapered back. So, in essence, you get taxed way harder very quickly, while the support the taxes pay for, get withdrawn at an equally aggressive rate.
Does it though? Income inequality yes, but I think it entrenches wealth inequality. The people I know in their 20s buying property or living it large aren't the ones in high paying professions, but those with wealthy parents. Reducing social mobility through income equality in some ways has entrenched a class system.
>It reduces inequality. Probably not over the long term, given our economy now has the complexity of a developing country. It's really only resource extraction that has propped up the broader economy to date. The rest of the economy is selling international students degrees and each other services, neither make for a sustainable economy. If incomes become too flat you will end up breaking industries like hospitality, where there elasticity of these markets are pushed beyond their upper limits.
Oh no guys the porsche 911s are expensive 
What’s September 11 got to do with purchasing power in Australia?
Another example of this, specialist tech in HCOL areas (very similar living expenses compared to Sydney) would pay about 2x (or if lucky, 3x) our top end of market. I suspect when the tech recovers (it's cyclical) we are likely to see a fair bit of talent draining from Aus companies, either through relocation or by moving to full remote US based firms.
Australia is not a highly taxed country.
Tell me another country that taxes 47% from $180k (AUD) onwards then. Good luck finding one?
Thanks, I didn’t know I was rich.
Haha you're welcome. You're also very handsome
Ah I know that already everytime I look at myself in the mirror.
I only know when I see my mother.
Your hair is spot on
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But avo toast is cheaper in many countries, has the calculator priced that in?
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I skim read before typing in the numbers and saw the graph. I came back again just to check. Nothing clearly explains this, how recent the data was, how thorough everything is. It’s good for giving top-level idea, which I’m sure most already know anyway, but if you’re going to be pedantic, please provide link to detailed research. In any case we all earn at least 250k in this sub, so my avo toast comment was a joke.
If you go to [https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i) and enter the numbers it has the methodology at the end
Because all the money I was saving 12 months ago is now going into mortgage payments. The answer is to downsize if you can , reduce or eliminate your mortgage and free up lots of cash flow to change things up.
Stamp duty hurts like a bitch
Stamp duty has remained the same despite the blow out in house prices, they’ll cancel your bracket creep tax cuts (stage 3) but no way are they changing the Rort that is stamp duty
People feel like they're getting no where because the currency they earn in is being debased regularly
"We have the highest minimum wage in the world". California, which has a substantially larger population than Australia, has a higher minimum wage at current exchange rates. "Our real estate is amongst the most desirable and therefore expensive in the world." You forgot to mention the numerous tax incentives for property speculation and artificial supply constraints due to poor planning and NIMBYism. What is true is that the Australian tax and economic system features a flat wage structure, which favors pre-existing wealth, particularly land ownership.
Exchange rates aren’t relevant if you’re earning and spending in the same country.
The claim was that Australia has the highest minimum wage in the world. If you want to compare numbers in different currencies, you have to use some conversion measure. If you don't want to use nominal exchange rates, that's fine. Here is a chart of PPP-adjusted minimum wages in 2022 in the OECD. Australia is indeed towards the top, but behind New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Belgium, Germany, and France are close behind. [https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW](https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW) Edited with data.
Of course it does. Where do you think those shoes you are wearing comes from? And what currency do you think they are traded at?
>numerous tax incentives for property speculation Outside of negative gearing and CGT discount what else is there?
Homeowner grants, super saver schemes, and shared equity schemes all pump taxpayer money into the housing market, thereby driving up prices. PPOR exemption from the pension assets test encourages people to buy bigger houses than needed and discourages downsizing. Tax free capital gains on PPOR (including when passing on as inheritance) similarly encourages people to pour all their savings into houses instead of investing elsewhere. Taxing labour heavily while barely taxing land at all similarly encourages people to invest in property as a path to wealth generation. Then there's the two you mentioned.
The ones you mentioned are all for PPOR, not IP.
Property speculation applies equally to PPOR as to IP. You can find posts on this sub nearly every day in which people ask what type of PPOR they should buy to maximise capital gains and their future financial position.
Yes, but I and the person I was replying to were talking about IP tax incentives. Not PPOR. And the tax incentives on PPOR are fine anyway. Why should you pay CGT on your PPOR?
In 2011 I was getting $23 AUD at Coles stacking shelves which was $25.30 USD at the time with much of Europe still in recession.
Almost like there was some kind of crisis, both global and financial
The NDIS sets the cost of mowing lawns at $50/hour - I mean why bother getting educated?
The number of NDIS funded jobs that are grossly overpaid is crazy. Several family and friends with zero training or qualifications have moved from various shitkicker jobs to effectively adult supervision for more money than nursing family members earn who spent years training etc. Then you have the other parts that have a normal price and then the NDIS price which is 30-50% more. And the services that supply these things and take a good chunk of it as well. NDIS was sorely needed but poorly implemented and needs a massive overhaul.
I have a friend who has zero qualifications, didn’t even finish the HSC, and she works disability support with about 2 years of experience. Her Sunday pay rate is something like $60-70 an hour and if her client cancels her shift (which happens regularly) then she still get paid for the entire shift. So basically she’s getting paid $550ish to literally drive to her clients house and then immediately drive back home. The NDIS wastes way too much money.
Bingo. This is incredibly common. You’ve just described the friends and family I was talking about. Meanwhile hospitals are short staffed and nursing homes have massively understaffed and not enough qualified staff issues and this is going on.
My question is why is stuff like gardening and cleaning not paid for out of their disability support allowance? If I'm on an aged pension or new start and I need someone to mow my lawn for me I pay that out of my allowance and as it's my money I'm incentivized to find the most efficient and affordable service. This approach of the government trying to set a fixed price for non-skilled labour is absolutely disastrous. There's countless examples in history of where price fixing fails dismally - what the hell were they thinking
Why isn't it run tighter? Sounds insane to me. I don't know anything about the NDIS.
This is why a laugh, in a disappointed way, every time someone suggests the government should build more public housing directly. And I hope my son doesn't read this. I only pay him $10/hr - well job actually. If he can figure out quicker ways to do stuff, more power to him.
I mean housing commission houses have never been known as good quality. But then again private builders have slipped massively as well. But throwing it out to the market to sort out via neg gearing hasn’t worked out either. So something has to happen.
The whole thing is absolutely disgusting and spits in the face of everyone that does an honest job for a living.
The NDIS gravy train won’t last.
Are they paid for the travel time between jobs, Equipment, Annual leave, Sickleave, Super ontop, etc $50 an hour is not much if not..
Seriously.... a generation ago kids would mow lawns for pocket money.... And don't we have a disability support pension? If I was on Newstart or the aged pension and I need someone to mow my lawn I pay that out of my government allowance. The advantage with this system is that I have direct ownership of the pension the government gives me so it's in my interest to find the best person for the job at a competitive rate. If that means being on good terms with the family down the road and paying $20-$30 cash to their child if they want some money for a light job then so be it. The benefit here is I can the market set a reasonable price for the service. What the NDIS has done is blow the cost of services out of the water astronomically which completely distorts the economy. Government mandated price fixing especially for common unprofessional services never works....
> a generation ago kids would mow lawns for pocket money And they didn't require insurance to do so and they didn't pay tax or super out of their income either. If you want to offer the neighbour's kid cash to do your lawn that's still your choice but the NDIS is not some random person, it's a government funded program with rules that suppliers have to adhere to
Yes but my point is that by having the government set the rate of these services it takes power of the market in being able to set a realistic price for the service. In Sydney just maybe $50/hour is a reasonable rate for lawn mowing given the cost of living.... but in most regional areas and smaller capitals that's probably far too much. Either way the market can determine far more efficiently what these sort of services should cost. I'm guessing you have a vested financial stake in the whole thing. I'm sure you're happy as long as us mugs are paying for it - not that we have a choice. They predict this thing will cost 100 billion a year by the end of the decade. In 2 years that amount of money could fund a high speed rail from Sydney to Melbourne. This is why we can't have nice things.... and our regional rail & infrastructure is run down and barely 2nd world..... why? because these brainless policies eat up all the government surplus and set us in debt just so a cohort of crooks get to grift the taxpayer and live like kings. Meanwhile the rest of us are going backwards from the inflation this is causing - truly we are the stupid country.... Personally I'm furious about it.
> Yes but my point is that by having the government set the rate of these services it takes power of the market in being able to set a realistic price for the service. The government only sets tne price for people using government money. You are free to offer whatever you want if it comes out of your pocket. If you think $15 an hour is a fair price to get your lawn mowed then you should post an ad offering it > I'm guessing you have a vested financial stake in the whole thing Nope I think the Ndis is a rort but that has nothing to do with the costs of business in Australia. Part of thr reason our standard of living is so high is the red tape we all have to jump through. We get minimum wage, guaranteed working rights, need insurance, have to abide by all sorts of environmental and safety laws. If we did away with all that stuff we could start charging third world prices but then we'd have third world conditions too. On a larger note this is why free trade is bullshit - we can't compete with countries that don't give a shit about safety or the environment.
you do realise that 50 an hour is overcharging and *not* a gov set price? next its simply supply and demand bud, *i dont even have a car* and i earn 30 an hour gardening, once i get the car ill be at 45 minimum (up to 60, i work for wealthy people). when you tell *an entire generation* that physical work is for drug users and morons what do you expect would happen? oh and the NDIS, while a huge issue itself, is a complete non-issue vs the **10 trillion** Australians have sank into trying to bludge off each other (residential housing: the single least productive industry in the nation). want to talk about overcharging? how about the fact that *Australias residential housing market is valued at* ***half*** *that of the US's.* *they have 15 times the houses* and the lot of them are only worth *twice* what ours is. Australians are lazy bludgers who want 'passive incomes'
I mow lawns, I would like to explain why this is false. I am going to use someone I work with, who makes over $150/h doing yard maintenance, for my example. My wife feels exactly how you do and cannot understand how I can make a living mowing, even though she is my wife. She does not value having her lawn mowed, she can do it herself and isn't too fussed about it being perfect. She doesnt mind leaving it a week extra if the weather is too hot. She also isn't scared about strangers on her property so sees no value in paying a professional, if she were to pay someone she would pay some unsavoury character cash if it meant it was cheaper. This guy who makes over $150/h tows his equipment trailer with a $12k ute, im not going to talk about the tow vehicle. This is what is on his towbar: -12k custom equipment trailer -Wright Stander B ($16,000 32" wide mower for residential yards) -Bushranger 53AH6IMSP ($1,800 walk behind mower) -Toro Z Master 6000 ($28,000 60" wide zero turn mower) -Stihl trimmer x2, Stihl edger, Milwaukee multi, pole saw, stihl chainsaw etc (Another $7000) -Fuel, chemicals, sprayer, backpack blower, tools, spares etc (Lets say another $2500) He is professional, insured, does incredible work. He has a 21 mows per year deal with a VERY nice air bnb which is charged at $36,000 per year.. to visit 21 times per year. His largest mower can do a standard residential front yard, assuming it has zero obstacles, in under 20 seconds, and the cut quality is amazing. If there were 25x 1000m blocks side by side with no houses on them he can trim the outside perimeter and mow the entire thing in around 1 hour. Lets say you have a standard 1000m block in the suburbs. How much would be fair for him to drive to your property and trim and mow the front and back yard? $60? If he can do it in 20 minutes thats $180 per hour. He can do it in 11 or 12 minutes with the equipment he brings. If you are a busy professional, with a really nice big place, maybe an acreage, and you want someone to show up every fortnight rain hail or shine and make sure the place looks amazing. If you want that guy to be a stand up professional, who wont steal anything or snoop around. Who always communicates with you when needed, who never needs to be reminded 'you missed a spot'. If thats who you are then you will pay what it costs. And if the guy brings the gear and gets it done fast AF then the hourly rate will NOT be $50.
Imagine this bloke has to get his limb amputated, and ndis send out little 12 year old Jimmy from down the road to mow his lawns for $10. He'd be furious.. 😂
People mowing for NDIS are doing an hours work and calling it 3 hours. The real rate for outdoor home services is way way way above $50. You cant mow lawns for $50 hour you'd be losing money.
What's the plan when the government inevitably realizes that the ballooning NDIS budget to service a small population is not economically sustainable, and begins to curtail it?
For the record a skilled guy with good equipment is charging a fair market rate of around 180/h. Most of what you are being charged for with mowing is equipment and some of it is hard work.
One key difference I have noticed in Australia is that people with in demand skills and higher education are doing quite well. But previously, people working casually as waiters, supermarket counter, bars, retail workers etc could afford to rent, go out and eat and drink and occasionally go on holidays etc Nowadays, unless you have done some trade or in demand university studies you will struggle. And it will only get worse as we as a civilization keep increasing productivity. As more goods and services get outsourced, I wish the govt in schools start giving honest advice to the students perhaps from year 10 regarding how life would be if they don't work hard and choose the correct profession. The days when you can be unskilled and still have a good life are not going to come back regardless if there is immigration or no immigration. Also I wish, more parents allow their children to live with them till they are 25-30 years of age. That will help even those on average wages to be able to afford to purchase a property by the time they are 30 plus more wealth will remain in the family.
Teacher here. We reiterate thisbto kids, parents don't. Because they got by, they rent and continue to, they never studied and they were fine. Average Aussies are getting out cultured by the Immigrant work ethic and the fact that their strong familial cultures support them thriving in Australia!
> The days when you can be unskilled and still have a good life are not going to come back regardless if there is immigration or no immigration Wrong. We saw when borders closed that wages for unskilled workers went up while rents went down.
Also known as ‘essential workers’
Yes and No. the price of each and every single item from lolly pops to labour, is subject to supply and demand. Everything. The reason most retail/hospitality work is paid so low is supply and demand. It’s easy work and there are heaps of people not finishing school. The pool of labour is significantly higher so the cost for labour is cheap. The opposite is true for accountants as an example. Because you have to sacrifice time and money to get a degree, there are less people doing accounting and the pool is smaller to choose from. Labour obviously higher. Tradies usually have an on the job learning curve which is typically easier than (for example, law), but tradies work hard and in adverse weather conditions and with dangerous tools…so a lot of people avoid those jobs making them in demand and obviously more expensive. If every kid at school, today, decides to study law and accounting and do so successfully…in 5 or 6 years time there will be that many lawyers that lawyers will be cheap. By comparison, the lack of retail workers might drive the value of them up.
Uh essential workers were all the rage not long ago
>what's required to "get ahead" My question is - why is getting ahead important? Or, I suppose, more specifically, why is it important to get huge distances further ahead? Once you have "enough", why do you want to be further and further "above" the average?
My mum and dad had unskilled jobs (cleaner and babysitting/caring) when they bought a house at 20&24yo. I'm 28, with 2 degrees, and 10 years of work in a skilled career - I still can't afford my mum's house (she still lives there and had it appraised recently). We live in a regional town, not even the city. I earn above the average, and it's still not enough.
> Once you have "enough", why do you want to be further and further "above" the average? because regardless of where people are currently, they only see other people ahead of them, and never the people behind them. So it always feels like they're "behind".
Realistically speaking, I don’t think many people predicate their life choices on the size of the income gap. That’s strange behaviour. It’s about what they want to be able to afford. If you asked me, I’d say I don’t need to be a billionaire. 5 million in today’s money, that’s enough for me to pack up and go travelling. Some people are happy to join an ashram forever, others want a mansion in double bay. It’s their life, neither right nor wrong.
Because I'm competitive and thrive off being better than the people around me. Pretty simple.
I'm more competitive and more Australian.
Not sure how anyone would define "ahead" but to me, my ideal financial state is to have a passive income allowing me to work as I please and enjoy my time whether that's travelling or picking up new hobbies. If I was able to achieve that, and not have to _worry_ about finances then I'd say Im ahaead
That's it. If you have what you need/want then you are ahead. Is it important to have 10x more than minimum wage, rather than 5x? I kinda like income inequality being low.
in order to achieve "passive income allowing me to work as I please and enjoy my time", a 10x min wage income allows you to materalise on that goal.
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I mean, 'greed' can be another way of phrasing it, too. You can be ambitious in terms of wanting to achieve things in life without that needing to involve "having lots more things and money compared to everyone else around you". When your 'ambition' is to get more money, then it's better classified as greed, in my opinion.
whats wrong with greed? what is money but a store of value that shows you have provided value to many other people, while also not consuming over what you have produced.
So does that value naturally just decrease over time? Does the work you did at time X lose its value five years later? Because that's what inflation does, it reduces the value of the money you got for the labour you performed over time. That should tip us off, I think, to the fact that money is a bit more than just a store of value to accurately reflect your productivity. There's a bit more going on perhaps. As to what's wrong with greed, I think there are all sorts of responses to that question. Greed can be pathological, it can impact the normal function of a person's day to day life, taking them away from other responsibilities or enjoyment, etc. Greed can also destabilise an economic system. If you allow for the concentration of wealth in the hands of too few greedy people, then an entire economy can collapse, or it can operate sub-optimally in terms of society's goals for the system. Greed is, I think by definition, an 'excess' of desire. It's wanting above and beyond what you need to be healthy and happy, because you place some intrinsic worth in "more for more's sake", rather than some genuine desire for more to serve a utility. I honestly think that's inherently pathological.
this inflation is from the government increasing the money supply without the corresponding increase in production.
There are a number of causes of inflation in an economy. You've only listed one of them.
Ambition is just a word used by those who don't have the guts to be lazy.
Because I don't want to be a poor commie.
bahaha. Good answer.
Depends what you define as getting ahead IMO. If we assume you are starting off adulthood with no money, HECs debt, etc...you obviously want to work towards at least getting the kind of lifestyle you grew up with if not surpass it if you got more skilled/educated than your parents. Likewise if getting ahead wasn't important to people, what's the reward for doing all the OT/studying/etc...?
Non-cynical answer, with the way this country is heading, if you are just happy where you are, you will be overrun by expenses. There is no equilibrium. You either shoot for more, knowing everything will cost more and be harder to get in the near future, or stay where you are and get surprised when you can't get to a doctor, afford basic food and shelter and end up on the ever broadening fringes of society.
Because every time I 'get ahead', I sit down to redo my budget to see how much I can save. Et voila! In that time from last budget to now pay rise EVERYTHING has gone up so we're just breaking even again.
We are a species that thrives within hierarchies and getting ahead usually = climbing the hierarchy... Money is our modern token for resources, where as for our ancestors it would have been actual food / shelter / water etc.
The need to be top dog, king of the castle does seem fairly entrenched. And if you're not in that top 1% then you have to keep fighting? No matter what?
From what I have read on the subject, it has little to do with comparison to the 1% and a lot more to do with being the top of your peers / neighbours. People are happiest when they are relatively better off than those immediately around them. This is why it's never enough, as someone moves up the income / wealth chain they are going to associate with social circles of similar or higher means and the cycle continues indefinitely. Class systems mitigated this to a certain extent, you basically could only move up and down within your strata. It made people content with their place in the hierarchy knowing there was finite movement, We were quick to throw away these concepts in modern times, but it's possible they had merit and served an important societal purpose.
Several reasons including 1) it can be fun to keep score 2) generally getting ahead is not just about quantum but about speed. In Australia the earliest you can fatfire is really in your 40s. In the US you can do it in your 30s.
I suspect the best answer on that should come from evolutionary psychology. Not my domain but I'll take a swing. - resource acquisition has always been critical for survival. To take a direct analogy from diet and nutrition: why are we all obease? Why don't our stomachs tell us we've had enough? - Repodictive success, mate selection, and social influence. - Competitive advantage. This one is a little awful to think about but in a world where resources are limited (or at least have been for most of our evolution), the more you have means the more that is denied to others. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that. But in short we are hard wired to want more.
I'm aware that I'm just stirring the pot with my comment. Evolution? yes, definitely, but I'll still question the hundreds (millions? billions?) of people all striving to be the #1 silverback, when it's bloody obvious that a very large number will kill themselves trying. With limited resources, yes it's good to be in the "have" group rather than the rock bottom, but there is still room for quite a number of people to have plenty, without having to continue to strive for out-hoarding everyone.
Inflation outpacing wage increases
Literally the only thing that matters. It's not our absolute buying power that's causing this feeling, it's the direction and rate of change. Our buying power is actively going backwards in chunks of this country. On top of that, the biggest changers in the cost of living aren't weighted appropriately (housing and energy) in the inflation basket of goods so the picture is even worse than data suggests.
For the average couple on a double income that’s renting.. to get a home loan.. they need to basically live like hermits. No socialising, no eating out, no drinking out, no concerts, movies, home delivery etc etc… If you’re fine with renting and don’t have aspirations to own your own home and you’re blowing all your income… then you’re living relatively comfortably.. but you’re only one emergency away from being on your arse.
We don’t have enough cities. I’m being very serious. It seems to be less of an issue in, say, the US because people can go to a smaller and cheaper capital city that still has work opportunities and culture. Australia is basically “every capital city is NYC and Los Angeles”. Even Adelaide is considered a bigger city in this context.
>we are all generally homogenously rich in a global context Which is cool and all, but doesn’t really help pay the bills… Unless you can work remotely and move to a country with a significantly lower COL. Then you could benefit from being rich in a global setting.
Spot on, the relativity of income is more important than the actual income itself. We seem to have this weird political philosophy of raising wages to fix living standards, when it doesn't actually deliver higher living standards long term. In a couple of months the minimum wage will rise yet again, probably by 4%+, yet material living standards and our currency value will continue to decline.
I would respectfully disagree. The reason 6 figures isn’t what it used to is because the currency is being debased. Government spends our money by printing more and diluting us and then have the added bonus(to them) of us sliding up the tax brackets . Check this on max or the last 10yrs. https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/money-supply-m1 Everything looks like it’s getting more expensive but it’s just an illusion. It’s the dollar losing value. Cash is trash.
We have one of the highest, but it's not fair to say we have the highest. California has a minimum wage of 16/hour USD which would be 24/hour AUD (just over 23.23). New York City has a minimum wage of 15/hour USD which would be exactly the same essentially as Australia (23.26). Norway has a basic minimum wage for unskilled workers of 164.8 AUK that coverts to 23.26 AUD. There are a few other wealthy countries with comparable wages.
purchasing power is what matters
You can't convert wage that way. Earn in AUD, spend in AUD. Similarly, earn in USD spend in USD. That's why purchasing parity/power metrics exist. It's like a Singaporean telling a Malaysian that everything in Malaysia is cheap. I earn S$5,000 a month and pay S$1,000 (MYR3,000) a month for rent! You're only paying MYR2,000 a month for rent! That's only S$600 a month for rent, so cheap! Ignoring the fact that the Malaysian who also earns MYR5,000 a month is then spending 40% of their income on rent while the Singaporean is "only" spending 20% of their income on rent. That said, because if the weaker AUD, we are likely spending a higher % of our income on luxury/imported goods than people in the US at the moment, but for most basic things like food, a person on minimum wage in Australia is probably faring better than a person on minimum wage in NYC or CA.
I heard food is a lot cheaper in the US. Sales are so much better in US than here too.
Supermarkets and eating out I have found are both more expensive in the coastal US cities I’ve been to in 2023/2024 compared to Australian cities
Not the high quality food I eat
I just wanted to add Australia has very cheap coffee compared to other high income nations. So it's not a good example. $5.50 aud for a latte is cheap.
This all depends where you are in the economy. The biggest impact to why it feels like I personally can't get ahead is that when we put together a plan to buy a house in 2020 we were looking at a set of goal posts which was something like ~10km from work, 600m2 3bed double garage, some Reno's required in a somewhat gentrifying suburb. Since then prices have about doubled. Our rent has gone up 20% for the same place and there are other, identical townhouses in our complex going for 30% more than that. Now we're looking at a 3/1 townhouse 40 km from work (1.25 hr drive home/45 min drive in) for 50k more than our original plan which had allowed for 4% compounding growth. This is all with my income going up 15% due to a job change. So yes Australians are probably well off comparatively and it might come across as whinging to some who are already on the property ladder but I've got whiplash at how quickly my picture of what I was heading for has changed. That's why it seems like my personal buying power has evaporated. Because it has.
Minimum wage earners also need to pay the same bills and expenses as everyone else. Can't have a 15$ minimum wage when rent is 40k a year for a basic house or apartment
The point is a major reason those bills are high is because of inflated wages due to min wage, immigration policy, etc...
So what's the solution? Have a poverty class of citizens while office jocks live it up? Would you take a pay cut to help out, you do know your wage has the same effect. Everyone deserves a home and the ability to raise children and to retire even if they have worked minimum wage jobs their whole life.
Implement policies that bring the cost of living down? You shouldn't have to make $25 an hour minimum wage to barely afford the cost of living here.
i mean lowering the minimum wage would have literally no impact on cost of living, you *cannot* seriously believe business would just up and lower prices because their costs decreased. its just doesnt happen in reality, they keep it as profit (no one expands unless demand increases and removing the minimum wage would *lower* demand). maybe if we added compounding tax to all property, residential and commercial, there would be more competition resulting in lowered house prices. imagine the boost to business if commercial RE values plummeted, some places are paying *5000 a week* in rent. **there is a reason all the OG capitalists opposed landlords as parasites stealing value from productive industry.**
You aren't going anywhere because Australia is the best and easiest place in the world to make money for the elites. They will keep paying you well and charging you high for everything. All this can continue to take place while Australians continue to grow their assets while experiencing massive decline in mental health.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion here on reddit where everyone these days claims to have some form of mental health disorder, but IMO unless somehow humans have evolved in a way that results in us having less resilience to adversity, younger folks these days (and I'm saying this as a Millennial) are trivialising mental health issues. Having an absolutely rubbish day at work doesn't harm your mental health, nor does it make your job "toxic". It's normal. Likewise if your job isn't what you'd originally dreamed of or not being able to afford a holiday you'd once dreamed of because things have become expensive. There are folks out there with genuine mental health issues that definitely need to get the help they need. Society treating it as a joke and a crutch for every setback doesn't help.
While I agree that sometimes the storyline of one’s life can be overly dramatised, there has to be some underlying force causing the widespread malaise. Frankly I think these people may actually just be closer to seeing things as they really are, but at the same time holding on to an idea that they’re a failure because they can’t seem to make it work. The helpless feeling results from the conflict between the two. Don’t you wonder how it could be that it’s getting harder to survive when productivity is higher than ever, we have better, more efficient technology, mass manufactured goods and highly optimised supply chains? Shouldn’t we be able to get by with fewer and fewer workers each year, or less and less hours worked? That’s not the case because any surplus is gobbled up by financial forces. Real estate is the standout example, how else can a decaying asset appreciate so much? Not that I believe there’s any malicious actor in charge, but the system itself converges that way. People are starting to see that, and opting out. > It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society
100%. I feel a lot of people don’t understand the difference between being sad and being depressed. Being sad sometimes is normal, being depressed is far worse, it’s totally debilitating in a lot of cases.
It's not very easy making money here for the 'elites' - the 47% tax rate sees to that, and our salaries are low in the global context. Lawyers get paid much better in the US for example. You could be a top 1% lawyer here and still barely make $400k which is not a lot of money after taxes. If you think Australia is hard on your 'mental health' you have clearly never lived in another country. Go try it out.
The “elites” don’t have a effective tax rate of 47% - the elite aren’t those who sell their labour it is those that own capital and do not need to sell their labour to survive. Once you own a sufficient level of capital you have the means to leverage that into whatever you want and bar a few minimal taxes like CGT (which is significantly lower than 47%) you’ll be living without a second thought for your effective tax rate: you’ll start to worry about what forms of corporate welfare you can scheme out of the States and the Commonwealth. And if we are simply calling the elites the labourers with the highest remuneration rates, the wealthier you are in this country the easier to take advantage of tax schemes to lower your effective tax rate. The only people who really pay the effective tax rate are the poor, and the lower middle class.
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You do what (almost) every other global city does and have third world immigrants to do these not so great jobs on temporary, non renewable visas with no pathway to residency. Too bad some nuffies are of the opinion that doing so is ‘modern slavery’. Slavery, right, earning 5x more than they would in the Philippines or Pakistan, which also have volcanic eruptions and earthquakes every so often. How come so many slaves want to come here?
> You do what (almost) every other global city does and have third world immigrants to do these not so great jobs on temporary, non renewable visas with no pathway to residency. Which the forces the locals who would have done those jobs into poverty and creates a permanent underclass.
I like it how people on min wage complian they can't afford to buy in the most expensive city in the country. It's like walking into a Lamborghini dealer and going I can't afford the cheapest vehicle here. Or when people think there is nothing beyond capital cities. Work FIFO give it a crack do some big hrs save up yes it's bad for your mental health. But is working 9-5 in a office hand to mouth.
I'm sorry but this is a really bad take. The most expensive city in the country also requires minimum wage workers to live there. Are they doomed to rent for the rest of their life? Yes, most people eventually move onto better jobs but there are a lot of people who stay in that 50-70k mark (adjusted for inflation, obviously) for their whole careers.
If they work a min wage job then yes they will likely live a minimum standard of living. I have nothing again min wage workers it's a great start but should be just that. If people put along do the bare minimum they can't expect to make in in the countrys move expensive cities. You should be getting pay rises based on inflation as well as moving up the ladder. If someone is happy flipping burgers there whole life with no plans to move up you can't expect them to be able to afford to buy. While it may be sad it's ultimately true. Min wage is arround ~45k per year. Now if you want them to be able to afford in Sydney how on earth are you going to do that. Does a tradey on 150k afford to buy some thing 3 times the cost. What about outside the CBD what do you expect them to cost. Ultimately if someone is min wage living in the city it's just a means to the end student or what else have you.
A salary is there to compensate you for your labour, and it rarely will make someone rich by itself. To "get ahead", investing is more important than an education or job in most situations.
Our high minimum wage sets a baseline for costs across various sectors, impacting everything from daily expenses to business operations. and the demand for real estate, driven by factors like safety and lifestyle, contributes to the high cost of living. So achieving financial stability and advancement requires a deeper understanding of these dynamics and the ability to adapt to the evolving economic environment.
Minimum wage isn't the cause of this. Its greedy CEOs who need another yacht.
Not true at all, plenty of states in the US have minimum wage of $30.80 AUD p/h and their purchasing power is far larger than ours. Our min wage is only $23.23. 30% difference right there
Is this post written by Neoliberalism? Our high minimum wages mean a better share for our workers, which turns out pretty goddamn well for all of us, given we're the workers. It means we actually have (or had as it is declining) a middle class. It also means even people on minimum wage can participate meaningfully in society.
The reality is simply that the dollar (cad usd Au’s same shit really) is a shit thing to hold. Governments have been printing money for decades so if you’ve been holding dollars you’ve gotten fked. You basically have to hold some alternative risk asset in order to keep pace - stocks (etfs) and property have absolutely boomed as a result. If you don’t own either and have been majority allocated in cash then yes you will feel poor (because the dollar has been devalued with all the increase in money supply).
Don’t overthink it. The money is defective. More and more money printed chasing the scarce assets, the houses prices only goes up in that unit of account. Forever. Take a house’s price history and measure it in ounces of gold. In AUD you’ll see it go from $120k to $1.4m in like a few decades but it will still buy a similar number of ounces of gold. On mobile but last time I looked it was maybe 20% difference, however the cost of maintaining the house would be a lot more than the gold.
All I'm hearing is we need to lower minimum wage. That motion has my full support.
I'm certainly not suggesting that
Yes, but I am. I don't want to pay $9 for an iced chocolate just because some unskilled labourer thinks they deserve $25 - $30 an hour.
+1 It's anathema to most Aussies here though - they think being born justifies you to $20/hour and if private employers won't pay it then the government should.
This is the stuff that makes the roses grow. Manure. There is a huge difference between the highest and lowest incomes. There is no direct or indirect link to the price of a burger and the hourly rate of pay for making such a burger et al, including housing. The link between incomes and productivity diverged decades ago. Someone failed Eco 101 in secondary school.