When it comes to debate surrounding the issue of the economy within the halls of power in Canberra and the broader coverage of federal politics, there is a phrase that is seen perhaps more often than any other: “superior economic management”.
This is a statement or slogan that both sides of federal politics have used extensively over the years, with it being almost entirely based on the performance of the economy in headline terms.
Metrics such as headline GDP growth dominate the discourse, despite the fact that they are arguably increasingly not representative of the experience of Australians in their everyday lives.
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In order to shed a bit more light on how the economy is performing, three different metrics will be examined starting at the surface and gradually drilling down further toward what is arguably a more accurate representation of the economic fortunes of the average household.
Those are:
We will be using the final national accounts data unimpacted by the pandemic as our base to measure growth in outcomes.
Headline Terms
Between the December quarter of 2019 and the latest ABS data, which covers up to the end of the March quarter of 2026, the Australian economy has grown by 13.7 per cent.
To put this into perspective, over the same duration prior to the pandemic from the September quarter of 2013 to the December quarter of 2019, the economy grew by 16.2 per cent.
Not a bad result in headline terms, but well below what was the norm in the 1990s and 2000s.
Source: Tarric Brooker Per Person
If we shift the lens through which the economy is assessed to growth in GDP per person, the picture is significantly less favourable.
On this metric, the economy has grown by 4.0 per cent since the end of 2019, but it has not grown at all versus where it was in the March quarter of 2022.
GDP per person peaked in the December quarter of 2022 and trended down to the March quarter of 2025.
While it has since bounced back somewhat, that positive impulse has since faded.
Source: Tarric Brooker Per Working Age Person
While GDP per capita is preferable as a metric compared with headline GDP growth, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
For example, as the proportion of the population held by children falls, all else remaining equal, GDP per capita should rise, simply due to a greater proportion of people being of working age.
Since December 2019, the proportion of the population made up by children has fallen from 18.88 per cent to 17.43 per cent.
Source: Tarric Brooker
Once the national accounts figures are adjusted to GDP per working-age member of the population (civilians aged 15 and over), the level of growth seen since 2019 falls further still to a cumulative level of just 2.1 per cent.
Source: Tarric Brooker
Part of this shift is the natural aging of the population and fewer children being born to replace them, but the majority in recent times has been driven by the migration of adult-aged individuals.
The Takeaway
Over the last two decades, growth in the nation’s economic outcomes have continued to deteriorate, as a series of failed economic strategies from both the major parties see the economy increasingly unable to deliver the level of growth and prosperity Australians have become accustomed to.
What those policy failures are and what their individual contribution is to the current economic quagmire Australia finds itself in remains a matter of debate amongst economists and political commentators. But what is clear is that sizable elements of the economic strategy pursued by the federal government aren’t delivering; the only real disagreement is on exactly what those elements are.
While the headline figures delivered by the economy are decent enough in a vacuum, when you begin to drill down into the data at something slightly more representative of a household level, it becomes increasingly clear why so many Australians are increasingly dissatisfied with the current state of affairs.
This data is also an aggregate figure for the entire economy, which is then divided by the total population or the working-age population, which likely overlooks vast differences between the households who are prospering despite the challenging environment and those who find themselves going backwards.
For more accurate granular data, we will have to wait some years until the ABS provides a snapshot of how things are playing out in the present for the nation’s households.
Ultimately, the data supports the contention that the outcome growth within the Australian economy has deteriorated significantly over the last two decades and that headline figures are increasingly unrepresentative of what households are experiencing on the ground.
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