Name: Why Australia’s Miracle Economy Is Failing
Uploaded: 2025-04-19T15:38:38.000Z
Duration: 9 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Australia, the land of sandy beaches, koalas and flat whites.

The land down under has also long been known for its prosperous economy, with many calling it the lucky country.

Australia's economy is known as a miracle economy, but miracles don't last forever.

When it comes to Australia, things look good until you peer under the hood.

However, in per-person terms, we've been going backwards.

In other words, while Australia's economy isn't in a recession, its people are.

We start to have rules that we just can eat out once per week.

We really watch what we spend and we have a budget for everything.

So how did Australia's economy get here, and is the country running out of luck?

Australia is one of those rare countries in the world which has avoided a recession since the early 1990s, if you take the pandemic period out.

And that is largely owing to its huge resources.

We've had a couple of mining booms in a row.

These were catalyzed by China's strong growth and emergence as it continued to develop following its accession to the World Trade Organization and its entry into the global economy.

Australia is the world's second largest exporter of coal and also a top producer of iron ore, natural gas and gold.

Natural resources make up nearly 60% of all the country's exports.

Between June 2023 and June 2024, mining alone contributed to $280 billion in export revenue.

That's more than the entire GDP of New Zealand or Greece.

Another big contributor for Australia's economic growth has been population.

Australia has relied a lot on international migration.

Over the past 20 years, migration growth in Australia has been 35%.

That is much faster than any other developed world countries.

Australia's always been an immigration nation and strong population growth has been one of those things that helped to underpin that growth story.

In fact, Australia's economy has grown every single year over the past three decades, barring the pandemic period.

The country's economy even grew during the financial crisis, unlike other major economies like the US, Canada and the UK, which all went through a recession.

But lately, Australia's been having a bad streak.

I'm the owner of a small coffee shop from Vietnam.

Last year, we were trying to look for a one-beddy apartment for me and my boyfriend.

And we kept applying, but it all got rejected.

And there's always a very big line of people inspecting the properties.

Australia is in the grips of a well-documented housing crisis as home prices continue to climb with demand still outstripping supply.

This shows the median price of a house relative to income.

Homes in Sydney are the second most expensive in the world, just after Hong Kong.

And it's not only housing prices that have been going up.

Bloomberg has a barbecue index that measures the prices of food that goes into a barbecue.

So we are talking prices of pork, beef, ice creams, cheeses, vegetables.

Since its creation in 2020, the price of all of these ingredients have risen significantly.

Because we have to buy fresh every day, so we have to constantly buy new fresh ingredients.

And those price fluctuations are really, really hitting us hard.

But you know that people are suffering as well.

You're kind of hesitant to increase the price because it's pressure for everyone.

While Australia isn't unique in seeing high inflation, the problem is that what's not been going up at the same rate as prices has been people's wages.

People are feeling like they are paying a lot more for everyday goods, but they are not making a lot more money.

The blue line shows the inflation rate in Australia, and these bars show how wages have changed, taking inflation into account.

As you can see here, for more than two years, real wages were negative.

And while the country's overall GDP continued to grow, its GDP per capita began to fall.

In fact, per capita GDP fell for 21 consecutive months from March 2023 until December 2024.

All of this means that at the end of the day, people can afford to buy and save less.

These lines show the growth in household disposable income.

Then the pandemic hit, and look at what happens.

There are several factors behind this unlucky streak.

While the country has widely welcomed immigrants, it hasn't expanded its housing supply fast enough to accommodate the inflow of people.

After the pandemic, when Australia reopened its borders, we saw a big influx of people coming from overseas, and that put a lot of pressure on our existing resources, in particular housing.

Land use and land supply has been constrained by planning regulations.

Australia has not built enough affordable or social housing.

Rental affordability is at its lowest since at least 2008.

That is a very big proportion of anybody's income going into rents or going into mortgage payments.

A good way of figuring out the health of an economy is how much people spend versus their income.

Australia's household debt is over 200% of household income.

In comparison, the US is around half this.

And then there's the issue of productivity.

Productivity in very simple terms is how much you produce from your existing resources.

If I'm able to produce more goods and services from my existing resources, then I'm able to make more profits.

I'm probably able to pay more wages, adding more to economic activity, paying more taxes, etc.

Well, Australia's productivity has been flagging.

If we look over the course of the last decade, GDP per hour worked in Australia's economy has been flat.

It's almost a lost decade of productivity growth.

The orange line, which is Australia, was above the green line, which is the US, for years.

Then comes the pandemic and the country's productivity growth switches.

Australia's economy is very services dependent.

Care sector is Australia's largest sector.

We've seen big increases in disability services, age services, some of these less productive relative to mining or manufacturing or other industries within the economy.

Then if you look at start-ups, which usually drive up productivity, their funding per capita in Australia is way behind other countries.

Inserting that dynamism into the economy, and in turn, boosting productivity, will be a key challenge for the Australian government in the years to come.

This is a whole new world of uncertainty that we're dealing with here.

We're seeing policy uncertainty out of the US.

China is slowing, and so our job is to provide that cost of living relief in a responsible way at the same time as we make our economy more resilient to these external shocks.

Some politicians have spoken about the need for an economic reform.

Australia has not had a major economic reform since the 1990s.

On the manufacturing side of the economy and the mining side of the economy, we can continue to foster innovation, encourage investment, to help make sure that those industries are as competitive as possible.

The government's already taken a step in this direction by introducing a plan to boost green manufacturing and high-tech.

However, analysts say the funding levels are comparatively small and more work needs to be done to identify potential opportunities for Australia.

That is really important in this current era of trade war where countries are slapping tariffs on one another.

Fixing the housing crisis will be another key challenge.

Australia has earned a fairly good reputation as one of the highest performing economies in the world.

But what's at stake here, if we don't turn this productivity story around, is seeing Australia's relative economic standing begin to fall behind.