Peter Martin, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
Australia is becoming more like the United States. Increasingly, we invest overseas. Our domestic economy is weak.
The statistics show the wealthiest households are getting a growing share of household wealth. The Productivity Commission is trying to tell us they are not.
ALAN PORRITT/AAP/ABS
Freedom of Information documents show the Bureau of Statistics spent a good deal of effort toning down news of rising inequality. The Productivity Commission seems to have been at it too.
Without consumer demand investments can be bad for firms and bad for the economy.
James Ross/AAP
We’ve been in the dark about how we use our time for more than a decade. It’s the decade that saw the rise of the smartphone, streaming and social media.
Public health spending is an important factor in reducing inequality between households in Australia.
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Peter Whiteford, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ latest analysis of the impact of government benefits and taxes on household income shows this reduces income inequality by more than 40% in Australia.
People in remote areas use the internet much less for entertainment and formal education compared to their urban counterparts.
Mai Lam/The Conversation NY-BD-CC
The people who have the most to gain from the extraordinary resources of the internet are missing out, including those not employed, older Australians and migrants from non-English speaking countries.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has changed what goes into its inflation calculation.
AAP
Weak Australian inflation and housing credit data mean the Reserve Bank is unlikely to move on interest rates.
There is a glaring need to reform Australia’s archaic wealth inequality statistics to make them commensurate with international practice.
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The squeeze on wealth in the middle class by those at the top is a long established trend in international inequality data. But the ABS doesn’t provide this information.
Of all the valid votes in the same-sex marriage survey, 61.1% said ‘yes’.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Politics Podcast: Mathias Cormann on the same-sex marriage postal survey
Since announcing that the ABS would be responsible for carrying out the same-sex marriage postal survey, Mathias Cormann has had no shortage of questions.
For the ABS, even the basic task of sending out ballot papers will not be straightforward.
AAP/Alan Porritt
The key question in a legal challenge to the ‘postal plebiscite’ is whether information about Australians’ opinions on same-sex marriage constitutes ‘statistical information’.
Wealth in Australia is much more unequally distributed than income.
AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
New ABS figures on film, TV and digital gaming show that subscription broadcasters and online content creators are booming. Yet local content quotas only apply to free-to-air broadcasters.