Labor keeps saying the economy is strong. These damning numbers reveal why Aussies aren't buying it - and it'll only fuel Pauline's rise: PVO

By PETER VAN ONSELEN, POLITICAL EDITOR, AUSTRALIA Published: 14:04, 8 August 2026 | Updated: 14:04, 8 August 2026 Labor and its all-too-blind apologists are forever instructing Australians to respect lived experience. There is one striking exception these days: economic hardship. When Australians say they can't afford their mortgage, rent, groceries or electricity bills, the PM and Treasurer reach for the talking points. Unemployment is low. GDP is growing. National wealth is high. Australia retains its triple-A credit rating. Therefore, apparently, the distress is imagined, exaggerated or incompatible with the official story. It sometimes feels like the Morrison years are ongoing. The old line about 'lies, damned lies and statistics' has endured because data points can mislead without being false. The most effective statistical misdirection doesn't require fabricating data, it merely requires selecting the figure that answers the question you wish you'd been asked. Australians aren't angry because they have failed to understand the statistics. They're angry because mainstream politicians keep using statistics to misunderstand them. To excuse failures. Labor ministers have made this sort of macroeconomic roll call a standard feature of their spin. To be fair, both sides of politics do it. The Coalition for years while in government relied on positive-sounding data points rather than enacting necessary economic reforms. The reforming legacy of Hawke, Keating, Howard and Costello is well behind us. In his latest budget speech, Jim Chalmers stressed stronger growth than our peers, rising real incomes, historically low unemployment and one of the world's strongest budgets. To his credit, the Treasurer also acknowledged household pressures. But 'we know people are doing it tough' risks becoming a rhetorical accessory to a triumphant list of aggregates. In his latest budget speech, Jim Chalmers (pictured) stressed stronger growth than our peers, rising real incomes, historically low unemployment and one of the world's strongest budgets. But behind those stats, the story is very different  The distortion comes when national economic resilience is presented as proof of household prosperity.  GDP data provides the clearest example. The economy grew by 2.5 per cent over the year to March, while GDP per person grew by only 1 per cent. In the March quarter, headline GDP rose 0.3 per cent while GDP per capita actually fell 0.1 per cent. In other words, Australia produced more in total while producing slightly less for each person. Immigration masked the drift towards recession, but it doesn't mask how people feel. This is why the 'per capita recession' entered mainstream discussion during the post-pandemic migration surge. At times headline GDP remained positive as the population expanded while output per Australian contracted. The government could boast that the economy had avoided recession while individuals experienced something remarkably like one. Funny that. It doesn't make immigration inherently bad or aggregate GDP fraudulent. But a country can grow because it contains more people without output per person improving. That's the fault of politicians, not the migrants. Touting overall growth while ignoring per capita decline isn't technically false, but it creates a profoundly misleading impression. You have to keep your eyes out for their trickery. A lower inflation rate means prices are rising less rapidly, not that they are falling. So it doesn't restore the purchasing power already eroded by years of compounding increases across groceries, insurance, electricity and rent. It merely slows the rate at which a bad situation gets even worse. Nor does one inflation number describe every household. The official data itself demonstrates that there is no single Australian cost-of-living experience. Some communities are doing it tougher than others. National wealth is similarly seductive-sounding but distorting, until it's broken down. Quite obviously wealth isn't evenly distributed and much of it isn't readily spendable. Using it to dismiss immediate financial stress is like reassuring a thirsty farmer that the nation's dams are collectively full. It's meaningless to many. Interest rates reveal the same gap between a number and its impact. A cash rate of 4.35 per cent might look historically unremarkable in isolation, but mortgage pain depends on the size of the debt relative to household income. A supposedly normal rate applied to an abnormally large mortgage can produce an entirely abnormal level of financial pain. 'To his credit, the Treasurer also acknowledged household pressures. But 'we know people are doing it tough' risks becoming a rhetorical accessory to a triumphant list of aggregates.' (Stock image)  Low unemployment provides no automatic immunity either. This is something both parties endlessly crow about. People can have jobs and still go backwards when wages fail to recover purchasing power lost during an inflationary surge. They can be employed but unable to secure enough hours, making them underemployed, which the unemployment rate doesn't pick up. The broader 'labour underutilisation rate' was 10.2 per cent in June, more than twice the headline unemployment rate constantly cited. The most damning metric deliberately ignored by the politicians is the Westpac-Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Index. It showed results in the bottom 10 per cent of all findings across its 50-year history just last month. Westpac concluded that family finances were under 'intense pressure'. Those who invoke statistics as sacred can't dismiss consumer sentiment just because it doesn't suit their narrative. People understand their own balance sheets rather better than government does. The worst of the political left compounds its mistake by confusing symptom with cause. It looks at One Nation's rise and concludes that populism is degrading Australian politics. Yet for at least some voters, One Nation is less the source of their anger than the vehicle chosen to express it. It's an important distinction. One Nation doesn't create every grievance it exploits. It harvests grievances Labor has failed to acknowledge, or Liberals have failed to act on. Telling a pollster you might vote for Pauline Hanson is often less an ideological conversion than a warning: listen to us, or we will shake the system until you do.  That doesn't absolve One Nation's more concerning commentary. Populists can inflame division and offer reckless prescriptions, so cause and effect can run both ways. But treating its rise only as the cause of political decline mistakes the symptom for the disease itself. When Labor counters 'I'm going backwards' with 'actually, GDP increased', it doesn't remotely reassure voters. It invalidates them further. That's fertile ground for populist protest parties, which don't need a coherent economic manifesto when the political left or right has already handed them the most potent message in politics: 'We believe you, they don't'.