Ehhhh I watched the footage to check (which FYI, is linked with the wrong timestamp - the relevant stuff is at like 4-ish minutes) and think this article is some miss, some hit. The entire discussion (by the ABC) that was being had wasn’t on the topic of “how is the Australian economy doing compared to everyone else”, it was in a segment with the headline “Reserve Bank set to announce its interest rates decision”.

Within the context of the RBA setting interest rates, how we’re doing vs peers isn’t reeally the core of the discussion. Here’s the quote with some more context (I’ve bolded the first part which the article quotes). Maybe I’ve just been captured by Big Economics 🫠

Host: So the official news just coming in, 25 basis point cut, as expected by virtually everybody – sorry, Ian, you were saying.

Ian: Well, um, you know, back in mid–mid-year, the core inflation figure was sitting at 4%, and the Reserve Bank in November really decided to cut that right back, cut it back to 3.4% as a forecast. When it was finally delivered it came in at 3.2. And if you take each of those quarterly figures going back to this time last year, there’s been a consistent drop in the core inflation figures, and quite a sharp drop as well, so it’s gathering pace, that’s the thing. So if the Reserve Bank didn’t cut today, they would run the risk that inflation would be going too low. And I know that there’s this argument about unemployment, but the Reserve Bank has two mandates - one is to maintain full employment, and the other is to keep inflation within the target band. Now, because we’ve got a strong jobs market, that is not a bad thing, that’s actually quite a good thing. Every other indicator of the economy is weak. GDP growth, just barely crawling ahead.

[the discussion continues for several minutes]

Host: You’ve got some, uh, Reserve forecasts there, or economist forecasts for some of the numbers we can expect, which will of course determine what happens next with rates.

Ian: Well, these were the forecasts that the Reserve Bank put out in November and then obviously in terms of core inflation they were predicting 3.4%, inflation at core came in at 3.2. And it really had – it really started to come off the boil from about mid-way through last year. But you look at GDP growth and in the September quarter it was 0.8%. Now, we’re looking at the-the next set of numbers will be coming in fairly soon. But 0.8% growth in the economy is appalling really, and we need to start getting the economy back up to scratch. We’ve got insolvencies running at record levels at the moment. We’ve got retail sales really – just barely – flatlining, um, so there’s a lot of indicators out there that the economy is in rather poor shape. The-the one saving grace that we have here is that the unemployment rate is at a low level.

IA lists a bunch of stuff that are positive indicators for the economy, but if the headline GDP growth figure is (by “normal” economic standards) low, it seems more like a disagreement over what stats are most important moreso than the actual state of the economy.

I don’t feel qualified to authoritatively interpret the retail stats (it’s not clear where we’re supposed to put the cutoff for “normal” vs “COVID-era” spending, for example) but I’m… hesitant to agree with the description of “surging”. If you look at the graph and say the cutoff is 2022 or 2023, then we’re definitely not surging. But even if you go with IA’s comparison here where we look at pre-COVID vs current, it’s still only a modest increase at a rate comparable to the annual pre-COVID increases (you can draw a trendline from the first bar to the final bar).

The part where there’s a mismatch of quoted stats raises an eyebrow, but it makes me want to ask for clarification of information sources before attributing it to malice.

I’m not thrilled with the published Ombudsman response, but that might also be (at least mostly) a case of pulling stats from different sources. The linked OECD data source currently gives an error (even when I hunt it down manually in case it was a URL issue) so I can’t check that one. I looked for other sources and it looks like the RBA has published data showing that real (in economic terms, i.e., inflation-adjusted) Australian household disposable income has experienced meaningful negative growth from 2020-2023 inclusive. It’s possible that the OECD data is calculated differently and would lead to the stated differences. The RBA data is obviously Australia-only rather than comparative, but it makes it feel plausible to be a data-source issue or some other less malicious error. I don’t know what’s up with the unsourced QoL claim; it’s possible they just mean cost of living stuff? Idk.