fatvegan

After the budget came out, I had a bit of a go at Peter Costello for saying $50,000/year was middle-income. It turns out that he was right. I said it was somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per year I think. I'd based that on ABS data, which wasn't entirely accurate because it didn't separate part-time wages from full-time wages. However I made an estimate based on the number of part-time workers against the number of full-time ones. But I've just found some Reserve Bank data which seems to disagree with the ABS data. By I large amount too. According to the Reserve Bank the mean wage of all working adults in $38,000 and according to the ABS it's about $30,000.

The Reserve Bank data is on at the RBA website Prices and Output (G Tables). Whatever G Tables are. Who knows.

The other side of this, is that it makes Costello's budget far more reasonable. The one-off payments are still stupid, but the tax cuts make some sense.

I still find it kind of hard to believe that $50,000 is the mean Australian full-time wage. But if you can't trust the Reserve Bank, then who can you trust.