How we delude ourselves about the cost of living

Let me tell you a home truth no politician would dare to: We don't have a problem with the cost of living. In fact, consumer prices rose at the unusually slow pace of just 1.9 per cent over the year to June.

I don't expect that telling you you're kidding yourself will make me popular – which, of course, is why the pollies aren't game to tell you, even though they know it's true.

But how on earth can I claim there's no problem with the cost of living when, in this column only last week, I wrote that the retail cost of electricity had more than doubled over the past decade, and was now rising by a further 15 or 20 per cent?

Because electricity bills do not the cost of living make.

Households have to buy a hundred other things apart from power, and it's changes in the combined cost of all those things that determine what's happening to the cost of living.

Trouble is, humans are not good at keeping track of what's happening to all the prices of the 101 things we buy.

We tend to focus hard on some price changes, while ignoring loads of others. Which ones do we focus on? The ones that are rising rapidly, of course.

Which ones do we ignore? The ones that don't change much. We even fail to notice or remember for long the prices that are falling.

Nothing's better suited to misleading us than bills for water, gas or electricity. They tend to come only once a quarter, which makes them a large dollar figure.

When they're a lot higher this quarter than they were last – and when we struggle to find the money to pay them – we're left convinced the cost of living is out of control.

Actually, it says we could be better at budgeting – could hold more spare cash aside for unexpected bills. But it's easier for us to shift the blame to someone else – the gov'ment, for instance.

All this subjectivity is why we get a reasonably realistic picture of changes in the cost of living only by accepting what we're told by the people whose job it is to keep a careful record of price changes, the Australian Bureau Statistics, with its consumer price index.

The index measures changes in the prices of a fixed basket of goods and services bought by households in the eight capital cities. The bureau conducts a detailed survey every six years to ensure the items in the basket reflect changes in our purchasing habits.

The basket includes 87 different classes of expenditure, covering – as we'll see – far more than just the things we buy in supermarkets. The bureau checks about 100,000 individual prices every quarter, across the eight capitals, mainly by having its workers go into shops to see for themselves, or by contacting service providers.

It tries to get the actual prices people are paying, and to adjust for changes in quality and quantity (such as when a producer reduces the size of a tin or package without reducing the price commensurately).

The index confirms that, over the decade to June, the price of electricity rose by 116 per cent, while the combined price of all the goods and services in the basket rose by just 26 per cent.

How is that possible? Because most prices rose by far less than electricity did, some prices actually fell, and – get this – electricity accounts for less than 2 per cent of the cost of all the many things we buy. (For age pensioners, it's 3.4 per cent.)

Let's look closely at that 1.9 per cent rise in consumer prices over the year to June. It includes a 7.8 per cent rise in electricity prices.

But food prices (accounting for 17 per cent of the total cost of the basket) rose 1.9 per cent, alcohol and tobacco prices by 5.9 per cent, clothing and footwear prices fell by 1.9 per cent, housing costs rose 2.4 per cent, while prices for furnishings and household equipment and services were unchanged.

Out-of-pocket health costs rose 3.8 per cent, transport costs rose 2.1 per cent, communication costs (mainly phones) fell 3.8 per cent, recreation costs (mainly audio, visual and computer costs) fell 0.1 per cent, education costs (mainly private school and uni fees) rose 3.3 per cent, and the cost of insurance and financial services rose 2.1 per cent.

This means prices fell for categories worth 17 per cent of the total cost of the basket and were unchanged for a category worth 9 per cent of the basket.

The truth so many people can't see is not that the cost of living – consumer prices – has been rising rapidly, but that wages are only just keeping up with prices.

Over the four years to March, consumer prices rose by 8.3 per cent, whereas the index for wage rates rose by an unusually weak 9.2 per cent.

What's really making us dissatisfied is not that the cost of living is rising rapidly, but that our wages haven't been rising by the 1 per cent or so per year faster than prices that we're used to, thus preventing us from increasing our standard of living.

That is, our ability to buy a bit more stuff than we bought last year.

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Why wage growth will strengthen before long

It's become deeply unfashionable to presume any of the present weakness in wage growth is merely cyclical (and thus temporary) rather than structural (and thus lasting). Sorry, my years of economy-watching tell me it's never that simple.

It's the mark of an amateur – a journalist who prefers sexy stories to boring stories that are more likely to be true; a youngster who believes all they're told on social media – to believe the established patterns of the past have no bearing on the present.

Note, I'm not denying the likelihood that a significant part of the problem may arise from deep, structural causes requiring correction by judicious government intervention.

What I'm saying is it's far too soon to conclude no part of the weakness is temporary. We'll know the truth of the matter only with hindsight.

We know the importance of "confidence" in driving the business cycle, but it doesn't just apply to businesses and consumers. It also applies to workers negotiating pay rises.

There's a chance that, with all the union movement's exaggerated talk of an ever-rising tide of "precarious employment", organised labour has spooked itself into accepting lower pay rises than it needs to.

As Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe keeps hinting, one day workers will decide to contest bosses' claims that they couldn't possibly afford more than a 2 per cent pay rise.

For another thing, it's surprising the wage-rise pessimists have failed to take heart from the Fair Work Commission's decision in June to raise not just the national minimum wage, but the whole structure of award minimums, by 3.3 per cent.

This compares with a rise last year of just 2.4 per cent.

It's true that only about a quarter of employees are directly affected by this decision, but many more are affected indirectly because the "individual arrangements" by which their wages are set consist merely of a set margin above their award rate.

And why would the supposedly more industrially powerful workers on enterprise agreements settle for another 2 per cent rise when, all around them, weaker workers were getting 3.3 per cent?

But there's a more technical argument that a period of weak wage growth was just what was needed as part of our transition from the decade-long resources boom. With that transition close to completed, it shouldn't be long before wage growth strengthens.

As Professor Ross Garnaut warned in 2013 in his book, Dog Days, the big fall in the nominal exchange rate that (eventually) followed the collapse in mining commodity prices wasn't all that was needed to restore the international price competitiveness of our export and import-competing industries.

We also needed the nominal depreciation to become a "real" depreciation, with the costs faced by Australian firms rising much more slowly than the average of costs faced by firms in our major trading partners' economies.

Garnaut doubted we could achieve the high degree of wage restraint need to make the depreciation stick but, as former top econocrat Dr Mike Keating pointed out in a recent blog post, that's just what's happened.

Keating says you'd expect that, over the medium to longer term, real wages, the productivity of labour and "real net national disposable income" per person (a version of gross domestic product that's adjusted for swings in our terms of trade) would each grow by about the same amount.

Between 2002 and 2012, the period of the resources boom, real wages grew faster than productivity, though by less than the strong growth in the real national income measure.

But Keating notes that, following the 2012 peak in the resources boom, these relationships were reversed, with real national income actually falling between 2012 and 2016. Real wages then needed to rise by less than productivity, which is just what's happened.

"My judgement is that equilibrium between productivity, [real] wages and real net national disposable income per person has now been restored," Keating concludes – implying there's now scope for real wages to grow in line with improvements in productivity.

This fits with the Reserve Bank's conclusion in its May statement on monetary policy that, as measured by comparing our "nominal unit labour costs" (nominal wage growth versus the change in labour productivity) with those of our trading partners, our real exchange rate has fallen to about its post-float average. This wouldn't have changed much since May.

So there's been a sound economic justification – the need to restore our industries' international price competitiveness – for our weak wage growth over the past three or four years.

But that need has now been satisfied, allowing us to hope for a return to real wage growth.

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