Thousands of families have been tracked for the last 23 years to create rich data on life in Australia — and the latest findings are not great.
Tax rates are the highest they’ve been in decades, people are retiring later, our bodies are in more pain, fertility rates have dropped, and we have less friends.
That grim snapshot of Australian life comes from participants of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.
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The 17,000 survey participants voluntarily signed up to the lifelong task in 2001, to give important data on how an intersection of factors impact life for Australians.
This year, the 20th report on the surveyed households shows they are paying more tax on average than they have since the HILDA Survey was launched in 2001.
There were no policy changes to tax brackets between the latest survey and the one before, so the survey findings suggest “bracket creep” caused by nominal wage growth.
“Normally, wage growth is good for workers’ living standards, but prices were also rising rapidly, so bracket creep contributed to a decline in workers’ living standards in this period,” report co-author Melbourne University Professor Roger Wilkins said.
Physical pain is also a record high for the cohort.
One of the key findings from the latest survey also shows how physical pain is disproportionately affecting people from low-income households.
Bodily pain rose by about 5.1 per cent for men and 11.6 per cent for women, since the survey first began in 2001.
While the ageing of the participants can account for some of this change, data adjusted for age still showed that pain increased by 4.8 per cent for men, and 5.6 per cent for women.
“People from lower income households or without a Bachelor’s degree are more likely to report experiencing bodily pain. The less money you make, the more pain you’re likely putting up with,” co-author and Melbourne University senior research fellow Dr Ferdi Botha said.
Not only did the report show that pain affected the work of the survey participants, but also that they were remaining in the workforce for longer.
Workers retiring between the age of 60 and 64 dropped hugely in the last decade, from 70 per cent down to 41 per cent for women, and from 49 per cent down to 27 per cent for men.
In the next age bracket — workers aged 65 to 69 — the numbers also dropped, from 86 per cent down to 66 per cent for women, and from 73 per cent down to 61 per cent for men.
Another report co-author Dr Kyle Peyton noted the increased age limit pension eligibility could be behind the later retirements, as well as other policy changes.
“At the same time, improvements in health at older ages mean that more people are physically able to keep working later in life,” Peyton said.
Australia is at risk of a further decline in fertility rates, with respondents reporting they want fewer children and smaller families compared to 20 years ago, according to the study.
In an Australian first, the average number of children desired by men has fallen below two, from 2.22 in 2005 to 1.99 in 2023.
Women on average desire slightly more children than men, but the decline was just as marked – from 2.35 down to 2.09.
This decrease is particularly prominent in younger age groups.
“As it was twenty years ago, two children is still the most desired family size, but we’ve seen an increase in the numbers of people who said they wanted one child, or none at all,” said Dr Inga Lass.
Australians also haven’t dived back in to making friends post COVID-19, with the majority of us having less friends statistically than in the early 2000s.
On a scale of 1–7 measuring a perceived quantity of friends, the 2001 average for the total population was 4.6.
By 2023, this had dropped to 4.1, a low reached during the pandemic without recovery in the years following.
“Not only do we feel like we have fewer friends, we’re also socialising less frequently than in 2001,” Lass said.
“The proportion of people meeting friends or relatives several times a week or more often dropped by more than 12 percentage points, from about 32% to 20%.”
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