Chris Richardson

And because we're not becoming more prosperous at the same rate that we used to do, we are getting grumpier with each other.

You're seeing fights over the pie, again, a very dominant part of this budget.

And you are seeing everything from social media to our voting patterns

We are grumpier with each other.

And it does worry me.

I actually like a bunch of things in the budget, but it worries me

that it hasn't done enough to break us out of that low prosperity trajectory, which means we may stay stuck fighting over fairness.

And that's not a great place to be.

I just use basic numbers coming out of the Bureau of Stats, the exact same numbers used in the exact same way by the OECD.

They look across a bunch of countries.

What you are doing is taking your total income from everything, from wages, salaries, dividend, interest, profits, however you're getting them, rent, taking out two big things to make it disposable income.

One is personal tax.

The other is interest payments.

and then inflation adjusting it over time, putting it on a per head basis.

And at least at the index level, you can then compare across countries as well as across time.

In economics, there is one...

truly great one-liner.

The Nobel laureate Paul Krugman once said, productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything.

Australia stopped getting better at doing stuff about a decade ago.

And when that happens, your living standards don't increase.