Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am going to go through some of the statistics. We have a very useful table of incomes that splits up income growth over a period of couple of decades right across the OECD. It is a really useful look at how people are doing. This is real growth in income, so it is above inflation. It is people's actual improvement. It is an OECD comparison. The total population of Australia on average saw incomes go up annually in real terms by 3.6 per cent in that time. That compares very well to the rest of the world. We see that the bottom decile went up by three per cent—the average was 3.6 per cent—and the top decile went up by 4.5 per cent. In that case, yes we have seen the top going up more quickly than the bottom. Let us look at some of the examples given to us as the benchmark by witnesses. The benchmark was the Scandinavian countries. We were told that they were the ones we should be seeking to emulate.