Australia used to be good at getting richer. In the ten years to 2012, real national income per head grew by about 2.7 per cent a year. Since then it has grown by 0.7 per cent a year. It fell in the four years after 2012. It has fallen again since 2022. In 2023 real household income per head fell by a record 5.1 per cent. In 2024 the OECD ranked our fall the worst of any of its members.

This was no drought, no war and no foreign crisis. Every major blow was struck by an Australian government. Both sides of politics joined in. Consider the charge sheet.

Start with electricity, taxed in the name of saving the planet. Between 2008 and 2019 the price of electricity paid by manufacturers rose about 70 per cent faster than prices in general. Manufacturing, a tenth of the economy in 2002, had shrunk to 6 per cent by 2019. It is now barely 5 per cent.

Governments then found a trick. Instead of fixing the price, they hid it. Households were given bill rebates. When the rebates ended, retail power prices jumped 22.4 per cent in a single year. Smelters were given rescues. Taxpayers will pay $2.5 billion over ten years to keep the Tomago aluminium smelter alive. Mount Isa’s copper smelter and Nyrstar’s smelters at Hobart and Port Pirie have needed rescues too. Meanwhile, federal subsidies to renewable energy topped $29 billion in the decade to 2022–23.

A subsidy does not make power cheap. It simply sends the bill to a different address. Australians pay it twice, once at the meter and again at tax time.

Next, governments locked up the resources that made us rich. Mining built modern Australia. They have spent a decade making sure it cannot do so again. In 2012, Victoria imposed a moratorium on onshore gas exploration. In 2017, it banned fracking by law. Victorian petroleum exploration fell from $234 million in 2002 to as little as $17 million a year.

Offshore, Canberra has done the same job more quietly. Real spending on offshore oil and gas exploration has fallen about 85 per cent from its peak. More than 50 offshore exploration wells were drilled in 2010. Three were drilled in 2023. In December 2022, Canberra capped the price of gas. In the year to mid-2023, real gas prices paid by manufacturers rose about 45 per cent anyway.

Apologists blame the oil price. Norway faces the same oil price. It drilled about 50 exploration wells a year in 2024 and 2025. The difference is not geology or price. It is permission. The Minerals Council says a new Australian mine takes 16 years on average to develop. The Dubbo rare earths project took 20 years just to be approved. Investors will not wait that long.

Now the courts have joined in. On 7 October, the High Court upheld the ruling that halted the expansion of the Mount Pleasant coal mine in the Hunter Valley. New South Wales approvers must now weigh the emissions from burning our coal in China or India. Coal burnt abroad has become an Australian miner’s problem. Asian buyers will simply buy elsewhere, and our coal exports will shrink.

The result is plain in the national accounts. Since 2019, mining output has fallen 4 per cent while mining hours have risen 15 per cent. Mining alone explains 84 per cent of the slowdown in private-sector productivity.

Meanwhile, governments hired themselves. When the private economy stalls, they do not shrink. They grow. Health, education and public administration are paid for largely by taxpayers. In 2002, they took 21 per cent of all hours worked. Today, they take 30 per cent. Since 2019, they have soaked up three in every five extra hours worked in Australia.

Their measured output per hour is less than two-thirds of the private sector’s, and it is falling. The statisticians value government output at what it costs. Hire more people and output rises by definition. Strip it out and count only what is sold in markets. Output per head has then fallen almost half a per cent a year since 2022.

The rule-makers have done best of all. Employment in public administration and regulatory services, excluding defence, has grown 3.7 per cent a year since 2018. That is nearly twice as fast as jobs in general. Their output is paperwork, delay and compliance cost, and someone in the productive economy has to absorb it.

Then they imported a population and forgot the capital. Net overseas migration hit a record 556,000 in the year to September 2023. In that period the population grew 2.4 per cent a year and the economy 1.75 per cent. Australia had a per capita recession and called it growth. Each Australian’s share shrank.

Business investment fell from 17 per cent of GDP in 2012 to about 12 per cent. Growth in the business capital stock halved after 2019. More people arrived. Fewer machines were bought. Output per hour worked is now lower than it was in 2022.

Finally, inflation picked our pockets. It pushed interest rates up. Household interest payments doubled from 3.1 per cent of gross income to 6.5 per cent in two years. Inflation also dragged wages into higher tax brackets. Income tax rose from 14.3 to 15.9 per cent of household income without a single vote in Parliament. The OECD named higher interest and tax as the immediate causes of our record fall. It did not need to name the governments behind them.

Australians worked more hours, not fewer. They emptied their savings to keep living. The household saving ratio fell from almost 13 per cent to 3.4 per cent. That cushion is now gone.

The verdict is plain. Wealth is created by people who build, dig, make and sell. For more than a decade, governments have made each of those things harder and more costly. They have rewarded the activities that consume wealth and taxed the ones that create it.

The remedy is not complicated. Price energy honestly. Approve good projects in years, not decades. Stop hiring regulators faster than the economy grows. Set migration at the pace that capital and housing can absorb. Index tax brackets so inflation cannot raise taxes by stealth.

Governments of every stripe will say this is too hard. Ordinary Australians have just shown them what hard looks like.