40 years after Gough, are we better off?

Dear Fellow Members,

The death of Gough Whitlam this week (may he rest in peace), had all of us thinking of different times.

Like many FiftyUps, you may have found yourself rewinding 40 years and reminiscing about how different it was to live in Australia in the mid-1970s.

At the FiftyUp Club, conversation turned to whether we were better off.

In 1974 we were paying 30 cents for a litre of milk.

We were outraged when Federal Treasurer Frank Crean upped the price of a postage stamp from 10 cents to 18 cents.

A loaf of white bread cost 24 cents, and a kilo of rump steak was $3.24.

And petrol was less than 20c/Litre before the 1970s oil shock.

Ah, the good old days, when the average male income was about $150 per week, the age pension was $26 per person and so was the dole.

The average house price in the capital cities was just under $30,000.

Are we better off since the days of Gough as PM?

Today we pay $1.50 on average for a litre of milk – that’s 5 times the 1974 price (and no doubt it’s being kept low by the big supermarket discount wars on milk).

An average loaf of bread is $2.93, which is more than 12 times the 1974 price, despite the supermarket wars.

We hardly use stamps anymore, but they’re 70c – that’s almost four times the 1974 price. But email is much cheaper, fortunately.

Petrol is 8 times the price at an average of $1.50.

The average price of a home in 2014 is about $550,000 – which is 18 times what it was back then!

Overall, the Consumer Price Index calculated by the Australia Bureau of Statistics has risen from 14.7 in 1974 to 105.9 today, which is a little over 7-fold.

But Australians’ average weekly earnings are about $1500, which is 10 times what it was in 1974. The aged pension is now a bit over $400 or about 15 times the 1974 rate.

So theoretically, we should feel better off. Some boffins like this one argue we just spend more and expect more these days. But is it as simple as that? We think not.

We paid upfront for healthcare before Medicare (or Medibank, as it was first called), but we weren’t paying an average private health insurance bill per couple of over $3000 in 1974.

There was no such thing as a broadband bill back then, or a $2000-per-household power bill – as some of us now pay.

Gough was a political locomotive in a hurry to reform Australia by crashing through or crashing. Fortunately there are many positive legacies, and they were affectionately acknowledged by all sides after news of his passing age 98.

As Tony Abbott said yesterday: “Whether you were for him or against him, it was his vision that drove our politics then and which still echoes through our public life four decades on.”

But governments since the 1970s are kidding themselves if they think they’ve done their job by making us all better off since Gough.

As FiftyUps we can be grateful for Medicare, free Education, Women’s Rights and the Rights of our Aborigines.

But we should keep campaigning for governments around Australia to keep one eye on what it costs to live in this wonderful country of ours.