Cost of living: A key election issue for Australians

The cost of living will be a key election issue when Australians head to the polls.

Australia is often named among the most expensive places to live in the world, and many people are being squeezed at the margins.

But many researchers say data shows we have never had it so good and that in real terms, many Australians are taking home more money than ever before.

The ABC has spoken to a student, a pensioner and a family of four to find out their views on the cost of living in Australia.

The student

Sarah McElholum, 24, works full-time at a bottle shop. In the evenings, she is studying a double masters degree.

She is based in Melbourne and lives in the inner-city suburb of Richmond.

Ms McElholum spends about half of her monthly allowance on rent and bills and uses public transport to get to work and university every day.

She says the cost of public transport is far too high.

"Because I'm a masters student I don't get full concession rates, so I pay full rates for the transport which is $7 a day, and I use it every day so it comes to quite a lot," she said.

"I think public transport needs to be looked into for people living in the inner-city because they are the ones using it every single day.

"It needs to be cheaper, because overseas it's a lot cheaper."

Ms McElholum lives in a rundown terrace in Richmond, which she shares with two other people.

She pays about $180 per week to live there, and says the cost of rent is "ridiculous".

"I think when I was living in Prahran (a nearby suburb) I was paying a very similar amount for a much smaller house," she said.

"It got to the point where it was just so expensive that - bills on top - you were just living month-by-month.

"I wasn't saving anything while I was there.

"Most people earn under what I earn so it's definitely excessive.

"They need to look into rent prices in the inner-city. If they want people to get off the road, they want people to work and live closer to the city and to use public transport, rent is ridiculous."

The pensioner

Retired painter and decorator Jack Pool is 81 years old and lives in the Brisbane suburb of Stafford.

He was married for 53 years before his wife died four years ago.

Mr Pool is the president of the Stafford Meals on Wheels service.

He is on the aged pension and receives about $800 a fortnight but has no superannuation.

"If you're careful you can live on it," Mr Pool said.

"It doesn't allow you to relax by going on a holiday once every couple of years, it's adequate provided you don't want to do those things.

"But we all need a break, even if you sit at home all the time you need a break, you need to get out of the four walls and go to the movies and things like that to communicate with people.

"When I was working, there was enough to make ends meet, we were able to go on holidays with the family.

"I've got four children and we were able to have a holiday every 12 months.

"In some cases before I became a sales manager, being a painter by trade, I used to go and work on Saturdays and Sundays to get a little bit of extra money so that the children could get a little bit more.

"Going from that to the pension was pretty hard in the first place because of superannuation, lack of, and then when my wife passed away it became a little bit harder.

"I do all my own housework because I can't afford to get anyone to come in and clean the house and I do the yard."

He says the cost of living is high and pensioners need more help financially.

"I think that we pensioners need more assistance generally from other organisations or other governments," he said.

"It's all the expenses with gas, electricity, food, generally right through the whole thing, it's gone up drastically."

Mr Pool says he is living as cheaply as he can.

"I cut corners pretty good, being where I am here at Meals on Wheels and seeing how a lot of the other people are living against what I'm doing," he said.

"I'd find it very very difficult to cut back on anything because I don't do anything that costs money.

"Probably about once every two or three months I'll go out and buy myself some dinner, when I get tired of cooking for myself."

He says he is not saving money because he has had to have two eye operations in the past few months.

"When you pay for those it's very hard to try and get some money," he said.

Mr Pool's 41-year-old son lives with him and does contribute to some bills.

"He will give me money if I want it, but I don't like doing that with my children because I need to live on what I get," Mr Pool said.

But Mr Pool says he believes there are many Australians who underestimate how well they are doing.

"There's a lot of Australians that are pretty well off, that say they're struggling but next thing they're telling you 'we're going on our second overseas trip for this year'.

"This is a really good question - could (these people) do better by doing more, helping people and the community instead of using their money to go overseas all the time?

"I think it's something they should sit down and take a good look at themselves and see what they could do."

The family

The Bell family lives at Alkimos, 40 kilometres outside Perth.

Marnie Bell is a library officer who works two days a week and her husband Simon is a teacher.

"About 40 per cent goes on the mortgage, and then normally not too far behind that is probably groceries, daycare costs a fair chunk - that's probably at least 10 to 20 per cent, and at the end after we've paid the electricity bill and that sort of stuff if anything unexpected pops up, you haven't got much left over," Mr Bell said.

Ms Bell says she has to work to supplement her husband's income, and after tax they make between $80,000 to $90,000 a year.

"I do like working but it is very hard trying to combine that with having young ones," she said.

"Sometimes at the end of the day, by the time you pay your day care, you're not really much better off.

"So we actually looked at whether I was better off not working and what sort of family assistance we'd get, because at the moment we don't qualify with our combined incomes even though I only work two days a week.

"I do enjoy it because it's a good balance, but I do find it very difficult and there's some days I just think it would be so much easier if I could just focus on looking after the kids and being a mum rather than trying to balance everything.

"At the end of the day, even though a big chunk of it (the money) goes to daycare, we still come out ahead."

The Bells say the family does not go out very often.

"We were just talking about that the other day, even going to the movies, by the time you get your ticket and popcorn and all that you can easily spend $60 or whatever and you've just gone to see a movie," Ms Bell said.

"We try and do stuff that doesn't cost too much, because if we do then we pay for it later on because we might not be able to make ends meet when the bills come in." 

Ms Bell says people have high expectations for their standard of living.

"I think as a whole yeah, people expect to have everything, they want to have the house, the car, the holidays, the latest iPhone all that sort of stuff," she said.

"I think as a society you think that's what people expect but I think in reality it is probably a small proportion of people that really do go and get all that sort of stuff." 

Cost of living: What researchers say  

A cross-section of economic data points to the overall cost of living in Australia growing at a much slower pace than wages.

It concludes households are better off than 10 years ago because their income rose faster than the cost of living over that period. 

INFOGRAPHIC: Household expenses 2002-2012 
(Roy Morgan)

Ben Phillips from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) has looked at the cost of living over the past decade.

"Australian households are really doing exceptionally well," he said.

"What we found over the past decade, is that Australian households are ahead of their cost of living on an average by about $225 per week, so this is a substantially strong result for Australian households.

"And we find this result holds for both high-income households and also low-income households, so they've all had very strong increases in their incomes relative to their cost of living or prices in the economy."

Mr Phillips says there is a range of perceptions on whether or not we are doing well as a nation.

"I think overall we do get told very much on a daily basis by politicians and by the media that times have never been tougher, but the evidence would certainly not really back that up," he said.

"We also hear that electricity prices are very high, that petrol prices are high, and to some extent this is certainly true.

"There is an element of bill shock that comes every quarter with opening up the quarterly electricity bill or gas bill.

"So we do have issues around, but we seem to not reflect enough on where our incomes are and where they were in the past.

"We've seen household income growing by around 5 or 6 per cent annually for many years now, whereas we've had inflation growing by only 2 to 3 per cent over the past 10 or 20 years.

"Overall we've been creeping ahead of our costs, so as a result of that households are really a long way ahead of their cost of living which is quite different to what the rhetoric is that we hear."

The NATSEM research compared economic data from 2003 to 2009/2010.

The cost of housing

An Australian home now costs about seven times the average household income - that is up from four times an average household income in 1996.

Ms McElholum says owning a home is a pipedream for her generation.

"We're going to have a lot of people that are owning houses that have three or four homes who are going into that market because they're earning money and getting a lot more profit on it," she said.

"A lot of my friends say that they think 'I'll never own a house, I'll never be a home owner, it's too expensive'." 

She says governments need to think about planning strategies for housing, especially in cities.

"There's not enough desired housing in the city, so a lot of people in my age group don't really want to look at apartments because they want space," she said.

"It's not just that, they want to play music and if you look at the city all the apartments they're making now they don't have soundproofing.

A lot of my friends say that they think 'I'll never own a house, I'll never be a home owner, it's too expensive'.

Sarah McElholum

"You're so close, paper-thin walls to next door, you can't be a young person and have neighbours that are that close because obviously they get noise complaints, you get issues like that.

"In my old place, that was definitely a problem.

"My neighbours were an elderly couple and they would call the cops at 9.00pm on a Saturday night.

"There's just two different worlds there and in an apartment, you're just that much closer."

Mr Pool is glad he owns his own home.

"One thing that helps me is that I own my own home and I own my own car," he said.

"But being with Meals on Wheels, I find that a lot of our clients who don't have that are really suffering because the pension is definitely not enough for them to even feed themselves properly."

Ms Bell says buying a home in the city has proved difficult.

"I was able to buy a duplex about eight years ago just before the boom, so that was great.

"But when it came time to sell, even though I made money on that, we then also bought in the boom and when we went to sell that one we actually lost money.

"I've got some older friends who just happened to have a house in the right place, it seems to be for Perth the price goes by location so the closer you are to Perth it doesn't matter the condition of the house, it's more the land.

"So people just happened to have a place that when they bought it, it wasn't that much and they obviously made a lot of money on those and that's how they've done okay.

"Wages have definitely gone up, but [housing prices] went up way more than what wages did, and then sort of dropped right down so a lot of people struggled in that way.

"When they were trying to sell they lost money that way.

"This is why we live 40 kilometres from Perth and people go on and on about us living so far away but we could not afford anywhere near Perth."

Ref: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-08/cost-of-living-weighs-on-minds-of-australians/4804728?section=business