New statistics released this week confirm that the Albanian Labor government and its union partners are continuing to deepen the biggest cut in working class living conditions since at least the 1950s.

The continued decline of almost 10%, which officially began under the previous Liberal-National coalition government, further exposes the fraud of Labour’s May 2022 pledge of a “better future”.

An analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data showed that the cost of living crisis hit households, on average, twice as hard as the devastating recessions of 1990–91 and 1982–83, and significantly harder than in any other period . back in 1959.

A “living standards index”, based on ABS data that measures gross disposable income divided by final household consumption and population figures, first started to fall in September 2021 under the Morrison Coalition government, but continued to fall under Labor.

This data, titled as an “exclusive” report in Australian today, in fact, it masks the deeper and ongoing pain caused by working-class households.

That World Socialist Web Site pointed out last week, such average results, which cover all households, mask the disproportionate impact of mortgage payments – which have risen by 155 per cent since May 2022 – and the still-rising prices of rents and services. They affect lower paid workers and young people the most.

In the past year alone, the cost of living for “household employees” in the ABS has risen by 4.7%. But in the September quarter, average wages rose at an annual rate of just 3.5 percent, down from 4.1 percent in the June quarter.

This was the biggest quarterly decline in nominal wage growth since the global financial crisis of 2009. This is primarily because union apparatuses have stepped up their efforts to force workers in both the public and private sectors to accept wage agreements below inflation.

As measured by the ABS Consumer Price Index (CPI), rents rose by 6.7% in the year to September, health costs by 4.8%, education spending by 6.4% and insurance premiums by by 14%. CPI doesn’t even count mortgage costs.