Australia’s cost-of-living crisis isn’t about the price of groceries. It’s about wealth distribution

‘Australian workers would be better served by a gradual reduction in inflation, without real wage cuts, as was achieved in the 1980s,’ writes John Quiggin. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The policy debate about the cost of living is among the most confused and confusing in recent memory. All sorts of measures to reduce the cost of living are proposed, then criticised as being potentially inflationary. The argument implies, absurdly, that reducing the cost of living will increase the cost of living.

The issue here is that the “cost of living” is an essentially meaningless concept, rather like the sound of one hand clapping. The problem isn’t the cost of buying goods, but whether our income is sufficient to pay for those goods. For most of us, that means the real (inflation-adjusted) value of our wages, after paying tax and (for homebuyers) mortgage interest.