Australian businesses benefited from rising prices. Workers? Not so much

The huge rise in mineral prices and relative lack of need to pay for extra workers in the export phase has seen mining profits explode, says Greg Jericho. Photograph: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images

The March quarter GDP figures look quite good, but they hide a massive shift in the economy away from employees and towards companies and profits. A couple of weeks ago when writing about the latest wage figures I noted that while the GDP figures were useful, the problem was “you can’t eat GDP”.

This has never been made more clear than with the March quarter figures which showed strong growth overall, but a shocking result for workers.