The Nominal Illusion
Almost two million taxable individuals — 1,988,380, across 83 of Australia’s 531 local government areas with full income-history coverage and at least 500 taxable individuals — live somewhere that a decade of income tax returns shows growth. In every one of those 83 LGAs, none of that growth, in real terms, actually happened.
Between the 2013–14 and 2023–24 income years, median taxable income in these LGAs rose in nominal dollar terms — by anywhere from a fraction of a per cent to nearly 30 per cent. Over the same period, cumulative CPI rose 30.3 per cent (ABS 6401.0). Once that’s accounted for, every one of these 83 LGAs shows flat-to-negative real income growth. Figures are approximate LGA-level medians, population-weighted from ATO postcode data via the APN-derived Mesh Block correspondence; they are not ATO-published LGA medians.
A bigger number on a tax return isn’t the same thing as more buying power, if prices rose faster than income did. That’s the entire mechanism here — no more complicated than that. The pattern below is what happens when a decade of nominal wage movement is read, at a glance, as a decade of getting ahead.
The Scale Case
This isn’t confined to small or shrinking places. Wyndham (WA), Stirling, Cumberland, and Melbourne — four of the most populous LGAs in the country — all appear on the list. Wyndham’s median income rose 28.9 per cent in nominal terms and fell 1.1 per cent in real terms. Melbourne’s rose 16.2 per cent nominal and fell 10.9 per cent real, the steepest real decline of any large-population LGA in the flagged set.
Figure 1. Real income growth (2013–14 to 2023–24) against 2023–24 individuals, all 531 LGAs with complete data. Gold points are the 83 LGAs meeting the flagged criterion (positive nominal growth, flat-to-negative real growth, ≥500 individuals). Correlation between population size and real growth: r = 0.02.
Plotting all 531 LGAs by population against real income growth returns a correlation coefficient of 0.02 — effectively no relationship. Large and small LGAs are equally likely to show this pattern (correlation is not causation, and this reading applies only to the association between population size and real growth, not to any other factor). It is not a big-city story, and it is not a small-town story; it is a story about the gap between a nominal figure and a deflated one, and that gap doesn’t discriminate by population size.
The Extreme Case
One LGA in the country shows decline on both measures. Exmouth’s median income fell 2.6 per cent in nominal terms and 25.3 per cent in real terms across the decade — the only LGA where the nominal figure itself went backwards. Exmouth sits below the 500-individual floor applied to the headline 83-LGA figure above, so it is not counted in that total, but it remains the single clearest case in the full 531-LGA dataset.
A Note On What This Excludes
Five LGAs — Gladstone, East Pilbara, Coolgardie, Boddington, and Bruce Rock — show among the steepest real declines in the dataset, all sharing a 2013–14 income base set during the mining investment boom. That’s a distinct pattern worth testing on its own terms, cross-referenced against approvals and construction activity, rather than folded into a measurement-methodology piece. It sits outside the scope of this one.
Close
Eighty-three LGAs, spanning capital-city inner suburbs and remote shires alike, show a decade of nominal income growth that didn’t survive contact with inflation. That’s a measurement gap, not a policy failure and not a forecast — a reminder that “income growth,” reported without a deflator, can describe a number that moved without describing anything that actually improved.
Methodology Note
Median taxable income sourced from ATO Taxation Statistics Table 8, aggregated from postcode to LGA level via Mesh Block correspondence (population-weighted, ABS ASGS Edition 3). This aggregation is a defensible approximation, not a certified ATO-published LGA median — postcode medians are summed, not recalculated, and medians are not strictly additive across sub-populations. Real growth calculated against ABS 6401.0 CPI, All Groups, quarterly, averaged to financial year (cumulative 2013–14 to 2023–24: +30.3%). Coverage: 531 of 547 LGAs have complete 2013–14 and 2023–24 data; ATO Table 8 excludes postcodes with fewer than 200 lodgments in a given year, which disproportionately affects small and remote LGA coverage. The headline figure of 83 LGAs / 1,988,380 individuals applies a 500-individual floor to the 93 LGAs meeting the flat-to-negative real growth criterion across the full 531-LGA dataset, to avoid citing figures drawn from very small underlying populations.
