Research

Australian taxpayers have been overcompensated for bracket creep and there is no need for further income tax cuts to reduce its effects. The government uses bracket creep to justify the income tax plan outlined in the 2018 Budget. The government claims that bracket creep is having a negative impact on the economy and income tax needs to be cut, particularly for those on high incomes. Our analysis of the long term impacts of bracket creep shows th...

Inequality is getting worse in Australia with the income share of the top 10% growing at the expense of everyone else.On Monday 18 June, The Australia Institute, Australia21 and the former Treasurer, the Hon Wayne Swan MP, jointly hosted a roundtable discussion in Parliament House on dealing with economic inequality in Australia. The report was released as part of the Inequality Roundtable and shows inequality is getting worse in Australia w...

While Australia debates how to reach our Paris Agreement targets, wider issues such as whether these targets are appropriate and how they might need to be adjusted in the future are receiving scant attention. Australia’s current 2030 emissions reduction target is for a 26-28 percent reduction on 2005 levels. The Australian Labor Party has said that it would adopt a 2030 target of 45 percent below 2005 levels.  In the context of the global ca...

The analysis looks at the average change in disposable household income compared to the average change for the whole of Australia in 2024–25, which is the first year the income tax cuts would be fully implemented.The biggest winners from the tax cut are wealthy electorates in Sydney and Melbourne. As shown in Table 1, the top 10 electorates all come from these cities. The average household in any of the top 10 electorates would get at least 50% m...

The Australia Institute routinely polls a representative sample of the Australian population on a variety of issues, including how they intend to vote at the next election. While other pollsters only ask about House of Representatives voting intention, our polling also asks specifically about Senate voting intention.In this new report series, to be released quarterly, we will present and analyse the results of these Senate voting intention polls...

This factbook reviews eleven different dimensions of job security in Australia, and documents a clear and multi-faceted deterioration in the overall stability of work in the period from 2012 (the peak of the resources investment boom) to the present.

In the 2018 Budget, the government announced a radical plan to reshape the income tax system over the next seven years. While the first stage of the plan largely involves tax refunds for low and middle income earners, stage two and three would remove the 37 per cent tax bracket – and, as a consequence, flatten Australia’s tax system.[DOWNLOAD FULL RESEARCH BELOW]Part of stage two and all of stage three would increase the 32.5 per cent tax thresho...