Despite being the official measure of price changes, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is not useful for tracking changes in housing costs or rent increases. It does not include land prices or mortgage payments, and significantly underestimates rent increases.

“Priced Out”, the Everybody’s Home Coalition report on rental affordability is based in part on a flawed comparison of low incomes and median rents. This is a silly housing statistic which risks undermining the important advocacy of the report and the campaign.

Media reports that Adelaide rents have surpassed those in Melbourne are based on silly statistics, but the reasons why they are silly reveal a lot about how we (mis)understand (and misuse) basic housing data on rents, rent prices and asking rents.

Marianne Faithfull’s classic song, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, has been critiqued for its attack on the role of a housewife. Yet what is more remarkable is that such critiques have little place in a modern economy – and the question is why? A victory for feminism, or of neoliberalism?

For Anti-Poverty Week 2024, I invented “the Vegemite Curve”, a graph plotting unit prices of an iconic Australian brand to demonstrate a poverty premium and how it costs more to be poor.