Living costs in many Australian cities rising faster than rest of world
Many Australian capital cities, including Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Hobart, have become more expensive over the past year compared to the rest of the world.
Australia’s most expensive city — Sydney — has risen to number 32 in this year’s Cost of Living Index, compiled by price aggregation website Numbeo.com. It is up from 41 last year.
Melbourne rose to 64, up from 77, while Adelaide, Cairns, Hobart and Canberra also moved up the list to 58, 69, 82 and 103 respectively.
Only Perth (56), Darwin (68) and Brisbane (93) have become more affordable.
The UNSW Business School’s Professor Kristy Muir, chief of the Centre for Social Impact, said although we have had a “couple of decades of the strongest growth in GDP” and are seeing low inflation rates around the country, “day to day this doesn’t reflect individuals’ household living expenses”.
They’re really struggling with their housing repayments, they’re struggling with their living expenses, and they’re struggling to basically meet debts and to cover the general costs of living,” she said.
“The cost of living for people on welfare is particularly challenging because you have a limited amount of income coming in, and yet your expenses have increased.
“Housing has gone up, whether you’re paying rent or whether you’re paying mortgages.
“The amount of money people are spending on housing has gone up relative to increases in wages or wage growth.”
But Professor Muir said it was important to realise that not all of those who live in poverty were unemployed.
“One in three people who are living in poverty actually have wages, so we have challenges not just about how we make sure people have jobs, but we also want people to have stable jobs,” she said.
“We want them to have jobs that are secure, and we need them to be able to get the amount of hours to be able to work to cover their living costs.”
Switzerland dominates top 10
The top 10 most expensive countries has remained largely unchanged over the past 12 months, with Hamilton in Bermuda hanging onto the top spot and Swiss cities including Zurich, Geneva, Basel and Bern dominating the top 10.
New York came in at number 14, with Tokyo at 21 and Paris at 23.
At 42 on the list was London, which again ranked more affordable than Sydney.
The index, which uses New York prices as a benchmark, showed the cost of living in Hamilton was 145 per cent of New York’s, while in Sydney it was 91 per cent and in London it was 89 per cent.
While Sydney ranked 32 in the list of most expensive cities overall, it was the 16th most expensive city in terms of rent.
A one-bedroom, city centre apartment costs the equivalent of $3,881 a month in New York, $2,876 in London and $2,618 in Sydney.
Nationally, the Numbeo report found costs like groceries, rent and restaurant prices were most expensive in Sydney and Darwin, while cities like Hobart, Cairns and the Gold Coast had some of the cheapest.
