A study that surveyed the same Australian households every year for the last two decades has found economic inequality is at a 20-year-high.
The HILDA survey, released by the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne Institute on Thursday, has been running since 2001 and surveys about 20,000 residents across more than 9,000 households.
It collects information about family relationships, childcare arrangements, employment, education, income, health, wellbeing and even pet ownership to determine how Australian life has changed.
The annual survey has run between 2001 and 2022, and the latest release examines how home ownership has changed and what Australian families have looked like over the last 20 years.
A peek inside Australian households
A couple with dependent children remains the most common household type, while a household containing a couple with no children is the second most common.
Single-parent households are becoming less common, and researchers say this is likely because of economic challenges from the last five years.
The report also found single parents have experienced a 76 per cent increase in childcare costs per child since 2006, compared with a 48 per cent increase for couples.
“The average number of hours of paid child care per week has increased in all age groups over the period,” it says.
Researchers say while families are using child care more frequently, it often does not impact the division of domestic labour in home life.
The study instead found that Australian men were doing the same amount of work around the house — 12.8 hours a week — as they were in 2002.
Report author Dr Inga Lass says the results ring true across most surveyed Australian households.
“We found that women take over a greater share of housework and care than their male partner in almost every employment scenario,” she says.
“The survey also allows us to see that men are overall more satisfied than women are with the current division of unpaid work around the house.”
Spending over the last 20 years has also changed.
“Due to cost-of-living pressures in 2022 on expenditure patterns, we see large increases in mean expenditure on motor vehicle fuel and mortgage repayments, consistent with growth in fuel prices and interest rates in 2022,” the report says.
The items that had the biggest declines in expenditure included tobacco, education, alcohol, telephone and internet, car repairs and children’s clothing.
Spending on groceries, insurance and health care stayed relatively steady but also declined.
Debt also remains steady across a number of categories.
The report says there was a fall in home ownership between 2002 and 2018, but home debt across all households rose in a “sustained fashion” regardless.
“However, between 2018 and 2022, despite the slight rise in home ownership, mean debt actually fell slightly to $138,726,” the report says.
“The increase in inflation in 2022 is likely to be the main driver of this decline.”
The report was funded by the Department of Social Services and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.
