This paper provides an overview of staff and staffing costs for federal regulatory bodies and agencies across the 2025 and 2026 financial years. It finds there have been significant increases over the past few financial years. It forecasts that in 2026 over half the federal government workforce will be engaged in regulatory activity.

The paper presents data on six measures of living standards: mortgage stress, disposable income, the number of Australians with more than one job, household price levels, tax burden and debt burden. It finds that price level rises in various household goods and services all exceeded wages growth between 2022 and 2024.

An economic scorecard that assesses the performance of each Australian state and ranks them across 10 key economic measures. Charts and tables are presented for each measure. The scorecard finds that Queensland is the overall best preforming state and New South Wales is the worst overall performing state.

This report examines trends in the Australian labour market, specifically comparing employment growth in the public and private sectors from 2014 to 2024. It finds that public sector jobs make up an increasing share of the total workforce, with the vast majority of new jobs post-Covid in the public sector.

This paper highlights the important relationship between microeconomic conditions and macroeconomic performance, and how business conditions flow on to affect overall economic performance. Twelve key metrics are established to develop an overall ease of doing business score. The twelve metrics are state government policies or state-level indicators that influence or determine a business’ ability to...