Nearly one in six Australian children are growing up in poverty. This report outlines the current and future impacts of rising rates of financial deprivation on child wellbeing. Key drivers are identified as rising housing and rental costs, slow wage growth compared to living costs, and families on low or fixed incomes falling behind.

This report investigates what drives a gender-balanced workforce – having at least 40% women and 40% men in the workforce. The findings are drawn from a dataset of more than 5.1 million Australian employers. The report makes the case that gender equity is not simply a matter of fairness and sets out a clear agenda...

Conventional productivity measurement frameworks increasingly fall short in recognising emergent drivers of productivity. This paper puts forward an enhanced productivity measurement framework incorporating extra inputs that are both distinct and essential to current and future productivity growth – information and data, care and human services, and artificial intelligence.

Moving to a more authentic and comprehensive measure of productivity means recognising that not all value is immediate, monetised or measurable in output per hour terms. This paper outlines some practical, forward-looking approaches to ensure Australia's productivity framework reflects the true value of service-sector investments and supports better policy decisions in a time of transformation.

This note looks at the evolution of inflation over the last term of government, failures of wage growth to keep up with inflation, and what the major parties proposed in the 2025 federal election campaign to alleviate cost-of-living pressures. It suggests that structural changes are needed to provide long-term relief and to protect consumers from...