Output per person, indexed to 100 at the first full quarter of each government. It is the single most-shared chart in Australian economic politics — and the one that most reliably misleads, because a government climbs higher simply by staying longer. Below it is rebuilt from ABS series A2304404C, and then re-cut so that duration stops doing the talking.
Three things the chart above will not tell you
Each point below is the same series, re-cut so that duration stops doing the talking. The order matters: the first problem creates the second, and the third is only visible once you stop looking at the cumulative line at all.
The index rewards longevity, not performance
A cumulative index only ever adds. Stay in office longer and you finish higher, whatever the rate of growth. Hawke and Keating end highest — but Howard grew faster. The visual ranking and the growth ranking are not the same ranking.
Annualised real GDP per capita growth, % per year across the full term.
Compared at the same age, most of the gap disappears
Albanese is 15 quarters in. Judge every government at its own quarter 15 and Howard and Hawke/Keating are a dead heat, while Fraser, Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison and Rudd/Gillard collapse into one cluster. The dramatic fan of the full chart is substantially an artefact of when each line stops.
Cumulative growth in real GDP per capita by quarter 15 of each term.
The current period is an outlier on a measure the chart never plots
Direction, not distance. Counting the share of quarters in which output per person actually fell gives a duration-free read — and it puts the present somewhere the cumulative line cannot show it.
Share of quarters in which real GDP per capita declined. Longest consecutive run shown at right.
Period, not cause
Output per person is driven far more by the terms of trade, the commodity cycle, global demand, migration and the central bank than by whoever holds the Treasury benches. The COVID collapse and its rebound both sit inside a single term. The 1982–83 and 1990–91 recessions landed where they landed.
Every chart on this page describes what happened while a government held office. None of them establishes what that government caused. Treat the ordering as a description of eras, not a scorecard.
Every government, every number
The full table, so nothing on this page is reachable only by hovering a chart.
Every quarter the ABS publishes
Real GDP per capita — chain volume measures, seasonally adjusted — with the quarter's growth and the index, side by side for every government. Each row is the nth full quarter of a term, so the columns line up and can be compared directly. Scroll sideways for the later governments; nothing is hidden or rounded away.
The 15 quarters this excludes, and why
Two reasons, and only two. A quarter containing a change of government is dropped from both sides — that is the rule the original chart's note states. And the ABS series begins Sep‑1973, part-way through the Whitlam government, which therefore has no first full quarter to index from and cannot appear at all.
How this was built
A quarter counts as a government's own only when it held office for the whole of it — so the quarter containing a change of government is dropped from both series, and each government's index starts at 100 in its first complete quarter. Dates are the day the incoming Prime Minister was sworn in.
Chain volume measures are constant-price dollars per person in the ABS reference year's prices. The ABS re-bases periodically, so dollar levels shift between vintages; everything reported here is index or growth based and survives re-basing.
Colour encodes government identity. Party colouring is available as a toggle rather than the default, because making it the default would assert a causal claim this series cannot support. The palette is validated for colour-vision deficiency and contrast.
This is one series from the AreaSearch Economic Dashboard
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