Australia

01Structure

Australia is a services economy — health, education, finance, professional services — sitting on top of a resource export industry that earns most of the foreign currency. Mining employs a small share of the workforce and produces a large share of national income, which is why Australian output and Australian employment can move in different directions for years at a time.

Iron ore is the single largest asset: Australia supplies more than half of the world's seaborne trade in it, and it is expected to earn about $117 billion in 2026, roughly a quarter of all resource and energy export earnings.¹ LNG and coal follow at around $73 billion and $71 billion.

Those earnings are forecast to decline substantially by the early 2030s as prices normalise — iron ore to about $77 billion in real terms by 2030–31.² The structural question behind every Australian budget is what replaces them.

02Trade and exposure

The export book is concentrated by commodity and by customer at the same time. Iron ore alone accounts for more than fifty-five per cent of everything Australia sells to China by value,¹ and China is the dominant buyer.

Because those exports are priced globally and imports are mostly manufactured goods, Australian national income moves with the terms of trade rather than with export volumes. The index has been far above its long-run average for several years,³ which flatters incomes and government revenue while it lasts.

03Energy and resources

Australia is a large net energy exporter — LNG, thermal and metallurgical coal, uranium — and simultaneously a country whose domestic electricity system is being rebuilt away from the coal it sells. The ageing coal fleet on the east coast is closing, and the replacement is solar, wind, storage and transmission.

The awkwardness of the position is structural rather than temporary: the same resource that earns the export income is the one being retired at home, and the eastern gas market has at times been tight while record volumes were shipped abroad under long-term contracts.

04Labour and demography

Australia's labour force has grown mainly through migration, and the intake has been reduced from its post-pandemic peak: net overseas migration has fallen to about 301,000, more than forty-five per cent below the 2023 peak, with budget projections of 245,000 in 2026–27 and around 225,000 thereafter.⁴

Housing is where that policy meets the economy. A new mortgage now absorbs about forty-seven per cent of median household income and rent about twenty-four per cent, and saving a twenty per cent deposit takes roughly eleven years.⁵ The OECD names housing affordability and productivity growth as the two things that would most support Australian living standards.⁶

05Public finances

Commonwealth debt is moderate by developed-economy standards, helped by years of commodity revenue arriving above forecast. The structural position is weaker than the headline suggests, because that revenue is tied to the prices in section 02 and to a customer whose steel demand is expected to fall.

The other side of the Australian balance sheet is private and large: superannuation assets reached about $4.8 trillion by the June 2026 quarter,⁷ roughly one and a half times GDP. Compulsory retirement saving on that scale makes Australia a substantial exporter of capital and gives its households an asset position that most comparable countries lack.

06Money and prices

The Reserve Bank of Australia sets the rate shown above, targeting inflation of two to three per cent on average over time — a range rather than a point, which is unusual among inflation-targeting central banks and gives it more discretion than most.⁸

Transmission runs through housing. A large share of Australian mortgages are variable-rate, so a change in the cash rate reaches household cash flow almost immediately — faster than in the United States, where thirty-year fixed mortgages insulate borrowers, and faster than in most of Europe.

07What the models expect

These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.

Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 1.41 on real gdp, 0.17 on unemployment rate, 0.29 on central bank policy rate, 5.35 on government debt.

08Structural indicators

The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.

09Sources and method

Live figures: OECD, Bank for International Settlements, OECD via DBnomics. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-12, next review September 2027.

1. Iron ore, LNG and coal export earnings, and the share of exports to China — Resources and Energy Quarterly, June 2026
2. The forecast decline in export earnings to 2030–31 — Department of Industry, Science and Resources
3. Terms of trade relative to their long-run average — Australian Bureau of Statistics
4. Net overseas migration and the budget projections — Minister for Home Affairs
5. Housing affordability measures — IMF assessment, via Mortgage Professional Australia
6. Productivity and housing affordability as the binding constraints — OECD Economic Surveys: Australia 2026
7. Superannuation assets — ASFA superannuation statistics
8. The RBA's target range — Reserve Bank of Australia, Statement on Monetary Policy