Day: February 28, 2026

Introduction Income inequality is now of central concern in Australian economic and social policy debates. Since the 1970s, Australia has transitioned from a highly regulated labour market with strong wage compression to a more flexible, globalised economy (Leigh 2013). These structural changes have influenced the distribution of income, with inequality rising over time before plateauing in the 2010s. To document these changes and account for breaks in ABS data it was necessary to construct a data set from the available