How much do household goods cost 50 years apart?
This post from the Australian Made campaign first appeared on Facebook on May 13, 2020. I’m certainly not against buying locally made goods for a whole host of reasons. But I think that the argument portrayed here is one-sided and simplistic. So I thought I’d see if there was any way of proving if there was any validity in this point of view. Was life really better when Australia made a lot more things domestically? When I was a kid, there were more Australian consumer brands across a wider range of goods (and it could be argued this reflected greater economic complexity). And so I thought the best time to go back and look at the product list above would be prior to July 1973, when the tariff wall protecting many Australian industrial sectors started to fall.
I’m not doing this for work, or anything on a professional level, so my prices are going to date from a roughly 2-3 year period . For one thing, with coronavirus, I don’t have access to better sources while the National Library etc are closed to visitors. Secondly, getting even approximate prices for particular goods has required some detective work. While inflation and wage statistics give a good overall picture about price change over time, they don’t offer much by way of specific prices. So, I turned to the digital collections of our various libraries, and discovered that historical newspaper and magazine ads have been the best source of prices. In the process, I’ve had a lot of fun laughing or cringing at the recipes on offer, and the social attitudes of the time.
What I haven’t been able to do is to work out exactly where the various goods named in the post came from at the time. Some were imported, others were made locally, but it’s often not clear from the ads or further research which goods came from which source. As a result, I’m simply going to use the prices as they stand, on the presumption that anything being advertised in the Women’s Weekly or newspapers at that stage must have had a reasonable market share, and thus be reasonably representative.
What I want to do is to look at each product mentioned across four criteria:
1. Where was it likely to have actually been made (as opposed to what’s suggested in the post above). Of course, a lot of the production location will have changed themselves since the 1970's.
2. To record the 1970’s cost of the good (if I can find it)
3. To calculate how long it would take to earn this good in the 1970’s, based upon the average wage figures at the time[1].
4. To calculate how long it would take to earn this good now, based upon the most recent average wage figures.
And the picture below outlines what I found after lots of digging.
Photo of Excel spreadsheet created by me on 17 June 2020.
At least on the basis of what I could find, and as far as the numbers go, Australians are better off now than we were in a closed economy. Having said that, life is not all about numbers.
I hope you found this interesting. If you are curious about this, and you contact me, I’m happy to share my sources and workings with you. Let me know what you think in the comments field below.
[1] https://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/free.nsf/0/220C05BDB79F69FBCA257FD4000DFC11/$File/50_13012%20-Vic%20YrBook-1974_Part_4_Industrial_Employ_Prices.pdf Wage figures taken from Page 175, Part 4, 1974 Victorian Year Book. Using Australian national figure for FY1972/73 for “employed male units”. Source examined 31 May 2020.
