The Australian government just released the 2026 report of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee.

The committee was asked to explore ways to reduce barriers to economic inclusion for people who experience severe disadvantage. A crucial part of this task is to identify who are the most disadvantaged groups in Australia.

Disadvantage is a concept that goes beyond income poverty to encompass people’s outcomes, including deprivation and social exclusion.

So what does disadvantage look like in Australia today?

The most comprehensive study of Australian disadvantage is the Productivity Commission’s 2013 report.

That report detailed approaches to measuring social and economic disadvantage between 2001 and 2010.

The Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee’s report draws on this framework, but updates its findings using 24 years of data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.

The report looks at disadvantage using a range of metrics.

Income poverty is a measure based on the resources available to households – how much money households have coming in compared to a “poverty line”. People are said to be in poverty when their resources are below this line.

Using a poverty line set at half Australian median income before housing costs, poverty increased from 11.4% of the households in 2010 to 14.2% in 2022, then fell to 12.6% in 2024.

Half of all public housing tenants and 38% of people receiving income support payments were in income poverty in 2022.

Read more: We can’t fix what we don’t track. That’s why Australia needs an official poverty measure

The deprivation approach seeks to measure the outcomes of inadequate resources. These are measured as the extent to which people are missing out on purchasable items, activities or services........

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