Housing and the Mining Boom

At the start of the 2000s Australia was derided by some for being an ‘old economy’. It lacked a substantial information and communications technology sector and was seen to be overly dependent on the extraction of resources, an activity that was not going to be enriching due to the declining relative value of commodities and weak potential productivity gains. However, by the end of the 2000s Australia was once again seen as the Lucky Country, riding on the back of rapidly rising commodity prices and having experienced only mild downturns at the time of the two international recessions that bookended the decade.1 Overall, it was indeed another prosperous decade; the unemployment rate fell and incomes rose strongly. The 2000s was the first decade since Federation in which the annual growth rate of real GDP in Australia remained positive throughout the decade.