Australia leads NZ in 10 of 11 categories

According to the 2025 taskforce's report, Australians have more leisure time than Kiwis. Photo / Getty Images

Australians live longer than we do, in bigger houses, and have more leisure time.

The report of the Don Brash-led taskforce on how to catch up with Australian living standards by 2025 quotes 11 items from everyday life to illustrate how the Aussies do better with their bigger incomes.

It cites only one item where New Zealand does better: McDonald's burger bars. We have 36.9 of them for every million people, compared to 34.9 per million people across the Ditch.

Some of the differences seem small. Australians live, for example, for an average of 81.1 years, just under a year longer than those of us who stay here. We live until we're 80.2.

Others seem of dubious value. The Aussies have more cars, television sets, cellphones and cinemas than us, and drink more alcohol and fruit juice. But most of us probably don't feel too hard up on any of those measures either.

More surprisingly, despite all the talk recently about our "over-investment" in housing, the report says the average new house or flat built in Australia in 2007 was a tenth bigger than here - an average of 212sq m compared with 193sq m here.

"There appears to be a widespread belief that, in some sense, New Zealanders invest 'too much' in housing, and that this is one of the sources of our longstanding economic problems," the report says. "The claim does not stand up to scrutiny."

Even proportionately, it turns out that the Aussies spend more on house building and alterations - 6.2 per cent of their national income, compared with 5.1 per cent of ours.

The report says living standards were about the same on both sides of the Tasman for about 100 years up to 1970.

"With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear now that our living standards began to drop below Australia's from the late 1960s," it says.

"In the 20 years after World War II, our terms of trade had been strong. They fell away sharply after 1966, which brought into sharper relief the consequences of longstanding protectionist policies that were adversely affecting the ability of the economy to generate stronger economic growth over the longer term.

"At no time since the mid-1970s have New Zealand incomes and living standards even come close to those in Australia," the report says.

The only good news is that the gap has not got much wider since the early 1990s.

But, with average Australian incomes now 35 per cent higher, the report puts the income gap for a family of four at $64,000 a year.

"The gap matters," it says. "Being poorer means those of us living here have fewer choices than our peers in Australia do. And more and more of our friends and families have chosen to leave New Zealand for the better opportunities, higher incomes and richer range of choices abroad."