What this measures
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures the total value of goods and services produced in Australia. The growth rate shows how fast the economy is expanding, published quarterly by the ABS.
How to read this figure
The measure was never built to describe wellbeing, and its authors say so. The international standard the Bureau of Statistics implements states that gross domestic product "is often taken as a measure of welfare, but the SNA makes no claim that this is so". Two of its conventions matter for reading the figure. Distribution is invisible, because the accounts record the price paid with no adjustment for who benefited. And most unpaid household work sits outside the production boundary, the line the accounts draw around what counts as production at all. The same cleaning, cooking and care counts when it is bought and vanishes when it is done at home, while repairing storm damage counts in full.
Revisions here reach further back than most readers expect, and they are not spread evenly through the year. Three of the four quarterly releases revise only the current and previous financial year. The September quarter release is the one that incorporates the balanced annual accounts, and it normally allows up to sixteen quarters of revision, so four years of history can move in a single publication. A seasonal reanalysis can revise the whole adjusted series at once on top of that.
None of this makes the figure unreliable. It makes the vintage part of the figure. A growth rate quoted from a release two years ago is not necessarily the growth rate now recorded for that quarter, and the difference is not an error in either.
That matters to a household through the version of this figure that describes its own share. Output per person is the same series divided by residents, so the gap between the two growth rates is population growth, and the aggregate can rise in a year when output per person does not. Because both are subject to the same revision windows, a judgement about whether a slowdown happened can be revised into or out of existence a year or two after the period it describes, which is worth remembering when a past year is invoked as settled fact.
The cadence is quarterly, generally on the first Wednesday of the third month after the quarter ends, which is roughly nine weeks. The annual national accounts follow in the last week of October and are the release that balances the year through the supply and use tables.
Longer read: The three ways GDP is measured. Gross domestic product can be built three ways and they should give the same answer. Quarterly they do not, and the published Australian figure handles that by averaging all three rather than choosing between them.
Related indicators: Inflation rate (CPI) · RBA cash rate · Unemployment rate - or the whole set on the Australian economy hub. For how figures like this feed into the exchange rate, read what moves the Australian dollar.