The Restaurant Was Full and Nobody Could Afford It

Saw a thread on r/AusFinance last night that stopped me scrolling: someone complaining about $43 steaks and $5 sushi rolls, asking how anyone affords eating out anymore. Six hundred and sixty-odd comments in a day. Normally that kind of post is just people venting about smashed avo, but this one turned into something more interesting, because the top reply wasn’t “cook at home, mate.” It was: a third of the country has no rent or mortgage, every restaurant is heaving, of course some people can afford it.

That’s the bit that’s been sitting with me.

I’ve felt this split myself, just not from the comfortable side. We bought our place in the outer southeast years ago, before things got properly stupid, and I know people who bought around the same time who are now basically laughing. Mortgage barely moves the needle, house has doubled or tripled in value, and they’re out there doing the regional wine weekend thing without blinking. Then I know people, younger, renting, doing everything “right,” who are watching the same steak on the same menu and doing maths that doesn’t work no matter how they cook the books. Same country, same Woolworths, completely different economy.

Someone in that thread linked an RBA report on household resilience, which is a very dry way of describing what’s actually a pretty stark story: a chunk of households are sitting on equity and savings buffers built up over a decade of cheap money and rising property, and another chunk never got in before the door shut, and now every rate rise that helps the first group squeezes the second one harder. It’s not really one economy with some people doing better than others. It’s two economies wearing the same flag.

What got me was a comment further down, something like: everybody thinks everyone else is having their experience, because everyone is mostly surrounded by people like themselves. That’s it, really. That’s the whole thing. I sit in meetings with people on household incomes north of $300k worrying about whether their renovation budget will stretch to the ensuite, and I know people a suburb over stressing about whether the OSHC fees went up again without anyone telling them. Both groups think they’re “doing it tough.” Both are telling the truth, from where they’re standing.

I don’t have a tidy fix for this, and I’m suspicious of anyone who says they do. Negative gearing reform, more social housing, wage growth that actually tracks inflation, all the usual suspects get wheeled out and none of them are wrong exactly, they’re just slow, and slow doesn’t help the bloke choosing between the electricity bill and his kid’s excursion money this month. I lean towards thinking housing is the actual lever here, not restaurant prices, because once you’re not handing a third or half your income to a mortgage or landlord, a $43 steak is an occasional treat rather than a referendum on your life choices. But I say that as someone who bought in early enough that I’m not really qualified to lecture anyone about patience.

What I keep coming back to is how quietly this reshapes a place. Melbourne still feels like Melbourne, laneway coffee, people complaining about trams, Friday knock-offs at the local. But underneath that sameness there’s a growing number of people for whom all of it has become aspirational rather than ordinary. That’s not a crisis you can see from the footpath. It shows up in Reddit threads instead, where six hundred people argue about steak prices and are actually arguing about something much bigger.

I don’t think the answer is to feel guilty if you can afford the lamb chops, or to feel ashamed if you can’t. It’s just worth noticing that “the economy” stopped being one thing a while ago, and most of our politics still talks about it like it is.