For the past 12 years, independent cultural insights and strategy agency, The Lab has tracked what Australians want through The Australia Project, its ongoing study into the cultural forces and values that shape Australian attitudes and behaviours.
This year, the answer changed drastically. Home ownership — long the defining marker of the ‘Australia Dream’ — has been knocked off the top spot for the first time, replaced instead by living comfortably.
The shift is the starkest among Gen Z. Roughly 25 per cent point to comfort and affordability instead.
The Lab director Paul Labagnara said it’s not that home ownership doesn’t matter anymore, it’s that young Australians have stopped waiting for it.
“For younger people it’s like ‘I don’t need to own the dream — I want to live it’.”
The bigger picture shows a generation reshaping its idea of success around what’s achievable instead of deferring happiness to a 30 year loan.
Underpinning the shift is a cost-of-living squeeze that’s beginning to feel permanent.
“The idea of cost-of-living was branded as a short-term temporary thing, and now it feels like something structural we have to navigate,” Labagnara said.
The result is The Lab has coined the “prove it” mindset, that’s spread from politics into mainstream media into how consumers size up brands, and the numbers back it up.
When asked what would push consumers toward a more expensive product, 54 per cent said it had to be a brand they already knew and trusted, while 44 per cent said the quality had to be noticeably better than other products.
Loyalty rewards, by contrast, only sway 13 per cent, a soft number for brands still relying heavily on points programs.
Labagnara pointed to ALDI, Carmen’s and Suncorp as brands successfully finding a way through.
He specifically pointed to Suncorp’s ‘Haven’ campaign, developed by Leo Australia which took home the Dan Wieden Titanium Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions this year.
He described it as a as a prime example of how brands can combat scepticism. With trust and confidence in institutions at historic lows, he said the opportunity for brands lies in genuine, demonstrated value rather than messaging.
“It takes understanding who you’re working with and then coming up with ways of thinking and ideas that people can use and interact with to of demonstrate that we have a shared benefit.”
For brands hoping to hold onto customers in this climate, Labagnara’s advice was blunt.
“Stop assuming people will be passive and come along for the ride”.
That extends to how brands talk about value itself. Labagnara said the instinct to compete on volume and discounting misreads what Australians are actually after.
“Not everyone wants more. They want better”.
That same realignment played out in the values data. Honesty held the number one spot for its tenth consecutive year, however this year’s most notable mover was creativity, up 50 per cent.
Labagnara linked it directly to AI anxiety, with over two-thirds of respondents having said AI had made them more respectful of things and work made my humans.
“There’ll be a premium placed on the human hand,” he said, drawing a parallel to a 2018 spike in demand for imperfection, which he tied back to backlash against social media induced perfectionism.
“Creativity is under threat because there’s a tsunami of context coming into our world”.
It’s a shift that reframes what brand identity is for.
As categories flatten and products blur together, Labagnara said the differentiator was never the product itself.
“Identity is more important than ever. It’s not about what I have; It’s about how I live,” he said.
More than 60 per cent of Australians have had to cut back on eating out, 54 per cent have started budgeting and 32 per cent have cancelled subscriptions — a map of where spend is shrinking and where brands still have room to earn it.
Taken together, the numbers point to an audience that isn’t retreating but recalibrating. Australians are trading old markers of success for new ones that feel within reach.
For brands, the brief hasn’t changed so much as he terms have. Trust is earned line by line, and the ones getting it right, are not the loudest in the category but the clearest.
