And because most of the drivers of this were on the supply side of markets, it's not about to go away any time soon.

Wage growth is now at 2.6 per cent for the past year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics found, with growth of just 0.6 per cent for the three months to June in the public sector and 0.7 per cent in the private.

With inflation at its highest level in many years, this meant people are "going backwards", UOW labour market economist Martin O'Brien said.

"I think it's pretty obvious to most people that prices are rising quicker than wages," he said.

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"In economics we talk about a thing called a 'real wage', which is basically the spending power of the money you're bringing home. If inflation at 6.1 is outpacing wage growth at 2.6 - that's a 3.5 per cent real wage cut.

"It just means the money you bring home buys less.

"Typically you'd expect that wages would be outpacing inflation, so people would be getting ahead over time - having more spending power as we go over the years.

"But what's happening right now is that we're moving backwards."

Associate Professor O'Brien said while wage growth had stagnated, this was not new, and had been the trend for many years.

But increasing prices - and the extent to which they have jumped - was the more recent, and dramatic, factor.

"That inflation of 6.1 per cent is something we haven't seen for quite a number of decades," he said,

"There's a lot of drivers behind it which are mostly on the supply side, which means they won't go away soon. We've had the supply chain disruptions which are still a bit of a hangover from COVID.

"A lot of reliance on global trade with a lot of things going through China ... when COVID goes through there they basically shit down whole cities.

"Ongoing conflict in Ukraine leads to high inflation as well. We've all seen the high petrol prices ... but there are a lot of things attached to trade that Ukraine conflict is leading to shortages.

"And closer to home, we've had really lousy weather. We've come from a couple of years worth of drought to having a really bad flood season ... that's really affected the crops. Most people would have noticed the price of fresh food and veges going up really noticeably."

With wage growth flat for many years, these factors have combined to put more pressure on the household budget.

"Now it's quite dramatic, with wages lagging behind inflation, and with the Reserve Bank predicting inflation to peak later this year at 7.5 per cent, we're going to go even further behind."