Character
John Smith.
The average man in Australia.
Who he is
Because the average moves, so does he: his age, income, household and habits are whatever the Australian average is at the time of telling.
Why he matters
Being exactly average makes him representative of the Australian population, and so valuable: advertising agencies play their ads to him and scan his brain to see how he responds.
The pairing: his inputs are average, read from Australia's published figures, and still give a wide range of futures, while his lines stay perfectly predictable.
How he talks
He says the most average possible things, exactly as expected, in every instance - the narrative, the stories, the articles: the definition of an NPC.
“Can’t complain. Bit warm for this time of year, isn’t it?”
Where he appears
- Definition before decision
How his figures are sourced
Each figure he carries is the latest official Australian one (ABS, ATO or APRA), held once on him with its value, source, address and release date, so when Australia moves, he moves. Where no official figure exists in the form he needs, the nearest official one stands in and the difference is said, or the figure is left open and says why; none is estimated, and none is older than thirteen months.
| Age | 37.6 years The median age of Australian men: half of the 13,859,185 men resident at 31 March 2026 are younger. In whole years he is 37. ABS, National, state and territory population, March 2026, released 17 September 2026. Quarterly Population Estimates (ERP) by State/Territory, Sex and Age (ERP_Q): males, Australia, single years of age, at 31 March 2026. The release prints no median for men alone, so it is read off its single-year counts the way the ABS computes a median age: half of 13,859,185 is 6,929,592.5; men aged 0 to 36 number 6,811,323 and men aged 37 number 201,712; 37 + (6,929,592.5 - 6,811,323) / 201,712 = 37.59, so 37.6. The same arithmetic on all persons at 30 June 2025 gives 38.44, which the ABS publishes as 38.4 (Regional population by age and sex, 2025). |
|---|---|
| Income | $95,732 a year The median weekly earnings of a man in full-time work, in his main job, before tax, in August 2025: all ages 15 and over, not men of his age alone. ABS, Employee Earnings, August 2025, released 12 December 2025. Median weekly earnings in main job, full-time employees, males: $1,841 a week (Table 2, 63370_Table02.xlsx). The ABS publishes it weekly: $1,841 x 52 = $95,732 a year. |
| Super | $78,289 The median super balance of a man aged 35 to 39 at 30 June 2024, counting only people with a balance or contributions above zero. The ATO publishes five-year bands, not single ages: the band is the one his age (37.6) falls in, and the balance is two years older than the population figure his age is read from. ATO, Taxation statistics 2023-24, Individuals, released 17 June 2026. Chart 12: Individuals - median super balance, by age and sex, 2023-24 financial year: males 35 - 39 (Snapshot table 5, ts24snapshot05indexofchartdata.xlsx, sheet 12). | Home loan | No current official figure. No official figure is current. The ABS measures what households still owe on their homes in the Survey of Income and Housing, and its latest release is 2019-20 (Housing Occupancy and Costs, released 25 May 2022: a median of $275,000 for all owners with a mortgage, not by age), six years old. The 2023-24 survey was withdrawn on 17 July 2025 for data-collection problems and its results will not be released; the next is the 2025-26 survey. The nearest current ABS figure, the average new owner-occupier loan in Lending Indicators, measures a loan when it is taken out, not what is still owing, so it does not stand in. | Spending | No current official figure. No official figure is current. The ABS Household Expenditure Survey's latest release is 2015-16 (released 13 September 2017: an average of $1,425 a week for all households, $1,716 where the reference person is 35 to 44), nine years old. No other ABS, ATO or APRA series gives a household's spending as a level; the Household Spending Indicator gives the country's total and how it changes, not what one household spends. |
| Pay rise | 3.2% How much the price of the same work rose over the year to June 2026: the rate for a fixed set of jobs, not the change in what any one man earns. ABS, Wage Price Index, Australia, June 2026, released 19 August 2026. Total hourly rates of pay excluding bonuses, all sectors, Australia, seasonally adjusted: June quarter 2025 to June quarter 2026. |