Australia is paying more for what it buys than it earns from what it sells
The war lifted the price of the fuel, fertiliser and plastics Australia imports far faster than the coal and gold it exports. Pick any account of the balance of payments and the channel you want to follow — every chart explains what drove it, era by era, and the 5-year view shows each quarter.
Balance of payments explorer
Choose an account, then a channelThe value of exports of goods and services minus the value of imports.
Moves fastest with commodity prices and the dollar: dearer exports or a lower dollar lift it; strong domestic spending pulls in imports and lowers it. In 2026 dearer fuel imports tipped it into deficit.
BOGS · terms of trade · international competitiveness · the J-curve
Balance on goods & services (BOGS)
Every era, explained
Balance on goods & services (BOGS) · the story behind each shaded bandA dollar near record lows helped exporters, briefly pushing the balance on goods and services into surplus in 2000–01.
Import spending grew faster than exports, keeping the trade balance in deficit of about 2–3% of GDP despite rising commodity prices.
Imports fell sharply in the downturn, narrowing the trade deficit to under 1% of GDP.
Record iron ore and coal prices produced trade surpluses of 0.5–0.9% of GDP in 2009–10 and 2010–11.
The commodity price slump pushed trade back into deficit (2.1% of GDP in 2014–15) until new LNG exports lifted it into surplus by 2016–17.
Iron ore above US$200 a tonne and collapsing imports produced record trade surpluses of more than 5% of GDP.
Coal and LNG prices spiked after Russia invaded Ukraine, keeping the surplus above 5% of GDP in 2021–22.
As energy prices fell the surplus shrank to 0.2% of GDP by 2024–25.
Dearer fuel, fertiliser and electric-vehicle imports pushed goods and services into a $5.1 billion deficit in the June quarter of 2026.
How the accounts fit together
Select any box to chart itRecords trade, income and transfers — flows that do not create a claim on anyone.
The mirror of the current account: how the deficit is funded.
Positions at June each year; the 5Y view shows every quarter.
Prices, the dollar, rates and national saving drive every account.
This quarter in detail
June quarter 2026The trade surplus has disappeared
The current account records every payment between Australia and the rest of the world. For most of the past decade, big mineral and energy exports produced a trade surplus that almost covered what we pay foreign owners of Australian assets.
That surplus has gone. The goods and services balance fell into deficit in the March quarter for the first time since late 2017 and widened to $5.1 billion in June, as fuel, fertiliser and electric-vehicle imports became more expensive.
Australia has long relied on foreign capital to fund mines, gas plants and bank lending. The profits and interest paid to those investors form the net primary income deficit — $21.9 billion this quarter, almost unchanged.
All components were in deficit in both quarters; bars show the size of each deficit. Components may not add exactly due to rounding.
Import prices are rising five times faster than export prices
The terms of trade compare the prices Australia gets for its exports with the prices it pays for imports. When they fall, the same shipload of coal buys fewer barrels of fuel — a direct hit to national income even if export volumes don’t change.
A dollar caught between high rates and a nervous world
RBA rises opened a 0.60-point gap over US rates and lifted the dollar above 72 US cents in February. The war then sent investors into US dollars. A weaker dollar helps exporters, but makes imported fuel — priced in US dollars — even dearer.
- RBA rate 0.60 points above the US Fed’s upper bound
- Coal and gold earning more than a year ago
- Australia is a net energy exporter overall
- War-driven demand for “safe” US dollars
- The Fed raising rates again (16 Sep)
- A falling terms of trade and China’s steel-output caps
The weak link: Australia refines very little of its own fuel
Before the war about 135 ships a day crossed the Strait of Hormuz; by March more than 800 were stuck in the Persian Gulf. Australia had enough fuel in storage, but panic buying created local shortages — a crisis the government described as almost entirely man-made. Diesel matters most: it powers farms, mines and trucking, so its price flows into food and freight costs.