CommSec’s State of the States report is a PR exercise for the Commonwealth Bank rather than a serious piece of economic analysis. As I’ve posted on before, its methodology is daft and gives weird results (Ask a silly question, get a silly answer). As the Brisbane Times reports (Queensland slips down population growth table), the latest State of States report finds “Queensland’s population growth rate ranks it just above Tasmania and behind every other Australian state.” But check out the latest ABS population data, which are nicely analysed in Queensland Treasury’s population growth information brief. Here’s the relevant chart:

That doesn’t look like we’re second last in Australia, does it? CommSec’s methodology penalises Queensland because we had strong population growth ten years ago, but I fail to see how that’s relevant in an assessment of the relative economic performance of the States in 2014.