The government will fall all over themselves trying to claim credit for a recovery in the economy, but every serious economist knows when we’ve had a recession as deep and as damaging as Australia has that, of course, the economy will recover.
Josh Frydenberg will pretend that it is his genius that has seen that happen, but most economists know that from such an extraordinarily low base, of course there’s going to be a substantial recovery in quarterly GDP. I don’t think any objective observer of the way that the government has implemented this stimulus would say that they got everything right. They haven’t got everything wrong, but they haven’t got everything righ either.
We called for wage subsidies and we were pleased when the government had a change of heart and brought them in, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve been perfectly implemented. Too many people were excluded. Too many people in the unemployment queues were deliberately excluded from jobkeeper by the government. What that has meant is that unemployment queues were longer than they need to be and we’ll have a problem with unemployment and underemployment longer than we would like to.
