Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Werriwa for her question. Her message, like the message from those on this side of the House, is that the government has provided an unprecedented level of economic support to help Australians get through this crisis by effectively building a bridge to the other side. If you look at where effective unemployment was in this country, you see that it got as high as 15 per cent, and today it's down to 9.4 per cent. We have seen 446,000 jobs being created in the past four months. Consumer confidence has been up for 10 weeks straight as of yesterday. Consumer sentiment today is up for the third consecutive month. Our AAA credit rating has been reaffirmed. And we heard from the Reserve Bank of Australia that the government is on the right track. If you look at our performance as a nation, both on the health side and on the economic side, we have outperformed nearly every other country in the world.

We understand that there are still many Australians who are doing it tough. That's why we put in this budget a series of economic measures that will continue to support the Australian economy. That's why we are helping the private sector to make more investments, because that, again, will increase economic activity—with the expanded instant asset write-off, with the loss carry back measure and with tax cuts for more than 11½ million Australians, with indeed more than 71,000 of those in the honourable member's own electorate. And we've extended the JobKeeper payment for another six months, out to the end of March, again supporting—

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