Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. Will the Treasurer please outline to the House how the Morrison government's unprecedented economic support to meet the challenge of the COVID-19 recession is helping families and businesses in my electorate of O'Connor and throughout regional and rural Australia more broadly? Is the Treasurer aware of any alternative approaches?

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

I acknowledge the member for O'Connor's experience as a farmer before he came to this place. I don't know what those opposite have against farmers. Talking about regional and rural Australia, we're supporting farmers in O'Connor and across the country. The member for O'Connor understands how we are now seeing the Australian economy recover from its biggest single shock in more than a century. Some 446,000 jobs have been created over the last 12 months. Yesterday we saw consumer confidence increase for the 10th straight week. Australia's AAA credit rating has been reaffirmed and just last week we heard the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia say that we were on the right track with the economic response.

I can also inform the House that consumer sentiment had its biggest single jump in a budget month, when in October it increased by 11.9 per cent. This was the biggest single jump in consumer sentiment since the series began back in 1974. And today we got this month's consumer sentiment number and again it is up—up for a third straight month. We have seen consumer sentiment recover from a downturn at its fastest rate on record, twice as fast as consumer sentiment recovered after the GFC and more than three times as fast as consumer sentiment recovered after the eighties and nineties recession. One of the reasons for that is that the Morrison government has been supporting the economy with significant programs and projects—like JobKeeper, with $70 billion already out the door, supporting more than 5,000 businesses in the seat of O'Connor; the cashflow boost, with $32 billion out the door, supporting more than 6,000 businesses in the seat of O'Connor; and the two payments of $750 to millions of pensioners across the country, including more than 9,000 pensioners in the seat of O'Connor.

In this year's budget we had other measures to support regional and rural Australia—like $2 billion to help our farmers recover from drought; $350 million to support regional tourism and another round of the Building Better Regions program; $317 million to help our exporters access markets and build on the 80,000 tonnes of exports that we have already supported; and $2 billion to support new funding for the new water grid, for dams, weirs and pipelines. This government continues to support jobs across regional and rural Australia.