Julian Simmonds (Ryan, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. Will the Treasurer outline to the House how the Morrison government's economic support continues to help Australian families and businesses and how grateful this government is for their courage and determination as we come back from the COVID-19 recession?

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

I thank the member for Ryan for his question and acknowledge his experience on Brisbane City Council, the biggest council in the country, before he came to this place. In the electorate of Ryan there are more than 70,000 taxpayers who are getting tax relief as a result of the policies that we on this side of the House have supported and have legislated. More than 5,000 businesses in the electorate of Ryan are benefitting from the JobKeeper program, a program which has been an economic lifeline for workers across Australia.

The member for Ryan, like others on this side of the House, understands that through COVID-19 Australia has faced the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression. We saw 1.3 million Australians either lose their jobs or have their working hours reduced to zero. We saw GDP growth fall by seven per cent in the June quarter, the biggest fall on record. But now the economic recovery is on, and Australia is seeing the jobs coming back. Eighty per cent of those 1.3 million Australians are now back at work. The effective unemployment rate has come down from 14.9 to 7.4 per cent. There are two million fewer Australians on JobKeeper in the month of October compared to the month of September. Business and consumer confidence is now back to its pre-pandemic highs. We saw that GDP growth in the September quarter was 3.3 per cent, the biggest quarterly jump in 40 years.

This economic recovery belongs to every Australian. Every Australian family and every Australian worker have delivered this result with the economic recovery now underway. And we are grateful to the small business owners and workers right across the country. Small-business owners are the first in and the last out. They work the front office and they work the back office. And they have worked through this pandemic to find a way to get to the other side, and we give thanks to those small business owners and their workers right across the country, and also the lenders. The lenders have partnered with the prudential regulator and government, and we have seen that 900,000-plus loans have had their payments deferred, worth more than $250 billion. So, this very much has been a team Australia moment, a team Australia effort where families, workers and businesses big and small have come together to ensure that Australia rebounds from this biggest economic shock since the Great Depression.