Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Smith for his very important question, because Australia is leading the world when it comes to the economic recovery from the COVID induced recession that the globe is facing. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on Australia, as it has on countries right across the world. Our economy, as we know, contracted by seven per cent in the June quarter, but this was substantially less—a much better performance than many of our international peers. In the UK it contracted by 20 per cent, in Canada by more than 11 per cent and in the United States by more than nine per cent. It was the decisive action that our government was able to take, thanks to years of good economic management, that enabled us to respond so strongly.

And we're now seeing our economy recover well as well. Our economic recovery plan is working. It's a long journey to come back from a hit this big, but 450,000 jobs have been recreated in the last four months. More than half of the record number of jobs lost from the COVID-19 crisis have already been recovered. Yesterday, we saw that the consumer sentiment index has risen again, for the third straight month. In fact, consumer sentiment last month had its single biggest rise in a budget month since the series was created in 1974. We also saw the consumer confidence index up for the 10th consecutive week, and it's now hit an eight-month high. Business confidence is up as well. It's up for trade, up for transport, up for construction and up for mining.

We're seeing the Australian economy recover because of the types of policy measures our government put in place to get business through the pandemic and to help them out of the pandemic. JobKeeper has seen $70 billion of support flow, but our other measures in this budget are now about helping that growth agenda. (Time expired)