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

I thank Senator McKenzie for her question and I note her concern for Australians right across this country—city and metro and regional—in terms of their health and economic wellbeing through what has been a most remarkable year around the world. Australia continues to perform better than most other countries in terms of saving the lives of Australians and saving the jobs of Australians. It's been an incredibly tough year for many people across Australia and an even tougher one for many people across the rest of the world.

Yesterday's national accounts show that, in Australia, real GDP increased by 3.3 per cent, the largest quarterly increase since 1976. Of course, that came off the back of a significant decline in the previous quarter. However, when you look around the world, the decline Australia faced was less than most of the rest of the world and the recovery is stronger than most of the rest of the world.

These are the defining factors. It is ongoing work. It is going to be a long road back from here to recovery for all countries around the world. But over the past five months we've seen 650,000 jobs created, 344,00 of those filled by women and 226,000 filled by young Australians. We welcome this incredibly important progress in getting Australians back to work and the decline in the effective unemployment rate from 14.9 per cent to 7.4 per cent. Our economic recovery plan, outlined in the budget this year—with programs to enable businesses that were previously profitable to have loss carry backs, our investment deductions, the bringing forward of tax cuts and plans around HomeBuilder—are all about the next stages of recovery over the months and years ahead, to keep getting more Australians back into the workforce and to drive those numbers to where they were in the past. (Time expired)