Rather than pouring more borrowed money into the economy, Australian governments should focus on building on their public health successes to get more of the economy back to normal sooner.
With an employed workforce of 13 million people, the federal Treasury estimate in March that 6.5 million Australians would be eligible for the federal government’s JobKeeper program always looked to be on the hard-to-believe high side. Someone in the Treasurer’s or the Prime Minister’s office should have twigged to this earlier.
But these good-faith Treasury projections were made at the peak of the medical alarm that what had happened in China’s Hubei province and in northern Italy could easily take hold in Australia. Without being too tart, they could be called the Norman Swan budget forecasts, egged on by a Labor opposition that urged an even more stringent lockdown.
Loading...
The Australian Financial Review’s succinct take on the principles at stake in major domestic and global stories – and what policy makers should do about them.
