Treasurer Josh Frydenberg hates it when it’s pointed out, but Australia’s economy was in poor health well before COVID-19 hit our shores.
A former federal Treasury secretary, Martin Parkinson, said it himself last week.
“Going into COVID, we’d had very weak productivity growth, very weak income growth, economic growth was quite anaemic,” he said.
“If you look at our productivity performance over the last decade, it has been running at about a quarter of its long-run average.
“This is all pre-COVID,” he repeated for those in the back.