More now on the GDP data released today and the lowest economic growth in decades. Political Reporter Tom Crowley has the details from Canberra.
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00:00There's a number of different things happening in these national accounts and business investment
00:06and exports and imports. They're part of the political conversation but really when we're
00:10talking about the cost of living it's all about how much pain households are experiencing
00:13and that's where the focus has been so much on how household disposable incomes are falling
00:18faster than they have at any point for decades. Some households conversely because their house
00:22prices have gone up are doing a little bit a little wealthier but generally speaking
00:27that household pain is something that the government is eager to emphasise that it is
00:32trying to address and it's something that the coalition is eager to pin on the government.
00:35The real question, everyone knows that households are doing it tough, the question is, is it
00:40enough pain? And that seems like a strange way to put it but it's all about what the
00:43RBA is trying to do with its interest rates. A little bit of pain is in a sense what the
00:47RBA wants to try and bring inflation down. We're in a period where we're uncertain whether
00:51it's done enough, whether what we're seeing, the contraction in households, is enough to
00:55bring inflation to heel and whether we might be able to go out the other side without a
00:58significant deterioration in jobs and further deterioration in households. The government
01:04is worried on the other hand though about the risk of the RBA with its interest rates
01:07done too much, the risk that households are under too much pressure. That's the balance
01:12the government's been trying to strike and for quite a while now it's been saying that
01:15its cost of living measures including tax cuts and energy bill relief are really all
01:19about that, trying to put the cushion under households, recognising they're doing it tough,
01:23recognising that's part of the inflation fight but saying that also we need to do a little
01:27bit to make sure they're not hurting too much. Once again today, that's the message that
01:31we heard from Treasurer Jim Chalmers defending his cost of living strategy. Here's a little
01:35bit of him.
01:36This vindicates the approach that we took in the budget and it frankly torpedoes a lot
01:43of the free advice that we got at budget time to cut harder and harsher. That would have
01:49been a recipe for a much weaker economy. We know that from the June quarter data that
01:55you have before you now.
02:00So that's Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Angus Taylor on the other hand, the opposition has really
02:04been building a narrative that all of this pain that households are feeling is the government's
02:09fault or at least has been made worse by government spending. So rather than what you heard from
02:13Jim Chalmers there that the government's striking a responsible balance, the argument that's
02:17coming from the Coalition is they've done too much, that their spending has worsened
02:20inflation.