news, federal-politics,

A public servant might call it "courageous". Scott Morrison used his opening election pitch to argue that even though there are global headwinds, the Australian economy is strong and will get even stronger under the Coalition's agenda. But just a week ago, the government's budget contained a string of downgrades to key economic indicators. GDP, dwelling investment and most importantly wages are now expected to do worse than what Treasury was forecasting just back in December. Future tax revenues were written down by $15 billion on account of the slow down. The International Monetary Fund added its own two bob's worth this week, predicting the Australian economy to grow by a sub-par 2.1 per cent this calendar year. If that came to pass, unemployment would be rising under the watch of whoever wins on May 18. Financial markets reckon the Reserve Bank will have cut interest rates to a fresh record low by September, largely due to what's going on across the nation's property markets. Moody's Analytics this week forecast steeper falls in house prices through the rest of the year with some parts of our major capitals looking at drops of more than 15 per cent. Already through the first 11 days of April, values in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth have edged further down. And while the Prime Minister, quite rightly, pointed to the stellar improvement in total employment since the Coalition took office, there are clear signs that full-time jobs growth is slowing. He also failed to mention perhaps one of the biggest economic issues facing Australians - stagnant wages growth. Instead, Morrison used his press conference to reference the last time the Coalition was evicted from office in 2007 and how good the economy was in the good old days under John Howard and Peter Costello. Of course, Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan came into office just weeks before the US went into recession and a year before the world fell into its deepest economic downturn since the 1930s. There's no sign of that now. But expectations are growing of a US recession in the next two years, China is slowing, continental Europe is in trouble and Britain continues to shoot itself in the foot time and again. Any promise around the economy and the budget during this campaign will need to be served alongside a substantial grain of salt. - SMH/The Age.

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