Just six weeks after denying he said Australia would head to a recession under Labor, the prime minister has reversed course, once again linking a recession with a Labor government as the Coalition toughens up it’s election message less than three months out from the poll.

Scott Morrison labelled the election a contest “between enterprise and envy” in an address to the Australian Financial Review Business Summit, and said a Shorten Labor government would be “an economic leap in the dark”, setting the scene for the 2 April budget and the official election campaign which will begin almost immediately after.

“The next election, just like in 2007, will have a profound impact on the economy that Australians and families and small and family businesses all around the country, it will impact the economy they will live in,” he said.

“The economy is not a theory, it’s something that affects every day of your life.

“Just one term of a Labor government can change the economic course and the economy each and every Australian will live in.

“I welcome this, I think it’s time for that scrutiny. Our government has been under scrutiny, as it should, we are the government. Equally, as you go into an election, it’s important that the alternative plans are put under the same scrutiny and an understanding of what the impacts are for the decade ahead.”

In a question-and-answer session following his address, Morrison went further.

Asked directly if he was “actually saying we could [be] back under a recession under a Labor government”, Morrison did not directly answer.

“I am saying the economy will be weaker under Labor, that is exactly what I am saying,” he said.

“Because they are going to put $200bn worth of taxes and take Australia’s industrial relations systems back to the time when we had recessions in this country and I am being very clear to Australians, no use on the other side going ‘oh I didn’t really realise it would have that impact’. It will have that impact.”

His office later said the prime minister had reframed the question to mean the economy would be weaker under a Labor government, and that was what he meant by his use of “that is exactly what I am saying”.

The shadow treasurer, Chris Bowen, responded to Morrison via social media, saying the prime minister’s claim was “shrill, desperate, wrong [and] highly irresponsible”.

Shrill. Desperate. Wrong. Highly irresponsible. Everything we’ve come to expect from a desperate Prime Minister with no economic policy of his own. https://t.co/mvVdgKt91l — Chris Bowen (@Bowenchris) March 4, 2019

In January, the government walked back from any hint of a recession warning, which emerged after Morrison delivered a speech where he warned half of all voting Australians “will have never experienced a recession in their working lives”.

“I don’t want them to learn how important a strong economy is to each and every single one of them by having them endure the cruel lessons of a weaker economy that would occur under the Labor party,” he said during the Brisbane 29 January economic policy address.

The next day, when asked directly if he was warning of a recession under a Labor government, Morrison replied “I never said that.”

Pressed in that same interview if that was what he was inferring, Morrison again answered “I never said that”.

“What I’m saying is the Australian economy will be weaker under Labor. And it will.”

In the same time period, Cormann also fell back on the weaker economy line, but did not say recession, a term in political and business circles known as the “R-word”.

“What we have said is a high-taxing Shorten Labor government will make the economy weaker, will make the country weaker and make Australians poorer, there is no question about that,” Cormann said in late January.

Morrison’s blunt warning came a day after a freedom-of-information response requested by Labor revealed the government did not ask the Treasury department to conduct any modelling on its 1.25 million jobs over five years creation promise, an announcement made during the same January Brisbane speech.

That announcement came under immediate scrutiny when the assistant treasurer, Stuart Robert, insisted the jobs would be full-time, before backtracking in the same interview, saying “we’ll wait and see what the economy throws up in that respect”.

During last month’s Treasury estimates hearing, Meghan Quinn, the department’s deputy secretary of the macroeconomic group, said the Australian economy would need to achieve employment growth of 1.9% to meet the target. Budget figures place current employment growth at between 1.5% and 1.7%.