Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mackellar for his question and acknowledge his experience in small business, in both the health and the financial services space, before coming to this place. He's no fan of modern monetary theory, but he is a great supporter of his constituents and of good policy in this place.

COVID-19 has wreaked enormous havoc across the global economy. The World Bank has forecast that more economies will contract this year than at any time since 1870. The OECD have said that they expect the global economy to contract by six per cent this calendar year. In comparison, during the GFC at its height, in 2009, the global economy only contracted by 0.1 per cent. The International Labour Organization has said that, as a result of COVID-19, effectively 500 million full-time jobs have been lost. The impact on GDP in the June quarter, across the world, has been staggering. In the United Kingdom, it's been around 20 per cent. In France, it's been around 14 per cent. We recently saw the numbers from Canada, which were 11½ per cent. In Germany, it was 10.1 per cent; and, in the United States, it was 9.1 per cent.

Tomorrow we will get the national account numbers for the June quarter, and the expectation is that the fall here will not be as large as we've seen in other countries around the world, indicating the remarkable resilience of the Australian economy—indicated by the fact that, of the 1.3 million Australians who either have lost their job or saw their hours reduced to zero since the start of this crisis—

Dr Chalmers interjecting—

around 700,000 have got back to work. More than half have got back to work. There are 340,000 jobs that have been created in the last two months. Of those jobs—

Dr Chalmers interjecting—

58 per cent have gone to women and 44 per cent have gone to young people.

See this speech in context