Today’s Investment Monitor from Deloitte Access Economics highlights the urgent need for a comprehensive plan to boost investment and create new jobs.
This is more damning evidence of the price Australians are paying for Scott Morrison’s inaction, which poses a clear risk to the recovery and jobs at a time of soaring unemployment.
Deloitte warns of further collapses in investment, including in sectors deliberately excluded from JobKeeper by the Morrison Government, highlighting that “investment drives growth in the economy, and without growth fewer jobs are created.”
The Monitor draws particular attention to the downside risks of the looming cliff in the construction industry:
- • “Commercial construction will fall sharply in 2020”;
- • “Some of the industries hardest hit by COVID-19 – the arts, tourism, retail and education industries – are all included in commercial construction”; and
- • “This sector is increasingly working through the existing pipeline of work, without that pipeline being added to at a matching pace”.
Australia entered this crisis from a position of weakness, not strength, including in investment with Deloitte noting that “private investment has been weak for several years.”
The scale of this crisis demands a serious response from the Government, particularly as the health and economic circumstances in Victoria continue to deteriorate.
The most important test of this Government’s management of the recession and its aftermath is what happens to jobs and the businesses which create them – none of that can happen without a plan for investment.
Labor continues to make constructive suggestions to help kick-start the economy, including a settled energy policy framework to encourage business investment, and a social housing construction program which would support a sector approaching crisis.
Vulnerable Australian workers, businesses and communities need and deserve a plan from the Morrison Government to promote growth and investment, protect jobs and create new jobs.
MONDAY, 3 AUGUST 2020
