Today’s incomplete budget update is a missed opportunity to outline a plan for the recovery and job creation, as Australians confront the first recession in three decades.
 
Australians already know the economy is in bad shape - they need to hear what the Morrison Government is going to do about it.
 
With nearly one million Australians unemployed and another 240,000 expected to be unemployed by Christmas, Australians need and deserve a plan to tackle the jobs crisis and create well-paid, secure jobs into the future.
 
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.
 
The Government has delivered record high debt and deficits but still has no plan for jobs, which means unemployment will be higher for longer and the recovery will be slower than it should be.
 
This budget update fails to provide the full and frank assessment of the economy and the budget that workers, businesses and communities need and deserve:

• Fails to provide a comprehensive plan for the recovery, with no new policies to tackle the jobs crisis.
• Fails to provide the usual four year economic and budget forecasts, despite the RBA releasing its full forecasts in May.
• Fails to come clean on the structural damage to the budget, beyond record debt of $851.9 billion and a deficit of $184.5 billion for this year.
• Fails to tell Australians how long it will take to get jobs back on track and tackle unacceptably high unemployment.

The scale of the health and jobs crisis demands a serious response from Government, but this is not even half a budget update, let alone a plan.
 
Scott Morrison shouldn’t pretend that this new record for debt and deficit is all the fault of the virus outbreak, when two-thirds of the debt was accumulated before most people had heard of the Coronavirus.
 
Vulnerable Australian workers, businesses and communities need Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg to do a much better job of managing the crisis and recovery than they did of handling the economy before the virus outbreak.
 
We don’t want to see a jobless recovery where even more Australians are left behind and held back.
 
THURSDAY, 23 JULY 2020