Yup and we should have used this time and the lowest ever interest rates to get a couple of big nation-building projects underway!

Yes we probably would need some guest labour. And probably could source most of it from the shakey isles supplemented with Chinese and Indian engineers?

The latter two groups needing to be quarantined offshore for a mandatory two weeks.

The rest of the economy reopened permanently, with the simple expediency of mass testing at critical exit and emry points/borders with the locally invented and reliable three-minute breath test! If you pass, you pass! If you don't, you don't, but proceed immediately to offshore quarantine! No ifs buts or maybes! Even after we get a safe and reliable vaccine! To remove the anti-vaccine crowd (resident fith column) from the general population!

Understand just one thing! Governments can almost always borrow at half the cost of private enterprise. And that salient fact makes a complete nonsense of current privatisation practises and outsourcing the recovery!
Alan B.

Yes Al, but the negative side of low interest rates includes a lack of motivation for people to save for rainey day, such as right now!

Low interest rates have hastened a flight of wealth into real estate, where bubbles are highly desirable: Thus Government policy drives the wealth hysteria down paths which ignore totally the essentials of the basic need of housing in the first place.

I noticed yesterday you wrote about your on-side view of this, agreeing to a limit of five properties negatively geared.
The whole focus of housing is in the wrong direction. It’s focus is towards profits over a social necessity housing should be.

The housing market generally needs to be dumped on its A* and restarted.

Maybe I’m hoping, this will occur as a positive outcome of Covid 19.
Thank you China!

Dan

The last thing we need is large construction projects. That simply hands huge profits to a small number of large construction companies, & another windfall to their BLF & other shonky union workforce.

We need to spread out any spending into small projects that will employ those most damaged by our excessive lockdown policies, & the hospitality industry.

The very last thing we need is the loss/loss building of public transport infrastructure. Any thing we build must be profitable to help pay out the deficit, rather than consume more tax payer funds in subsidising transport. Brisbanes cross river rail is a perfect example of a project designed to profit Labor mates, & the unions, then keep on costing those who will never ride it for eternity.

Public housing projects could be spread over every capital city ; and many different suburbs.

Support for demand at the lower and middle ends would also be more likely to fuel a consumption-led recovery than the third stage of tax cuts for the well-off.

The first thing we need to do is to sack every 'expert' for insisting on the house arrest of healthy citizens and now somehow claim they have saved lives. What an idiotic ideology our Governments adopted to destroy the lives of many, rob children of saying goodbye to loved ones and have the gall to say they did a good job. It is obvious we were sold a dud and pollies and 'experts' now know it.

Just as we have seen billions of dollars of 'Jobkeeper' money syphoned off to business profits and executive bonuses, by fudging the books. There is an expectation that much of the new assets write-off incentives for business will see billions being channelled into nothing more than investment in "the wife's new Mercedes", with no new job creation.

The government is making a huge mistake relying on the private sector to drag Australia out of the Morrison recession. There are three things required to bust a recession and they are, jobs, jobs, and more jobs. Glib exercises of hiding the real level of unemployment through a short term wage protection scheme (Jobkeeper) or figure manipulation (official unemployment stats) do nothing to save jobs. What is needed is government investment in job creation with sustainability in mind, jobs in infrastructure, jobs in energy development, health, housing, education, manufacturing, services, etc etc, none of this so called give it to the private sector and hope for the best. The only worthwhile thing to come out of the Labor parties mouth is "we need to get ban for our buck", yes indeed we do need to get bang for our buck, but not shooting ourselves in the foot as the gun goes off. Unfortunately Labor seems to be missing in action most of the time when it comes to ways of fighting the Morrison recession.

The left whingers equate Keynesian economics with a license to spend wildly, and as expected the usual left whinge suspects are criticising Morrison for not spending more and for letting businesses make a profit. That small and medium-size businesses create the most jobs seems to elude the public bureaucrats.

Keynes while advocating public expenditure and a fiscal deficit during a recession also clearly advocated for budget surplus during economic growth. That Labor is incapable of budget surplus even during a period of strong growth is an indictment of them.

Morrison's budget is not socialist it is basic economics and the flip side of a surplus when the economy is growing.