"Why are you being so churlish about it?"

I think you've lost the logic of the issue. The question is whether the virus or the reaction to the virus caused the economic downturn in Australia. Finding an example from Brazil is irrelevant to that issue and since the reaction to virus was the cause of the economic problem in your example it simply continues to prove my point.

ie the virus wasn't the cause of the economic disaster, the reaction to the virus was cause of the economic disaster.

Childcare got a boost in this socialist budget: from $10.3 billion up to $12 billion, with a lot of the loot going to families earning up to $353,000 per annum (to be raised further), so more mothers can dump their children with strangers.

The women who have actually increased female participation in the workforce the most are 60 years and over. Child- bearing aged woman went back to work long before lavish child care. So, the benefits to the economy of providing child care are not what they are cracked up to be.

Disadvantaged families benefit the least from this lavish spending on childcare, and the Productivity Commission has found that the benefits to the economy are delusional.

Judith Sloan calls the childcare industry "middle class Mafia".

With encouragement from the new-socialist Liberal party, Australians are now totally addicted to big government and handouts. It's time for their coalition partner to give them the flick. The National Party would still have their rural support - none of their seats would be lost - and the Liberals would be happier punching it out with Green Labor for the inner city elites, who they are now pandering to.

Come on ttbn,

My Old Man always said there was no bigger socialist/capitalist than the "Cow Cocky", he changed with the weather. In a good season he was a capitalist, as soon as a drought or a flood hit he was a socialist wanting all the government assistance he could get. Not being a student of Australian political history you would not have known that in its informative years of the 1920's the Country Party was indeed a socialist party. Proportionately conservative governments led by National/UAP/Liberal parties as senior coalition partner were under more pressure to spend from the members of the junior party (Country/National party) than they were from their own members. The most noted Country Party leader John "Blackjack" McEwen put huge pressure on the Menzies and Holt governments to spend in areas of agriculture and manufacturing. McEwen was very much a social conservative (refused to have the privately gay William McMahon as PM) but economically he was closer to the ALP than the Liberals.

" Despite taking a conservative position socially, the National Party (formally the Australian Country Party) has long pursued agrarian socialist economic policies. Ensuring support for farmers, either through government grants and subsidies or through community appeals, is a major focus of National Party policy. According to Ian McAllister, the National Party is the only remaining agrarian socialist party from the "wave of agrarian socialist parties set up around the Western world in the 1920s".

The Liberal party has lost all fiscal responsibility.

The 'Australian Financial Review' opines that: "The age of entitlement, declared dead in Joe Hockey’s 2014 budget, is very much alive and well in this (budget). It is disappointing that Mr Frydenberg is taking such a casual approach to deficit reduction, leaving it to its own devices."

Australia is set for permanently higher spending, higher taxes, and higher debt, without offering any economic reform. Terry McCrann believes that we will never see again a federal budget surplus, nor any more tax cuts "after the last round from 2019 arrives.”

Debt might not be so bad if it was used to fund productive assets - e.g dams, coal-fired power, or nuclear power. But the government is borrowing money to subsidise such things as child care for high-income, professional couples.

The new-socialist Morrison Liberal Party has no strategy to pay off the trillion dollar debt it is intent on incurring, and it has surrendered to the Left not just the cultural ground, but with the budget, also the economic ground.

Australia is rooted, not by the obvious suspect, the Marxist Left, but by the disgraceful politicians who pretended to be right of centre until they gained power

ttbn, some of what you say is true. Conservatism is a luxury afforded us during good times. Friedbrain did say with spending he is not constrained by ideology, but is driven by necessity. Has all the spending over the past year been wise and targeted, no there has been waste and excess, but generally its been needed to avoid a deep recession with high unemployment and business failures.
The government realises it cannot control debt, and is relying on low interest rates and higher than expected revenue to keep some minimal control, and it is minimal. ScumO' and Friedbrain if nothing else are practical politicians who realise there is little they can do about debt, and the real problems it brings will be far in the future, and they wont be in office, so it will be someone else's headache.