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Speaker 1: Now, look, while I was tramping all over the top

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Speaker 1: of the Commandual peninsula, we had some good and bad

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Speaker 1: news about our economy. GDP came out better than we expected,

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Speaker 1: a rise of point seven percent in the fourth quarter,

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Speaker 1: which should signal the start of green shoots and recovery

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Speaker 1: and confidence. But at the same time, the consumer confidence

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Speaker 1: figure came out and it was the worst we've seen

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Speaker 1: since the nineties. And then Paul Bloxham, the Australian economists

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Speaker 1: who invented the rock Star economy name, came out and said,

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Speaker 1: our recession has been the worst in the CECD So

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Speaker 1: what happened there and why aren't we confident? And why

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Speaker 1: was our recession so hard? And here is my take.

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Speaker 1: The Reserve Bank and the government need to start working together.

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Speaker 1: During the pandemic, the bank slashed the interest rates while

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Speaker 1: the government turbocharged spending, leading of course to what we

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Speaker 1: know the hangover that needed medicine. The previous government rightly

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Speaker 1: blamed for the mess it was responsible for. But we've

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Speaker 1: been double hit by the bank and the government. They

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Speaker 1: pulled all the leavers. So then the new government came

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Speaker 1: in to fix things, slash spending to reduce boring good

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Speaker 1: move and also reduce revenue through tax cuts. But the

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Speaker 1: Reserve Bank had already started attacking inflation a year beforehand

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Speaker 1: with interest rates, so once again we were doubly hit

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Speaker 1: and we got some tax cuts, which was that the

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Speaker 1: right thing to do at the right time. Fran O'Sullivan

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Speaker 1: six weeks ago described the tax cuts as badly timed.

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Speaker 1: It meant we weren't paying back debt. We're still struggling

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Speaker 1: just to pay the interests. So, as Paul Bloxham has

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Speaker 1: now described, we had an excessive pandemic reaction followed by

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Speaker 1: an excessive inflation reaction. Now, all the stuff that all

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Speaker 1: the parties did is technically correct in macroeconomics, and this

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Speaker 1: is easy to criticize the twenty twenty hindsight, but it

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Speaker 1: has been as though the left hand and the right

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Speaker 1: hand doesn't know what each other are doing, which means

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Speaker 1: it was tough, which means now our recovery will be slow.

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Speaker 1: All the parties claim they are the prude fiscal managers,

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Speaker 1: and all Reserve Bank governors claim the same, but if

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Speaker 1: you look back over the past five years, that's simply

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Speaker 1: not been true. They've been working against each other, and

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Speaker 1: we did it hard. And the reason I mentioned all

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Speaker 1: of this is because we need to learn from this

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Speaker 1: unless we want to keep on reeling from boom to bust,

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Speaker 1: over and over again. For more from Early Edition with

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Speaker 1: Ryan Bridge, listen live to News Talk set Be from

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Speaker 1: five am weekdays, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.