Economic activity expanded 0.2% over the June quarter of this year

More now on the GDP data released today and the lowest economic growth in decades. Political Reporter Tom Crowley has the details from Canberra.

Transcript

00:00There's a number of different things happening in these national accounts and business investment

00:06and exports and imports. They're part of the political conversation but really when we're

00:10talking about the cost of living it's all about how much pain households are experiencing

00:13and that's where the focus has been so much on how household disposable incomes are falling

00:18faster than they have at any point for decades. Some households conversely because their house

00:22prices have gone up are doing a little bit a little wealthier but generally speaking

00:27that household pain is something that the government is eager to emphasise that it is

00:32trying to address and it's something that the coalition is eager to pin on the government.

00:35The real question, everyone knows that households are doing it tough, the question is, is it

00:40enough pain? And that seems like a strange way to put it but it's all about what the

00:43RBA is trying to do with its interest rates. A little bit of pain is in a sense what the

00:47RBA wants to try and bring inflation down. We're in a period where we're uncertain whether

00:51it's done enough, whether what we're seeing, the contraction in households, is enough to

00:55bring inflation to heel and whether we might be able to go out the other side without a

00:58significant deterioration in jobs and further deterioration in households. The government

01:04is worried on the other hand though about the risk of the RBA with its interest rates

01:07done too much, the risk that households are under too much pressure. That's the balance

01:12the government's been trying to strike and for quite a while now it's been saying that

01:15its cost of living measures including tax cuts and energy bill relief are really all

01:19about that, trying to put the cushion under households, recognising they're doing it tough,

01:23recognising that's part of the inflation fight but saying that also we need to do a little

01:27bit to make sure they're not hurting too much. Once again today, that's the message that

01:31we heard from Treasurer Jim Chalmers defending his cost of living strategy. Here's a little

01:35bit of him.

01:36This vindicates the approach that we took in the budget and it frankly torpedoes a lot

01:43of the free advice that we got at budget time to cut harder and harsher. That would have

01:49been a recipe for a much weaker economy. We know that from the June quarter data that

01:55you have before you now.

02:00So that's Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Angus Taylor on the other hand, the opposition has really

02:04been building a narrative that all of this pain that households are feeling is the government's

02:09fault or at least has been made worse by government spending. So rather than what you heard from

02:13Jim Chalmers there that the government's striking a responsible balance, the argument that's

02:17coming from the Coalition is they've done too much, that their spending has worsened

02:20inflation.