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Australia’s national broadcaster continues to falsify the impressive economic recovery under Labor [1]
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Date: 2025-03-03
Australia’s retail sector employed 1.30 million workers at the beginning of 2024, a number expected to decline as self-checkout and online shopping advanced.
Yet according to last Thursday detailed jobs update from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), shopkeepers had to employ an extra 52,700 workers last year to deal with surging demand.
That brought the retail workforce to a record 1.35 million, up 4.1% for the year, well above the overall jobs growth of just 2.4%.
The same ABS file shows jobs in accommodation and food services surged by a thumping 84,000 last year, or 9.4%.
This brings to more than twenty the number of datasets from the ABS and elsewhere showing Australia has moved out of the Coalition’s cost of living crisis of 2021-23 into an impressive household spending boom.
Persistent serious media failures
ABC News, funded by Australia’s taxpayers, consistently misreports the economic successes of the current Albanese Labor administration, just as it refused to report accurately the severe economic failures of the previous right-wing Coalition regime.
Another shameful example arose during analysis of the Reserve Bank’s (RBA) interest rate cut on Tuesday 18th February. A chap called Ian Verrender, described as the ABC’s chief business correspondent, made multiple assertions at odds with the evidence.
He claimed:
“Because we’ve got a strong jobs market, that is not a bad thing. That’s actually a good thing. Every other indicator of the economy is weak.”
And later,
“There are a lot of indicators out there that the economy is in rather poor shape.”
In fact, virtually all significant economic indicators except growth in gross domestic product (GDP) show Australia’s economy is among the world’s best-performed. These include the 15 graphs listed here last week, and these additional 17 datasets:
This is the opposite of “rather poor shape”. It is the antithesis of a “weak economy”.
Verrender then claimed:
“You look at GDP growth. In the September quarter it was 0.8% ... But 0.8% growth in the economy is appalling really.”
No, it isn’t. The entire world is in the low GDP growth phase of the long-term cycle, with several countries either still in or just out of recession or a per capita recession. Australia is one of only three OECD economies to have recorded positive quarterly growth every quarter for the last three years. Spain and Costa Rica are the others.
Developed countries to have copped six or more negative or zero quarters over the last three years include Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, Hungary, Latvia, Austria, Estonia and New Zealand.
Yes, 0.84% growth is historically low. But this does not signal anything “appalling” given conditions worldwide and all the other strong outcomes.
His third false claim:
“We’ve got retail sales really just barely flatlining.”
Australia has enjoyed a retail upswing since households were gifted billions in stimulus money during the Covid pandemic. Retail volumes soared as the free cash was splurged. Values increased even more in 2021 as inflation raised prices, prompting the ABS to note that “disruption and volatility caused by COVID-19” impacted its data.
When the aberrant period of artificially-inflated retail turnover ended in late 2023, neither values nor volumes returned to pre-Covid levels. Both stayed higher. See chart below.
Retail sales volumes now substantially higher than pre-Covid, despite media falsehoods. Chart courtesy Independent Australia.
The category breakdown is instructive. Spending on luxuries, including cosmetics and dining out, reached an all-time high percentage of retail turnover in the December quarter at 21.3%.
In contrast, the proportion on essential food has fallen. This has averaged 39.5% of retail sales for the last three years, down from the pre-Covid average of 40.6%.
Retail is not “flatlining”. It is surging.
Responses from the ABC
IA emailed Ian Verrender twice with no response. We lodged a formal complaint to the ABC Ombudsman who, it seems, only checked the facts with Verrender himself, not with any external authority.
The Ombudsman’s response addressed most points raised, but simply repeated the false claims – which are well-rehearsed mantras of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News and the right-wing Liberal Party.
The Ombudsman asserted, “We had the highest disposable income per capita up until the pandemic. Now we have the lowest.”
That is plainly false. The detailed OECD data explorer confirms Australia ranks seventh among 35 countries with US$37,433.
The Ombudsman also claimed, “Australia’s (sic) has experienced the worst drop in living standards in more than 50 years”. That is laughably absurd. No dataset shows that. They all show impressive upswings.
Of course pockets of hardship and deprivation remain. It will take many more years yet to undo all the damage of nine years of Coalition corruption and incompetence.
But the recovery is underway, despite media denials. Just ask the 2.33 million retail and hospitality workers striving to meet consumer demand.
*
This is an edited version of an article published today in Independent Australia. The original article is available here in full for free:
https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/abc-news-continues-to-falsify-australias-strong-economic-recovery,19486
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