Australia’s economy has posted its worst performance in more than 30 years, excluding the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew just 0.2 percent in the April-June period and 1 percent from a year earlier, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday.
With the exception of 2020, annual growth was the slowest since 1991-92 – when Australia was emerging from recession.
On a per capita basis, which accounts for the impact of record levels of immigration, GDP fell 0.4 percent quarter-on-quarter — the sixth consecutive decline — to 1.5 percent year-on-year.
Before the pandemic, Australia enjoyed an unprecedented three-decade streak of uninterrupted economic growth, emerging from the 2008 global financial crisis as the only major economy to avoid recession.
Australia’s post-Covid recovery is struggling after the central bank raised interest rates 13 times between May 2022 and November 2023 in an effort to cool inflation that was running at quarter-century highs.
On Sunday, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said continued interest rate hikes were “breaking the economy”.
While weak economic data is likely to fuel calls for the Reserve Bank of Australia to cut rates, inflation rose slightly in the June quarter and remains above the central bank’s 2-3 percent target.
Growing discontent over the economy has caused Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party government to lose support.
In a Newspoll opinion poll published on Monday, 41 percent of respondents said they approved of Albanese’s performance, compared with 54 percent who disapproved – the worst performance by an Australian leader since his election in May 2022.
In a separate poll by Redbridge, just 24 per cent of Australians said they could name one thing that had improved their lives since entering office.
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