There wasn't the demand for workers to support it. This time last year, the official budget strategy (its formal title is fiscal strategy) pledged to maintain economic support until the unemployment rate was 'comfortably below 6 per cent'.įrydenberg ditched that target on the ground it was unambitious in the May budget, replacing it with a commitment to spend until the recovery was 'secure and the unemployment rate is back to pre-crisis levels or lower'.īut – even projecting forward all the way out to 2025 – Frydenberg couldn't promise an unemployment rate below 4 per cent. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg couldn't have done it until recently. Yet, astoundingly, both are now within reach. Neither have happened for half a century not since the long Coalition reign of Robert Menzies and his successors from the 1950s to the early 1970s, when unemployment was between 2 and 3 per cent.
It would be to forecast an unemployment rate below 4 per cent (a rate of three-point-something), then to pledge to go further, to two-point-something. What's the boldest thing the Morrison government could do in next month's budget?