Dr Sam Wylie

And that's, you know, ordinarily that would happen in a normal economy every five to seven years.

Australia had this incredible period from 1992 through to the beginning of COVID-19 where we didn't have a single recession at all.

You know, we had 30 years from 1992 to 2020.

I guess that's 28 years.

where we didn't have two quarters of negative growth.

And mostly that is to do with the Australian economy being hitched to the China growth story.

China needed the resources that we have, and our economy just grew and grew over a long period of time.

You know, neither of you might have ever seen a recession.

There's certainly lots of young people.

I was very young.

It was a surprise when COVID-19 came along.

But they are more common than people would ordinarily think.

Now, what does it mean to say that the economy is not growing?

Well, we usually think about this in output terms.

So there's really three types of output we should think about.

We should think about the production of goods and services that people consume, like Uber rides and computers and holidays and clothing and others.

And then there's investment.

which is the building of new houses, the building of machinery, buildings, et cetera, but also non-tangible things like computer software, et cetera.

Not all of investment actually leads to something you can see or touch.

If you invest in writing software, for instance, then that's also investment.