Federal Finance Minster Mathias Cormann on Thursday said that the resource sector has been ‘incredibly important’ over the last six months to the resilience of the Australian economy as it dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We have continued to perform strongly when it comes to our export volumes and the price in particular for iron ore is quite high. In the half-yearly Budget update we assumed that the price for a tonne of iron-ore would go down to A$55/t. When I last looked it was running at above A$100/t. “Things are hard. Things are difficult, but they are not as bad as they could have been. They are not as bad as they are in many other parts of the world. We just have to keep things in perspective, despite all of the challenges we are dealing with.”
Australia is expected to face its largest budget deficit since World War Two, with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg forecasting a deficit of more than A$85-billion for the 2019/20 financial year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.