The word of the day is resilience. It was in the title of the Treasurer's budget speech and then appeared another 13 times after that. In the budget papers themselves, it appeared a whopping 170 times. It's sort of ironic. By any objective measure, the Australian economy has displayed a remarkable level of resilience over the last decade.

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Even more ironic is that many of the proposals being put to government by think tanks, commentators and the like would probably reduce the resilience of the economy rather than increase it.

Is the focus on resilience misplaced?

Risks are high, and we can always do more to make ourselves more resilient. Now is the time to learn the lessons about what has made our economy resilient over the past 10 years, and how we can get more of it.

To be fair, some might wince at the suggestion that the Australian economy has been resilient. What about all those supply chain problems during COVID-19?

Sure, Australia faced supply chain challenges during COVID-19 for a handful of products. But put this into context.

Australia imports tens of thousands of products each year. If you're worried about a tiny fraction of products facing shortages (that were only temporary) during a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic, I fear your standards might be a bit too high.

The same is true for China's trade restrictions on Australia. For years we've been told that Australia is too dependent on China and that China could destroy Australia's economy by cutting off our exports.

But when we ran this experiment and China imposed trade restrictions over tens of billions of dollars of Australia's exports, the overall result was a nothing-burger.

Lobsters took a hit, wine took a hit, but the overall impact of China's trade........

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