AMID all the huffing and puffing about the budget, three sets of economic data on Wednesday quietly warned that the economy is struggling.
Consumer confidence slumped, wages grew at a snail's pace and job vacancies fell.
It's not a good look for an economy that's supposed to be picking up towards a normal rate of growth.
Consumer confidence was obviously affected by the federal budget last week.
Even before that, though, the economy's chronic sluggishness had put the Westpac-Melbourne Institute index at an unusually low level for an economy not actually in recession.
But the index has now dropped to a level typically only seen when some sort of crisis is under way - a recession, a stock market crash, a financial crisis or the like.
The only bright spot in the survey was a bounce in expectations for the state of the economy over the coming five years.
But, given the gloom evident in other measures including slumps in gauges of shorter term economic conditions and family finances, it's likely that the expected improvement in the coming five years is more a measure of how grim things are now than of how good they are expected to be later.
The weakness in confidence has most likely been exacerbated by what's happening to wages.
Which is, as it turns out, not very much.
Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday showed average wage rates rose 2.6 per cent over the year to the March quarter.
That data series goes back as far as 1997 and there has not been a smaller rise over that time.
But longer-term data sets like the measure of average compensation per employee from the national accounts, which extends back to 1972, show that wages growth this slow is very rare.
And it was a smidgin slower than the 2.8 per cent rise in the consumer price index.
That's not exactly bound to boost consumer confidence.
Nor is the state of the jobs market.
The Department of Employment counts the number of vacancies advertised on internet sites.
This data series shows the trend in vacancies, after a small and tentative rise in the second half of last year, has stalled and is now flat at best and possibly drifting lower.
That will feed back into both confidence and wages growth, tending to depress both.
And that will just make it harder for the economy to gain traction as it pushes against the triple headwinds of a fading mining investment boom, a high exchange rate and a contractionary budget.
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