The good news? Household living standards are on the rise. The bad news? Just about everything else

‘In the March quarter of this year, GDP growth was just 0.2%, down from 0.6% in the December quarter,’ Greg Jericho writes. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

There were early signs that the March GDP figures were not going to be good.

To start with, the Bureau of Statistics’ new measure of household spending that covers about two-thirds of all household spending had already revealed that spending for the quarter was flat compared with a 1.6% jump in December quarter last year. So household spending was worse.