A growth driven majorly by public spending, has yet increased the value of construction work in Australia by 1.9% from the December quarter to the first three months of this year. But this hike is much less than what the economists had predicted in seasonally-adjusted terms, as that of 4% increase over the quarter.

The entire edifice in the State had climbed, in the March quarter, to a worth of almost $39.5 billion, as surveyed by Australian Bureau of Statistics. The fourth quarter of previous year has shown a drop in construction work by 0.2%, in comparison to the earlier reading of a rise of 2.6%.

This much less rise in work than the expected, has forced many economists to scale back their GDP forecasts. A senior Economist at ANZ Shane Lee quipped, “With today's data being a little bit on the soft side, plus the retail sales data that was out last week also being reasonably soft that we'll be revising that down, but other areas in the economy will be fairly strong contributors to growth, particularly say inventories, and we expect growth of somewhere around half a per cent”.

He also envisaged that where the economic stimulus spending is continuing to buoy the construction sector, it is the private sector work that fell steeply, and on the other hand, the public sector work, which rose profitably.