Joe Hockey is right. The economic news is hardly wonderful, but the media's attempt this week to convince us the economy was perilously close to recession was sensationalist nonsense.
What set them off was news from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' national accounts that real gross domestic product grew by just 0.2 per cent in the June quarter. What they forgot to mention was that in the previous quarter it had grown by 0.9 per cent.
As Hockey says, the figures "bounce from quarter to quarter". But why let that small fact get in the way of a good scare story?
The less excitable Dr Chris Caton, of BT Investment Management, put it another way: "The weak growth for the June quarter was in part payback for the strong growth in the March quarter."
Just so. We were told, for example, that spending on home building fell by 1.1 per cent in the latest quarter, but not reminded that the previous quarter it had grown by a remarkable 5.6 per cent. There is no reason to believe the housing construction boom has ended.
We were told that the volume of exports fell by 3.3 per cent in the latest quarter, but not reminded that in the previous quarter it had grown by 3.7 per cent. Turns out the weather was unusually favourable around bulk-commodity ports in the first quarter, but unusually bad in the second.
We weren't told about these one-off negatives for growth in the June quarter, but much was made of a one-off positive: a sudden surge in defence spending, we were told, fully accounted for the quarter's 0.2 per cent growth.
(Actually, it was worse than that. Whereas total public sector spending made no contribution to overall growth in the March quarter, it contributed 0.6 percentage points in the June quarter.)
All this is why searchers after truth rather than headlines don't take quarterly changes in GDP too literally. Combine the two quarters and you get average quarterly growth of 0.55 per cent, or annualised growth of 2.2 per cent - which is probably closer to the truth.
It also fits better with a fact we were told only in passing, that the economy grew by 2 per cent over the year to June and by 2.4 per cent on average over the financial year, meaning Treasury's forecast of 2½ per cent was near enough to right - a point Hockey kept making and the media kept ignoring.
Examine the figures for the year to June and you don't find much evidence of an economy likely to collapse in a heap. Consumer spending grew by 2.5 per cent, home building by 10.4 per cent, public sector spending by 3.3 per cent.
Export volumes grew by 4.5 per cent, while import volumes fell by 0.7 per cent. In fact, apart from a small fall in the level of inventories, the only major negative contribution to growth came from business investment spending, which fell by 4.1 per cent.
That fall comes from the end of the mining construction boom, of course. It's a reminder of the truth of our position - that our transition from mining-led growth to more normal sources of growth has been far from smooth and isn't achieved yet - a truth too prosaic for the headline chasers. Growth in the low 2s is clearly well below average.
But if you dig a bit deeper you do find signs that the transition is proceeding, with help from record low interest rates and an ever-lower dollar.
For a start, there is evidence of recovery in non-mining investment. According to rough figuring by Kieran Davies, of Barclays bank, it's up by 4 per cent over the year to June, led by investment in the services sector.
Exports of services - including tourism and education - are also growing. Though little changed in the June quarter, their volume was up 7 per cent over the year, Davies says.
"With imports of services down 8 per cent over the past year as the falling exchange rate has made it more expensive to take an overseas holiday, trade in services [exports minus imports] added 0.1 percentage points to GDP in the June quarter and 0.6 percentage points over the past year."
Much has been made of the 1.2 per cent fall in "real net national disposable income per person", rightly described as the best measure of material living standards the national accounts provide. It's fallen for five quarters in a row.
Why? Because of the deterioration in our terms of trade - the prices we receive for our exports relative to the prices we pay for our imports - as coal and iron ore prices have fallen.
But it's important to see this in context. Why do so many people care so much about economic growth? I (and Joe and his boss) think it's mainly because they want to see more jobs created.
If so, real GDP - the quantity of goods and services workers are employed to produce - is a more relevant indicator than the various measures of "real income".
And the growth in GDP we've had has been sufficient to create 240,000 jobs over the year to July (including 68,000 during the supposedly knackered June quarter) and to stabilise the unemployment rate at just over 6 per cent.
It's true that the size of our real income has an effect on our spending on goods and services, and the demand for goods and services affects employers' demand for workers.
But much of the loss of income caused by lower coal and iron ore prices is borne by the mining companies (which are about 80 per cent foreign owned) and by state and federal governments (which collect lower mining royalties and company tax), rather than by the rest of us.
Times aren't easy, but we're not in bundle-dropping territory.
