MacroBusiness Access Subscriber Only Content Westpac with the note: The growth rate in the Leading Index peaked at 5% back in November last year shortly after 22 consecutive negative prints and a particularly large -6% during last year’s national COVID lock-down. It has since fallen back to 1.34%, still comfortably above zero and therefore signalling the outlook for above trend growth. On July 20 Westpac revised its near-term growth forecasts to take account of the lock-downs in both NSW and Victoria. We now expect that the NSW economy will contract by 3.1% in the September quarter and the Victorian economy will contract by 0.1%. That assumes the NSW lockdown will last a total of eight weeks and the Victorian lockdown three weeks. Contractions in the two biggest states will mean that the national economy is likely to contract by 0.7% in the September quarter.