The latest housing and personal lending data shows the housing market is holding up well and the amount we are borrowing for big purchases has fallen in line with all other economic measures. 

One of the weirdest aspects about the government’s homebuilder package is that it is not really needed. Not only is its focus on renovations a daft way to stimulate the economy, it is even more odd because the residential construction sector is mostly doing fine – and certainly a lot better than other segments of the economy. 

It’s true that in April, the value of building approvals for alterations and additions did fall 13% – the biggest fall since 2017 – but overall residential dwelling approvals rose 4.4%. And the annual growth of building residential houses in April was actually faster than it has been since the middle of 2018:

This is reflected in the latest housing finance figures released on Wednesday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

While other sectors are seeing chart-breaking falls in sales and income, in April, there was just a 4.8% fall in the value of housing finance compared with March.

But the monthly growth figures are pretty erratic, and we get a better picture of how the sector is faring by looking at the annual growth. 

Here we see there was a bit of a drop-off in April, but total owner-occupier housing finance commitments in April were still 15% above what they were a year ago:

The investor side of things is less impressive, but even that is growing faster than it was for all of 2018 and 2019. 

This suggests that house prices should continue to grow over the next six months:

Towards the end of the year there may be a dip in prices, but at this stage even that is unlikely to be enough for prices overall to fall below what they were a year earlier. 

And even if we look at what the housing loans are being used for, we see little reason to think we need to stimulate the residential building sector. 

Loans for housing construction in April were for the first time since 2018 higher than they were 12 months earlier:

None of this should be all that shocking given interest rates are lower now than they have ever been in the past 60 years. 

And yet the figures show that the situation is stunningly varied across the nation:

While New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT are holding up well, elsewhere things are taking a decided turn for the worse. 

And yet even here the situation is not really about construction. In Queensland for example, the number of finance commitments to build a new home remains around the level of the past year, unlike for purchases of new and old homes: 

Buying a house, let alone deciding to build one, is a very long-term commitment – you work towards it, you don’t just decide to do it because you got a job, or even a raise. 

As such house prices and home loans can be relatively unresponsive to economic downturns (unless, like the GFC, it is directly related to finance and the housing market).

That cannot be said of the decision to buy a new car. 

Given the price of cars are pretty static, and you never buy one for “investment purposes” (unless you happen to like bad investments), the decision to buy a car mostly comes down to how flush you are feeling right now. 

This does not necessarily mean when employment is growing well that new car sales will soar, but when the economy goes bad it is never a good time to be trying to sell cars. 

And so it was the case in April, when the amount of personal finance for road vehicles fell 38%, after a 10% fall in March.

In April for the first month since 2015, less than $1bn in car loans was taken out:

The housing market might seem for the moment disconnected from the current economy. This is mostly because buyers hope the situation will be a short-term one and because the impact of job cuts will take some time to flow through into people’s long-term decision-making – if you were going to buy a house in April, you were likely feeling pretty economically secure regardless of the virus. 

But if we are looking for signs the economy is back close to normal, we could do worse than look at how many of us are buying new cars – and right now, we have a long way to go to get back to where we were just three months ago.

• Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia