Official figures show that Australia's economy was hit by its heaviest fall for 20 years in the first three months of 2011, shrinking 1.2% from the previous after wild weather rocked mining and farms.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics said gross domestic product saw its largest quarterly fall since the March quarter of 1991, when the nation was last in the grip of recession, as the weather hammered key mining exports.
'Flooding which began in late December 2010 combined with cyclones in both Queensland and Western Australia have had a significant impact on the March quarter activity,' the ABS said.
But the figures, which also showed 1% annual growth, beat market forecasts of a 1.4% quarterly fall.
A drop in net exports took 2.4 percentage points from growth, which Treasurer Wayne Swan described as the single largest hit to exports since records began. Rallying commodity prices helped stave off a worse outcome.
It is the first contraction in Australia's economy since the depths of the global financial crisis, when GDP fell 0.9% in the fourth quarter of 2008 before rebounding on strong mining exports to Asia, dodging recession.
