It would easy to interpret a rise in retail spending in June as a recovery from the blow to confidence from the federal budget.

Easy and a tad simplistic.

As far as recoveries go, it was a very weak one and the trend remains soft.

The 0.6 per cent rise, after seasonal adjustment, put the value of retail spending at a level only 1.7 per cent higher than at the end of 2013, according to official figures.

In the six months before last Christmas, retail turnover jumped by 3.8 per cent.

So the six-monthly growth rate has been more than halved, despite the bounce in June.

And half of June’s bounce was no more than a catch-up from a fall in May, which followed three consecutive months of virtually no growth at all.

It’s just too early to make the call that consumer spending is back on track – unless the track is one that’s rising only very gradually.

There’s no doubt that confidence took a savage beating at the hands of the budget, which included controversial measures like the $7 Medicare co-payment and the withdrawal of the unemployment safety net for under-30s.

But there’s more to retail trade than confidence.

The figures cover a wide range of retail establishments but miss some large chunks of household spending.

One is petrol, whose price in the june quarter was nearly eight per cent up from a year before.

Other big drains on the family budget were property rates and charges, up by eight per cent; electricity, gas and water, up by seven per cent; and health and education, both rising by five per cent.

At the same time, annual growth in the total value of wages and salaries over the year to March – the latest measure – was only 2.9 per cent.

That was less than half the 6.4 per cent average growth rate for the preceding decade.

That anaemic growth in household income, combined with the hard-to-escape cost of ballooning household bills, will limit the extent of any confidence-driven bounce in retail spending.