With growth hard to come by, many Australian companies are making cost cuts that go well beyond the chocolate biscuits in the kitchen, says CBA's Tim Rocks Photo: Natalie Boog Falling real incomes in Australia and global growth concerns are undermining corporate and consumer confidence and put at risk the government's fiscal objectives, a conference heard on Monday. A panel of experts told delegates to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's annual Australasian Conference that the economy had been slow to recover from the end of the mining infrastructure boom and lacked any clear drivers of future growth, aside from bigger volumes of resource exports and housing construction.