Alan Kohler

And the market's predicting another one in August.

and probably another one by the end of the year, so possibly two more.

Certainly Lucy Ellis, the Chief Economist at Westpac, thinks there'll be two more from here.

And the RBA is predicting a slowdown, not a recession, but a slowdown from 1.8% growth to 1.3% growth this

but surprisingly not an increase in unemployment for this year at least.

Next year and the year after it's predicting unemployment will sort of rise gradually, but nothing too drastic.

That's what they believe.

So, yeah, I mean, look, I think obviously the jobs market and the world economy and the Australian economy in general is in the hands of what's going on in Iran, which we'll get onto in a minute.

A bit of a focus this morning on what Michelle Bullock said about the government in the budget basically warning, I mean, in central banker words, warning them not to splash cash too much in the budget next week.

because that'll just make their job harder and, you know, possibly lead to more interest rate hikes, although she didn't specify that.

The, you know, the effort of governments and politicians is to offset the cost of living problems that their voters have in order to get their votes and the Reserve Bank is trying to cause more cost of living problems in order to get inflation down.

So, you know, they're fundamentally in conflict.

And, you know, the question is what actually takes place.

I don't know.

I mean...

The government doesn't sound like it's going to do a lot of cash splashing, but maybe they will.

Well, look, Jim Chalmers has been going on about intergenerational fairness now, you know, for the better part of a year or more, and I don't think they can basically continue to talk about that if they don't tackle a couple of gains tax and negative gearing.

I mean, I just think that's sort of a threshold they have to cross.

And look, I think it's more like John Howard's promise not to do GST, which he ended up obviously having to do.

Fair enough.