Carrington Clarke

But yes, it's a brave position to be taking.

One of the things that is surprising, last week we had the interest rate decision from the Reserve Bank.

It was only a week ago, isn't that crazy?

I also received the statement of monetary policy.

I went through a process similar to this where we were locked down.

I noticed that the predictions, the forecasts from Treasury were a little bit more rosy than the predictions from the Reserve Bank when it comes to some of the key variables that they're looking at.

And underpinning that difference is what they think is going to be productivity.

You know, this key word that we kept hearing, how much productivity is going to be increasing in Australia.

Now, the government is predicting it's going to be growing at 1.2%.

The Reserve Bank only thinks it's going to be growing at 0.7%.

And so this feeds into a lot of the other metrics, including wage prices, how much we're growing.

And both of them are kind of rosy when you look at what's happened recently.

And productivity is one of the most important words, I should say.

It's still not going up.

Yeah, well, exactly.

But they think it's going to be a lot rosier than what the Reserve Bank thinks.

Now, they say there's measures in here when it comes to competition policy, better utilising skilled migrants, ways of making the economy more productive.

But it's still not as high as the government would like it to be for the economy to be moving at great speed.

and be able to move to grow without putting more inflationary pressure into the mix.

Well, and I think one of the big changes recently in Australia is the demographic shift where we do have a lot of young people who now vote, who feel particularly when it comes to housing, that they've been mistreated by the system and that when they've gone to auctions, they've been competing with people who have a taxation advantage and that's why they're being outbid.