Carrington Clarke

So it wasn't a real representation of what was happening in the economy at the time that it was released.

This one will take into account the massive inflationary pressure that has come from soaring fuel costs, even though that's more kind of the bowser.

I don't know that we've really felt the full impact of those heightened fuel costs, that less supply in the world, because most big companies, for example, the airlines and others, they buy stuff well ahead of time.

they're not buying petrol at the pump in the same way as we do and affected by those instant shocks.

So we're still going to see more of that flowing down the line in the coming months and probably perhaps even to a greater extent because things that we haven't thought of yet that we've still got storage of now, things like fertiliser, plastics, all these kind of petrochemical products, we've got them now.

the pressure is going to be in the coming months.

So it will be a fascinating read to see what happened at the very start of this conflict and the pressure that will be ongoing.

I mean, you'd love to be in the room.

To remind people for the look at inflation we had before this conflict took off, the Consumer Price Index, the CPI, rose 3.7% for the year to February.

The trimmed mean, which is the RBA's preferred measure, which excludes volatile items, that was 3.3%.

Now, that's still higher than the RBA wants it, which is 2% to 3%.

The flip side, and I guess probably the counterfactual that some of those economists are working on, is that the rise in fuel costs is already a handbrake on spending.

We have consumer sentiment about as low as it has been.

We've got this handbrake on consumer spending.

The costs that are coming are from a supply problem, not from a demand, there's too much money in the economy problem.

So it will be fascinating to see the decision they come to, how close the votes are, if there's differing sides of the argument here about whether getting 40% of Australians who have large housing debt and another 30% who rent and

whose rents are subject to mortgages, so many of them will go up as well, having them ship more money to their banks every month to pay off housing debt will lower inflation.

Or if the inflation is baked in from other things, far beyond their control, from a conflict literally on the other side of the world, they can't affect as Australian consumers.

And whether all of those costs are actually going to

crimp spending so much that inflation tempers itself.