Chris Richardson

It is worth noting, and you're talking about the budget, and you're entirely right, right?

It is worth noting that what we are juggling in Australia in the near term is not that dissimilar to what we juggled back in 2022.

In 2022, right, there was already inflation, like we had before the Iran war, and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices up.

And you got off the back of that combination of worsening in inflation.

And again, we're getting that worsening in inflation now.

And governments, so I've mentioned the feds are about a quarter of the spending in Australia.

By the time you add in the states, you're about two-fifths, 40% of all the spending in Australia.

The politicians essentially reacted to that by giving us money and lots of subsidies for this and that.

And I suspect there was a certain amount of grinding of teeth from the Reserve Bank around that because it sounds good.

In a bunch of cases, they handed us money in ways that reduced the measured inflation rate.

But they still actually worsened inflation because they were giving us extra money at a time when there was already too much money chasing too little stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you are setting out – I thought of three tests for the budget.

One, just briefly, if you like, was insurance in the sense of paying more for fuel really hurts.

But running out of fuel, especially diesel, our farmers feed the world, our miners make us the money, our transport sector moves everything that –

If we were to run out, then that would be a real problem.

So the main task for the government right now is to make sure that we're getting supplies and that our supplies are secure.

The second one, though, and you talked about it, inflation.

because back a handful of years ago, when the Reserve Bank was taking money out of the economy, governments and the states were arguably worse than the feds.

Governments were putting the money back in.