Dr Richard Denniss

And again, I'm comfortable with people saying they don't know what's going on.

I'll put my hand up and say, I don't know what Trump's going to do.

I don't know how long the war's going to go.

But I agree with Michelle Bullock.

Increasing interest rates

will not lower prices in Australia.

When prices are going up because petrol and diesel are going up, increasing interest rates will do nothing to fix that.

So for me, as an economist, as a person with a mortgage, and as someone who cares about the country I live in,

I just think that this is a bad decision that loads up a lot of pain and a lot of risk on some people while actually increasing the interest rate that people with a million bucks or two million bucks in super are going to receive.

Yes, it does, particularly because the RBA governor's rhetoric is basically saying that her job would be easier if Jim Chalmers was nasty to people too, right?

So she's literally saying, hey, government, if you could kind of increase taxes on poor people and

and don't give any public servants a pay rise, you could add some fiscal policy misery to the monetary policy, the interest rate misery I'm dishing out, and if you would do that, Treasurer, that would make my job as Governor of the RBA easier.

All I'm saying is that the extent to which government make up

the shortfalls for households by giving them more money, it makes it harder to dampen demand.

So she's not blaming Jim Chalmers for inflation because he didn't cause it, because Donald Trump caused it.

But what she is saying is, hey, I'm taking a stick...

to ordinary Australians.

If you took a stick to them as well, we could be double safe, triple safe, whatever.

So I do think it makes life harder for the Albanese government that is under pressure to fix people's problems.

It is under pressure to help people out during a cost of living crisis that Donald Trump caused.