Ian Verrender

And I think you might find in the budget next week, that'll be a continuation.

Look, one of the difficulties with interest rate hikes particularly is that they target a very specific cohort.

So you target younger people, you target younger people who've bought homes, and you target younger people who bought homes in the last couple of years.

They've paid extraordinary prices for them.

They've had to borrow to the hilt.

And so any interest rate rise, the magnitude on your spending power is just incredible compared to years past when people didn't borrow as much and interest rates may have been higher so that when a rate hike came through, it wasn't proportionally as big an impact on your budget and on your spending power.

So it's a very small section of the population that gets hit there.

Is that fair?

Well, no, it's not.

And so should we be looking at other ways to try and rein in spending in the economy over a broader measure?

Yes, we should.

Now, that's a philosophical question that probably won't be answered either by the Reserve Bank or the government and in this budget.

But clearly in the budget, the Treasurer has decided to look at intergenerational issues and try to rectify some of the

anomalies that are there.

Now, over the past 25 years, what we've seen, and look, budgets are about two things, just a bit of background here.

They're about, you know, is it going to be a surplus and therefore restrictive?

Is it going to be a deficit and therefore expansionary?

That's the big picture.

But within that framework, budgets are about redistributing wealth and income, right?

They always have been.