Jim Chalmers

Not necessarily built in, but one of the things that plays out pretty substantially in these inflation forecasts is we use the market curve for inflation.

Sorry, for interest rates.

And so sometimes what you will see is a broad assumption that monetary policy is reacting to inflation.

You'll notice that those are all in the middle of the RBA's target band.

And so I think it's not set in stone, but that's a big factor in the way that they work it out.

So you're right.

I mean, we think inflation will peak or Treasury thinks it'll peak about 5% in the middle of the year and then trail away.

Higher than we would like it to be, higher than it would be absent the war in the Middle East.

But we're trying to give people the best sense of that.

You also see that there's another scenario in there where if oil stays really high for a long time, then obviously we expect higher inflation for longer too.

Well, we're trying to give you and your

listeners, viewers, a sense of the kind of contingencies that we work through.

A really big part of this job that people might not really appreciate is we go through different scenarios, we work out different contingencies.

A lot of your investors and people associated with businesses of all kinds, they're familiar with that kind of scenario planning.

So we've tried to give you a sense of that in the budget.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of interesting elements to that.

If you think about our economy last year, you know, inflation in a much better place.

Productivity is kind of a perennial problem in our economy, as you would know.

So really what I tried to do after the election was to say, we're going to try and make productivity a much bigger focus of the whole government, not just the Treasury.