Michelle Marquardt

So I look after all our different price indexes that we create.

So people have probably heard about the wage price index, the consumer price index, which is about inflation.

We've also got some smaller indexes, the living cost indexes and producer price indexes.

and international trade price indexes.

So quite a lot of different indexes that show different parts of the economy and how prices are travelling.

So we collect it in a whole variety of ways.

For the consumer price index, we get scanner data from supermarkets as a big source for food prices and other types of things that they sell through the supermarkets.

So that's a record of everything that they sell.

So, you know, how many tins of

spaghetti they sell each week and how much people pay for all of that and we also have web bots that scrape the internet to get prices from the internet and we also run some surveys of different businesses.

So they're both really interesting for people who are interested in real estate in particular.

So we treat the two indexes, treat housing slightly differently.

So for that inflation, for the consumer price index, we look at what the cost to build a new house is.

Whereas for the living cost indexes, we look at how much people are paying for mortgage interest charges.

So the reason they're a little bit different is because the CPI, the inflation index, is used by the Reserve Bank to set interest rates.

So to have interest payments in the CPI would all become a bit circular, but it's still interesting for people to understand what's happening to living costs, which is more about what's happening to the interest payments that they're making rather than just buying the new houses.

So we put out an information paper on Tuesday that we've got open for public comment all about how we might do a monthly CPI indicator, so a monthly indicator of inflation.

And it's showing that over the months, April, May, June, inflation kept going up.

So it went up from 5.5 to 6.8 by June, which is a little bit higher than we were showing in the quarterly indicator.

And that just helps people understand sort of what direction it's going, gives everyone a more frequent read on what's happening in the economy around prices.