Nick Goodall

All good, mate.

Then let's look at the economy and labour market release for Q4 in particular.

Of course, the headline was that unemployment rate increased to 5.4% from 5.3% in Q3.

bit of a surprise even for the economists that update their forecasts more frequently than the reserve bank they still surprise them too though as per usual with these numbers you have to look a little bit beyond the headline to get the real true detail of how this labor market is performing try to take us um through that detail and i guess your overall read on you know how bad this is or it's not so bad and maybe at the end we'll get to the implications for

the official cash rate in particular, how the Reserve Bank might read this.

Of course, they're meeting in, what's that, about nine days' time, 18th of February, next Wednesday, to decide the OCR issue the next monetary policy statement.

So, yeah, we'll get to that shortly.

But, yeah, first the figures on the labour market, Kelvin.

yeah always again trade-offs in these figures yeah yeah i think that's good that's kind of where my mind was heading to i think you know there was other stats in there showing that hours worked increased by one percent so yeah those people that already have a job their hours are slightly increasing as you said i think you take that read on participation rate increasing that yes it is people having a bit more confidence in the labor market to go out there and try and find that job so i do think there are those positive reasons but and and probably more to your point that

later on it's more about what's next right and it's not like anyone's expecting 5.4% to grow further in the coming quarters or yeah even hold there you know it still is an expectation that it's going to start to drift lower so I think as you say for for that kind of result it's as positive as it can be despite getting worse by 0.1% in itself and that has to be seen as a good thing but

More importantly, I think, yeah, the conversation in the last two weeks since we got that high CPI inflation rate that led to people going, well, they're going to have to drift the OCR back up again.

You need to stop it being so stimulatory.

I think this kind of does...

go back towards the other side of those economists who are saying, jumping the gun, bringing these OCR increases forward further into 2026, the economy is still struggling a little bit, labour market's still not going great, you know, just tie-ho on that a little bit and let this play out a little bit longer and you can keep the OCR a bit more stimulatory for a little bit longer than having to get it back to what everyone seems to see as the neutral rate around about 3%, which we're obviously 75 basis points away from.

So,

That, to me, is where I sit off the back of this, that it does show that there's still some weakness out there.

There's definitely no rush to get this OCR travelling back upwards, even though we had that inflationary figure outside the band, of course.

The expectation is still for inflation to come down.

Yes, unemployment should also come down as well.

The economy should start to grow, but it's not like those, even the more recent data or the faster moving data is showing signs of this storming away.