Stephen Koukoulas

And so in a sense, you're sort of getting this move in the right direction.

But as we said, if you were to go...

and completely unwind capital gains tax concessions and negative gearing and not grandfather it and issues like that, which, again, we'll wait and see what actually happens in terms of the details.

But if you were to go cold turkey and this is the best economic policy that you could come up with, you would create a lot of upheaval and you would have a very good chance of losing the election.

And, of course, politicians get criticised for that, but that's their job to get re-elected.

They don't want to lose their job, nor do most other people.

Right, well, we saw the RBA put out their forecast last week in the Statement of Monetary Policy.

There's usually not a big difference between the two because Treasury and RBA do talk to each other.

So we'll have a slowing rate of economic growth coming through both 26-27 financial year and probably into the 27-28 financial year.

Unemployment will be forecast to be a little higher, inflation higher, staying higher for longer.

Oh, you know, I'm sounding pretty gloomy here.

But with some of these parameter changes, like the numbers that lead to revenue into the coffers of the Treasury or outflows from the Treasury, they're actually a net benefit.

And my good friend Chris Richardson, who's the budget guru of all time, he's calculated that as several tens of billions of dollars.

If you throw in a little bit of fiscal tightening, a little bit of budget tough love for the community...

we'll get sort of close to a very, very small deficit.

I won't say a surplus, but we'll get very close to a deficit that could be as tiny as $10 billion.

And remembering that the Australian economy is $3 trillion.

So it's a mere decimal point of GDP.

Yeah, the wage price index is released on Wednesday, I think it is.

And we know that from the RBA statement last week, and the link between wages and profitability and margins and inflation is a well-established one.