Stephen Koukoulas
speaker
2,355 appearances
24 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard yesterday
Stephen Koukoulas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 24 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 6.
Appearances
But if we get that unemployment rate starting to creep a little bit higher, it just creates a little bit of a discussion point for the people who might be a little bit more dovish on the Monetary Policy Board and opens up a slightly different debate for what the RBA does.
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Maybe not one more hike.
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I think that's pretty much a done deal.
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But whether there's another one and another one after that becomes more problematic the higher the unemployment rate goes.
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is the whole immigration debate being a complex one, and there's no easy solution.
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That's obvious from the debate that we're having right now because people are saying, you know, even 225,000 net overseas migration is too high or 250 is too low or whatever the case may be.
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So there's a myriad of issues, and you're quite right to identify sort of the backpacker and the skill areas.
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Backpackers providing...
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you know, relatively low labour costs to the rural and regional areas, picking strawberries and apples and oranges and these sorts of things, but also providing services in other parts, which is where you get the skilled migration.
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You know, people who are tradespeople who work in the construction side of the economy is important too.
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So...
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It's one of these ones where it's hard to put your hand on your heart and say 225,000 is definitively the correct number for net overseas migration or 130 or 280.
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It's a very, very hard thing to say.
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But we do know that there is a level that is more desirable than the 500,000 people that we saw a few years ago or, as we saw during the pandemic, zero, which was too low.
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And the debate is somewhere in the
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It matters for a number of reasons.
It does
provide a bit of a reality check on the fact that GDP is growing at two percent.
So superficially that's quite good.
But population's growing at one and a half percent.
Showing 61–80 of 2,355 · page 4 of 118
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