Stephen Koukoulas

They're down in Sydney and Melbourne.

They're weakening in the other areas.

what were formerly boom cities for prices.

So this whole housing debate overlaid with this tax policy debate are getting to be a very, very hot topic for the economy and for the householders who have got either a benefit in the housing market, got investment properties and the like.

So housing could well be the dominant issue for the second half of the year, whereas inflation and interest rate hikes were the dominant issues of the first half of the year.

Yeah, well, it's been weakening.

Michael, I'm actually a little bit concerned about our external trade position that for nine consecutive years, we had international trade surpluses in the goods market.

So that's goods, materials and the like.

And last month we had the first deficit in nine years.

And I think that's a function of the Aussie dollar being strong.

So that's undermining a little bit of export competitiveness.

And it's also a factor, I think, that volumes, while the price of commodities is still pretty good,

the volumes have been flattening out.

So I'm just a little bit concerned that that positivity from net exports to our economy could be a little bit of negativity in the months ahead.

So I'm looking for another small deficit of about $2 billion for the monthly trade numbers.

In terms of what the jobs numbers meant, yes, there was weakness there.

And in a sense, it's surprising that it's taken so long for the unemployment rate to move up because we've had basically a couple of years where growth has been, you know, tepid, moderate, you know, not super strong.

And we've had a couple of years where the job vacancies numbers, the sort of leading indicator of unemployment, have been trending down.

So that said, it's finally caught up.

So yeah, minus 19,000 employment in the month.