Stephen Koukoulas

I love looking at the weights that they put in.

So the average Australian household, for example, spends 3.35% of their money on petrol.

So that's why the weighting of petrol is 3.35%.

So, for example, if petrol prices were to go up 30%, just as an example –

That one item with a 3.3% weighting, 30% times 3.35% adds one percentage point to your inflation rate.

And that's roughly what we're seeing now.

So we spend that much on petrol.

We only spend 1.84% on electricity.

And, you know, electricity prices are highly, highly sensitive.

But we spend not much money on electricity.

We spend more money on or twice as much money on takeaway food than we do on electricity.

What about alcohol?

What about kind of – Alcohol and tobacco?

Michael, alcohol and tobacco, the sin items, we spend 6.5% on alcohol and tobacco, which is almost double the amount that we spend on petrol.

So, you know, it's a really fascinating thing.

And even things like something dear to your heart, international travel, 3.1% of our...

Spending is on international travel, so roughly the same as petrol.

Domestic travel is about the same, 3.16%.

So this is this basket of goods and services that the average household spends.

The ABS monitor price changes in these sorts of things, in newspapers and clothing and footwear and food and bread and vegetables and these sort of things, and they come up with the rate of inflation.