Stephen Koukoulas

And as the RBA has been talking about, the governor, we had the assistant governor, Sarah Hunter, talking to just last week.

They're worried about the second round effects and inflation expectations because if you expect prices to increase, you want bigger wage increases.

And if you're a business person, you bump up your selling prices.

So if we get a headline, pleasant surprise, as we're saying, maybe that just sort of counters some of that inflation expectations issue.

numbers, which had been spiking higher.

So yeah, there's a lot more to go on this really complex question.

You know, the oil price is still all over the place.

We don't know whether the government's going to extend the excise reduction, which comes to an end on 30 June.

So July, does petrol just jump by 32 cents a litre over and above whatever the international price is doing?

Yeah, well, the last –

refer to our previous answer on the March inflation rate, because March household spending was plus 1.6%, an absolute boomer.

However, petrol consumption, when we fill up our tanks, was up 22% in the month.

So while we were all rushing around filling up our cars, that added to that figure.

And the underlying, gosh,

household spending, we've got an underlying measure for everything now, I think, we're still up about 0.7%.

So what we're going to see, the headline figure, like the inflation figure, being very weak because everybody's filled up with petrol now and they've filled up their jerry cans and whatnot.

So petrol is going to be probably fairly weak, a big drop occurring.

And so we're looking for household spending to be about 0.5% weaker, minus 0.5%.

But, again, the underlying figure for household spending is

chugging along moderate growth of about 0.5% per month.