Tom Crowley

It's very visceral when you're at the bowser filling up your car, exactly what that cost is.

And so when you have typically 50 cents of every litre being taxed, it's such an easy thing for the government to say, well, there's an easy way that we can make that tangible difference right at that salient point at the bowser and make you feel like you're a little better off.

That's absolutely right.

So, yeah, I think the argument there being that it doesn't change, as you say, with the elasticity too much, the demand, how often people choose to drive or not to drive.

Whether that applies at this ultra extreme end of the price curve that we're in now, this unprecedented territory with these enormous prices.

And whether also, you know, that 26 cents, which represents obviously a smaller percentage of the total price that people are paying now than it ever has before because that price is so high, whether that will even be noticed, whether it will just sort of seem to most people to come out in the wash, whether the ACCC will be able to ensure that it really does flow through in full or...

All of these questions, I think, we'll see play out in the next few days, whether it pushes up inflation.

There's this kind of tricky thing because measured inflation, the numbers that we check, literally the fuel price is lower and therefore measured inflation is lower.

People, though, have more money to spend.

Do they spend it on something else?

All of these debates I think will be had over the next couple of weeks.

But as I say, I think we also have to view this through the lens of what could be a brimming recession, or even if it's not, is a period of significant economic pain.

Martin Parkinson at the Press Club yesterday just made this point.

People have become conditioned to expect, rightly or wrongly, that they will get some sort of financial relief from governments when there are big external shocks that are not their fault.

And it is just hard to imagine, I think, a universe where the government could not have done this in some form.

A lot of Hormuz anxiety.

It is.

And I think there's an element of thanklessness in cost of living politics, which is that, as I said just before, I think governments now feel that they absolutely have to give people relief at times like this, but they don't tend to get thanked for them.

An anecdote that of all people, Angus Taylor once mentioned to me back when he was not the leader of the opposition about the politics of cost of living, which was that a constituent of his when he was the energy minister came in and was furious about how

Their energy bill had gone up and blaming Angus Taylor.