Tom Crowley

And he stepped through and he said, oh, you know, our policies, we've actually seen power bills going lower overall.

And then it turned out this person had just bought an air conditioner in Angus Taylor's telling and was running it several hours a day.

And that was why the power bill was so angry.

But they were inclined to blame governments similarly here.

No one thinks the war is the federal government's fault, but they do feel that having had a few years of prices of everything going up, they're just angry.

And I think that that's where the government feels that political thing most of all.

So all of these sort of technical details, which are interesting and worth talking about,

kind of drowned out in the end by what I think was a calculus from the federal government, particularly once Angus Taylor started calling for this, that why do you want to look like the Grinch?

It's a couple of billion dollars for the federal budget.

It's a price that we're willing to pay.

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both.

I've always found that the technical definition of a recession is a little bit slow to be useful when you're in one, you know, because I went back to the pandemic and

we did get that technical recession by the end of the June quarter in 2020.

If you think back to that year, that was a fair way in already.

But the ABS only released the figure that officially got us over the finish line in September of 2020, by which time, of course, the full suite of government policy responses was already there.

And what I think was recognised in the pandemic was that

Particularly with that first lockdown, it might have been a short, sharp downturn that may not have even necessarily lasted for six months, although in the end it did.

But the key thing was that that could cause pain that would stick around.

And this, I think, is the thing that governments and central banks really worry about in recessions is that, yes, jobs are lost, businesses close.

And that that is not something that you can just hit undo on when the crisis ends, even if with both the war and COVID, you can think of it as this sort of artificial, time-limited, non-fundamental thing that will come and go.