Might this new knowledge about what really matters to Australians, might that make governments less keen to prioritize employment in the future and, uh, keener than they have been to do everything they can to keep prices under control?

Again, I don't think so.

I think it's just because it's a relative concept, which inflation sort of hurts now.

Uh, in the past there's been periods where unemployment hurts more.

We got an unemployment rate, I think it's around about 7.5% at the peak in COVID.

You know, as Gianni said, there was expectations from some of the best forecasters in the country that that could've been as high as 20%, and the reality is that had the policy response not been as it was, it could've been 20%.

That is a very different economy.

Sherelle.

Where do you think we're headed for the rest of the year when it comes to interest rate rises? More on the cards?

Unfortunately, I think so because we know that on the basis of the Reserve Bank's own forecast, which of course will really matter for what it will do, you can see the underlying inflation rate sitting up above 3% really right through 2020. to the middle of next year.

So that's core inflation sitting above 3% for more than another year.

And that is with the assumption in the forecast, because it uses market forecasts to give a rate assumption, that there's one more rate hike already in there.

So even with that situation, you still have inflation too high, which means inflation There's no other read of this other than the fact that inflation will remain high and therefore interest rates need to go higher.

What did you make of Michelle Bullock's comments about government spending yesterday? It was quite

clear, wasn't it? She was saying that the increase in demand that comes from government spending, which is kind of no different from increase in demand that may come from a private sector spending or a tight labour market, that's all contributing here.

You can't kind of quarantine that type of spending off and say it doesn't matter.

But how concerned should we be about that?

Yeah, I don't think we should be too concerned at the moment because it has been so strong for such a long period of time.

And so any sort of deterioration from here to some extent had to be expected because you couldn't kind of maintain that level of jobs growth and such a low unemployment rate forever.

Of course, you know, it's hard to talk about this in the macro because to one person, obviously a loss of a job is a big deal.

So I don't kind of want to take away from that.

But I think, look, we should see continued jobs growth in September.

And this is a point, actually, that Michelle Bullock, the governor of the Reserve Bank, made last week at the Senate Estimates Committee hearing.

And, of course, we're going to hear a lot from the Reserve Bank this week, be it minutes from the most recent board meeting as well as a few speakers.

I mean, if you could pick where you wanted your economy to be, inflation in that 2% to 3% target, 4.2% unemployment, growth is a bit slow, definitely, but it's not a disaster by any stretch.

No, that's right.

We're sort of in this kind of Meek Mill in some ways.

We are getting, I think the economy is genuinely getting a little stronger.

You know, we've got the consumer picking up.

That's really important.

As you know, like half of GDP is the consumer.

How do we fix it?