Well, then he wouldn’t be Spud but there we are:
The Reserve Bank of Australia has lifted its key interest rate to 4.6%, its highest level since 2011, while warning of further hikes.
Did Australian mortgage holders need to be punished as a consequence of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu starting a profoundly unethical war in the Gulf, which they now do not know how to bring to a halt? The answer is obviously no.
Will increasing costs for Australian mortgage holders address the problems that the inflation in question is creating within the Australian economy? The answer is, again, no.
So, the Oz inflation target is already more like what Spud wants – he has indeed said that it should be higher than 2%:
Australia’s inflation target is to keep annual consumer price inflation between 2 and 3 per cent.
OK. And as to the effects of oil etc:
Key statistics
In the 12 months to July 2026:The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 3.5%, down from 3.8% in the 12 months to June 2026.
The largest contributors to annual inflation were Housing (+5.0%), Food and non-alcoholic beverages (+3.2%) and Recreation and culture (+2.6%).
Trimmed mean inflation was 3.6%, unchanged from 3.6% in the 12 months to June 2026.
Trimmed mean inflation is:
The trimmed mean Consumer Price Index (CPI) is Australia’s core inflation measure that calculates the weighted average price change after removing the most extreme 15% of price increases and 15% of price decreases.
💡 How the Trimmed Mean Works
• Ranking changes: All expenditure classes are ordered by their seasonally adjusted price movement.
• Trimming extremes: The top 15% (largest price spikes) and bottom 15% (largest price drops) of weighted items are discarded.
• Middle calculation: The final rate is the weighted average of the remaining central 70% of price changes.
🔎 Why the RBA Uses It
• Removes noise: Strips out temporary or volatile shocks like sudden fuel or fruit price spikes.
They are already looking at prices without the oil rise. And inflation, by this non-oil measure, is well ahead of target. It’s also housing which seems to be a major driver. Yes, increasing interest rates to take some heat out of housing and so lower the inflation rate to target could be justified.
Is there no beginning to this man’s knowledge of economics?
If the Labour Party is about to announce plans to end the Triple Lock on State Retirement Pensions it’ll be interesting to see which inflation index they’ll use in their new scheme. “Trimmed” means seem a pretty, ahem, flexible tool for politicians to fanny about with.
For politicians “trimmed” has the same meaning as “normalised” for the climate modelling geographers.
Did mortgage rates go up this month? He seems very vexed about it.
Labour MP talking to Andrew Pearce an hour or so ago stated the ‘nettle of Social Care has to be grasped’. She said that at the moment pensioners can lose their homes to fund their care, thereby implying that if they got rid of the Triple Lock to fund the NHS Social Care provision, pensioners wouldn’t have to lose their homes. I’d live with that, but I bet it won’t work that way…….
Addolff, brave of you to watch GBNEWS coverage of the Labour conference. Such a dire event, so many zombie leftists trotting out the same old bollocks and proposals that didn’t work the last twenty times but this time..
They’ve been floating the idea that they would stop the triple lock and use any savings to pay for free social care. The thinking appears to be that old people would prefer to have the safety net of free social care for a slightly smaller pension and keep their house.
The problem with it is that it appears to benefit wealthy people who won’t miss the reduced pension but will still get free care and then be able to pass on their houses to their children.
So why would Labour do that a few commentators have been asking. Well, the answer is in this lunchtime’s Speccie news letter.
It should also be noted that Labour is also the party of people with gold plated government pensions.
This explains why Labour goes in for luxury beliefs.
Pols have been promising to “do something” about social care for ages. It has never come to anything. My prediction is that they’ll end the triple lock but not make any substantial change to social care.
I’m pretty sure its ‘free personal care’ not ‘free nursing homes’. The personal care element of being ‘in a home’ is matched by the hotel costs, which the individual will still need to fund from their assets. Its quite similar to what Boris proposed years ago – a lifetime cap on ‘social care costs’ of IIRC £86k, but that cap only covered the personal care costs, not the hotel costs.
So under Burnham’s plan if Granny goes into a home perhaps 50% of the fees would be covered by the scheme, but the other half on the individual (assuming they have assets). So given care home fees are c. £1500/wk, or nearly £80k/yr people are still going to have to find £40k/yr from their own pockets. Which still means selling Granny’s house……
The whole idea is bonkers. There must be millions of elderly people who currently manage at home with relatives or neighbours providing social care at zero cost to the taxpayer. And plenty paying for their carers privately. Whats going to happen when social care is ‘free’? Many of those will suddenly decide ‘Hey, lets get the free NCS to do it instead!’. Whatever the cost of social care is today you can multiply it by 2 or 3 once it becomes ‘free’. And how exactly is that care to be rationed (as rationed it must be once its ‘free’)? You can ration ‘free’ healthcare by making people with non fatal issues wait, how can you ration ‘free’ social care? If they need it they need it, you can’t put someone on a waiting list for it. Plus of course the standard of care provided by State employed carers makes the NHS look like the Dorchester. A bigger bunch of lazy, uncaring, untrained, unprofessional and borderline criminal types you’d be hard pushed to find. At least in hospitals there are people around and paper trails etc to record what goes on, in private homes there will be no witnesses at all.
Burnham and Labour will rue the day they opened this can of worms. There’s a reason every government ignores it, because its one of those problems that is almost certainly unsolvable. Whatever changes you make will piss off a lot of people, who all vote. So best just to keep the status quo, any changes just land the instigator in deep sh*t.
National Care Service? Doesn’t that imply a ministry of care which will nationalise all the existing care homes?
And how long now before we have bestowed on us a national food service?
I think thats the misconception – ‘Care’ as in ‘Social Care’ is not the same ‘Care’ as in ‘Care Home’. Social care is looking after old people, maybe in their own home, maybe in a facility that houses many of them. It doesn’t mean paying for whatever building they live in, the maintenance thereof plus their food and energy costs. So it doesn’t mean ‘free care homes for all’. It means ‘free carers to come to your house to help look after you, and some contribution to your care home costs if you live in one’.
Its going to be a money pit. Once you provide something for free everyone who currently pays their own way crawls out of the woodwork and demands their bit of the pie. People who currently pay carers will demand free ones. Relatives who look after the elderly likewise. Elderly who might stay at home with carers will go into homes because its ‘cheaper’ now. From every direction demand will skyrocket. Look what happened to the NHS, the creators thought its costs would fall once they’d got on top of the health of the nation. 11% of GDP and counting later…….
And as for nationalising all the care homes, well unfortunately for Labour the ECHR forbids it, unless they pay full dollar for them. And then take on all the staff at public sector wages. So good luck finding the cash for all that right now. This is the absolute worst time any government could have gone down this rabbit hole. We’re stony broke. We can’t afford what we do now, let alone something like this. I’d say this is the equivalent of invading Russia. Sounds like a great idea at the start, usually ends in a Gotterdammerung near a station (Kaiserhof or Waterloo).
Well correct me if I’m wrong but getting rid of the triple lock doesn’t provide much of a saving in the short term, certainly not in the time horizon politicians have. It is however a prime subject for making anyone who threatens it look mean. We’ll put it out for review, knowing that the review won’t report until the next lot are in charge.
Don’t we vote politicians in so that they can make “difficult” decisions (at least in theory)? Why can’t the fuckers do anything without reviews and focus groups?
What is this Triple Lock thing? It’s the State Pension rise each April by the highest of CPI inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%.
OK, so its purpose is to preserve pensioners’ PPP. If it doesn’t rise by CPI or average earnings growth, it’s not doing that. We’ve not seen inflation down to 2.5% for quite a while, so it rises according to one of the other two criteria. Abandon that and pensioners – most of whom no longer work because they’re now too old to be able to, or be economically useful – get poorer.
I rather think there are other more worthy targets than the cohort of people shuffling towards the checkout who no longer have the means to do anything about their income.
Actually the “Triple Lock” only applies to the Basic State Pension, not to any “Additional” pensions that we paid for they go up by less than inflation (i.e. the value decreases while the nominal amount in debased currency decreases). I found this out because I deferred drawing my state pension until I was 70 so it should have gone up by 52% – a few years later I noticed that the increment was less than 50% of the basic pension so I queried it and got a lot of “Sir Humphrey”-esque blather from which I learned that the Graduated Pension from the ’60s only goes up by just over 1% and my alleged 52% uplift to the Basic State Pension is *not* that but just an annuity that declines in value every year as its annual nominal increase is less than inflation.
As I have an occupational pension from my former employer I am not on the cake-line let alone breadline but I resent being cheated.
Is it ever wise to delay taking a pension unless you have control over it ie a SIPP.
My IBM pension I could take at 50 or delay until 60 for £2000pa. I took it at 50 and in the next ten years built up an advantage I’d have to live until 90 to get back. Yes I arranged my self-employed finances to stay out of higher rate tax.
When I was 65, DHSS gave one an extra 1% for every 5 weeks one deferred one’s pension.
I consulted actuarial tables for life expectancy of pensioners (and of annuitants who tend to live longer) and calculated, assuming that interest rates stayed reasonably constant, that the optimal decision was to defer until I was 71 or 72 but opted for 70 as the benefits of having more money to spend when one is able to enjoy it rather than when one isn’t doesn’t show up in the arithmetic calculation.
DHSS has since roughly halved the uplift for deferral to 1% for every 9 weeks so it is only worth deferring if you expect to live a long time.
I have nothing but contempt for these pensioners.
Quite aside from their willingness to sacrifice the prospects of younger people back in 2020-22, and in fact for decades to come, because they allowed themselves to be scared out of their wits by Fat Blair because they’re too stupid to obtain information from anything which is not the BBC, quite aside from that, I will work until I drop.
And if at that point I do not have enough money, then I do not have enough money and I will die.
Soit.
But this idea that they get to retire at 60, 65, whatever, and then spend 15 or 30 years on Saga cruises paid for by their grandchildrens’ rents?
Screw that for a game of toy soldiers.
I’d add that they can’t say they weren’t warned but of course they got their news from the BBC, so it’s tough titty that they didn’t know the whole thing was a pyramid scheme.
There’s actually, buried in there somewhere, a reasonable point. Raising interest rates to cool down the economy is fine unless the main driver is out of control government spending. Which domestic interest rate changes probably won’t affect. When the bill comes in for refinancing the debt on the global market, well, that’s a different story.
Ltw
Out of control government spending is exactly the main driver down under. And it’s not just the federal government there are also the profligate State Governments as well.
I live in Victoria, John, so yes to that.
You live in Victoria, I feel for you
As for paying the pension to very wealthy people, that’s bollocks. Anyone who has a fantastic income will effectively lose 45% of the pension in income tax. Someone far less wealthy can lose 40% of it. Many people who actually had a job with a pension scheme lose 20% of it. Sure, there are people who get by only on the state pension, but in a state of penury.
The trick is to ignore that it gets paid gross – the tax comes off any other income. The trick is to visualise it as on top, and therefore paying your highest tax rate on.
“Raised to [x], the highest since [Quite Recent, Eternity for a Mayfly].
So you .. look stuff up, as one does when …Triggered… by Alarums!! , doubly so if it’s a certain
pollutantoccupantresident of Elian terraced real estate.And cor blimey…. amateur….
Ozzie interest rates in that way got up as high as 17.5% in his lifetime. Well into his…..Career… as “Accountant”, not even his “Youth”….
Oz seems to have survived. Even to the point of being able to “Afford” Socialists, Commies, and Greens….
So …. his point?