Nine National Affairs editor on RBA boss rates comments 03:42

Now the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Michelle Bullock, she's delivered a not-so-happy Friday message to homeowners and people with small business loans. She's doubling down on her warning that forget about cutting interest rates. It is too early to start thinking about the Reserve Bank cutting interest rates.

So Michelle Bullock reckons inflation's just too high and it won't return to the bank's target until the end of next year. Now, Nine's national affairs editor is Andrew Proban and he joins me from Canberra. Andrew, g'day. Good afternoon. It's one of those things, I suppose. It's not unexpected, but it's still hard to hear it come out of a mouth.

Yes, Chris, absolutely. And there's also the market itself expects there to be an interest rate cut. It's basically price one in by the end of the year. But she is, as you say, doubling down and saying that's unlikely. Now, it could be that she's trying to a bit of expectation management, but listening to her today, she's pretty adamant. Now, one of the reasons for that is this

There's a lot of uncertainty around the world. Of course, we've got things going on in China. We've got a US presidential election, which may or may not affect international trade. And then there is that bloody thing called inflation, which she says is,

is way stickier than she had forecast along with the Reserve Bank in May. So trying to drag down inflation, which is giving us all real hip pocket pain, is her number one task. One thing I'd ask, Andrew...

I know the federal government, I think the Albanese government mostly, has been pretty successful in its bid to deflect criticism about Alboflation and their government being the reason for it. However, we've got a situation now where inflation in Australia is at 3.8%. New Zealand, it's at 3.3%. They've just cut rates. In the United Kingdom, 2.8%. In the United States, 3%. At what point are we asking Albo and his crew, hey, is it your fault?

Look, every economy is a bit different. I mean, New Zealand's enduring recession, so we don't want that. They've got higher unemployment. Obviously, Britain's going through another crisis of a different type. It's linked to Europe and the uncertainties there caused by Vladimir Putin. So we're lucky, being this island nation of ours to some degree, but Anthony Albanese has...

with his government tried to force the hand of the Reserve Bank with those energy rebates. They said last week they were seeing through that, that they weren't going to be looking at those energy rebates and they were going to look at the underlying inflation, underlying factors. And in fact, we heard in another inquiry today from an association representing Australia

and restaurants saying that some of them were experiencing energy bills increasing by 30% in the past year. So that energy bill relief, not only is it not dragging down inflation, it's not actually hitting the sides when it comes to those businesses

businesses and this is this is not an uncommon story um we're also hearing um today about a lot of insolvencies across the nation and yet unemployment is is pretty good there are a lot of confusing uh figures knocking around in this time andrew appreciate you coming on thanks so much good on you chris that's nines national affairs editor andrew proban doesn't