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If you’re the person in your household who usually goes grocery shopping or fills the car, you don’t need a statistician to tell you that prices are going up. Nonetheless, the latest official reading of rising consumer prices is out on Wednesday from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This is called the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. “The way to measure inflation in Australia is to look at the different categories that consumers use to spend their money,” explains AMP senior economist Diana Mousina. The numerator at ABS goes around all the capital cities and checks the latest prices for this “basket of goods,” with about 100,000 different individual prices collected every three months. The statisticians then calculated how much had changed since the last survey three months earlier. Each year, the ABS also checks what Australians typically spend the majority of their money on, and ‘weights’ the CPI accordingly, thus reflecting where the a...

Australians are still spending big bucks, but surveys suggest that could change quickly as rising interest rates send consumer confidence to pandemic lows. Key points: Consumer confidence has fallen to the lows usually seen during a recession Soaring inflation and a sudden spike in interest rates to combat it weigh on households The slump in confidence has yet to feed through spending cuts, with various measures hitting record highs The latest consumer spending data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed household spending was 7.9 per cent higher in May than a year earlier. Much of the increase in spending is not because Australians have had to buy more, but reflects a spike in inflation, meaning people are paying more for most of the things they buy. Transportation spending rose nearly 15 percent, as people once again took to the skies, but also as fuel costs soared. Eating out and going out together has also seen a double-digit percentage increase in spending over the past y...