KEY POINTS:
If you spend your money on beer, pantyhose, shampoo, package holidays and consumer electronics inflation is not much of problem.
If you spend it on petrol, food and electricity, on the other hand, it is, and it got worse in the June quarter.
Those three items accounted for more than three-quarters of the 1.6 per cent jump in the consumers price index, which pushed the annual inflation rate to 4 per cent from 3.4 per cent three months ago.
As it ponders whether to start cutting the official cash rate next week, or wait until September, the Reserve Bank might take some comfort from the fact that non-tradeables inflation was marginally weaker than it expected, 0.9 per cent in the quarter or 3.4 per cent for the year.
But tradeables inflation, which is influenced by world prices and the exchange rate, jumped 2.3 per cent making 4.8 per cent for the year.
Core inflation has picked up. The 10 per cent trimmed mean measure, which ignores the largest price rises or falls and looks at the broad mass of prices in between, rose 1.2 per cent in the quarter making 3.8 per cent for the year.
In the CPI as a whole more items rose than in the March quarter, and by a larger amount, while fewer fell and by a smaller amount.
For a central bank trying to persuade people not to try to pass on higher costs to their customers or their employers, it all makes pretty unpalatable reading.
