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This is better than Yesterday.

Welcome, glad you're here.

This is a podcast that is full of useful tools and useful conversations.

They help make your day to day better than yesterday.

And it's been here every week since twenty thirteen.

Min Ams Rosha Ginsburg.

Thanks to downloading the show.

Thanks for being here.

It's summer.

The team and I take a bit of a break.

However, we're grabbing some episodes out of the storage and throwing them back up the flag pole.

Hoist them up into the air, get them flapping around of the ear in the breeze for a little bit.

Because these conversations are fantastic.

They're the most popular, best received episodes we've done all year, and we're going to play them because they're well worthed.

Listen or a second listen.

So I'm going to open this one with a question for you, what does the future of Australia hold for your money?

Because if you are anything like me and our good friend Snoop Dogg, we have our minds on our money and our money on our minds.

But unlike Snoop Dogg, you and me we're not laid back about it bring some clarity to this.

My guest today, Chris Kohler is here.

He's a TV presenter.

He's the National Finance editor of nine News.

He's the author of the new book How They Get You, Sneaky Everyday Economics and Smart Ways to Hold Onto Your Money.

And he's an absolute delight, a wonderful thinker, a lovely communicator, devilishly handsome and has some excellent insights into the cost of living crisis, to changing economy of Australia and what we can all do to save a little bit where it counts.

Enjoy the show.

Thanks for coming in, Curiz, Thanks for having me.

I'm really good.

The state of origin is Rugby League Christmas.

When the federal budget drops?

Is that like economy Christmas?

Are you all like super excited?

It kind of is.

It's really embarrassing to say that we all just nerd out, and it's really cool because God, listen to me.

Really cool.

You get to put your phone away, get handed a big stack of documents and just sit there and just read through what the government's up to.

And it's kind of fun.

It doesn't sound like fun when I say it, now.

Well it kind of does.

Why should we give a shit about the budget?

Well, all of our money, right, so it's all we open our wallets to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars every year, and it's kind of interesting to know where they're going to put all that money.

So you know the sort of the changes are often you know, little tweaks, but you know, depending on who you are and where you work, it can make a big difference, I reckon.

So I'm the product of someone that is most definitely the son of Both of my parents are both doctors, all right, and they're both very interested in culture at the same time as being interested in science and stuff like this.

So I learned a lot about music.

I learned a lot about art.

I learned a lot about performance from both of my parents.

And just yesterday on the plane, I was helping Wolfgang learn how to draw.

He's really interested in transformers right now and he wants to draw one of them.

Elita one, the lady one, And I said, mate, everything's just circles, rectangles and triangles, And we went through a picture and I showed him there's a circle, there, there's a rectangle, and he's like he created He's five at what age did you start to understand and what deficits and surplus has started to be.

There are circles in the triangles of my household.

We are you sitting there eating cornflakes, and Dad's like, okay, so there's a surplus of milk here, son, You've gone into a corn flake deficit.

The balance is all out way too milky.

Yeah.

A bit like that.

Wasting your money had a very serious chat behind it in my house.

You came home and you bought something stupid.

It was like, did you really need to buy that?

What's that going to do for you?

But I'm actually just scrolling away the circles and triangles because I got to use that.

That's a ripper.

It's real good.

But look for me.

So my dad taught me how to drive, and a memory that I firmly have is we used to get in the car.

I was on a learner's permit, and he would just answer the phone the whole morning on our way to wherever, and it was him talking to his producer at the ABC, whose name was Marco at the time Marco, and it was just launched off into long chats and all I wanted to do was understand what was going on in those chats, and so I kind of without deliberately doing so, I just wanted to learn the language to speak with him.

So he didn't infuse it upon you.

Or absolutely not.

His biggest piece of advice coming up was don't be a journalist.

If you are insistent on being a journalist, don't be a financial journalist.

Strikes one or two right there, Woos.

So, at what point did you start to realize that you understood the way that money worked and therefore how the country worked a bit better than your friends.

Look, I started working as a financial markets reporter straight out of UNI in my early twenties, and it was just sort of this immersive thing of now you're learning about how to read a market update from Woolworths or BHP or whatever.

And it's a very kind of daunting thing at first, and then over time you find out you're observing something that is very big and the wheels are always turning, and then after a while you can kind of start to see the light and shade in it, and you can kind of start to see the humor in it.

You can kind of become, you know, someone who is able to watch the play and the dance as it unfolds.

And I'm by no means a financial expert in that I'm not sitting on top of a huge property portfolio or a pile of gold or equities that would make anybody sweat.

But I just I love the kind of the dance of it all, you know, all these people putting on their suits and kind of being very serious, even though in many ways it's kind of absurd.

Sometimes I understood property portfolio.

The other two things you said I did not understand, which is probably where I am.

Where I am and my super looks like it does though I've spent I've spent a lot of time in America and have makes it the big you know, big firms, the big, big big ones and their partners and stuff like that.

They're all as tall as you, they're all as good looking as you.

How did you avoid becoming the banker anchor?

There weren't the invitations?

Yeah, I know, I look, look, No, I never really thought about going into the actual making of the money rather than just the looking at it.

You know, I don't know, it's it's a funny thing.

I kind of you know, I came out of Union, I just sort of thought, yeah, I'm going to be a journalist.

I didn't really pursue much else, right, you know, And and like there's been opportunities along the way to get out of journalism, of course, but I never really thought too long and hard about it.

There was always too many interesting things going on.

What is it that you think is the appeal of that path?

I mean, you didn't try it, but I'm sure you've got mates that did go that way.

Oh look, I mean, yeah, I've got made to you all these lawyers heading for partner and you know, I interview and deal with people in the finance space all the time who are killing it, but they don't have much of a work life balance.

I mean, the appeal of it is money, you know, frankly, like it's very hard to live in a big house in Sydney or in Melbourne, or in Queensland anywhere really unless you have family wealth, or unless you're in one of those types of jobs.

And so I think there is absolutely an understandable drive to want to get there.

And so I'll kind of I never sort of disparage people for wanting to do that, but it's I mean, it seems a little bit sol destroying to be grinding away at that sort of pursuit all the time.

They have to make millions while they're there, and they have to fend off people all the time.

It's kind of it's simpler to just report on that.

At one point, speaking of the reporting, if there's one thing that I just love about your work, and it's something that I really align with, because this is the first year I haven't done the Comedy Festival in a couple years, I was doing a fake news show down there, and to avoid getting suits for defamation because we're reporting on real people doing actual things, we decided to make the moral question the joke every time.

It wasn't a failure of this politician or that politician, it was the failure of the policy as far as like a general moral value, widely well collectively held value.

And I see a lot of that in your work, and I'm wondering how that first started to appear to you, Like, hang on a fucking second, Like this is not okay that these companies are making this much money.

And at the core of it is this moral choice, clear moral choice to just wrought and gouge and sometimes destroy people.

Yeah, thank you, it's really it's really nice of you to say.

Look, it's been something that's developed slowly.

I was reporting these stories and think about journalism, all kinds of journalism really is that there's structures to it.

You play within the boundaries that have been set over decades of this business being made.

You know, you interview these types of people, You put together the story in these types of ways.

If you watch the news or read a newspaper, you can see the structures because they're taught.

And I was coming home a lot and I was talking to my wife Susanna about the stories that I was covering and about what had bothered me about them, you know, whether or not there was something that I wasn't really able to get across that I wanted to.

And invariably we'd end up chuckling between us about the type of silliness.

And you know, what would it be like to be in those boardrooms where they come up with those decisions?

I mean, could it be as ridiculous as well?

How else can we make money out of these people?

You know, can we squeeze them anymore?

Is there anywhere we're not squeezing it?

And you know, we kind of ended up, just sort of having this little laugh, you know, a bit.

It is like that they're just people like, yeah, they've gone a UNI and they're smart, but sometimes they're a pack of idiots as well.

You know.

Surely so you can do the swearing for you.

It's okay, is it okay?

I saw you can swear all your life, Thank you very much.

We go up to crap in my world, no further, Oh okay, sometimes not even crap.

Oh what if you're reporting on a one for one toilet paper company.

I think we I think we're allowed to say shit in certain certain circumstances.

Or if you said it, if I interviewed you and you said shit, then that's going up.

Yeah, that's fine.

That's why I said Archadel was swearing for you.

What I love about it's essentially what you're doing is satire, but rather political Saturds's come as my financial satire, which I really really love.

There's something about satire which is super super powerful, and then it can change public opinion way more than any editorial or any big front page or anything like that, because if the moral question is the thing that is the joke, Like particularly you did one on Tap and Go fees and it was just like if fucking hell man, my mind knew they made money, but I know they made billions.

Yeah, that is just and these things develop relatively quickly.

Like the problem with me and everybody is that our notions of things are kind of caught five years ago.

Things change faster than we kind of catch up to them.

I mean, a lot of people still feel like two thousand was a couple of years ago, Like you know, you know what I mean, Like we have this anchoring thing that we do, and I think with things like tapping, a new innovation comes along and it's really great and it's really accessible and bang bang bang, away you go.

And then before you know it, you kind of oh, what is this extra ten cents I'm paying every time?

And how much does that add up to?

And you're so deep in it by the time you catch up to what's happening that you know, you're a bit lost.

So let's use that as a bit of an example.

What does that ten cents add.

Up to four billion dollars a year nationally?

I mean, internationally is much bigger than that, Like it's and the thing is, it's all like, so there's a little radio frequent.

This is amazing stuff to me, and apology is an advantage.

You don't worry, you don't let the don't let the T shirt and the motorcycle force.

I know, I know.

Like so the radio frequency stuff goes back to you know, World War two planes, how do we identify our planes as opposed to others?

And it kind of, you know, it started getting used.

I've got you know, I've got a swipe card that works on a security pass.

These sorts of things have been used for decades and then around early two thousands, Visa and MasterCard popped it into their cards and they introduced this payWave idea.

It took a little while to take off because none of the merchant terminals could really do it.

So after a little while the merchant terminals catch up.

Everybody starts putting the payWave stuff on their phone and instead of having to insert your card or swipe your card, which is a little bit of a hurdle to the payment thing, it became seamless.

And that is what payments have to be.

If a business is getting your money, they want it to be like that.

But if you want to kind of communicate with them or maybe ask a question or make it plant.

No, no, no, it can be much longer and harder.

But getting your money has to be so fast and so easy.

And so when it started becoming a matter of tapping your card and then tapping your phone, I mean you're often racing like people.

There's no more mental arithmetic that needs to happen.

Somebody says, tap your phone here and you go bang, and then you're away.

You're gone.

I've got my thing, you know I've left.

It's down the street.

Deep in our brains, there's this thing that's been written quite a lot about by academics called the pain of paying.

If I hand over a twenty dollar note, it hurts.

There's a part of my brain that just doesn't like it because I've accumulated, I've worked hard for it, I'm tapping my phone.

None of that bypasses it entirely.

It's the same reason that you have a chip at a casino you trade your cash besides this thing, because you're not seeing your hundred bucks one hundred dollar note.

It's just a little green piece of plastic.

Off it goes perfect example, loops it easy.

Yeah, And that's kind of how it feels.

Is in very businesses like casinos.

Other people see that that is a good that has some depth to it.

A supermarket, you know, you put the good stuff at the back.

You don't have clocks, you don't have windows.

You know, These sorts of things like the casino aification of other sorts of business.

I guess, just taking a moment away from Crystal, let you know that Story Club, the monthly live storytelling show that I put on here in Sydney, is up on YouTube.

Every week a new story goes up, and their live shows returned in February.

Tickets are on sale for the next show in February right now.

The linkers and the show notes for both the YouTube channel and to get the tickets.

And while you're in those show notes, you can also grab a copy of So What Now What, which is a brand new book that I've written with Cam Walker, and of course the memoir Back After the Break, which is exactly where we will be in a moment.

It is playing at the core of it is playing on our psychology.

So look, there's a lot of ways that you can kind of justify these sorts of changes.

It is convenient if I lose my debit card, someone can tap it.

If I lose my wallet, someone can just take my cash.

But if I'm tapping my phone, I have to have the facial recognition or maybe the thumb print software that is secure.

That's a fair point.

I think you don't have a lot of risk anymore that somebody else is going to pickpocket you and run around town.

You have a lot of other risks.

Scammers are just loving the digital economy that we've gotten ourselves into.

Anything where there's a conversation to be had, these people are very good at arguing their points.

You're not going to sit them down and change their mind, and they're not going to unring the bell of digital payments and that sort of stuff.

We're there now.

But I think broadly, the problem that I have is that the tactics of confusion are so lucrative now and they're so widely used.

One of the ones I like to talk about is telecommunications.

I mean, what is a gigabyte actually supposed to cost?

Who knows.

They tell you the numbers that they want you to think, but what is kind of riddled throughout that sect is good old fashioned behavioral psychology.

They want you to pick this number and not those numbers.

And so they'll give you three options where one of them stands out to you quite nicely, and that's the one they want you to pick.

But you know, the idea that a gigabyte should cost you ten bucks or twenty bucks, nobody knows, and so people just go along with it.

In India, a gigabyte costs basically nothing because in twenty sixteen, this company called Geo came along and built their whole new infrastructure and just decided to disrupt it themselves.

There's issues with that idea, but the problem is the structures that we are really relying on are only one or two steps away from getting the ass blown out of them by a disruptor.

And the confusion is kind of just passed around, and it's frustrating, I think, to see as it happens.

I mean, we've all been there.

You kind of just go what is this charge?

Like?

Why is there some sort of service fee and a handling fee?

Why if I wanted to buy a ticket to go to a show, though I have to have a ticket processing fee if it's a digital one on my phone.

What's going on here?

And you can't have no recourse, no where to turn, no where to share you for frustration, and unfortunately the cynic in me and the kind of the grim sort of underlying tone of these videos is that it is inescapable and all you can try to do is laugh about it.

For someone like me who has a hard time with all this kind of stuff and is just complete prey to this tactics of this what do you call it, the tactic of confusion?

Yeah, yeah, that's how it feels.

Yeah, yeah, How can I avoid getting stuck in this kind of thing?

What's the thing that I can start to look for if I'm trying to change my dow and to provide a role trying to get a different phone plan.

Look, the unfortunate thing is they just keep saying shop around, which is fine, but it puts the onus on you, Like how much time do you have to shop around for insurance?

Your telecommunications provider, your phone plan, like all of these things one after the other.

Mortgage, you know, five different types of insurance you.

I kind of talk to people about it as like the darkest day of your half year.

You have to sit down and think about all this stuff.

But if you just sort of say, okay, that's my bad day, where I'm going to have to do all that.

Then you'll probably end up saving quite a bit of money by doing it.

It's just it's the loyalty.

I hate loyalty in our economy.

Anything where a business is trying to get you to not look at the competitor for pricing and for service, I really don't like that.

So loyalty programs I don't think are worth it.

Pretty much blanket rule there.

I mean, I know a lot of people are going to be listening to this and saying, well, mine is though, because you know it's a credit card that gives me points, or because it's an airline that gives me points, and you know, the agabill see last week said look, you know, for one of the big supermarkets, we're talking half a cent discount for every dollar.

You're giving them a lot of data.

You're getting giving them everything about you on a platter, which then you know, I don't know anybody who reads the terms and conditions, but they can usually package and on sell that.

And the person that's calling you from a call center trying to pussele you for whatever it is, You've probably given your information to somebody who's then sold it to that person.

But the cost is there.

It's a bad exchange rate.

You know, here's all my information.

What am I getting in return some vague notion of reward points somewhere.

So I don't like that.

I think if it were me and I was sitting down with somebody, I'd say, interrogate your loyalty programs and whether or not they're worth it, and try to shop around as best as you can and be as disloyal as possible to businesses.

There's a point in my life where I was just being is the reason why I've got financially fucked, because I've spent a lot of money when I was still drinking and using.

But the after effect of one of them has I've got lifetime gold status at Corners.

That's pretty good.

It was pretty good.

That's the exception.

It's fucking close to plantum lifetime.

Stop drinking and stop doing all kinds of dumbshit business class flights for the first time ever because and for what that means is that when you're traveling with the kids, you're board first and you get to the lounge for the first time ever.

Yesterday, coming back from Brisbane, they made the first board boarding court.

I was like, oh, that's us, we get up.

Oop, You're in the next group, sir, Hang on what they've put another fucking tier on top I was previously top tier, and now there's an even special tier.

Change the rules of the game halfway through on you hate that has lifetime, lifetime so annoyed.

When it comes to an election campaign, you can get away with a lot, like if you and I are running against each other, I can say, if you vote for Chris, your taxes are going through the roof.

I don't even have to show proof.

I could just say they are.

That's true.

He's got a plan.

He wants you just he wants you to never go on holiday again.

He wants you to always board last.

A vote for Crius is a board for vote for boarding last.

I don't have to prove that, but you can just say all kinds of wild shit, particularly when it comes to very complicated, complicated economic problems like cost of living has got to be a three hundred headed beast.

There's no one reason, but you can say in two sentences, I'm going to fix that.

Yeah, can anyone fix it?

The cost living thing?

Ah?

Jeez, I mean no, Look, no, it's a big issue that I think one of the most interesting things to me about this whole election campaign is what they're not talking about.

So you're right, they're they're throwing haymakers at each other, as every political campaign has always done.

But what they're really trying to do is get out of the way of probably the Reserve Bank, which has the biggest cards, you know, in its hand right now, because the market's expecting three more rate cuts this year, which would probably if you've got a six hundred thousand dollars mortgage, let's say, probably puts two hundred and two hundred and forty bucks in your two hundred and seventy actually in your pocket.

You just did that in your mind.

You fucking did that in your brain.

It's well, no, I mean, I can't of know you.

Health quite as far as I'm concerned right now you are.

It's all a trick, Gosha.

So let's say two a month in your pocket.

The government is talking about potential twenty bucks a month from midnext year onwards.

The Coalition is talking about dropping fuel taxes and maybe saving you fourteen bucks a week.

This is helpful, but the reserve banks to one that's going to be really making a play here.

And you know, while they were hiking rates all the time, all the political bodies wanted to do is say, got nothing to do with us, guys.

And so now when rate's probably going to start coming down, it's interesting to see whether or not they're going to start taking credit or whether or not they're going to say, you know, this is this is the economy writing itself.

So I think that's a big one to watch.

What are some of the other things that they're not kind of deliberately not talking about.

I'm glad you asked that, because the one thing that's been bothering me lately and no one seems to be talking about it is home insurance.

It's such a big issue.

And they don't have anything in the.

Budget, particularly if you're north of the Tropic of Capricorn.

Yeah, yeah, so this is huge, right.

We talk about, you know, energy rebates, we talk about fuel taxes, all these sorts of things, tax cuts in general, but there are large parts of the population now in very hazardous areas who cannot get insured at all.

That's going to be an issue.

You've got a population about thirty percent can't afford the insurance they've got and almost all of them are under insured because the cost of building a house has gone up through the roof.

So I think there's a big problem there.

And I think, you know, if cyclone Alfred had a touchdown in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, category two wins would have been a huge problem because if I'm not mistaken, anything below Bunderberg doesn't really have to be built to withstand category two wins.

So I think insurance is a really big one, and I think we're going to have to have that conversation pretty soon because more and more houses, more and more homes, and viable building land is going to be seen to be unusable.

Had the CEO of the Climate Council land here the other day, Amna mckencier, and we were talking about this because i' alwas thought for a long time it's going to be the insurance companies that drive climate policy, because if we can't ensure our homes, or if a big disaster comes through and empties an insurance company out, what does that do for our ability to do business in Australia.

Yeah, well it's a massive problem.

I mean we all need insurance, just to kind of get by.

I think the housing markets, a lot of real estate agents are now starting to see a lot more people do their due diligence, including is this a flood risk, what's it going to?

What am I going to have to be coughing up here in terms of insurance costs.

Whereas rewind a couple even a couple of years, that wasn't so much of a consideration.

I think it's becoming much much more front of mind.

It's affecting where people can and want to live, which affects where people can set up big businesses.

And you know, we've decided as a country for the most part, that we want people in the office as opposed to working from home.

That makes it difficult to just head wherever you want ahead and set up your life.

So I think, you know, places like Melbourne is sprawling right out.

I mean, Melbourne's an enormous city, as is Sydney.

I mean, if you put a Melbourne or a Sydney in the USA, it would be the third biggest city in the country over there by population.

And yet over there those big cities they all kind of go up.

We're going out, So it affects everything.

I think insurance is a massive one.

Because without if the insurance companies go under.

That was a big part of it was in two thousand and eight when everything fell apart, was aig I think, because if an insurance company goes under, how does that affect the economy.

Yeah, well, all the insurance companies get their reinsurance from bigger global insurers.

So all of a sudden, if the maths aren't mathsing, people start pulling out, and all of a sudden you're left with one or two insurance companies that start jacking out their prices.

I mean, insurance is a price on risk.

If we're deciding that these sorts of things are more risky, then the price goes up.

We can't afford it.

All of a sudden, only a few people can have the luxury of being insured.

Yeah, the flow on effect are enormous.

It's so interesting that the moral question of climate action or social policy even isn't the one that gets the thing done.

It's it's the money, and it's sad, but a part of it had to come to grips with that going.

Look, if it's money, it's money.

Okay, if you've decided that helping this twelve year old boy by providing in some social services now, so don't have to pay hundreds of thousands dollars a year to keep him castrated once he's eighteen until he's fifty.

Great.

Yeah, not because it's the right thing to do, because it saves your money.

Later on, having unconscious costs you a lot of money.

You know, you want to get rid of that consciences.

Come on, man, you're right though, it's a calculation.

You've got to figure all that sort of stuff out, like business is always evolving and changing and the pricing of risk is constant.

We just need to take a quick break from Chris Kohler back in a moment in the election campaign that we're in right now.

What I love is that for all the where's the details of Peter Dunton, I've got to admire a man who's so less than a year later is bold facingly go, oh, the details will come on the nuclear THN thing.

Yeah, the details will come.

What the because the money is a coward If anybody wants to know what's happening, and look at what massive black rock and shit like that, what are they doing with their cash?

Where are they pulling it?

From and we're now putting it to Money does not like uncertainty.

Money doesn't like long term risk.

When someone like the coalition here in Australia is pitching nuclear as a long term energy option, how do we even assess that?

How do we get our brains around Is this a good idea?

What the price of energy will do for Australia manufacturing in forty years when it's ready.

It's so hard to put that onto people without any realistic pricing strategy.

I mean, how can you assess it.

We're talking so much money over such a long period of time, and I think they've kind of gotten the hang of the fact that that's too far in the distance.

Now they're talking about redirecting gas and keeping twenty percent of it here in Australia, all that sort of stuff, and they're talking about fuel and they're sort of the here and now.

I mean, I think that was a very interesting moment of policy.

Everybody sort of knew that energy prices are a big deal, and the Dutton shadow Cabinet clearly decided we need something big here, something eye catching.

Look, it was just too light on the details, where we don't know how much it's going to cost and that's such a big part of it.

Look, I think the real stuff to look for when you're looking at a campaign an election campaign is not the big stuff, because as you say, where's the detail, I think the small stuff is where you should be looking things.

Like when I was in the budget, one of the things that caught my eye and I thought was very interesting was the banning of these bogus non compete clauses that are in apparently three million Australians contracts.

You know, if you're a hairdresser, it might say you're not allowed to work for a competitor for six months after you leave here, regardless of the circumstances within five kilometers.

Or if you're a tradee or if you.

Mate, if you're a fitness instructor, if you're working as a PTT precise you know the watching MC call it twenty four right down the road.

You can't then go and work at the other.

If you work at the red one, you can't go work at the blue one.

Yes, So this sort of stuff has led into every part of the economy, it would seem for no good reason.

We're talking cleaners who are not allowed to go and clean a building across the road for fear of some vague notion of legal action.

Of course, it's not really able to be pursued.

But the problem is people don't have the resources to take it to an employment lawyer.

They just look at it and go, okay, I'm not allowed to do it.

So Jim Charmers came through and he does a tour of the press gallery and we kind of when he came to us, we said, so, what's the deal with this noncompete thing?

And he says, well, we got the Productivity Commission to look into this, and they said that the highest yield, lowest impact way to get wages moving is to get rid of all this crap that is stopping people from getting a five percent pay increase by going across the road.

It's awful because it stops you from having to like somebody goes, hey, I can get a better job.

I can get more money at this other place, and then you, if you have this non compete, can go no, you can't.

Aha, instead of stay here, I'll make your life better, I'll pay you more, which is supposed to be if you're a desirable employee for the other person, you should be getting as much money as you can.

These are the little things I think that make a lot of sense.

And I mean, obviously the Coalition has some smaller pieces of policy that are interesting and worth looking at as well, whether it's housing policies or if it's the fuel tax X side stuff.

But I reckon, if possible, people should be looking at the lower level, you know, stop halfway and look at what they've actually laid out on the table.

As for other pieces of policy, I like that the Coalition is going to put aside a few billion dollars for urgent infrastructure lower to the ground stuff water sewage.

That's going to hopefully help some of these new places that we want to live be more habitable.

I suppose I.

Love that you said habitable rather than habitable.

I put the embasis on a different salaval there.

It's perfect.

If a suit didn't show you, this is how you become a professional professional journalist.

There is an addiction I discovered yesterday.

I say the word I say the word drawing with two hours.

I think that's it was like it's a w ring.

I was drawing.

No, that's okay, though.

The thing is when I said a bitable just then I knew it was coming in my sentence and I was like, oh shit, we can't stop.

Stop it's already.

And then I tried to cruise past and you saw it.

It was beautiful.

It was beautiful.

But I know the feeling because having been a broadcaster for a long time.

Yeah, your brain has to be twenty seconds ahead and the mouth stuff.

Those messages have already been sent.

You can't stop.

You can't stop them once they're going.

It's a perfect way.

It's true though, You're like, it's going to come out and I'm going to have to come.

Then I've got thirty more seconds before the news.

Okay, I'm an handle this.

It's such an awful feeling, a grim feeling, and then it comes out and there's this pause where you got Yep, it did it, It happened, Okay, keeping it on going now.

Yeah, humanizes you.

I think it humanizes you.

What's something that we really need to understand going into the selection about how our economy works.

I think our economy is changing faster than we give it credit for.

We have been an economy that has gotten a lot of prosperity out of digging stuff out of the ground and selling it to China more specifically than anywhere else in the world.

BHP is no longer our biggest company.

CBA is the one that was a mining company.

The other one was probably their bank, but is a bank exactly right.

So you know, the business of selling rocks to China is now not necessarily as big as the business is selling debt to all of us in Australia.

So it's tapping go fees man, yeah.

Man, yeah.

But also like it's interest we pay on our debts, it's the fees that they charge us, which god, there's a long list of fees.

Like when we rock up to get a mortgage, we're so happy that they're going to give us one what we ignore the fact that we've just paid six hundred bucks for them to look at the mortgage application, four hundred bucks a year to have the mortgage, another few bucks here and there just to have an offset account.

They hit you every single time.

I mean not just CBA, of course, this is banking in Australia.

But the business of banking is incredibly rich now.

I mean as far as a sector, it's huge and growing all the time.

Our banks are some of the most valuable according to their market capitalization in the world.

So Australian economy is about financial services to Australians because we're not really like our bank service Australians for the most part, and they're getting huge, like their share prices have gone berserk in the last couple of years.

If a bank is more valuable than our previously most valuable company, which was selling raw materials and commodities by the trainload to other countries, that is a lot of fees.

It is.

It's a lot of It is an intimidate.

Well yeah, I mean you know.

Sorry, it's because you use your own eyebrow to put the punchlines on your videos and then when I see it live, it destroys Like I see the guy, he's in there, the horrible easel man, and affably get a couple extra things out of them.

Guys, is there a way?

Is there maybe just an extra ten bucks a month?

They're not going to notice.

It comes back to the conversation you're having, what's the price of a gigabyte on the mobile phone?

Surely it's just what is the price of having one formula on this selling a spreadsheet calculate with another formula on that selling a spreadsheet apparently six hundred dollars a year.

Yeah, I don't give it back to you if your application is not successful.

By the way, that's theirs now keeps these mine six hundred dollars.

It's not like someone's hour of the day.

They're running it through a machine that spits out the top two percent.

Yeah, these no problem.

It's probably the next ten percent.

I'm probably gonna have someone look over this, but they won't look very long and then the rest is just sorry, you get a formula, that's right.

I mean.

And we've got big four banks, four big banks in Australia.

They all charge basically the same like it's it's you know, conspicuous.

If you're going to disrupt the banking sector, how would you do it.

I would try to get as many people as possible to bank elsewhere, smaller banks.

We've got ninety eight ish lenders in Australia and yet three quarters of the market used four of them.

I like that.

We have lots of lenders and they are really scrappy at times.

They try to offer lower interest rates and be free periods.

I don't know, I think there should be there should be a lot more due diligence encouraged out there for people to sit down and kind of have a go at it, because you know, we're kind of at sea here, like we get told, yeah, here are your bank options.

But in reality we've got a wide world of banking.

This is a very interconnected world.

You could have a bank off shore if you wanted to.

You could have any number of smaller lenders that you may never have heard of until you sit down and start researching some of the better fees and some of the lower interest rates for deposits.

Yeah.

I mean that to me would be a big one.

We all were kind of semi risk averse in Australias.

We tend to keep our money in the bank as well.

I mean, if there was an opportunity for people to start getting a bit more okay with the idea of index funds and low risk stock investments, I think that'd be probably for the best too.

Your half yearly hard day, hard day.

Put in your half yearly hard day, and it's all.

Day, by the way, like morning till night.

You're sitting there looking at it, but it pays your money, Like that might be a solid amount of money if you can just sit there and do it.

You talked about the a triple C.

There was a report handed down about what supermarkets are doing with their pricing.

Yeah, Labor going to the election saying they're going to bring in some sort of UK style law.

I don't know, man, These supermarket's pretty powerful.

Like if someone going to end up with a cabbage in their bed, Like, what's going to happen?

Sorry, half a cobage, half a cabbage and a bed.

Its might a source all over it.

Ye, I don't that.

It was a really good report.

It was four hundred and forty one pages and read the whole thing.

But I look through a lot of it and it did a beautiful job of detailing the problems that we have in Australia when it comes to our two big supermarkets.

They just don't compete that much.

It had a lot of solutions.

The big solution though, is to try to get another aldi in the mix.

You know, we've had little calf Land from overseas coming in and sniffing around in Australia, but they've decided not to hang around.

If you're asking the government, how are we really going to fix this supermarket issue?

The question really is what kind of Carriac.

Are we dangling to get more big supermarkets to sort of come in and break it up, because it's got to be a market lead solution.

You can't just come down hard on anyone who's trying to do what two big companies at the top do, which is dominate the market.

I mean they're sharing somewhere around sixty eight seventy percent of the whole grocery market share between them.

You know, they've done it.

They've kind of done it.

You know, like we're going to have to come in and break them up.

I don't really want to do that.

Just need somebody who's going to steal their market share away from them the way that good businesses do.

Have we ever broken up stuff in Australia, We have not.

We don't have those laws.

They have them in the US.

They brought them in to break up Standard Oil, which was the Rockefeller you know, own ninety percent of the oil market and they came in and said we don't like this anymore, and they broke it up.

And so they've got those laws in their books.

They would never use them now.

They did the same with the Telcoe.

They did it with AT and t H do they yeah.

Yeah, right, Okay, there you go broke it apart.

Yeah, so, once you get too big in the US, there is that big stick.

In Australia.

There's been a few people who've talked about bringing it in.

There's not much political will to do that.

I mean, I think you probably don't need to in Australia.

You just need to encourage more competition.

Because the flow on effect to the pante but also to the farmer and the providers and the transport sector.

Speaking of fees, well, yeah, listen to how some of these providers are being charged, Like they bought one hundred thousand kilos of beetroots off me.

But you know, now I'm getting stung for this fee to get it.

It's like bananas.

They can't get out of.

It, that's right.

It's kind of heartbreaking.

Look, I think the supermarkets defense is always that this isn't that good of a business.

You guys, our profit margins a right like two and a half two point three percent, and we're like, oh okay, what.

Are their profits?

Oh billions?

Yeah, well yeah, you know that's.

Done it again.

Hey, follow up questions come on, come on, I mean, like two and a bit percent I don't know.

Look, the problem with that is all their costs that they've piled into their own plenty of businesses.

They're all offer you twenty eight like twenty five twenty eight thousand different things you can buy at of Cole's or a woolies at Aldi, there's eighteen hundred different things you can buy, which is a cheaper way to run a business, and so their prices are lower.

So it doesn't really matter what their margin is.

It just that we've been kind of these two have competed in this very specific way about doing each other and maybe the way that we didn't specifically ask for.

Yeah, you really need eight different types of raspberry jam.

I don't know when I used to.

When I lived in America, I did my groceries at a place called Trader Joe's, which has I'm going to get corn ships there they are.

That's the one packet in the one size.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, And that was it.

That was a whole shop.

It was excellent.

Yeah.

I didn't fuck around in and out in five minutes totally.

I mean, that's it.

The problem, of course, is that having all those different types of options means that we have this economy of small businesses that can get their products into the supermarket, whereas they're not getting anywhere near an Aldie or a Trader Joe's.

So you end up having this trade off situation.

But if all we're interested in is the cost of living and getting our grocery shopping down, then choice is expensive.

Having a big, beautiful supermarket is expensive.

Having a fresh sushi bar in the corner that's expensive.

Like you just look at the way Aldi is halftime.

It feels like they're not even turning their lights on in half the shop, and you're like, yeah, sweet, it's cheaper.

And I got a chainsaw.

Yeah, just so quietly, I'm walking out of here with a chainsaw.

You guys, hey, you never believe it.

You know that bump you know, you know the guest bed you wanted to blow up?

Yess, he's got an air compressing out.

This guy, didn't I send you for eggs?

Yeah, I can't find eggs.

There are no eggs.

There are air compresses though, Like you joke, I nearly bought a Mita saw the other day at Aldi, and I had to be pulled away from it by my wife.

Your handymoon, no use for it, but I was like, look at this thing.

Maybe I'll get into making decks or something.

Nah.

I love that.

She came over very hard on me.

She was like, well you back to business.

When it comes to how we are.

You know, as you mentioned before, we're we're a nation of quarrymen and house flippers.

That's how we make our money.

That's pretty much what we do.

And we buy a lot of stuff from overseas.

That's how we have this iPad, these clothes that everything I'm wearing was made overseas.

Everything in this room was made overseas.

So we have a trade deficit with lots of countries.

How does that play into what's happening with America at the moment?

And what can either of our parties do anything, if at all, about what's coming?

They can't really.

Either Peter Dutton or Anthony Albanezy has the ability to call up Donald Trump and say hey, man, don't do this, and he'll be like, yeah, sweet, okay, it doesn't seem like that's likely.

He's heading down this path.

He wanted to do it, probably during COVID, and then COVID happened and then he couldn't.

So now he's got this second term, he's gone hard at tariff's.

The Australian government keeps saying, what's going to happen here is the indirect hit to Australia because really we're talking about you know, steel an aluminium as an exported item to the US.

Well, that's going to cover a hit and that sucks for people who work in that industry.

But relatively it's a small part of our economy.

Meat that's another painful one.

But you know, we're not Canada, We're not Mexico or China.

This is going to be small.

So what's going to happen really is that it's going to be tariff's at twenty paces all over the world.

The global trade is going to slow down as a result.

China's economy is probably going to weaken a little.

And as I said, we do quite a lot of trade, which I think they're right.

It's the indirect impact.

It's this thing where Donald Trump, we now know what he meant by making America great again is try to undo fifty to eighty years worth of globalization.

I didn't know it when he first started saying it.

I kind of am like, oh wow, so that's what you meant you're going to magic up the local manufacturing industry.

Again, if we had have known, I mean, the market is now and has this year been pricing that in and it's all over the place.

But yeah, we just didn't quite know what it was that he meant, and now we're kind of figuring it out, I think.

But is he also interested in letting those companies that have offshore their manufacturing.

Is he going to say, well, you used to build televisions or washing machines here, and your plant is now a housing estate.

Yeah, here's four billion dollars to build a new one.

Yeah, good question.

I mean, the big car manufacturers in the States have copped a huge hit lately because they're basically assembling cars from parts that they're getting from overseas.

So for GM, they're getting smashed on the market.

At the moment, their valuations have tumbled.

You would think that Donald Trump knew that that was going to happen, and these companies were probably briefed and they knew, and they probably argued their case.

It doesn't seem like there's much that's going to slow this down anymore.

I mean, maybe some things.

It seems like Donald Trump is focused on getting the price of oil down.

That might be a calculation that he's making with Russia with Opek, you know what I mean, Like so he's yeah, that could be part of the offsetting factor.

Because people a tariffs are attack on people, your local people.

You have to pay the taxes if you want to buy something, they get passed directly onto you.

So people are going to turn around and go, hey, this is shit.

I don't like this, And maybe down the track that the plan is to say, well, I've brought down the barrel price of oil quite a lot.

You're welcome.

Maybe that's it.

I mean, that's speculation.

Everything speculation at the moment.

But now if I want to get the medicine for my kid seven hundred dollars because it comes from Switzerland.

Yeah exactly.

I mean, you know, he's certainly breaking a lot of eggs to make these on once he wants to make Hey.

There's an egg shortage.

Yeah, well there's that, I mean, which is a fascinating thing because we're eating so many more eggs.

I saw this piece of data that showed that our egg consumption has gone up, So this egg shortage hurts way more than it used to.

Usha but yeah, I don't know, it's a killer like that, that thing that is the big one.

I mean, we're doing pretty well in our Australian economy now as opposed to a year or two ago, but that that's a big scary at the moment.

Kind of have one final question that's around.

We were saying, like, coming into this selection, there's a lot of stuff.

These two guys man leaders of these big parties aren't really talking about that night that you're at the budget with your big four hundred pages.

They said they brought in a deficit.

Now, I saw some data the other day that equated something twenty four billion dollars that if you added up the tax not collected off, negative gearing, tax breaks to the super duper duper wealthy, and the diesel fuel ex pretty much around about twenty four billion.

And so we're in a deficit because we've decided to be.

And that makes my quite hurt.

Yeah, look, you can look a lot of people take the numbers and then rearrange them in lots of ways.

You just got to think hoodwinked by No, No, No, I don't think so.

I think that's probably accurate.

It's just about is there any political will from either side.

I mean, we're going to vote them in either side if we start mucking around with negative gearing.

I mean, you could argue that a massive thing to do in Australia would be to introduce an inheritance tax of some description.

We don't have one in Australia and globally that's kind of unique, especially considering how much wealth is about to be passed from the boomer generation to either X or millennials.

But that money, whether it's super or housing, provided it's the primary place of residence, is going to be going straight through, which is sort of great for a lot of the people whose parents have done well.

It's not so great your parents haven't done well, but you could be earning a lot of tax like that.

You could be coming down hard on big businesses or billionaires, lots of different things.

But in the end, these parties have to win elections and they have to court certain types of votes, and they've clearly done the maths that ten years worth of deficits is more palatable than mucking around too much with the tax system.

When it comes to the inheritance tax.

Both my parents are immigrants, my wife's parents are immigrants, and like a lot of Australia most a lot of people have arrived here in the last thirty forty years.

There's going to be a point where those people outnumber everybody else.

And it might be like, hey, you guys have had time in the market.

All you really did was buy a house in Epping when it was a country town, and then you just sold it for eight million dollars.

I know, I'm not saying redistribution, that's a kind of a bit of a pinko word.

But have we shared about it.

Look, it's a it's a big area.

That's a lot of money.

We're talking trillions.

I mean the housing market, the Australian residential housing.

I could work about eleven trillion dollars superannuation, four point two trillion dollars commercial real estate roughly too.

I mean, that is such a huge amount of money to be not touching on the way through.

When I say that, I say people passing away and there's an inheritance involved.

Yeah, it just feels like that's got to be a conversation at some point.

Politically suicide to bring it up rather before an election, you know, twenty nineteen we were talking about negative gearing, and that did not go well, and that was one tweak.

Think about something as huge as an inheritance.

Tax, We're going to have to have that conversation sometimes seems like it seems like it's coming at some point.

That and the insurance one.

Yeah, one hard day every half a year.

Yeah, we'll sit down.

So this one we'll talk about insurance, the next one we'll talk about inherance tax, and then we'll get to our home line.

Yeah, and maybe that's right.

Maybe we could even have This is going to sound weird, Maybe it could be fun, like who's ripping me off?

And?

Who am I going to squash out of my life?

You just invented a game shot?

Who's ripping me off?

With Chris Color?

With you?

I'd only do it if you're on it?

Are you fucking kidding?

I will go upstairs and petch it.

We're in the building right now.

Let's go upstairs and pitch it.

Our first concessant.

Here is Adam.

Here's his phone bill.

Let's have a look going through here.

There's a fee.

Do everything you off?

What do you want to do about it?

Ignorant?

Or do something?

I want to do something?

Bang all right, he's your half day.

That's and you know what, and then then you get the sponsors involved, because then you get the alternative.

That's when you get your super loopho show up instead of your NBN to and then mate, it writes, it pays for itself.

No network will say no, it's on.

We need to do this more more chats about this because now we're getting all these great businesses.

I don't understand.

Get canon Brooks on the phone.

I've got a thing for him.

Only got his number, Mike's number.

That's Mike canon Brooks, one of the billionaires.

I just dropped a name.

You know.

Lennard Cohen once told me, if you're going to drop a name, drop a big one.

No, it's been a pleasure.

That was Chris Kohler.

His new book, How They Get You Sneaky Everyday Economics and Smart Ways to Hold into Your Money is out right now.

If you haven't already followed him on the Instagram and the TikTok, just get on there with you.

He's so good.

He's very good.

Thanks so much for listening.

I really appreciate you being here.

Please check the show notes.

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