Australia’s inflation rate slowed in November, reinforcing expectations the Reserve Bank’s key interest rate has peaked.
The headline consumer price index for the month was 4.3%, down from October’s 4.9%. It shows prices were rising at their slowest pace since the 4.0% reported in January 2022, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday. Economists had forecast November’s CPI to be 4.4%.
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, welcomed the drop, while adding that inflation was “still higher than we would like”.
Labor’s policies were “helping to put downward pressure on inflation but we know that there’s more work to do because people are still under pressure”, he said.
Michelle Marquardt, the head of prices statistics at the ABS, said housing costs continued to rise, up 6.6% from a year ago, while food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 4.6%, and insurance and financial services were 8.8% more expensive.
Excluding volatile items from the monthly CPI indicator, the annual rise in November was 4.8% – lower than the annual rise of 5.1% in October, she said.
The annual trimmed mean, another inflation measure that the RBA monitors closely, also slid to 4.6%, or well down on annual rates of 5.4% and 5.3% for September and October, respectively.