JIM CHALMERS, TREASURER: Good morning, Karl. I think what we saw in the US overnight was pretty much expected. People were expecting a rate cut there.

It’s really important to remember that rates went up by more in the US than they did in Australia and even after this interest rate cut overnight in the US, interest rates are still higher in the US than they are here.

When the Reserve Bank meets next week they will consider a whole range of things including that, but they’ll be primarily focused on inflation, as the Government is.

Inflation had a six in front of it when we came to office, it’s halved since its peak in that year that we were elected, but we need to see it come down a bit more, and we’ll get some new inflation figures in the middle of next week which will tell us a bit more about how we’re going.

STEFANOVIC: Still a pretty dramatic turn in the US coming down by that much, and there are now fears of a recession in the US.

The Reserve Bank here will be watching our unemployment figures out today. They seem to lack confidence in the effects of your spending still.

CHALMERS: No, I don’t agree with that, Karl.

It is true in the US that their jobs market’s been softening, and there are issues, there are concerns around a slow down in the US.

We’ve also got a slow down in China and I’ll be there at the end of next week. The global economy is a pretty uncertain place, that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing these rate cuts in places like the US.

When it comes to the Australian situation, we’ve got inflation coming off pretty substantially, the Reserve Bank will weigh that up.

The jobs market here in Australia has been pretty resilient. We’ve seen the unemployment rate come up a bit in the last year or so, we’ve seen job ads come off a bit, but we’ve seen around a million jobs created in our economy. We’ll get an update on that at 11.30 today.

But in the context of a slowing economy and a softening labour market, creating a million jobs under this Albanese Labor Government is a pretty remarkable feat, it’s a tribute to our people, their economy, employers and workers.

No government has ever seen in one parliamentary term a million jobs created before, and so that would be a pretty remarkable thing and it’s all about our efforts to make sure that more people are working, earning more and keeping more of what they earn.

We’re making progress on all three of those fronts and that’s a good thing.