On inflation, I said last time that it could be approaching 3 per cent by the second half of 2001, that is after the impact of the GST has dropped out of the four-quarter-ended growth rate. Our current guess, now that we have two quarters more of CPI data, is about 2½ per cent for the same period.
So far, I have spent most of my time covering events leading up to our decision to ease monetary policy, so it is time I moved on to more recent events. As I said before, March was a bad month for the economy, mainly because people received the news that there had been a decline in GDP in the December quarter.