Australia news live: new laws to crack down on property underquoting in NSW; inflation could reach ‘high fours’, Chalmers says

Minns government introducing legislation to significantly increase penalties. Follow the day’s updates liveJim Chalmers has confirmed Treasury modelling suggests the war and other economic conditions could push inflation in Australia to the “mid- to high fours”.Labor has been battling sticking inflation, but economic shocks from the Middle East will make the task much harder, putting extra pressure on the Reserve Bank to lift interest rates.We’ve run a couple of scenarios which make it clear on some realistic assumptions about global oil prices and how that would potentially flow through to inflation, and for how long you know, if we were putting pencils down on those forecasts today, we’d have inflation peaking somewhere between the mid- to high fours.We don’t have a model that has petrol prices going that high, but there’s a lot of volatility and a lot of unpredictability in the global oil market. Continue reading...