It's been said here before @Foolednomore - but moving interest rates is the only lever that our central bank has to pull, and it's not a very effective handbrake for our economy for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they don't really know how much impact rate movements are having vs other factors that may well impact the economy in far more serious and rapid ways than interest rates. So they have a very poor feedback loop. They don't know how they're doing often until they've gone too far. It's a poor system but because governments have tended to handball this stuff to central banks and central banks only have interest rates to move, it is what it is. There are far better ways to target sections of the economy but that requires tax changes, tariffs, laws, that sort of thing, and governments are too concerned with popularity polls and less concerned with being effective economic managers. They are more focused on their re-election chances than what they can do to help engineer a slow down that doesn't turn into a recession.

So to address your question specifically, I agree with you that inflation is largely being caused by non-discretionary items, so increasing rates to get people to stop spending on discretionary items is not addressing the root cause, it's just trying to dampen one side to compensate for the other side going too high, and the people who can least afford it are always the ones who are negatively affected the most.

Using interest rates to try to regulate inflation and economic growth is largely ineffective and often does more harm than good, but I can't see any of Australia's politicians agreeing to change the broken system that we have, so I'm just accepting it, because I don't see a doable way of changing it. The rules are set by witless fools, and we have to work out how to best survive - and hopefully thrive - within the framework that we have.

agree @Foolednomore however in short this is called "top line" inflation and although an important consideration on whether to raise or not these items are "stripped out" leaving the "core inflation" numbers and it's these numbers that are the primary focus of any raise or not to raise decision.....so in essence it's a collective basket of things considered....nonetheless still frustrating as you say.

Not a stupid question at all @Foolednomore -- and one I wish more journalists would ask.

To add to @Bear77 and @Jimmy thoughts, I'd just add that I'm with Milton Friedman in the view that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

When you expand Credit and Money supply faster than the productive capacity of the economy, prices go up. So it's not just a question of lots of credit/broad money being created, but that much of it is being ploughed into things that have marginal productive value (like, oh I dunno, housing?)

I don't think it's a coincidence that inflation became a problem shortly after the M2 money supply expanded by 30%-odd.