Q+A: The Week Ahead | 14 Sep 2026

Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Michael Thompson, and every Monday morning we're joined by economist Stephen Koukoulis to look at the week ahead. You'll find him at thekouk.com, that's T-H-E-K-O-U-K.com, and sharing his views on LinkedIn as well. Stephen, good morning. Very good morning, Michael. Interesting week coming up, isn't it? Because one of the big issues in terms of politics and really for the relevance of this conversation for the economy is population. It is population data. It is net migration. It is all of those figures that make that up. And this week we get an update for the March quarter. Why does this matter so much? Well,

It matters for a number of reasons. It does provide a bit of a reality check on the fact that GDP is growing at 2%. So superficially, that's quite good. But population is growing at 1.5%. This is in annual terms. So aside from the quarterly volatility, so per capita GDP is not increasing by all that much. So that's where we consumers are feeling a bit of pressure. Things are... sort of moderate. So that's important for sort of the consumer sentiment, how are we going and whether the economy is actually making genuine progress for the hardworking Australians that are in our economy. It also is important too because it is, as we've been discussing for a long time now, it's a driver of demand for housing. Population is increasing rapidly and You need houses, whether they're rented or bought in a way doesn't matter in the short term, but there's pressure in the housing market. And so some people have noted that the very strong increase in immigration and population growth over the last few years has been one reason why house prices were strong. So we'll be getting a bit of an update on all those sorts of indicators just to sort of see, is there anything happening there that's Because I think there's tripartite, if that's a word, support for lower immigration from Labor, the coalition parties and One Nation. They're just arguing about how low it should be.

Is there a sweet spot here for migration and for population growth? Basically, is there a number that we can essentially sustain with the amount of housing that we have and that we know is actually going to come, not a figure that we're aiming for, but that we can actually do infrastructure as well, but then also bring in enough of the skills and labor that we need?

That skills point is really important. Are we sort of fortunate enough, smart enough to be bringing in the type of workers that we need? The obvious one, tradespeople. We've got to build more stuff, not just houses, but data centers. We're building more warehouses. We've got a lot of infrastructure spending going on. So if we can choose the right balance, that's a good thing. But there's no number set in concrete. It is a bit cyclical. When your economy is stronger, you can skew that number a little bit higher. When your economy is weak, you don't want very, very high levels of immigration because it puts downward pressure on wages. It adds to unemployment. The new immigrants can't find a job. And you sort