Rates, Chicken Nuggets, and the Economics of Getting By

Someone on r/australia posted a headline yesterday that made me laugh out loud at my desk: “RBA Reassures Australians They’ll Stop Raising Interest Rates as Soon as Economy Collapses.” It’s satire, obviously, but it’s the kind of satire that lands because it’s barely exaggerating anything. A couple of hours later the top post on the same subreddit was a photo of a $7 Aldi air-fried chicken meal, built specifically to be cheaper than a KFC run. Same day, same forum, same country. One post about macroeconomics, one about getting a feed for footy finals without going broke. Somehow they’re the same story.

I’ve been half-following the rate commentary for a couple of years now the way you half-follow a long-running TV show you’ve lost the thread of but keep watching anyway. The theory is straightforward enough: raise rates, cool spending, tame inflation. The reality, going by the comments under that post, is a lot messier. Someone pointed out that higher rates are meant to make saving attractive so people spend less, except that logic falls over for anyone close to retirement who isn’t going to benefit from a multi-year savings strategy. Someone else noted their borrowing capacity drops every time rates go up, which means even as house prices soften a touch, actual affordability doesn’t necessarily move at all. Two people can both be telling the truth and the overall picture still doesn’t resolve into anything tidy. I don’t think there’s a clean answer here, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells you there is.

What struck me more than the rates debate itself was the generational sniping running underneath it. A few commenters had a go at “cashed-up boomers,” one mentioned a landlord complaining that “the rent doesn’t even cover the mortgage anymore,” another fired back that landlords had a good run for a long time and regulation catching up isn’t exactly a tragedy. I get the frustration on both sides, truly, but I also think this generational blame game lets everyone off the hook a bit too easily. My own parents weren’t cashed up. Plenty of boomers are doing it tough on a pension in a townhouse they can barely afford to heat. Plenty of landlords are just someone with one rental property and a mortgage of their own, not a property empire. The real structural problem, the one nobody in a Reddit thread can fix with a hot take, is that for decades housing was treated as an investment vehicle first and shelter second, and both major parties signed off on that, repeatedly, with full knowledge of what it would do. That’s not a boomer problem or a millennial problem. It’s a policy problem that outlived several governments because it was never in anyone’s electoral interest to touch it.

Then there’s the $7 Aldi chicken, which is its own small, cheerful rebellion against all of this. People in the comments were trading tips like it was a public service: get the corn cobs for a dollar, skip the lasagne because Aldi quietly swapped the 1kg tub for a 2kg one and the quality dropped along with the price per kilo. Someone called it “skimpflation,” which is a genuinely good word I’m stealing. One person compared the cost to a Melbourne pub quoting $40 to $50 for the same meal during an NRL final, and honestly, that tracks. We had the grand final on at home this year rather than battling a pub crowd, and it wasn’t because we’re introverts avoiding noise, though we are a bit, it was because a counter meal for three now costs about what we used to pay for a sit-down dinner somewhere decent.

There’s something very Australian about responding to a serious economic squeeze with recipe tips and air fryer recommendations in the same breath as grumbling about the RBA. It’s not denial, it’s coping, and it’s oddly effective. We’ve always been better at solving the problem in front of us, dinner, footy, a decent coffee that doesn’t cost nine dollars, than the problem sitting three steps back in the system. Maybe that’s a flaw. It’s also, if I’m honest, one of the more likeable things about this place. You can be furious about structural housing policy and still get genuinely excited that the air-fried southern chicken “slaps,” as one commenter put it. Both things can be true. I don’t think I’ve resolved anything here, and I’m not sure resolution is on offer this month. But I did add corn cobs to the shopping list.