Treasurer green lights ANZ takeover of Suncorp

ANZ has won a long battle to buy Queensland's Suncor, but analysts say they shouldn't celebrate too hard. When we have a look at every regional bank acquisition I've ever seen, the acquirer ends up basically losing a lot of market share unless they very actively discount our competition. Watchdog opposed the $5 billion deal but lost in court. After that, not much could stand in the way. This was an on balance call but it was consistent with the advice that I received from Treasury and from the regulators as well. The next three years, no branches will close and no staff will lose their jobs. After that is anyone's guess as the industry trims its network and we've seen this play out many times in the past. That's when you should expect to see branch reductions in Queensland just generally. ANZ has also bought the rights to the Suncor name for the next five years, but no guarantee it will continue beyond that. We're always against the amalgamation, especially making the big four even bigger. The biggest concern for most customers? Not the brand, but the impact of high interest rates. The central bank wants the growth in prices to stabilise between 2 and 3% a year, but the consumer price index and the RB as preferred measure of trimmed mean inflation are still far above that and trending up. Enter a deputy governor, newly arrived from the Bank of England, telling Australians to keep calm and carry on. It would be a bad mistake to set policy on the basis of one number and we don't intend to do that. The deputy governor says the RBA understands the impact on household budgets. We have a wide variety of ways of getting in a non-technical spreadsheet DSG model kind of information in to complement the the pointy headed stuff. The Reserve Bank board meets next in early August.