TAKE a deep breath. Inflation is not, as one commentator opined this week, ''a disaster''. It seems to me to be a long way short of what would be needed to bring forward an interest rate hike on Tuesday, as the ANZ is now predicting.

There's no doubt the headline figures are high: 0.9 per cent for the quarter and 3.6 per cent for the year. The underlying measures the Bureau of Statistics calculates for the Reserve Bank are high too, each coming in at 0.9 per cent for the quarter, and a more acceptable 2.7 per cent for the year.

But there are good reasons not to place too much weight on any of these figures, and the bureau knows it.

From next quarter the bureau will publish a new improved consumer price index, removing one of the most erratic and troublesome components and shunting it off to an appendix.

The so-called ''deposit and loan index'' is a valiant attempt to measure what banks charge. The fourth-largest component of the CPI, accounting for 4 per cent of the bureau's ''shopping basket'', it is made up of the fees the banks charge directly and also an estimate of the margins they whack onto their rates.