It’s rare that the millions of Australians locked out of the housing market get much in the way of good news. But Wednesday’s monthly inflation contains two bits of light at the end of the tunnel.

Trimmed mean inflation, which is the Reserve Bank’s preferred measure of underlying inflation, fell from 2.8 per cent in January to 2.7 per cent in February, which was below the market’s expectation. As tends to be the case, there was a fair bit of volatility in the monthly numbers, particularly around energy prices.