pensive. Interest rates will remain ‘low’. Terrorism is impossible to predict but retailers need to prepare themselves. The GST could rise before January 2017. If and when it does, there will be a flurry of spending depending on how much notice we get. The LVT will drop but will have no material effect on retailers in Australia because the GST pales into insignificance compared to overseas on line prices. Taking them one by one: The oil price has stayed low and is in fact still dropping. The AUD has not hovered in the 80s but rather in the late 70s. Interest rates have certainly remained low. Terrorism regrettably hit us in December 2014 after I had written a column stating that retail was unprepared for terror attacks. Again in October this year there was an attack with the shooting in Parramatta. I firmly believe that as retailers we are still lacking in preparation for terrorist attacks. The GST is now discussed almost daily. When I wrote my predictions for 2015, Tony Abbott was Prime Minister and I said: Apart from the GST exemptions being reduced, the GST will probably rise to 12.5 per cent which is silly because it will then rise again to 15 per cent some time later. I speculated that it may rise before the election on 14 January 2017 but that it will rise. The LVT (subsequently changed to LVIT) will indeed be scrapped (from 1 July 2017) according to the announcement made in August. So by and large the predictions were reasonably accurate not that it took a lot of genius. Now we need to look forward to 2016 and I fear that any forecasts will not be as easy as they were this year. Early in the New Year, I will again throw my hat in the ring. If I am wrong, I would at least have got one out of two years reasonably ‘right’! Stuart Bennie is a retail consultant at Impact Retailing and can be contacted at stuart@impactretailing.com.au or 0414 631 702. Want more Inside Retail? Subscribe to Inside Retail Weekly now and get our premium print publication delivered to your door every week.