Peter Hartcher

Governor, thanks for your speech today. Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. [Also author of Philip Lowe’s a convenient punching bag for a government suddenly on the ropes]

With the enormous expansion of government fiscal policy in recent years plus the strength of the bounce back that you've described today, is this the time that governments, federal and state, should be starting to retrench fiscal policy and tighten spending.

Philip Lowe

... I think the general point that I make here is that over the past couple of years, governments have borrowed a huge amount of money and they borrowed that against the country's future income. It was exactly the right thing to do. Private incomes were weak because we couldn't work in the pandemic. The government's borrowed and supplemented private sector incomes with money they've borrowed from the future. Perfectly sensible and I've been strongly supportive of that. ...

https://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2022/sp-gov-2022-02-02-q-and-a-transcript.html