Former RBA governor lashes One Nation’s radical central bank proposal
One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce wants the RBA to have more input in fiscal matters. Bernie Fraser does not approve.
Barnaby Joyce’s pitch to transform the Reserve Bank into a government spending adviser has been slammed by the central bank’s former governor Bernie Fraser.
Fraser warns the central bank has a tendency to “over-emphasise on inflation”, telling Capital Brief that any fiscal policy advice from the RBA is likely to end up “interfering with government policy to improve well-being and living standards and so on”.
Joyce has outlined a radical plan, first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, to empower the RBA to “give a directive to the government, whether it takes it up or not, to reduce regulation and spending” as part of its inflation-fighting toolkit. It is his first publicised major reform idea as One Nation’s economic spokesman.
Joyce said an alternative, short of a direct target on government spending, would see the monetary policymakers “giving a critique”.
