NEXT50 Lunch: A Decade of RBA cash rates with Ian Harper

In 2016, economist Ian Harper received an unexpected invitation. Would he consider joining the board of the Reserve Bank, returning to the institution where he got his first big job out of university three decades earlier?

What followed was an eventful decade on the monetary policy committee that sets the economy’s most important administered price.

Professor Harper’s time on the Reserve Bank board included the below-target inflation period of the late 2010s, the once-in-a-century shock of a global pandemic, The sharpest inflation breakout in a generation, an external review that led to the central bank’s biggest shake-up in more than two decades and then the frustrating attempts to get persistent inflation back in the box.

One of Australia’s most experienced practical economists, Ian Harper, AO, chaired the 2015 Competition Policy Review, was a member of the 1997 Financial System Inquiry (the Wallis Review), was inaugural chairman of the Australian Fair Pay Commission, spent two decades as an economics professor at the University of Melbourne, was a director of Access Economics and dean and director of the Melbourne Business School. This is his first public event since his term on the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Board ended on August 31.