Andrew Hauser, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, took to the podium in Melbourne on 24 June 2026 to deliver the Sir Douglas Copland Memorial Lecture — one of Australian economics' most storied annual addresses — under the auspices of the Economic Society of Australia's Victoria branch. The lecture, subsequently published by the Bank for International Settlements on 1 July 2026, carried a title drawn from a maxim attributed to the architect Antoni Gaudí: "The straight line belongs to man, the curved line belongs to God." In choosing that provocation as his framing device, Hauser signalled an address concerned not with tidy linear models of economic behaviour, but with the irreducible complexity that governs real-world monetary and financial systems.

The choice of the Copland Lecture as the vehicle for such a message is itself significant. Sir Douglas Copland was among the foremost economic statesmen of twentieth-century Australia — an adviser to government during the Great Depression, a champion of applied economic thinking, and a foundational figure in the institutional architecture that gave rise to modern Australian economic policymaking. Delivering a lecture in his name carries an implicit obligation to engage with economics as a discipline of consequence, not mere abstraction. Hauser, who joined the Reserve Bank of Australia after a distinguished career at the Bank of England, brought to Melbourne a perspective shaped by decades at the intersection of central banking theory and crisis-era practice.

The Gaudí quotation at the heart of Hauser's title encapsulates a tension that has quietly unsettled mainstream macroeconomics for years. Central banks, by institutional temperament and regulatory necessity, are drawn toward straight lines: linear models, point forecasts, policy rules that can be communicated cleanly to markets and the public. Yet the phenomena they are tasked with governing — inflation dynamics, credit cycles, labour market frictions, cross-border capital flows — trace curved, non-linear, often unpredictable paths. The gap between the clean geometry of economic models and the messy curvature of lived economic reality has never been more consequential than in the post-pandemic era, when successive forecasting failures by major central banks exposed the limits of frameworks built for a more predictable world.

For Australia specifically, the stakes of that tension are acute. The Reserve Bank has navigated an unusually complex post-pandemic landscape: a labour market that proved far more resilient than models predicted, an inflation surge that arrived later and proved stickier than in peer economies, and a housing market whose dynamics continue to defy straightforward policy transmission. Hauser's willingness to invoke complexity and curvature — rather than reassure audiences with the language of controlled precision — reflects a broader shift in central bank communication philosophy, one that prizes intellectual honesty about uncertainty over the false comfort of spurious exactitude.

That philosophical stance has practical implications for how monetary policy is both made and explained. When a central bank acknowledges that the economy behaves more like a curved line than a straight one, it implicitly concedes that policy paths will require more frequent recalibration, that forward guidance must be held more loosely, and that the humility embedded in scenario-based thinking is more honest than the confidence implied by a single deterministic forecast. It is a position that demands more of both policymakers and the publics they serve — but it is arguably a more truthful account of how monetary policy actually operates under uncertainty.

The BIS's decision to publish the lecture in its official review series underscores the international relevance of the themes Hauser raised. The BIS has itself been among the most consistent institutional voices urging central banks to grapple seriously with non-linearity, tail risks, and the structural changes reshaping the global economy. Hauser's Melbourne address, arriving at a moment when several major central banks are reassessing their policy frameworks following the inflation episodes of 2022 through 2024, contributes to a wider conversation about whether the intellectual tools central bankers rely upon remain adequate to the world they must navigate.

What This Means for Central Banking Practice

Hauser's Copland Lecture arrives at a pivotal moment in the evolution of central bank thinking. The post-pandemic years have forced a reckoning with the limitations of linear, model-driven policymaking — and the RBA, like its peers at the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England, is actively engaged in reassessing the frameworks it uses to understand and forecast economic conditions. For financial markets and the banking sector, the message embedded in Hauser's chosen title carries a direct implication: policy surprises are not failures of process, but an honest acknowledgment that curved lines cannot always be drawn in advance. Institutions that price assets, manage credit risk, or structure long-dated liabilities against a backdrop of assumed central bank predictability would do well to reckon with that reality. The straight line may belong to man — but it is the curved line that the economy, and monetary policy, must ultimately follow.

Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.