On the evening of 24 June 2026, Andrew Hauser, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, took to the podium in Melbourne to deliver the Sir Douglas Copland Memorial Lecture before the Economic Society of Australia (Victoria). The occasion was more than a ceremonial fixture on the academic calendar. In choosing to title his address after the aphorism — "The straight line belongs to man, the curved line belongs to God" — Hauser signalled an intent to confront one of the deepest tensions in contemporary economic policymaking: the instinct to impose clean, linear frameworks on a world that stubbornly refuses to behave in straight lines.
The Sir Douglas Copland Memorial Lecture carries considerable weight in Australian economic discourse. Copland himself was a towering figure in Australian economic history — an architect of Depression-era stabilisation policy and a pioneer of institutional economic thinking in the Pacific region. To be invited to deliver the memorial address in his name is to accept a standard of intellectual seriousness that goes well beyond the routine. That Hauser chose so philosophically charged a theme speaks to both his own intellectual disposition and to the moment in which central banking currently finds itself.
Hauser's appointment to the Reserve Bank of Australia brought with him a distinguished international pedigree, including senior roles at the Bank of England, where he led the Markets directorate through some of the most turbulent episodes in recent financial history, including the aftermath of the United Kingdom's 2022 gilt market crisis. His arrival in Australia was widely read as a signal that the RBA's leadership was seeking to inject fresh external perspective into an institution undergoing its own reform process following a formal review of its structure and governance.
The lecture's central metaphor — borrowed from the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí, who attributed the curved line to divine design and the straight line to human imposition — resonates powerfully in the context of current macroeconomic conditions. Central banks globally have spent the better part of two decades constructing elegant, often linear, analytical frameworks: inflation targeting regimes with precise numerical anchors, interest rate reaction functions codified into policy rules, forward guidance designed to compress uncertainty into neat probabilistic distributions. The post-pandemic inflation surge, the supply-chain dislocations, the geopolitical fragmentations reshaping trade — all of these have bent those straight lines into something far less predictable.
For the Bank for International Settlements, which published Hauser's speech text on 1 July 2026 through its central bank speeches repository, the address represents yet another contribution to a growing canon of senior central bank communications grappling publicly with the limits of the profession's own models. The BIS platform gives such lectures international reach, ensuring that an address delivered to an audience in Melbourne is read in Basel, Frankfurt, Washington, and beyond. In that sense, what Hauser said to the Economic Society of Australia (Victoria) was also, implicitly, a message to the global central banking community.
The philosophical framing of the lecture invites reflection on how economic institutions communicate uncertainty. There is a long-standing tension between the institutional need for clarity — markets and governments require central banks to project confidence and coherence — and the intellectual honesty of acknowledging that economic systems are complex, adaptive, and resistant to the kind of deterministic modelling that underpins most policy frameworks. Hauser's willingness to engage this tension openly, and to give it a memorable rhetorical frame, reflects a broader shift in central bank communication toward what might be called epistemic humility: the acknowledgement that the curved lines of economic reality will always exceed the capacity of human models to fully capture them.
What This Means for Central Banking and Economic Policy
The significance of Hauser's Melbourne lecture extends well beyond its immediate audience. At a moment when the RBA is navigating a post-reform institutional transition, when Australian monetary policy faces the complex interplay of persistent inflationary pressures, a slowing global economy, and evolving domestic demand dynamics, the Deputy Governor's choice to foreground intellectual humility over technocratic certainty is itself a policy signal. It suggests that the RBA's current leadership is prepared to be transparent about the limits of its foresight — a stance that, paradoxically, can reinforce rather than undermine institutional credibility when communicated with the authority and precision that Hauser brought to the Copland stage. For economists, policymakers, and market participants watching the RBA's trajectory, this lecture will be read as a philosophical marker: a senior figure at one of the world's significant central banks publicly affirming that the most honest thing an institution can say is that the world, like Gaudí's architecture, does not always comply with the lines we draw for it.
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