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 the more prestigious addresses on the Australian economic calendar — and chose a title drawn not from an economist but from an architect. "The straight line belongs to man, the curved line belongs to God," the Catalan visionary Antoni Gaudí is reputed to have said, and in invoking that phrase, Hauser signalled that his remarks would wrestle with something more fundamental than the usual rate-path commentary: the boundaries, assumptions, and inherent limitations of modern central banking itself.
The lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Economic Society of Australia (Victoria) and subsequently published by the Bank for International Settlements on 1 July 2026, arrives at a moment when central banks across the developed world are navigating terrain that resists the straight lines of conventional macroeconomic models. Supply chains remain structurally altered, labour markets have behaved in ways that confounded pre-pandemic forecasting frameworks, and the neutral rate of interest — that foundational concept in monetary policy — has proven stubbornly resistant to precise calibration. In choosing Gaudí's architectural aphorism as his organising metaphor, Hauser acknowledged, implicitly but unmistakably, that the economy curves in ways that policymakers cannot fully anticipate or engineer.
Honouring a Tradition of Honest Economic Thinking
The choice of platform matters as much as the content. The Sir Douglas Copland Memorial Lecture commemorates one of Australia's most consequential economic thinkers, a figure whose work during the interwar period helped lay the intellectual foundations for Australian macroeconomic policy. Copland was distinguished not only by technical rigour but by a willingness to engage with uncertainty and complexity at a time when orthodox economics offered few satisfying answers to the crises of the 1930s. In that sense, Hauser's selection of a title that openly references the limits of human design feels deliberate — a conscious alignment with a tradition of intellectual honesty about what economists do and do not know.
For a central bank deputy governor to choose such a frame is, in the context of institutional communications, a notable act of candour. Central banks have spent decades cultivating credibility through the projection of analytical precision: inflation targets stated to the decimal point, forward guidance delivered in carefully calibrated language, models presented with confidence intervals that can obscure as much as they reveal. The Gaudí quotation cuts against that tradition of manufactured certainty. It suggests that the economy, like organic architecture, follows curves that no policy spreadsheet was designed to accommodate.
The RBA in a Shifting Policy Landscape
The timing of the lecture places it squarely within a period of genuine consequence for the RBA as an institution. The bank has undergone significant internal review and reform in recent years, with its governance structures, communication practices, and decision-making processes all subject to scrutiny. Hauser, who brought extensive experience from the Bank of England before joining the RBA, has been a central figure in that modernisation effort. His willingness to engage publicly with the epistemological limits of monetary policy — the question of what central bankers can reliably know, and when they should admit they cannot know it — reflects a broader shift in how the RBA is choosing to communicate with the public and with the professional economics community.
That shift matters for markets and for the broader economy. When a deputy governor of a major central bank explicitly frames policy in terms of curvature and complexity rather than straight-line precision, it recalibrates expectations about the nature of forward guidance. It is, in effect, an invitation to market participants and households alike to hold their own views with appropriate humility — and to understand that the central bank is doing the same. This is not a counsel of despair but a more mature epistemology: one that acknowledges model uncertainty while maintaining the institutional commitment to price stability and full employment that anchors the RBA's mandate.
What This Means
The publication of Hauser's Copland Lecture by the BIS ensures that its ideas will circulate well beyond Melbourne's economics community. Central bankers and finance ministers from Zürich to Singapore will read a senior RBA official arguing, through the language of architecture and theology, that the economy does not submit to straight lines. In practical terms, this philosophy has implications for how the RBA communicates uncertainty in its Statement on Monetary Policy, how it presents its forecasting models, and how it conditions market expectations during periods of elevated volatility. The curved line, as Gaudí observed, belongs to a domain beyond human control. The task of the central banker, as Hauser's lecture implicitly frames it, is not to straighten that curve but to navigate it with honesty, rigour, and the intellectual humility that Australia's most distinguished economic tradition has always demanded.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.