Andrew Hauser, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, delivered a pointed and philosophically rich challenge to economic orthodoxy in Melbourne on 24 June 2026, using the occasion of the Sir Douglas Copland Memorial Lecture to the Economic Society of Australia (Victoria) to argue that policymakers and economists alike must relinquish their attachment to linear models when navigating a world that stubbornly refuses to behave in straight lines. The lecture, subsequently published by the Bank for International Settlements on 1 July 2026, has since drawn considerable attention among monetary economists and central banking circles for the clarity and candour of its central provocation.
The title alone — drawn from the aphorism "The straight line belongs to man, the curved line belongs to God" — signals that Hauser's intentions extend well beyond conventional policy commentary. By invoking a statement that contrasts human-engineered rigidity with the organic, non-linear complexity of the natural world, he positions the challenge facing modern central banking as fundamentally philosophical before it is technical. In an era when sophisticated econometric models and data-driven forecasting tools have never been more abundant, Hauser's lecture asks whether the profession's love of clean, tractable frameworks has become a liability rather than an asset.
The Peril of Precision in an Imprecise World
Central banks have long sought to communicate certainty to markets and the public, deploying forward guidance, inflation targets, and precise numerical thresholds as anchors for expectations. Yet the post-pandemic period has exposed the limitations of this approach with uncomfortable clarity. Supply shocks, geopolitical fractures, and the non-linear dynamics of labour markets and energy prices have repeatedly wrong-footed even the most carefully constructed forecasting frameworks. Hauser's lecture, delivered in the tradition of the distinguished Australian economist Sir Douglas Copland — himself a figure who navigated the brutal complexities of depression-era policy — appears to call for a more humble, adaptive posture from institutions entrusted with monetary stewardship.
The choice of venue and occasion is itself instructive. The Economic Society of Australia has historically served as a forum where theoretical rigour and practical policy wisdom intersect, and Copland's own legacy straddles both. By grounding his remarks in this tradition, Hauser is not merely offering intellectual provocation — he is drawing a lineage that connects Australia's formative economic experiences to present-day challenges. The implication is that the instinct to reach for the straight line, the clean equation, the unambiguous target, has been a recurring temptation in economic governance, and a recurring source of error.
Complexity as a Feature, Not a Bug
What Hauser appears to advocate — and what the BIS's decision to amplify the speech underscores — is a mode of central banking that treats uncertainty not as noise to be filtered out, but as a structural feature of the economic landscape that must be incorporated into both analysis and communication. This is no small shift. For much of the inflation-targeting era, the operating assumption was that transparent, rules-based policy could gradually tame the variability of economic outcomes. The experience of the 2020s has tested that assumption severely.
The curved line, in Hauser's framing, is not a symbol of failure or imprecision — it is a more honest representation of how economies actually evolve: through feedback loops, threshold effects, sudden reversals, and the irreducible influence of human behaviour and expectation. Accepting the curve means accepting that policy will sometimes need to move in ways that appear inconsistent with prior guidance, that models will require continuous revision, and that communicating genuine uncertainty is more valuable than projecting false confidence.
Implications for the RBA and Broader Policy Debate
For the Reserve Bank of Australia specifically, Hauser's remarks arrive at a moment of institutional significance. The RBA has undergone meaningful structural reform in recent years, including changes to its governance and decision-making processes, and is operating within an environment of persistent cost-of-living pressures, shifting commodity dynamics, and an evolving global trade architecture. The Deputy Governor's willingness to interrogate the foundational assumptions of monetary modelling signals that the institution is engaged in a deeper reckoning with how it understands and communicates its own limitations.
More broadly, the lecture contributes to a growing conversation across the global central banking community — one in which the BIS has been an active participant — about the appropriate epistemological humility that monetary authorities should bring to their work. When the world's premier institution for central bank cooperation chooses to publish a speech whose central metaphor is borrowed from philosophy and art rather than econometrics, the message to the profession is deliberate and clear: the map is not the territory, and the straight line drawn through a scatterplot is not the economy.
What This Means
Hauser's Copland Lecture is likely to resonate well beyond Australian monetary circles. At a moment when central banks globally are grappling with the limits of their forecasting tools, the political pressures of prolonged adjustment cycles, and the communicative demands of an increasingly sceptical public, the argument for embracing complexity rather than papering over it is both timely and necessary. The straight line may be easier to draw and easier to defend — but in a world shaped by curves, it is ultimately a fiction. Policymakers who mistake their models for reality risk being undone by the very simplicity they sought as a virtue.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.
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