Andrew Hauser: From the shadows to the podium - central banks and the press

Remarks by Mr Andrew Hauser, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, at the Business Journalism Awards, Sydney, 8 October 2024.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

It's a privilege to be with you today and to announce the shortlist for the 2024 Walkley Business Journalism Award.

I am not the first senior official of the RBA to address this event – but, to put it mildly, our central banking predecessors a hundred years ago would have been surprised to see us here.

The high priest of central banking in the mid-1920s was Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England. Norman was an extraordinary character – a devotee of mysticism, who wore a long flowing cloak and travelled under the fake name of Professor Clarence Skinner. His communications strategy was succinctly summarised in the pithy phrase 'never explain, never apologise'.

He regularly put those words into practice. When asked by a Parliamentary select committee in 1930 to rationalise a particular course of action, for example, he simply tapped the side of his nose three times and stared into the distance.

Despite – or perhaps because of – this unusual behaviour, journalists loved him. A breathless 1932 New York Times pen portrait, entitled 'Banker and Legend', purred: 'Mr Norman is all elusiveness, technique, finesse - he sits silent, discreet, unseen - exercising a power unthought of by old-fashioned tyrants and only glimpsed by alchemists of long ago poring over their crucibles.'

Sadly, that passion went unreciprocated. Indeed, Norman made titanic efforts to avoid the press. Once, aboard ship in rough seas, word reached him that reporters were gathering to question him at the next port. He promptly leapt over the rails, shimmied down a rope ladder, and made his escape in a dinghy.