Economics Legislation Committee
10/11/2022
Estimates
TREASURY PORTFOLIO
Reserve Bank of Australia
Senator RENNICK: I asked at the last set of estimates for the correspondence between the RBA and the Bank for International Settlements. The RBA refused to do that. Can you tell me why, as elected representatives of the Australian people, we shouldn’t have access to correspondence between the RBA and the Bank for International Settlements?
Ms Bullock : There are a couple of points. I think the first one is that the requested amount of information is voluminous because a lot of it is very transactional. It’s just meetings, setting up meetings and these sorts of incidental things. So it’s quite voluminous and would take a lot of work for us to do. The second point is that the information that is potentially of interest is, in fact, confidential.
Senator RENNICK: That is the information I want to get hold of. I would like to know why there is confidential information between the RBA and the Bank for International Settlements? It has a notorious history. They melted down the Nazi gold. They are a notorious operation. Why does the RBA consider that information confidential from the Australian people?
Ms Bullock : Because a lot of the information is about conversations we are having with other central banks. Those conversations are had on the condition that they are kept confidential. If we were to release that sort of information, I would say one response would be that we would not be allowed to be included in conversations which include confidential information with other central banks.
Senator RENNICK: That is my concern. Central banks aren’t being held to proper standards of transparency and accountability. Given that central banks have expanded the volume of money on a dramatic scale in the last 30 years, if anyone should be transparent and accountable, it should be the world’s central banks, especially the US Federal Reserve, which is owned by a number of prime banks. Most people in this room wouldn’t even know what a prime bank is. That is the level of secrecy they operate behind. So I will continue to pursue those confidential minutes, whatever they may be, because I think that the RBA should be accountable to the parliament. As Senator Wong herself said last week, that is the ultimate level of accountability. Central banks shouldn’t be keeping conversations to themselves. I will finish off with that as a statement.
