Two new members will sit on the RBA's monetary board from March under the overhauled structure. The Coalition had demanded the existing board members remain on the new-look board. The new monetary and governance boards will begin operating from March.
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TVTranscript
00:00The Treasurer has outlined his new appointments. As you say, there will now be two boards at
00:07the Reserve Bank of Australia. One, the Governance Board will run the daily operations of the
00:13bank, but the second board, a Monetary Policy Board, will be in charge of setting interest
00:19rates. Now, this review was done because of those string of interest rate rises that we
00:24saw. It was an independent review and it's now passed legislation. So there will be six
00:29new appointments overall. Two new appointments on the Monetary Policy Board. They are Marnie
00:36Baker, who was the former CEO of Bendigo Bank, and Renee Fry-McKibben, who is a Distinguished
00:43Economics Professor at the Australian National University. As I say, they're both fairly
00:48uncontroversial appointments. They're qualified people. There's also some new appointments
00:53to the Governance Board, a few names that people might recognise. Jennifer Westacott,
00:58who's the former CEO of the Business Council of Australia. David Thode, the former CEO
01:03of Telstra. Lawyer Danny Gilbert and Swathi Dave, who was most recently the CEO of Export
01:11Finance Australia. And Michelle Bullock, who people will have come to see quite a few times,
01:17who gets up and explains the decisions after interest rate changes. She will remain as
01:22chair of both of those boards. Now, the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, says that these people have
01:29gone through a qualified process to be appointed. And he says that it is an important change
01:35that he makes these changes. It's as a result of the review. And he's the reason I guess
01:41this is significant, is that the types of people on the Monetary Policy Board in some
01:46way determine what sort of decisions they make. And he was asked whether people who
01:51have mortgages could expect to see anything different or better as a result of the appointments.
01:56And this was his answer.
01:58I don't want to pre-empt decisions taken by either the existing board or the future
02:04boards when they're set up. This is about modernising the Reserve Bank, picking up international
02:10best practice and making sure that we equip the Reserve Bank to make the best, most considered
02:15decisions into the future. And that's what the whole Reserve Bank review has been about.
02:21I understand and acknowledge that people aren't necessarily sitting around their kitchen tables
02:26thinking about the composition of the Reserve Bank boards. But I also know that people are
02:32under substantial cost of living pressure.
02:36Treasurer Jim Chalmers there. And these new appointments will start when these two boards
02:41are split and officially set up in March.