It sometimes surprises us how many local market and media commentators place rather little weight on these forces. The second observation is the value of the information of a qualitative nature gained by talking directly to firms, industry associations, State Government departments and so on. This is in addition to the insights the non-executive members of the Board bring from their other activities.
But that notion and others have been used too often in the past to justify a level of secrecy that turned out to be an unnecessary constraint on our obligation to be transparent in conducting the public's business. We need to remember that in decades past it was believed that monetary policy was most effective when it was least transparent.