Absent that, I suspect we may have had a fair bit more trouble containing inflation. But events being as they were, inflation came down pretty quickly and we have achieved something pretty close to 2½ per cent on average. In fact, we have been achieving the inflation target for over two decades.
From 1993 to 2016, a period of 23 years, the average rate of inflation has been 2.5 per cent – as measured by the CPI (and adjusting for the introduction of the GST in 2000).