Carolyn Wilkins, a former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada will lead the review of the Reserve Bank of Australia, the terms of which were announced yesterday by the treasurer, Jim Chalmers.
Wilkins is currently an external member of the Financial Policy Committee of the Bank of England.
She will be joined on the three-person review panel by Renée Fry-McKibbin, interim director of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University and Gordon de Brouwer, secretary for Public Sector Reform.
The review will assess:
• Australia’s monetary policy arrangements, including the RBA’s objectives, as outlined in the Reserve Bank Act (1959) and in the Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy, including the continued appropriateness of the inflation targeting framework;
• the interaction of monetary policy with fiscal and macroprudential policy, including during crises and when monetary policy space is limited;
• this will include Australia’s macroprudential governance arrangements, but exclude APRA’s statutory role or functions.
It will also assess: the RBA’s performance in meeting its objectives, including its choice of policy tools, policy implementation, policy communication, and how trade-offs between different objectives have been managed; its governance and accountability arrangements; and its culture, management and recruitment processes.
The review will not loook at the RBA's payments functions.