Here is a bit of transcript from Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Steven’s in response to a question put by Craig Kelly MHR during a Parliamentary committee meeting. You could find neither the question nor the answer anywhere else in the world.

Mr CRAIG KELLY: There was an article published earlier this week in The American Spectator. If I just quote a few passages from it, you might like to comment. It said:

“America is languishing from historically low growth rates for the past ten years … In the fourth quarter of 2015, our growth rate was less than 1% at .70%.”

It goes on to talk about Japan. It says:

“Japan has followed this same pattern of high tax rates, lower interest rates, and endless government spending for the past 25 years. The result is massive federal debt, a slow growth economy, and reduced international competitiveness.”

Then it goes on to Europe:

“Europe has followed the same prescription, with similar results …”

Then it goes on:

“Jean-Baptiste Say theorized that the growth of economies is not demand-driven, but growth is created by new and lower cost products and services.”

Do you think that governments worldwide over the past six, seven or eight years have been too much focused on stimulating from the demand side rather than from the supply side?

RBA GOVERNOR, Mr STEVENS : Say’s law, as it is known, is a long-run proposition that supply creates its own demand. I think my colleagues are more educated in economics than I, but my sense is that mainstream economics would admit that there are occasions when, for one reason or another, aggregate demand in the economy can fall short of its supply capacity, and we lived through one of those. It is actually pretty likely that will happen in a financial crisis, and that is what happened. So it was appropriate for the countries affected—which were many, including us—to adopt more expansionary demand management policies, both monetary and, where space allowed, fiscal.

But then the question is: it is one thing to manage demand around the cycle—most mainstream economics accepts that some of that should be done, especially in deep downturn episodes where it is virtually certain that it is a deficiency of demand that has caused it—but, in the longer run, where does the growth come from? This is a point where I am a broken record, but this is the point we have made many times. It cannot really be the case that we get long-run growth by just using monetary policy which, in the end, borrows from tomorrow’s income to spend today. That cannot be a recipe for sustained, strong long-run growth. The sustained and strong long-run growth in living standards comes from innovation, risk taking, productivity et cetera et cetera. We have talked about all that, as you know, many times before, and I think the committee understands our view.

So I would say that in the past seven or eight years too much has been expected of monetary policy to keep delivering growth. Really—and I am speaking at a global level here—monetary policy globally has been asked to do something it cannot really do. It is not simple to put long-run growth on a better track, but this is why, when we hosted the G20, we talked about the growth plan structural initiatives. None of those initiatives were that the central bank should cut rates further to get the two per cent extra growth the G20 talked about, they were all structural things to help make economies work better—to help productivity, to assist innovation et cetera. That is where prosperity comes from. It does not come from manipulating the price of money. There is a place for doing that in a demand downturn but long-term growth does not come from that. We have been very clear about that.

The question is outstanding and the answer is pretty damn good as well.