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The Reserve Bank's deputy governor has played down this week's surprise inflation data, saying it would be a "bad mistake" to set interest rates on the basis of one number.
The monthly Consumer Price Index indicator released on Wednesday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed annual inflation had jumped from 3.6 per cent in April to 4 per cent in May.
The number was higher than analyst expectations and saw market pricing for the chances of another interest rate hike rise to nearly 50 per cent.
Speaking at the welcome dinner for Citi's A50 Australian Economic Forum in Sydney, Andrew Hauser told the gathered group of business leaders and finance sector heavyweights that there were plenty of other important economic data to be released before the RBA board next meets to decide interest rates on August 5-6.
"There's a whole series of data coming out," he said.
"Two measures of retail sales, which have been on the floor, there's an important release on employment, the Q2 [second quarter] inflation number — bearing in mind that the [May] numbers that we spent a bit of time earlier talking about are only partial, and that's something I'm not used to from the UK that these monthly indicators don't contain a full sample process — there's business surveys.
"It would be a bad mistake to set policy on the basis of one number."
Andrew Hauser brings a fresh, outside perspective
Andrew Hauser is the first outsider to grace the Reserve Bank's senior ranks, leaving the Bank of England to become the RBA's deputy governor in February this year.
His appointment was seen as a key outcome of the RBA review, which sought to bring more transparency and debate to Australia's central bank, amid accusations of groupthink and domination from the top.
One thing Hauser clearly has been keen to bring in his early public appearances is perspective.
Much like Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen skit, Englishman Hauser effectively told an audience of Australia's corporate elite that if they thought they had it tough they should try his homeland.
"When economic conditions are as challenging as they are today, it can be easy to forget just how prosperous modern Australia is," he commented.
"Measures of relative affluence, such as GDP or wealth per head, regularly place the country in the top echelon globally.
"Of course, the distribution of that prosperity is far from uniform – so it would be brave for a new and infatuated stranger to declare Australia an earthly paradise.
"But coming as I do from a country whose GDP per head has been more or less static since the global financial crisis, and lies between one-quarter and one-third lower than Australia's, I can tell you that cross-country gap feels very real."
Probably never more real than when dining at Sydney's top-end Quay restaurant with views of the Opera House.
(And, in case you're wondering, at this event the journalists present were allowed to attend only for the speech and not the dinner).
Australia's natural and human endowments
Moreover, the Reserve Bank's new deputy boss believes that this prosperity gap could widen into the future, given Australia's abundance of natural endowments.
"Australia has large shares of global reserves of many of the minerals critical to 'new world' technology and energy transition industries, with significant headroom to expand current production, given the right investment and demand conditions," he argued.
The graph he showed highlights how much untapped potential sits below the ground.
However, Hauser said Australia's natural endowments are not just below us, but all around us.
"Multiplying the intensity of the Australian sun (using the World Bank's Global Horizontal Irradiation metric) by its enormous landmass, Australia has the largest assessed theoretical potential solar capacity in the world – many thousands of times the country's domestic energy needs," he added.
Needless to say, solar resources are another area where Australia is well ahead of Hauser's country of origin.
And, for a nation so heavily dependant on exporting natural resources, we are also a bunch of relatively well-educated diggers.
However, despite a growing pool of national savings, particularly through decades of compulsory superannuation, the RBA's deputy governor said Australia still requires foreign investment to make the most of its largely untapped resources.
"When Walter Wriston, Citibank's CEO from 1967 to 1984, said, 'Capital goes where it is welcome, and it stays where it is well treated,' he could have been describing Australia," he said in his prepared remarks.
"Australia remains one of the top recipients of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) globally, when expressed as a share of GDP."
Hauser added that, while Australia's world-leading natural resources are a major lure, foreign investors generally require something more to park large sums of money in long-term projects.
"Endowments bring opportunity. But harnessing them for a country's greater good takes something more – and Australia's real secret sauce has been its strong but adaptable pro-growth institutions," he argued.
"Among Australia's greatest assets have been its political institutions, its legal system and its civil service."
A civil service of which Andrew Hauser is now a critical part.