RBA Governor Bullock says inflationary pressures to last longer than expected; inflation is driven by domestic capacity pressures; Board will raise rates again if needed

The conditional pledge to raise rates again if needed is a standing formulation the Bank has used before, but its weight depends on whether the demand side is actually cracking; the accompanying observation that unemployment remains historically low signals the Board does not yet see the labour-market slack it has in the past treated as a precondition for declaring the job done. The distinction worth drawing is between inflation persistence driven by capacity, which argues for holding or tightening, and persistence driven by administered or imported prices, where the RBA has historically been more tolerant of looking through. Front-end Australian rates and the AUD have tended in comparable episodes to reprice on the tone shift itself, then hand the baton to the next quarterly CPI print and wages data as the test of whether rhetoric becomes action. Worth noting is whether this framing is echoed across the Board's other speakers and how it sits against the Bank's own published forecasts, since commentary that outruns the forecast track has usually been the prelude to a revision at the next meeting rather than a standalone signal.