Now that Lenore Taylor has left, David Uren is one of the few journalists remaining at The Oz with credibility and analytical heft, and he was on the money this morning when he saw that Glenn Stevens yesterday had been somewhat less subtle than previously on the issue of debt’n’deficits.

While the RBA wouldn’t have been happy with the partisan headline ‘Reserve backs Labor on debt’, Uren was dead right: Stevens’ statement that Australia’s finances are in “terrific shape” further undermines the Opposition’s repeated attempts to play up the issue, both with a coherent insistence that the budget deficit is too high, from Joe Hockey, and Barnaby Joyce’s somewhat less coherent insistence that Australia was in danger of defaulting.

Bear in mind that this is the only economic policy we’ve got from the Opposition: slash government spending because debt is dangerously high due to too much stimulus spending.

Stevens, who was speaking yesterday at an ASIC conference, went further than noting “government finances are in terrific shape” and that Government debt would peak at 10% of GDP (that’s the figure from the November forecasts – what’s the bet it’ll be lower in May).  He went on to note how exceptional Australia was internationally, in part because we “didn’t have to do very unconventional monetary and fiscal measures — the regular measures, applied liberally, worked — worked a treat actually.”  Expect those words to pop up in Government doorstops and Question Time answers in coming weeks.

This was the least subtle Stevens has been on the deficit issue so far.  He resisted efforts to get him to discuss Joyce at the recent House of Representatives Economics Committee hearing (where, incidentally, Jamie Briggs was the only Coalition MP to pursue an interesting and genuine public interest line of questioning), but Stevens referred to default by saying “there are few things less likely”.  He had also taken to putting caveats into his speeches warning that comments about international issues shouldn’t be construed as comments on domestic monetary policy, as the Opposition was doing.

No Opposition has ever been so demonstrably at odds with the Reserve Bank on critical issues of policy, not since the RBA’s legislated independence anyway.  Oppositions are always inclined to play politics with interest rate settings, but that’s an altogether different matter from the RBA Governor — whom the Coalition can’t attack in the same way as they attack Ken Henry as partisan — endorsing the Government on the only economic policy position the Opposition has.

If it was a Labor Opposition being implicitly rebuked by the RBA, you can bet we’d never hear the end of it, and its implications for economic competence from the media, especially if they were running around with a leader who admits he has no interest in economics and a dill of a finance spokesman.