cost of accepting credit cards on to cardholders ; and – third, the elimination of the restriction on entry to the credit card schemes that keeps out potential competitors that are not deposit - taking institutions. after we released our document, we allowed interested parties till mid - march to prepare submissions, and we have been going through those submissions thoroughly with them since then. we want to give each party every opportunity to put their view forward, even if it involves multiple meetings. we are still in this process and, when we have finished, we will release our findings sometime after the end of june. during this period, we at the reserve bank have not engaged in public debate on this subject, even though some of the other participants in the credit card industry have been quite vocal. we see our role during this stage essentially as the umpire adjudicating between the competing views of the financial institutions and card schemes on one side, and the consumers, retailers, billers, etc. on the other side. of course, our umpire role should not inhibit the committee from asking any questions it wishes to.

speech the year ahead philip lowe [ * ] governor address to national press club of australia sydney – 2 february 2022 this is the fourth time that i have addressed the national press club. thank you for having me back. as i've done on each of the three previous occasions, i have titled my remarks ‘ the year ahead ’. i will talk about our latest forecasts, the outlook for monetary policy and yesterday's decision by the reserve bank board to end the bond purchase program. in summary, i remain optimistic about australia's prospects. our economy has weathered the pandemic much better than was expected, jobs growth is strong and unemployment is low, household and business balance sheets are generally in good shape and wages growth is picking up. these are all welcome developments. at the same time, though, the country faces challenges. the pandemic is not yet behind us and the sharp pick - up in inflation in some parts of the world, particularly in the united states, has added a new element of uncertainty to the outlook. we also face the challenge of lifting productivity growth, including through investing in the workforce skills and technologies that are needed to generate sustained increases in real wages. and over time and as conditions allow, we will need to navigate a return to more normal settings of monetary policy. a useful place to start is to look to the year just past for lessons. to do this, the table below shows the outcomes for the key economic variables in 2021 as well as the rba's central forecasts at the start of last year. table 1 : key economic variables – 2021 per cent outcome forecast difference ( percentage points ) gdp growth 5 * 3½ 1½ unemployment rate 4. 2 −1¾ cpi inflation 3. 5 1½ + 2 underlying inflation 2. 6 1¼ + 1¼ wage price index 2¼ * 1½ + ¾ ( a ) * estimate based on available data. sources : abs ; rba the picture is pretty clear. the economy performed significantly better last year than we had expected – gdp growth is likely to have been around 5 per cent, compared with our forecast of 3½ per cent. this is despite the setback caused by the delta outbreak. the unemployment rate also declined by more than we had expected and now stands at 4. 2 per cent, the lowest rate since the peak of the resources boom. these stronger gdp and labour market outcomes have translated into higher inflation than we were expecting. we had expected underlying inflation to be