or why did we raise rates by 50 basis points rather than 25? inevitably, the answers to these questions involve an element of judgment. but the truth is that the answers are not very important in the medium term. rather, it is the average level of interest rates that matters. have we allowed them to stay too low and so encouraged the build - up of an inflationary process, or have we raised them too high and so set in train a contractionary or deflationary process? these are the important questions, and any judgment on them must be based on the medium - term performance of the australian economy. this may not be a simple task, but i would suggest that a favourable judgment would require that the macro - economic performance of the australian economy be better than in earlier decades, and that it stand up well in comparisons with the experience of other countries over the same period.

www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2017 / sp - gov - 2017 - 07 - 26. html 5 / 13 7 / 26 / 2017 the labour market and monetary policy | speeches | rba graph 5 today, almost 80 per cent of australians work in service industries, broadly defined. by way of contrast, in the 1950s only around 50 per cent of employed australians worked in the services sector. in the past, it was common to have a full - time job producing goods. in our more modern economy, this is no longer the case. in an effort to better understand the growth in services - sector employment, one of the exercises that we have done at the rba is to classify around 300 individual service - sector occupations into jobs that pay hourly wages that are below average, around average and above average. [ 3 ] we have then tracked employment growth for each of these three groups since 2000 ( graph 6 ). https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2017 / sp - gov - 2017 - 07 - 26. html 6 / 13 7 / 26 / 2017 the labour market and monetary policy | speeches | rba graph 6 the picture is pretty clear. the growth in service - sector employment has been strongest in those occupations with above - average rates of pay. since 2000, over a million new higher - paying jobs have been created in the services sector. some of the occupations where there have been large gains in employment are : medical professionals, it managers, project administrators and sales managers. there has also been strong employment growth in occupations with lower rates of pay. we have also conducted the same analysis for the business services and household services sectors separately ( graph 7 ). the growth of higher - paying jobs has been much more pronounced in business services, than it has been in household services. for the household services sector, the growth has been strongest in jobs with below - average wages. some of the occupations where there has been a big increase in employment here include : baristas and waiters, childcare workers and aged - care workers. so it's a mixed picture. https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2017 / sp - gov - 2017 - 07 - 26. html 7 / 13 7 / 26 / 2017 the labour market and monetary policy | speeches | rba graph 7 i am often asked where future jobs growth will come from. the short answer is that it will come mainly from where