Macfarlane Governor. Thank you for the opportunity of being present at the celebration of the Reserve Bank of Fiji's 25 th Anniversary. The family of central banking certainly has a wide span of ages — from the Swedish Riksbank, which this year is years old, all the way down to relatively young central banks, such as a number of us in the Pacific region. I would have to include the Reserve Bank of Australia as one of the younger ones — we have only been a separate entity for 39 years — not much older than the Reserve Bank of Fiji.
Over the 25 years that the Reserve Bank of Fiji has been in existence, relations between it and the Reserve Bank of Australia have always been close. Many members of the staff of the Reserve Bank of Fiji have visited us in Australia for training, and in turn we have seconded a number of our people to the Reserve Bank of Fiji.
Some of you may remember Paul Talbot who spent a few years here recently — he is now in charge of our Information Office. Our latest Reserve Bank of Australia export to Fiji is Steve Morling, who is finding the work so interesting and the lifestyle so congenial that we will have difficulty getting him back. Leaving that aside, I am sure the close relationship between our institutions will continue over the next 25 years and beyond.
I should now turn to the more serious business of today's seminar. I will be doing so from the perspective of a large island central bank — the Reserve Bank of Australia. A lot of the problems we all face are similar, but, as you know, the lessons learnt in developed countries may not always be entirely appropriate for other countries. I am conscious of that, and I will do my best to take into account the unique challenges facing small island economies in what I have to say today.
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