What the IMF actually said about Australia’s economy

When the IMF put out its January update to the October World Economic Outlook this week, there was actually precious little in it about Australia. Just one mention to be precise. But were you to read some of the commentary, you would think Australia was the focus.

One of the funniest things about Australian media is the desperate lengths that will be made to suggest an international event or report is actually about Australia and that the Albanese Government is being warned or lectured to despite nothing of the sort occurring.

In the IMF update the one mention of Australia came in a sentence in which the IMF did a bit of a cooks’ tour of inflation. It noted “Australia and Norway are also projected to see some drawn-out persistence in above-target inflation.” Now none of this is “news” in the sense of it being new. In the RBA’s November Statement on Monetary Policy, inflation was forecast to not get back to under 3% until the middle of 2027.

This was slightly different to the IMF’s own projections a month earlier, so it is not surprising that now three months later the IMF has noted the change.

But according to the AFR this pronouncement by the IMF was “IMF calls out Australia for ‘drawn-out persistence’ in inflation”. The Australian ran with “IMF warns of drawn-out cost of living pain for Australia as global tariffs weigh on national economy”. It was not doing either of these things – there was no “calling out” or “warning”, there was just the IMF projecting what the RBA was already projecting.

In its editorial the AFR went even further suggesting that “the International Monetary Fund’s latest global economic update called out the Albanese government’s financial management by singling out Australia for the “drawn-out persistence” of above-target inflation.”

It did no such thing. There was no slap down of the government’s spending. There was not even an update of the inflation projections from the October economic outlook.

All the IMF did was update its projections for economic growth in 2026 and 2027 and unlike for a number of other countries nothing changed for Australia:

It means that Australia’s economic growth remains projected to be among the best of advanced economies, even if it is down on the long-term average. Even better, next year, Australia’s economy is expected to grow faster than any of the G7 nations of France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Japan, the UK and US:

It is weird that such a report would also be one where the IMF is warning or calling us out, and urgently demanding action by the Albanese government, but according to conservative media, apparently that is what happened.

Reading the report it however was rather clearer that the IMF barely even thought about Australia at all.