SOMETIMES it's hard to know whether the Reserve Bank of Australia changes the wording of its monetary policy announcements because it's views have changed, or because it just wants to prove someone turned up to its monthly board meeting.
The statement issued on Tuesday after this month's meeting on Tuesday was not identical to the previous announcement, but it came fairly close.
There was only a subtle shift among the positives and negatives that we've become accustomed to seeing listed in the monthly commentary.
In April, the coming expansion in housing construction was expected to be "solid", but that's now been upgraded to "strong".
In April the RBA said the unemployment rate "will probably rise a little further in the near term".
This time, the forecast of a higher jobless rate has been dropped - the official figures showed it fell to 5.8 per cent in March from a decade high of 6.1 per cent in February.
"More recently, there has been some improvement in indicators for the labour market, but it will probably be some time yet before unemployment declines consistently," the RBA said this month.
That would imply a little less reluctance to raise the benchmark cash rate, which has been held at a half-century low of 2.5 per cent since August last year.
But all this weakness in the labour market has had an effect, making the risk of rising inflation even lower than it has been.
"Growth in wages has declined noticeably and this has been reflected more clearly in the latest price data, which show a moderation in growth in prices for non-traded goods and services," the RBA said.
That has kept consumer price inflation consistent with the RBA's two to three per cent target range.
"If domestic costs remain contained, that should continue to be the case over the next one to two years, even with lower levels of the exchange rate," the central bank said.
That comment continued the RBA's low-key war of words with the Aussie dollar which it said on Tuesday, for the umpteenth time, "remains high by historical standards" despite being lower than it was a year or two ago.
The RBA is clearly settled in for a long wait as it judges whether the positives are going to prevail, as it appears to expect, over the negatives.
But those negatives are not trivial.
The high exchange rate, the looming federal budget and the slide in mining sector investment are all potential game-changers for the RBA.
For the time being, though, the RBA is happy to stay on the sidelines.
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