Racing keeping former RBA governor on his toes
Fiscal Fraser happy to chip away with small band of horses
For seven years, between 1989 and 1996, economist Bernie Fraser held one of the most important positions in the country as the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
He presided over the Central Bank during the prime ministerial terms of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, a tenure in which he navigated a recession in 1990 and ’91, when unemployment hit double digits and interest rates were at an all-time high of 22 per cent.
Fraser, rising 83 and retired from public service at his property Magpie Downs, also has a great love of horseracing, training a string from New South Wales town Queanbeyan, near Canberra, for 25 years.
He still owns a few horses who are prepared by jockey-turned-trainer Pat Murphy at Goulburn, Gratz Vella in Canberra while the now Scone-based Luke Pepper also trained for the former RBA Governor.
Fraser keeps a close eye on fiscal policy but early yesterday, just two days after incumbent Philip Lowe and the RBA board kept the official interest rate at 4.1 per cent, he was feeding a couple of weanlings, a few racehorses and equine retirees on his farm in -2 degree temperatures.
Overseeing the nation’s monetary policy and educating horses isn’t too dissimilar, according to Fraser, one of the few people as capable of wrestling a weanling as he is juggling a country’s monetary matters.
“There’s no certainty in anything, really, and the inflation and the effect of interest rates are very uncertain. Running monetary policy is very much an art and not a science. It is a matter of judgement. That’s the only way to deal with the uncertainty, to make judgements, and put your toe in the water and hope you’ve done the right thing and, if you haven’t, you put it in a bit further,” Fraser told ANZ Bloodstock News yesterday.
“It’s like breaking in a horse, really. I have got a couple of weanlings here – one I bought at the Inglis sale recently (by Peltzer) and was pretty well broken in when I got her and the other is a homebred (by Sandbar) – and I was trying to explain to some journalists a couple of weeks ago and I made a mistake of using an analogy of breaking in a young horse.
“I said, ‘you have to pull when you put a rope on them and you pull, but release the pressure and you pause to let what you’ve done sink in before you start pulling again’ and I think it’s the same with interest rates.”
Almost three decades since he departed the RBA hotseat – “my job when I got there was to reduce interest rates, not increase them, and the first 15 or 16 months I was there, there were 15 reductions in interest rates from those very high levels” – he has maintained a public profile but when it comes to racing he prefers the country life.
The weanlings are keeping him busy and he is quite taken by the filly by Twin Hills stallion Peltzer out of A Land Of (Foxwedge) he bought from Olly Tait for not much more than an inflation-charged electricity bill after she was passed in at the Inglis Australian Weanling Sale two months ago.
“I like to go down and look at them before I buy them and, as it happened, the electricity was out here all bloody day, the first day of the sales, and that was the day I’d picked three or four out of the catalogue to have a look at, so I couldn’t get down there,” Fraser said.
“Olly Tait used to look after horses when I sent them up to Darley – I had a lot of horses go up there – and I heard he couldn’t sell a few weanlings and I asked him when he came back what were their catalogue numbers.
“A couple of them were weanlings I had pencilled in to have a look at. He had a couple there and he had one at a very competitive price ($3,000).
“I quite like some of the Foxwedge bloodlines, too, so I was happy when Olly said I could have her and she’s a nice type. She is going to be a big horse and So You Think [sire of Peltzer] was a big horse.”
Fraser trained 30 winners over more than 20 years before handing in his licence in March 2021, unable to recruit trackriders to Magpie Downs to work his small team, prompting him to disperse his stock to other stables.
Pepper trained I Call Junee Home (Delago Deluxe) to win four of six starts across two preparations in 2021 and 2022, while he has Highway ambitions with the Murphy-trained Fairness Is Best (Press Statement), a maiden four-year-old who has placed three times.
“I still sort of prepare them and repair them when they come back from the trainers, but I outsource them to trainers. I have got four or five horses away with trainers, I’ve got a couple ready to go back into training and a couple of these weanlings to play around with,” Fraser said.
“They are competitive bush horses.”