Leading market economists are open to the idea of negative rates being deployed in Australia, but it would take the US Federal Reserve to go there first, and could backfire in the eyes of ordinary Australians.

"Negative rates are not the next step for the Reserve Bank, they have a lot more options before they would even entertain the idea of negative rates," Su-Lin Ong from RBC Capital Markets told AFR Inside Markets. "It probably is in the toolbox. Like many central banks around the world, the toolbox is full of many different tools and negative rates is just one of them."