New RBA governor Michele Bullock’s shredder problem

Outgoing Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe and incoming governor Michele Bullock. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Treasurer Jim Chalmers may want to think twice before giving incoming Reserve Bank boss Michele Bullock anything important for safe keeping.

Judging by a statutory declaration Bullock signed some years ago, the economist doesn’t have the world’s tightest track record in securing her own crucial documents, either at home or at the RBA’s Martin Place head office.

To tell the story we must rewind a tad. The central banker lives in Sydney’s inner west with husband Ian, in a home purchased more than 30 years ago for $285,000. It’s got a pool and an estimated worth of more than $4m. Before you ask, the mortgage was taken out with Gateway Bank so, no, she didn’t pull a Phil Lowe and borrow a cheeky chunk of funds from the RBA ­itself.

Anyway, the title was returned to the couple in 2005, once they extinguished the mortgage, with Bullock storing the document in a filing cabinet at the family home. By 2011 she moved it to her office at the RBA, thinking it was safer. There it stayed for a number of years, as her husband noted in his declaration (and we’ll get to why this was necessary in a sec).

“My partner moved the (title) to the filing cabinet at her place of work as this was a more secure place for (it) due to the fire protection in the building and the security provided,” he said.

In her statement, Bullock wrote: “I also stored work-­related legal documents in the filing cabinet where I placed the Certificate of Title.”

Fast forward to 2015 and Bullock figured it was time to toss out all unnecessary documents, ordering her personal assistant to shred everything contained in the aforementioned filing cabinet, forgetting that the title to her home and other personal items were stored inside. Ha ha, so silly! “I attended to culling the legal documents held in the cabinet … forgetting that the Certificate of Title was also in the cabinet.” Hence the requirement for statutory declarations.

Bullock needed to outline the sorry saga and her mistake in expansive detail to be issued a replacement title. If not for that, how else would we ever know of this amusing mishap? We’d nickname her ‘‘the shredder’’ but former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian has already been dubbed as such.