This nation’s 20 million-plus residents would be a lot better off if these two guys could reach some sort of agreement over just what is happening in the Australian economy.

Mind you, neither of them has a brilliant track record.

Mr Stevens, for example, is the chap who presided over the massive interest rate hikes of 2007 and 2008 that it now turns out we didn’t need to have.

That was pretty obvious to the mug punters at the time who, every time they pulled into a petrol station, realised they didn’t need an interest rate hike to curb their spending and keep inflation at bay.

OPEC was already on the job.

Mr Stevens is also the guy who presided over this week’s .25 per cent interest rate hike – again because of fears that a strong economic recovery could bring on inflation.

He’s obviously a “glass half full kind of guy”.

Mr Henry, on the other hand, sounds like the pessimists’ pessimist.

Somewhere along the line he has dropped 20 quid and picked up six pence.

Low expectations you might say.

Mr Henry, who we assume is channeling the same economic data that drove the Reserve Bank to hike up the interest rates, definitely does not take the view that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Au contraire. He believes – in spite of the excellent jobs data, business confidence survey results and the like – that the economy is still at serious risk of going to hell in a handbasket.

If the government doesn’t keep on spending as if there is no tomorrow then there might not be one, he argues.

Trouble is the government is spending borrowed money to save an economy that seems to be doing fine.

As of Tuesday, thanks to a dissenting view from the Reserve Bank, the cost to us of that government borrowing has just started to go up.