Su-lin Ong, Senior Economist, RBC Capital Markets
"A tightening bias is quite clear. Having said that, the statement concludes with policy being appropriate...It doesn't seem to be a sense of urgency to exercise that tightening bias.
"It's pointing to higher growth and inflation over the medium term but that's not new. That has always been there.
"I don't think that suggested that they are moving any time soon. It's a bit more of a balanced statement.
"We are pretty comfortable with a hike in the second half of this year. We continue to have Q4. It may come a bit early, depending on how the data evolves."
Brian Redican, Senior economist, Macquarie
"It's a very balanced statement. They point to the high terms of trade but also to a moderation in jobs growth, modest demand for credit and softer house prices. The high exchange rate is also expected to do some of the work on inflation. And they seemed happy to ascribe much of the pickup in CPI inflation to the flooding, rather than broad-based pressures.
"The last line in the statement on assessing the outlook at future meetings, suggests they will be preparing to hike at some point but there's no sense of urgency as yet."
Matthew Johnson, Economist, UBS
"The tone was slightly hawkish. There are bigger terms of trade, a greater confidence in above trend growth and the view that inflation has probably troughed and will increase from here.
"We think they will move rates in August. There is a lot of uncertainty about how important the appreciation of the Australian dollar is to the inflation outlook and how important the natural disasters were on the inflation outlook."
Helen Kevans, Economist, JPMorgan
"On the commentary, its a very similar statement towards the end from what we saw last time.
"Going forward the RBA will continue to look at the data from month to month and make decisions based on that. The general themes are still there such as the (strong)terms of trade and even though we're seeing a disruption to Q1 GDP, the RBA maintains growth will return to trend in the near term."
"We're still looking for August, and potentially another rate hike from there before year end."
Michael Blythe, Chief Economist, Commonwealth Bank
"There has been a bit of toughening in the rhetoric which is not surprising after the CPI results.
So the grounds are being prepared here for a rate rise sometime over the next couple of months. We've been saying August but I suppose there's a chance it could happen a little bit sooner."
Spiros Papadopoulos, Senior Economist, NAB
"No surprise that the Reserve Bank left interest rates unchanged, and no surprise that they changed their commentary on inflation.
Most notably, they are now implying through their comments that they see inflation rising above the target over the next 12 months, where previously they have said that inflation would remain consistent with the two to three percent target.
This month, they are saying inflation will remain close to target over the year ahead. So that's a hint that they do see inflation breaching the three percent barrier. If we do continue to see strong or solid activity in indicators over the coming months, that should be enough to prompt them into another rate increase by around August of this year."
Reuters