The Point Live: Tim Wilson's fuel excise gaffe; Australia's "consular crisis"; Economy grows faster than expected; PM's "boss move"

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After days of grey skies and wet weather, Canberra might turn on some sunshine for the pomp and ceremony which will accompany Canadian PM Mark Carney’s visit to the capital, ahead of his address to Parliament.

Speaking of which, it’s the last sitting day of the week so, as the old saying goes, don’t get between an MP and the Parliament House exit when Question Time ends … which is usually about 3:10pm on a Thursday.

I’m not holding my breath given the tangerine madman’s current form, but let’s hope for an outbreak of peace in the Middle East tonight.

Bye.

Once again it looks like the opposition leader’s team picked a theme for Question Time and, by hook or by crook, MPs were going to stray from the script.

Today, it was the living standards data in this morning’s National Accounts, which they appear to have misread.

To be clear, as Greg Jericho pointed out, the data shows living standards improved in the December quarter – and over the past year.

The Prime Minister and Treasurer both began a couple of answers with “they’ve gone up”, almost incredulous that this was the subject the opposition decided to run with.

One Nation might have ambitions to be the opposition but, as always, the only decent questions came from the crossbench: Allegra Spender on AI, Rebekah Sharkie on supermarket price gouging, Sophie Scamps on Jobs for Mates.

Whenever you hear someone from the major parties say Independents are useless because they can’t ever be in government (they should see some of the minority governments overseas) should watch question time … and see how the tone of the debate changes when most Independents are involved.

For much of the previous Parliament the coalition had a habit of tagging many of its questions with a cheesy tag line.

It happened under Peter Dutton and continued under Sussan Ley.

Now, like the very definition of insanity, they’re doing it again, presumably hoping for a different result.

Four, maybe five, questions so far have ended with the line “When will the Prime Minister finally accept that the buck stops with him?”

I get that it’s about trying to ingrain a short, sharp line into the minds of voters.

But they keep changing the line and, while I’m not in Liberal focus groups (thank the good Lord above), I think it’s fair to conclude it’s a tactic which hasn’t worked.

It also sounds like a pretty ordinary high school debating tactic*.

I’m sure some of those backbenchers told to stand up and repeat the dodgy tag line are embarrassed to do so.

*with sincere apologies to high school debating teams

Independent Member for Wentworth, Allegra Spender:

AI has already had a significant impact on the country and is rapidly evolving. My community is concerned that the government doesn’t have enough urgency in addressing AI, particularly because it took three years to develop an AI strategy. How are you thinking about the impact on AI of AI on the economy and how will the budget urgently address both capturing the upside, opportunities, and managing the downside risks?

Treasurer, Jim Chalmers:

I would contest the inference in her question to the time its taken the government to get our thinking together on this. We’ve been working on some of these really important questions and making, I think, some substantial progress. The Honorable Member knows, as every member on this side of the house knows, that AI is a transformational technology, and we want to make sure that Australians are the biggest beneficiaries of this change, rather than victims of this change. We brought forward the release of Australia’s national AI plan in response to the urgency of some of the most contentious and most important policy issues.

We’ve got three pieces of investment already rolling out, $29.9 million for the Safety Institute, $1 billion through the National Reconstruction Fund, and $166 million for government. We’ve made it really clear a big focus of the upcoming budget. AI can be part of the solution to our productivity challenge if we manage it right and maximize the opportunities along the lines of the AI plan and so AI productivity more broadly, are really important part of the deliberations and discussions that we’ve been having on this side of the house as we lead up to the government’s fifth budget in May.

Rebekha Sharkie, Independent Member for Mayo:

In Coles, Pink Lady Apples are $8.90 a kilo. No surprise, Woolworths advertise the same apples for the same price. Australian families are struggling to afford basic groceries. One in three kids regularly have no school lunch due to in part to supermarket duopoly price fixing and price gouging. Will the government urgently consider bringing forward the timeline for supermarkets to comply with the ban on excessive pricing of groceries, it’s not due to come into effect until the first of July?

Treasurer, Jim Chalmers:

We know that Australians are under financial pressure. A lot of that pressure does come at the checkout, and that’s what’s motivated a lot of our efforts. When it comes to our competition policy suite, I acknowledge Assistant Minister Leigh and Minister Mulino for the work that we do together to try and make sure that our supermarket sector is as competitive as it can be, and also that we have the price transparency that we need, and that we’re cracking down on price gouging wherever it pops up. Mr. Speaker, and so I acknowledge the honorable member’s interest in all of that work. I know that her question is about bringing forward the start date of some of those really important measures. The reality is, Mr. Speaker, that we go as quickly as we can, but also consulting where we need to making sure that we get it right. But at every turn, what we’re trying to do is to strengthen the arrangements as soon as we can, because we know that supermarket transparency, we know that supermarket competition, is potentially a big part of this challenge, and that’s why it’s a big focus on the government.

The opposition likes to argue that government spending is driving up inflation.

Today’s GDP figures however show that national government spending is having less of an impact on annual GDP growth than in the recent past:

The biggest cause of the increase (such as it was) in the December quarter was state and local government spending and defence spending.

Not surprisingly Jim Chalmers pointed this out and also pointed out that the opposition apparently wants more defence spending.

Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson has just been slapped down two questions in row for misunderstanding how petrol excise works and for failing to read (or understand) today’s living standards data in the National Accounts.

So, he puts his head back on the tee and hands the Treasurer his one wood, for another free hit.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers:

When we came to office, living standards were falling sharply. We’ve been able to recover some of that lost ground, including by having eight of the last nine quarters have seen real wages growth. Real wages fell five consecutive quarters in the lead up to the 2022 election. If those opposite really cared about living standards, they wouldn’t have appointed a guy as Shadow Treasurer who wants to privatise Medicare or end work from home, or dismantle superannuation, or end the dual mandate so that there’s higher interest rates and higher unemployment.

What today’s National Accounts show is that our economy is growing stronger than every major advanced economy. Mr. Speaker, every major advanced economy has weaker economic growth than Australia does, and I know that makes the Shadow Treasurer unhappy. I know that he would prefer we had weak growth in this country, but Australia has strong and broad, and private sector led growth. Most objective observers would consider that a good thing, even if those opposite do not.

The war in the middle east has sent gas prices soaring – by almost 40% on the European futures market yesterday alone.

How will this affect Australia? That depends on what our government does.

Australia’s domestic gas price is linked to the world price because governments allow unrestricted gas exports – about 80% of Australia’s gas is exported.

This means that Australian households and businesses end up being forced to compete with international buyers for what should be their resource. Instead, Australians pay 4-7 times more for gas than other large gas producing nations including the USA, Russia, Qatar and Canada.

Worse still, because gas-fired electricity generation operates at key times, it often sets the electricity prices, meaning that Australia’s electricity prices are also linked to the world gas market.

No one can say where the war is going to lead, but the Australian Government can take some simple policy measures to ensure that everyday Aussies avoid the kind of price shocks seen in the wake of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. As Australia Institute research shows, the solutions are simple:

1. Divert ‘uncontracted’ gas away from the export market and towards Australian domestic use.
2. Ensure none of Australia’s gas is given away for free by imposing a royalty or export tax on all gas exported from Commonwealth waters.

This will break the link between world prices and Australian domestic gas and electricity prices. Even better, it will mean that new gas projects will no longer be necessary, and those fossil fuels can stay in the ground and not heat the planet.

There’s been a continuing campaign to cut social spending, a lot of which has popped up in the business press, such as the AFR. A recent quote from the Commonwealth Bank CEO sums it up:

“You’ve got to look at things like tapering off benefits… particularly healthcare, social security, NDIS, we’ve got to be thinking about paring some of that back … Put simply, those who can pay more should.”

Essentially, the idea is that social spending should be cut and new means-tests introduced, restricting programs like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) to only those on lower incomes.

This fundamentally misunderstands the point of social spending. Social spending is not just about moving money from rich to poor; it also has a ‘social insurance’ role, it insures or protects everyone against certain risks to their livelihoods, such as sickness and disability.

We generally understand that we all pay for our public health system, and if you get sick, you should be able to get treatment for free or at least heavily discounted. If a poor person develops a serious illness, our public health system will treat them. If a rich person falls down the stairs, our public health system will treat them.

The same logic applies to things like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), in the words of Julia Gillard, Prime Minister when the NDIS was introduced:

“Disability can affect any of us and therefore it affects all of us. …The risk of disability is universal, so our response must be universal.”

Cutting social services and introducing means testing does not mean “those who can pay more” do so; it means people with disabilities or illnesses pay more. Meanwhile, the healthy able-bodied rich are let off the hook. Means testing also creates new barriers to accessing benefits, applicants will now have to fill out additional complicated paperwork to prove their income and assets, this often leads people to slip through the cracks.

If Australia is concerned that “those who can pay more should”, then we have a well-known solution: higher taxes on the rich.

Great question from Dr Sophie Scamps, Independent MP for Mackellar:

The review of public sector board appointments found the current appointments process is not fit for purpose and often looks like patronage and nepotism. The review found, and I quote, “the public’s confidence in the integrity of appointments is so low that the clarity and assurance of legislation is required to rebuild trust and embed integrity in the board appointments process”. Can the government explain why they ignored this recommendation to legislate an independent appointment process instead releasing a seven dot point non binding framework process is not fit for purpose?

Treasurer Jim Chalmers takes this on behalf of the Prime Minister, representing Senator Katy Gallagher, Minister for Government Services:

I’m very proud of, and we have reformed the system of appointments to make them more about merit and the national interest. When we came to office, ministers had virtually unchecked power to reward people and fill boards with political favorites. By the end of the previous government, we saw some particularly shameless behavior in terms of jobs for mates. So this government did commission the Briggs review, as the Honorable Member knows, and in response, we’ve instituted the whole of government reform through the new framework that the Honorable Member refers to. Now our framework actually goes further than the Briggs review itself recommended. We’re extending it beyond government bodies to cover departmental secretaries, agency heads, statutory office holders across the Commonwealth. Now, the seven principles of the framework established that all appointments must be made on merit in the public interest, with ministers fully accountable for each decision that they make. Under the framework, appointments must reflect Australia’s diversity, uphold integrity and high standards and be made through flexible, proportionate processes that are informed by rigorous skills and capability assessments. That’s all under and by mandatory transparency for reporting requirements, and that transparency is how we make sure ministers and the government is accountable to the Australian people for the quality of the appointments that have been made. So we put in place a new system on appointments get the best people into the right roles, so that government bodies can deliver for Australians. That means real accountability to cabinet, to Parliament and to the Australian people as it should be, we welcome the Honorable member’s scrutiny on government appointments, but we think that the best part is to have ministers responsible and accountable in this way to the Australian Federal appointments.

Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen gets a Dixer on fuel security:

The very concerning events in the Middle East have led Australians, quite rightly, to ask about fuel security and how we’re placed, and have led to many questions about Australia’s position. And I’m pleased to tell the house and to inform Australians that we enter this period of great international instability. Very well prepared. In 2023 the Albanese government instituted the minimum stock holding obligation on Australia’s refining companies. Mr. Speaker, there had been no obligation before that Australia’s refineries to hold minimum stocks. I can tell the house that in Australia currently, we hold one and a half billion litres of petrol and 3 billion litres of diesel in our minimum stock obligation, which is, in effect, a strategic reserve. And those stocks are held in electricity and born on two which is where we think they should be held. Mr. Speaker, here in Australia, not in Texas or Louisiana, we think, we think the minimum stock obligation, the strategic reserve for our country, should be held in our country.

Tim Wilson just got a question, which is nice.

He asked about living standards and noted, quite correctly that real wages are lower than they were 3 years ago.

But today’s GDP figures provide us with the numbers for total household disposable income – which includes wages and other income and takes away taxes and the cost of mortgages.

On this score, the picture is much better. Living standards are growing.

And we begin with cost of living, continuing the theme from Angus Taylor‘s impromptu visit to a supermarket today.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese comes off the long run …

Mr Speaker, they always talk Australia down, which has faster economic growth than Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, States. The UK and Germany have recently experienced recessions, Mr Speaker. Australia has a lower unemployment rate than Canada, France, Italy, the United States. We have stronger employment growth than France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States. Higher participation rates than Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and the UK. And unlike G7 nations, Australia’s budget been in surplus in recent years, along with the smallest gross debt. That’s our record.

On the eve of a new AFL season, it’s a sad day for footy … and a sad day for Australian sport.

The man who added the phrase “centimetre perfect” to the sporting lexicon, legendary broadcaster Dennis Cometti, has died aged 76.

My favourite piece of Dennis commentary was when he described then Collingwood defender Heath Shaw effectively ruining St Kilda’s premiership dreams, smothering Nick Reiwoldt’s potential premiership-winning goal in the 2012 AFL grand final, with the immortal line: “He came up behind him like a librarian.”

I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Dennis when I was at Channel 7 and I can assure you he was as much a consummate gentleman as he was a consummate professional.

Dennis had been unwell for some time.

Vale Dennis.

The Liberal review into the 2025 election is happy to criticise the behaviour, personality and persona of then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, butit is silent on the Liberal Party’s failure to address the climate crisis or economic unfairness.

The closest it comes is complaining that young people are “alarmed by false claims” on climate change.

Also unmentioned in the review is the right-wing campaign group Advance, even though it is funded by the Liberal Party’s “nominated entity” the Cormack Foundation, and spent over $10 million during the election campaign – most of it trying to help the Liberals bring down the Albanese Labor Government.

Australians for Prosperity, the Coal Australia-funded outfit whose spokes was former Liberal Jason Falinski, is only mentioned in passing.

The omission is surprising, because these organisations provided the “third-party” attack campaigns and “keyboard warriors” that the review says the Liberal Party is lacking. Advance used deep fakes to ridicule an independent candidate and Australians for Prosperity was criticised for spreading misinformation about independents.

And as noted by my colleague Skye Predavec on the live blog, Advance is gleefully dragging the Liberal Party towards pro-Trump, pro-nuclear and anti-immigrant policies, all positions that the review identifies as damaging the Liberal Party.  

Those are not the only internal contradictions the party needs to resolve.

One of the top concerns among Chinese Australian voters is apparently their objection to public housing; catering to that would only leave the Liberals more isolated on housing.

On immigration and Australia’s multicultural communities, “the Liberal Party needs to understand Australia as it is and not how we would like it to be.”

Even better, in my opinion, would be if the Liberal Party liked Australia as it is, not merely “understood” it.

Movingly, the review identifies one of the top three concerns among Chinese Australians as “the sense that they were not welcome in the community”. Now deputy leader Jane Hume’s references to “Chinese spies” cannot have helped that.

The review did find time to address the misconception that the Liberal Party campaign was lacking in music or humour:

“Yet, during the campaign, the Party released a rap song”.

It’s hard to believe that the party that raps “I just want to buy some eggs and cheese, $100 are you kidding me?” has a problem with the youth vote – but kids these days are too busy panicking about “false” climate claims to appreciate good music.  

Yanis Varoufakis – renowned economist, former politician, and author – just joined Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director at The Australia Institute, to talk about his new book Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance.

Having already written a book as a message to his late father, Yanis felt that his mother’s story was missing. At an emotional low point, Yanis decided to take himself on a journey to enrich his soul, tracing the journey of his mother, and four more extraordinary women in his family.

People may ask why Yanis, an economist, wrote a book about women and the soul. To Yanis, the answer is simple: this book is about misogyny and the women who resist it, and how their experiences shaped him into the man he is – a man who stands up to inequality and to the male chauvinist within. 

Upon completion of his new book, Yanis described himself as being “in awe of the multiple generations of women” who raised him. This, I’m sure, is something that many can relate to.

Touching on subjects including housing, taxes, and the growing conflict in the middle east, today’s conversation with Yanis ranged widely. For more of his work, see his moving contribution to Australia Institute Press’ book, A Time for Bravery. 

Tomorrow evening, Yanis will be appearing at a sold-out event in conversation with Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah and The Australia Institute’s Leanne Minshull in the Sydney Town Hall.

In the meantime, keep an eye on The Australia Institute’s social media accounts for snippets of the great chat between Yanis and Ebony.

The far-right is benefitting from a failing status quo – but it doesn’t have to be this way.

On this episode of Follow the Money, author and economist Gary Stevenson joins Ebony Bennett to discuss wealth inequality, the global issue of housing unaffordability, why Australia should tax gas properly, and how many far-right parties have become the Steven Bradburys of global politics.

Images from Treasurer Jim Chalmers‘ media conference in the Blue Room of Parliament House.

The Liberal review of the last election talks almost as much about the “Teal” community independents as it does the Labor Government – there are 52 mentions of “Teal” to 77 mentions of “Labor” or “ALP”.

For reference, the Liberals lost 16 seats to Labor and 1 to a community independent (and they won another back, for no net change).

The report celebrates Tim Wilson’s successful (but expensive) strategy to win Goldstein back from community independent Zoe Daniel. He ran a very localised campaign, spent three years campaigning, and ran the campaign in two stages: breaking the electorate’s relationship with the incumbent, and then persuading people to vote Liberal.

One reason the Liberals found community independents so hard to defeat is that the community independents “spoke a great deal about kindness”.

By contrast, the Liberal Party’s digital advertising spend was $3 on negative ads for every $1 spent on positive ads, and some thought even that was too little negative advertising. 

Another strength of the community independents was the local nature of their campaigns. The community independents employed people to translate campaign materials into other languages. They varied their signage. Meanwhile, unsuccessful Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer was banned from doing anything as outré as adding a page for young people to her website.

The report describes the community independents as having “huge budgets”, but the evidence is limited to the fact that some had “paid campaign managers” (the political parties do too, of course) and that they hired people to hold signs and paid people to translate ads from English to Chinese.

This from the Liberals, who spent $1 million in just two months on ads “telling the Peter Dutton story”.  

You do have to admire the report authors for their rosy outlook on life. They write:

“Overall, the Teals have one fewer member in the House of Representatives, an encouraging result for the Party.”

To be clear, the community independents are down a seat because it was abolished in a redistribution (there were too many seats in that part of Sydney as populations changed). The Liberal Party had nothing to do with it and there’s no reason to think it’ll happen again.

How encouraging.

Recently the Australia Institute examined the forecasts of the Reserve Bank of Australia and suggested that those forecasts anticipated more inflation pushed by profits.

We said that “analysis of the National Accounts and Reserve Bank data and forecasts confirms rising wages are not causing renewed inflation increases.” Hence the RBA forecast for December 2025 suggested prices would increase 3.6% compared with a year earlier, that is compared with December 2024.

Our figures showed that wages would account for 1.3% pts and the rest, non-wage incomes, would be 2.3%pts.

Non-wage incomes are mainly profits before tax, interest, depreciation and amortisation as well as the incomes of unincorporated businesses. For convenience these non-wage incomes are simply referred to as “profit”.

Today’s national accounts allow us to examine the price pressures for the whole economy and compare them with wage increases as measured by the ABS unit labour costs figure and from that we can work out the profit-push. They confirm our earlier research.

The results in the table clearly show that wages expressed as unit labour costs are not fueling inflation at the moment.

Rather the big contributor is the profit figure which added 0.68%pts to the total inflation of 0.96%. It is also clear that in annualised terms, inflation is well above the RBA target range as a result of the contribution from profits.

In the figure below we calculate the share of December’s price increase attributable to wages, taxes and non-wage incomes.

The graph clearly shows that unit profit costs are responsible for 71% of the December quarter price increases with wages contributing just 24%.

So no, wages are not causing the inflation increase.

For a country that is constantly trumpeting the essentiality of the international rules-based order in preserving global peace and stability, Australia is shameless in its ability to slide into the American slipstream.

To hide behind Iran’s alleged possession of nuclear weapons – or at least its ability to produce them – as justification for the attacks and the obliteration of Iran’s governing leadership, portrays us as gullible, duplicitous or both. Trump claimed that Iran’s ability to construct nuclear weapons was destroyed last June. Truth or lie? It cannot be both.

Is Trump playing Australia, and the UK and Canada for that matter, as patsies, confident in the judgment that all three will go along with his decisions whatever they are? If he is, Australia, the UK and Canada’s responses to the attacks on Iran is even more disappointing. Their support for the US and Israeli attacks on Iran premised on its alleged possession of nuclear weapons is disingenuous. Deception is no basis for diplomacy.

Australia, along with Canada and the United Kingdom, may well be locked into the global US-led signals intelligence and command and control system. But far from excusing us from following our moral compass, our participation in the world’s most powerful strategic communications system actually demands that we enhance and reinforce our moral authority and that of our partners, along with the alliances of which we and they are members.

Cynicism and duplicity are the negation of moral authority. Without principles – such as those Australia and America helped to negotiate in the UN Charter in 1945 – and the rules through which those principles are operationalised, catastrophe is increasingly in prospect.

It is high time that we put our diplomacy where our mouth is, stop pandering to the powerful and exercised our own agency as a significant power in the Asia-Pacific region.

This is an excerpt from Allan’s analysis in The Guardian, which you can read here.

If you’ve spent more than five minutes with a child holding an iPad, you know that kids today are inundated with cleverly designed ads for all kinds of unhealthy products.

From images of brightly coloured cereal boxes on YouTube to viral challenges involving soft drinks on TikTok, the marketing machine never sleeps—and our kids are its favourite target.

These ads aren’t just harmless background noise. Constant exposure to branding and product placement shapes kids’ behaviours and food preferences. 

Right now, there isn’t one unified legislative framework to regulate how these industries advertise.

Instead, existing regulation is fragmented across more than 60 pieces of legislation and 16 voluntary industry codes. Major gaps, weak monitoring, and even weaker enforcement result in an effectively unregulated marketing and advertising of unhealthy products.

This is why the Alliance for Gambling Reform, the Food for Health Alliance, and the Foundation for Alcohol Research & Education launched a campaign called “Give us an Ad Break” at Parliament House.

They are calling on the Australian government to introduce comprehensive legislation to regulate the marketing of harmful and addictive products, including gambling, alcohol and unhealthy foods.

What the Proposed Act Would Do

Modelled on the successful Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act (1992)—superseded by the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Act 2023—the proposed Act would cover all forms of harmful product advertising, including digital, outdoor, broadcast, and targeted online marketing. This new legislation would also establish mandatory compliance, strong enforcement, and active monitoring of all harmful advertising.

The health of the economy was revealed today with the realise of economic growth figures showing the economy grew at a better-than-expected rate of 2.6% for 2025. This compared to the forecast of just 2.2%.

But the growth was strangely skewed. Household spending increased by 2.4% in 2025, but it was mainly driven by discretionary spending. Growth in spending on essentials was much slower. This could be highlighting a two-speed economy.

Those with money to spend are out spending it on travel, recreation, and other discretionary items, particularly at the black Friday sales. At the same time those who are struggling are having to tighten their belts.

Both private and public spending contributed in roughly equal amounts. Private spending was driven by household spending and private investment, including in data centres.

On the public side it was overwhelmingly at the state and local government level, mainly increased spending across health, education, and police. At the federal level, there was a large increase in defence spending, which was up 7.1%.

This strong economic growth is likely to increase the chance of an interest rate rise as the RBA wants to slow the economy down and increase unemployment. Strong economic growth will require more workers, the exact opposite of what the RBA wants.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has just given a press conference in the Blue Room at Parliament House.

He says he’s monitoring markets closely and speaking daily with members of the National Security Committee.

Video by Mike Bowers.

He’s also ripped into Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson, who wrongly claimed rising petrol prices would put more money into Treasury coffers, through increased fuel excise revenue.

First, excise is not calculated on price, it’s calculated on volume. Second, it’s likely the government will raise less fuel excise while prices spike due to the war, with motorists likely to cut back on travel.

Video by Mike Bowers.

Sometimes a chart tells a thousand words.

In this case: what role the Liberals’ Review of the 2025 Election thought gender played. 

The words “male” and “men” appear just five times altogether while the words “women” and “female” occur 76 times. 

A female voter from Wentworth put it bluntly: 

l like you, but you can’t expect me to vote for Peter Dutton.

As the report notes, women were 4.7% less likely to vote Liberal (based on Crosby Textor’s post-election two-party preferred survey) which is “worrying in a country where there are more female voters than male”.

The future of the party is at least in part going to be determined by how successfully they engage with women. But given that “After at least a decade of a declining female vote it remains a mystery that the Party has not performed a deep-dive into its causes”, the question remains whether it will take another decade before honest analysis reveals the source of the cr

Australia’s economy grew at 0.8 per cent in the December quarter, the fastest rate in three years and above Reserve Bank forecasts.

The central bank had expected the nation’s gross domestic product to expand 2.3 per cent over 2025.

But figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday showed the economy grew by 2.6 per cent over the year, the fastest annual growth rate since March 2023.

Annual growth was up from 2.1 per cent in September.

The result will do little to dampen RBA concerns about inflation, given it estimates the economy cannot grow faster than about two per cent annually without adding to price pressures thanks in part to Australia’s weak productivity growth.

Productivity as measured by GDP per hour worked grew one per cent over the year.

They’re too busy on Mondays, having usually just rolled into town for Parliament.

Tuesday mornings are flat chat with party room meetings.

So, Wednesday mornings are the perfect opportunity for a photo opportunity, even if you’ve got nothing particularly new or interesting to say.

But at least by doing them away from the big house, you don’t get lots of pesky questions about your leaked election review or the Shadow Treasurer’s most recent bout of foot-in-mouth.

Mike Bowers joined Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, his deputy Jane Hume and Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson as they roamed the aisles of a Canberra supermarket today.

You have to love Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson’s ability for economic pratfalls.

Earlier today, as Glenn reported, he suggested that if petrol prices go up then the amount of fuel excise raised would also rise.

That is completely wrong – fuel excise is based on volume. As a result if prices go up so much that we all buy less petrol the amount of excise raised would actually fall!

But this reveals a deeper issue.

We know that when oil prices rise because if things like wars (legal or not) gas prices also rise.

Australia, with Qatar and the USA, is the biggest exporter of LNG in the world – so when gas prices go up, the value of Australia’s gas exports skyrocket.

This happened in 2022-23 when due to the Russia invasion of Ukraine the value of Australia gas exports rose from $70.5bn to $92.2bn

But because we do not tax the amount of gas exported in price (or even in volume) the amount of the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax barely moved at all.

When other oil and gas exporting nations see the price of oil and gas rise they celebrate because they know they will get more revenue. For Australia though we complain about the price of petrol and gas.

If we had a 25% tax on gas exports, as The Australia Institute and the ACTU are calling for, rather than gas companies profiting off of an illegal war, Australians would receive more revenue which could be uses to help those most affected by these price rises, and also in the efforts to transition away from fossil fuel given the damage the gas companies are doing to the planet.

Wilson might not have a clue, but he has revealed, without intending to do so, the problem with how Australia taxes fossil fuels.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor went shopping this morning … at one of the more exclusive supermarkets in an upmarket suburb of Canberra.

Of course, the media was invited.

Afterwards, in a carpark surrounded by Beamers, Merc’s and Porsches, he explained how customers are doing it so tough.

Mike Bowers was there.

James Packer’s first political donation in a decade was revealed by the AEC last month, with the billionaire sending $150,000 to the hard-right campaign group Advance Australia in July 2024.

Packer was not Advance’s only wealthy benefactor; the group racked up $13.5 million in donations during the 2024-25 financial year.

That massive war chest achieved very little at the 2025 election. While Advance claimed its efforts were key to unseating three Greens MPs, including then-leader Adam Bandt, the campaign group did nothing to prevent Labor achieving a historic 94-seat majority. Pro-Trump, pro-Nuclear, and anti-immigrant policies were seen as fatally damaging for the Liberals in the party’s recently leaked campaign review. Advance was a key proponent of all of these.

The donation does, however, highlight the need for reforms to Australia’s political finance laws – which currently allow parties like Labor and the Liberals to receive over $1.5 million in donations from a single benefactor in each 3-year election cycle. On the other hand, minor parties and independents could be subject to a cap as low as $50,000 – creating a clear double standard which advantages the major parties.

That was part of the changes to political finance laws in 2025, which were passed by Labor and Liberal without proper scrutiny.

While a $150,000 political donation is beyond the reach of any working Australian, it is relatively small compared to some of the billionaire contributions in recent years: most notably Clive Palmer’s $53 million spend on Trumpet of Patriots, but also Anthony Pratt’s $3 million donation, which he split between both Labor and the Liberals.

As part of fixing the severely flawed new laws, the Australia Institute has proposed a mega-donor cap, which would limit the ability of billionaires like Packer, Palmer and Pratt to pour money into elections without damaging our democracy.

Yesterday in her appearance at the AFR economic shindig, RBA Governor Michele Bullock addressed the issue of unemployment.

It was a truly eye opening moment that revealed just how little regard the RBA has for workers.

She told the audience that:

“If the labour market remains tight and there’s continued pressure on inflation, then one of the things that’s going to happen, is the unemployment rate will probably have to rise.”

This is something we here have been noting is the impact of rate rises. We also have been arguing that the data shows that at the moment the inflation spike is being driven by greater profits, not wage growth, so why is she worried about a tight labour market (if it is even tight).

But at least she is now being open about wanting the unemployment rate to rise.

This is however where she really gets pretty gross

“I want to be clear here though that people often say, when I say the unemployment rate has to rise, they do a quick calculation in their head and they say Michele wants 100,000 people to lose their jobs. No, that’s not what I want. I clearly don’t want that. “

Uhuh. She just wants the unemployment rate to rise but for there not to be more people unemployed.

She goes on however to suggests she doesn’t want people to lose their jobs she just wants it to be harder for people to find jobs:

The unemployment rate can rise for a variety of reasons, not because people are necessarily losing their jobs, that people are finding it harder to find jobs, the skills mismatches, they might find that the skills they have are not required so they find themselves unable to get a job for that reason. 

What she really is saying here is that – hey all you school leavers and recent uni graduates, hey you parents coming back into the workforce… I’d like at least 100,000 more of you not to be able to get a job. But hey, don’t be mean with me because I am not saying I want people to lose a job!

However Michele Bullock wants to spin it, higher unemployment means more people unemployed. That she is particularly uncaring about those who would like to get work compared to those already with a job does not make her position less gross. But I guess it is good to know that the RBA regards the youth very much as the cannon fodder in its fight against unemployment – young people really have had it good for far too long…

The Liberal Party’s review into the 2025 federal election (by Liberal veterans Pru Goward and Nick Minchin) is thorough, running to 61 pages. It goes into exhaustive detail about the failures of the 2025 federal election campaign and the Liberal Party more generally.

It does not hold back, saying:

“The 2025 Federal Liberal campaign failure is widely considered to be the worst campaign the Party has ever fought.”

Then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton “trusted the judgment of very few of his colleagues and doubted the motives of many of them”. On that, he finds agreement with many Australians – but it’s probably not a good philosophy for the party leader.

While some of the problems were specific to Mr Dutton and the campaign team, the party itself is clearly in strife. The Liberal Party is “aging”, struggling to fill volunteer and paid roles. The “once powerful and energetic” Young Liberals were “almost entirely absent”. The party turned to the Exclusive Brethren, who were accused of “poor behaviour” on polling booths.  

The Liberal vote among women has been declining for at least a decade. It “remains a mystery” why the party has never looked into this issue. Read on a few pages, and it turns out MPs, the party’s own Women’s Councils and Mr Dutton’s team showed at best “lack of interest” and at worst “distrust and hostility” towards Hilma’s Network, the organisation that encourages Liberal women. Maybe it’s not such a mystery.

The party’s taxpayer funded think tank, the Menzies Research Centre, “had no formal role in policy development during the term”.

The report is genuinely funny, though not intentionally, in its description of the election timing. It talks about the election happening on schedule, three years after the last election, as some kind of “black swan” event that no one could have anticipated. The timing gave the Albanese Government “unexpected advantages” like an extra Budget (you know, the thing that happens every year).

Why was this so surprising to the Liberals? Because they wanted an early election, because interest rates were higher.

This is a recurring theme in the picture the review paints of the Liberal Party: wishful thinking.

Ignoring all the polling evidence except from the pollster paid by the Liberals. Failing to anticipate how Labor would frame each Liberal policy announcement. Talking themselves up as the favourite instead of getting sympathy as the underdog.  Assuming the Labor Prime Minister would call an early election because it’d be really good for the Liberals if he did.

Yesterday I noted that the Governor of the RBA, Michele Bullock, had told the annual AFR economic summit that the March RBA meeting was “live” – ie that there was a chance rates could rise.

In reality this is not news – there is always a chance, and the RBA governor is never going to say publicly that they will get in a room knowing there is no intention of doing anything.

Initially there was no change in the market for expected rates in March, but the expected cash rate for April rose – which implicitly means the market began to think the likelihood was greater that a rate rise might occur.

It went from pricing in a 0% chance of a rate rise to a 27% one all because of what she said – not because of any data but just because what Bullock says moves markets

It’s pretty stupid that all that has happened is Michele Bullock said something that was obvious and yet it spooked the market such that in one day it went from thinking maybe one more rate raise and that’ll do to thinking, hmmm maybe 2 more rate rises.

This is why being a trader of the foreign exchange and futures market is not conducive to good mental health.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers‘ office has rushed out a media release in response to comments from Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson, claiming he’s dropped a “clanger” on the fuel excise.

Wilson told Sky News earlier:

It’s very clear to me that when there’s an increase in petrol prices, Jim Chalmers collects more excise revenue.

Chalmers points out that fuel excise is calculated on litres, not dollars.

The Treasurer says it’s Wilson’s second major mistake in two weeks on fuel excise.

It’s clear that Tim Wilson either doesn’t understand how the fuel excise works, or
he’s intentionally lying to the Australian people.

Chalmers is going to have a field day in Question Time. (As if the leaked coalition election review wasn’t fodder enough.)

The excise component of petrol is calculated on volume, currently at 52.6 cents per litre, and is only updated every six months for inflation. Excise revenue does not increase when petrol prices increase.

Tim Wilson has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. He can’t expect people to take him seriously on the economy when he lies about something like this.

Inexplicably, Tim Wilson also lashed out at the Government for tasking the ACCC with ensuring fuel suppliers don’t use the Middle East conflict as an excuse to price gouge Australian motorists.

This Liberals’ economic credibility is still in the gutter, no matter who’s in charge.

Our webinar with Yanis Varoufakis kicks off shortly, at 11am.

Click here or on the image below to register. It’s not too late.

Today the ACTU has begun to campaign for 5 weeks of leave to become the standard rather than 4 weeks.

The 4 weeks leave came into effect in the mid-1970 on the back of it being introduced for commonwealth public servants by the Whitlam govt. And you better believe back then businesses were arguing it would signal the end of times.

The call is based on research from the Centre For Future Work (which was based with The Australia Institute, but is now independent) in its annual Go Home on Time Day report.

The report last year found that

• Full-time employees average 3.8 hours of unpaid overtime a week. For every ten hours of paid work, they’re working one for nothing.
• Despite doing significantly fewer hours overall, part-time employees do 3.7 hours of unpaid overtime a week. For every seven hours of paid work, they’re doing nearly an hour for nothing.
• Younger people (18-24) do the most unpaid overtime at 4.7 hours a week, equivalent to almost one hour of unpaid work for every five paid hours.
• Unpaid overtime equates to almost 173 hours per year, per worker, more than 4.5 full-time weeks.

As a result, the ACTU’s general secretary Sally McManus argues that:

“Australia should increase annual leave to a minimum of five weeks for full-time workers. Australians work relatively long hours, which has only increased over time, yet the four-week annual leave standard was set 50 years ago.

Extra leave will decrease stress and burnout. Australian workers already do an extra four and a half weeks of unpaid work on average every year. Getting back one of these weeks is fair and reasonable. It will mean a better rested and happier workforce.

Younger workers – from 18 to 24 years old – most urgently need to see this burden start to lift. They are the ones doing the most unpaid work – an average of 6.4 weeks of free work for their employers each year.”

5 Weeks would not be unusual, McManus notes that “The majority of European countries have already moved beyond four weeks. Countries like Austria, France and Spain have already recognised the importance of rested, healthier employees and have higher rates of annual leave than Australia does. They are some of the most productive and competitive economies in the OECD.”  

Businesses will say that it can’t be done because productivity needs to rise, but the same was said when 4 week’s leave was introduced, when maternity leave was introduced etc etc.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese leaked the Liberal Party’s secret review into their ‘worst ever’ 2025 federal election campaign, by tabling it in Parliament.

Leaking the report this way takes advantage of the protections of parliamentary privilege, which means Mr Albanese cannot be sued for defamation, copyright infringement or the like.

Would-be Liberal leader Andrew Hastie called it a “boss move” this morning. I said yesterday that the report should be public, so you might be expecting me to say the same.

But I’m troubled by the government leaking the private documents of a rival party, to humiliate and further divide them. This is not whistleblowing, where a brave person exposes wrongdoing – like criminal behaviour, code of conduct breaches, bullying and harassment or corruption. This review was widely distributed (and already reported-upon), and contains observations and opinion not an expose.

After all, it is the Labor government that is trying to restrict freedom of information requests, muzzles advocacy groups with non-disclosure agreements, inserts a whingeing complaint into every Senate demand for transparency, had to be dragged into releasing a jobs-for-mates report it had already promised to disclose, and persecuted whistleblowers for exposing government wrongdoing.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Liberals in the Senate would be within their rights to help along the Albanese Government’s newfound transparency drive by tabling Labor Party and government documents that have until now been kept secret.

That said, the review is a very interesting document and there is much to say about it. Glenn and Greg summarised it on the live blog last evening. I’ll draw out some interesting parts and share them today.

Doug Cameron agrees with Emma Shortis‘ point about what Trump’s criticism of Spain not wanting to become caught up in the US-Israel military attacks on Iran … and what it means for Australia.

The owner of liquor chain Dan Murphy’s has increased sales after offering customers lower prices, although that’s yet to translate to higher profits.

Endeavour, which also owns the bottle shop chain BWS and hundreds of pubs, reported a bottom-line interim net profit of $247 million, which was about $50 million less than its last first-half result.

Group sales were up 0.9 per cent to $6.7 billion.

The group was restarting “top line growth” in its retail bottle shop business, which comprises more than 1700 stores, said CEO Jayne Hrdlicka, the former head of Virgin Australia.

“In a challenging market, our increased focus on value and price leadership has been embraced by our customers and is delivering sales growth and market share gains,” she said in a statement on Wednesday.

There’s a story today on the ABC how supermarkets and other retailers are moving away from the standard paper price tags on shelves to electronic shelf labels.

The reasons are obvious – printing costs money, whereas once you have the electronic labels set up you can change them with ease.

And with that comes the real issue – dynamic pricing.

Essentially this is the type of thing that we see for uber rides – where prices can go up and downish depending on demand. It also has been happening more and more for concert tickets where a floor price will be set, but if the demand for tickets is strong the price goes up. It is observed for the Australian Open where prices for tickets next to aisles etc are more expensive than the one next to it.

While this is bad enough for car rides and concert/events at least with those there is some sense of demand and with concerts at least a sense of the standard price.

This becomes much harder for shoppers in supermarkets.

Think of it this way – what is the actual price of a bottle of Coke? Is a 2l bottle double the price of a 1l bottle? What if you buy it from a deli as opposed to Coles, or a service station. Coles and Woolworths essentially take it in turns having Coke and Pepsi on sale – usually for half price or 40% off. So if for 26 weeks of a year a 1.25l bottle of Coke is $2.30 and for the other 26 weeks it is $3.85, is the actual price $3.85 and the other time you get it “on sale” or is the actual price $2.30 and for the other time you are paying more?

What is the price of a 1kg of apples? Do you have knowledge of weather events in apple growing areas that might affect prices? It’s easy when there is a cyclone, but do you keep a record of the price of all the different types of apples so you can know when you are getting a cheap one – also why is it cheap? Is it old?

We already know that Coles and Woolies engage in pricing practises which the ACCC alleges are false because they will raise the price of an item for a couple weeks then lower it to more than it previously was and call it a “sale”.

But now imagine you have electronic price tags, and the price of items can change during the day, depending on data the supermarket HQ has and what is being bought and when and where.

It is a situation where you might no longer be able to know what is the price of something – you can’t shop around, because by the time you look around and go to actually purchase, the price could change

That is not even the worst-case situation. Consumer advocates and unions in the USA are currently worrying about surveillance and facial recognition being used with electronic labels and is seeking to ban them.

And just remember the USA grocery market is not as concentrated as ours and as a result the profits margins of their big supermarket retailers is not a large as for Coles and Woolworths

When it comes the advertising will tell you it is all about convenience, in reality it will all be about maximising profits at your expense.

Minister for Trade Don Farrell has warned that war in the Middle East could impact billions of dollars worth of trade.

It comes amid reports of shipping companies adding a surcharge on containers ships travelling through – or being redirected around – the Middle East.

$15 billion worth of trade. Obviously that’s very important for those companies that are trading there. I
was in the United Arab Emirates two weeks ago the big Gulfood event, the largest food trading event in the world, and we got billions of dollars’ worth of more trade. So, our trade is in fact increasing in the Middle East. We now have a free trade agree, the United Arab Emirates. Already our beef trade has doubled in the six months that that trade agreement has been in operation. But of course, all of that gets affected by this uncertainty of the war in the Middle East

Just as it did after the shootings at Bondi Beach in December, the coalition is using tragedy to score a few cheap political points.

As the bombs continue to drop across the Middle East, with people losing lives, homes and livelihoods, Shadow Foreign Minister Ted O’Brien is running up and down the press gallery in Parliament House claiming the government was slow telling Australians not to travel to the region.

It took three days and over 100 ballistic missiles before the government changed the travel advice to ‘do not travel’. That is not acceptable. The obligation now is on the government to ensure they do everything possible to ensure that Australians are, first and foremost, safe, but secondly, there’s an option there for them to be evacuated.

Assistant Foreign Minister Matt Thistlethwaite responded:

Since the 1st of January this year, there’s been 41 travel updates regarding the Middle East through Smartraveller, each one of them upgrading the travel advice. There’s been 26 social media posts. On 11 January, the Foreign Minister made a statement regarding advice around travelling to the Middle East, warning people that the situation could escalate and that there could be airspace closures. That message was reiterated by the Foreign Minister again in a media conference on 20 February. As soon as our government has received advice from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, we’ve acted straight away to update that advice and ensure that Australians have the latest, up to date advice.

The National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), a US business lobby group that represents giant companies including Meta and Google, is arguing that the government’s proposed ‘News Bargaining Incentive’ may breach the Australian-US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA).

What free trade agreement?

You might be surprised that Australia even has a free trade agreement with the US. As I’ve previously written, AUSFTA was a bad deal when Howard signed it, and now it’s worse; it doesn’t even keep Australian exports free from American tariffs, the main job of agreements like this.

Instead, these days, AUSFTA is mostly used to benefit giant US tech companies. It previously delayed local content quotas for streaming services; now it’s being used again to resist regulation.

What is the News Bargaining Incentive?

Back in 2021, the (then Morrison) Government developed and introduced a mandatory news media and digital platforms bargaining code to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms and help support public journalism.

The Big Tech platforms were strongly opposed to being forced to pay for news, and both threatened to (and in Facebook’s case did) withdraw services in Australia.

The Australian Government won that stand-off, and platforms including Facebook (now Meta) and Google signed agreements with news media businesses. Australia Institute research showed the code appeared to be working; job advertisement numbers increased 46% compared to the pre-pandemic average after the mandatory bargaining code was introduced.

On 29 February 2024, Meta announced that it would not renew its agreements, which were due to expire in the next few months and would also remove access to the “Facebook News” tab for Australian users. Google renewed deals, but with worse terms for news publishers.

In late 2024, the government announced a new ‘News Bargaining Incentive’ to encourage digital platforms to enter into or renew deals with news publishers.

Where to now?

Hopefully, the government ignores this lobbying and pushes forward with its planned incentive. Big Tech could do with more regulation, and public journalism definitely needs more revenue. As for the worse-than-useless free trade agreement, it’s time that the government reconsiders it.

An ACT Ombudsman report has found that Housing ACT tenants have been left waiting in unsafe and hazardous housing conditions for extended periods of time due to poor communication between Housing ACT, tenants and contractors.

Between July 2024 and November 2025, the Ombudsman received multiple complaints from Housing ACT tenants about their requests for repairs or maintenance, alongside media reports of people living in properties posing life-threatening concerns.

“Housing ACT is the biggest landlord in the ACT, providing public housing to some of the most vulnerable people in our community. In these cases, Housing ACT has not satisfied its legal obligations as a landlord,” said ACT Ombudsman, Iain Anderson.

Concerns with Housing ACT properties included collapsing retaining walls and ceilings, leaking sewage, mould issues, faulty smoke detectors, and exposed wiring.

At the time of the investigation, Housing ACT was responsible for maintaining 11,868 rental properties it owns, with maintenance and repairs managed and completed by private company Programmed Facilities Management.

Housing ACT failed to communicate effectively, resulting in tenants being charged without warning or not being told what was being done to fix their problems for months at a time.

“We found that requests were taking far too long to complete, leaving some tenants in hazardous situations with mould or leaking roofs in their homes,” Mr Anderson said.

The investigation found that timeliness of repairs, communicating with tenants, resolving complaints, and quality assurance monitoring were the four key areas that needed improvement in the administration of housing assistance.

Australians can expect more of their letters and parcels to be delivered quietly in the coming years as Australia Post expands its fleet of electric vehicles. 

The company announced plans to increase the electric trucks and motorbikes in its network as part of 2030 sustainability goals on Wednesday, as well as doubling its solar power generation and using more low-carbon fuels. 

The targets come after the national provider cut its carbon emissions by more than anticipated in 2025, and a week after it posted a reduced half-year profit that it said reflected strategic investments in its fleet, technology and facilities. 

Australia Post unveiled its environmental goals in its 2030 Sustainability Framework report, led by a target to reduce its direct emissions by eight cent compared with 2025. 

The company previously cut its carbon emissions by 20 per cent – five per cent more than it targeted. 

Structural changes in transport, energy and resources would be necessary to significantly cut greenhouse gases in future, Australia Post chief sustainability officer Richard Pittard said, and would include expanding its electric vehicle fleet. 

“Reducing emissions in a network as large and complex as ours is not simple,” he said.

“It requires electrification, low-carbon fuels, renewable energy and smarter logistics but just as importantly, it requires partnership across our supply chain.”

Australia Post operates the largest electric vehicle fleet in the country, with more than 5600 low-emission trucks, motorbikes and three-wheelers in operation. 

The company added another 500 Rapide 3 electric vehicles to its delivery network in October, each featuring a built-in canopy, 180km range, and space for an extra 120 parcels. 

As well as changes to its fleet, Australia Post would seek to install 30 megawatts of solar capacity on its sites, up from a goal of 14 megawatts, and would continue to match electricity use with energy from renewable sources, the report said. 

The company would also seek to maintain its scope three emissions – those created by suppliers and customers – at 2025 levels, and reduce waste sent to landfill by 30 per cent. 

Australia Post previously cut its landfill by 39 per cent compared to 2019, and Mr Pittard said the firm would consider how materials could be used and reused to achieve its 2030 goal. 

“By embedding circular principles into how we operate, using less, using longer and using again, we can reduce waste within our business and explore how our national network can help Australians do the same,” he said.

While letter deliveries have reached a historic low for the postal service, parcel deliveries are expected to increase throughout the period to 2030 after a record 283 million were delivered in the last half of 2025. 

The Reserve Bank of Australia seems particularly prone towards seeing an overheated economy that needs cooling down. In her speech today the Governor of the RBA, Michelle Bullock, said we now think demand was outstripping supply over the second half of last year. There are a few reasons for this.

First, private demand has been stronger than we expected. Global conditions proved more resilient than many feared after the tariff announcements last year, and financial conditions have been more supportive of growth than anticipated.

Second, the economy’s supply potential appears to have been somewhat lower than previously assessed…inflation is likely to remain above target until those pressures ease. That assessment was central to the Board’s decision to increase the cash rate last month.

This seems amazing given the Statement of Monetary Policy in February which forecast slowing economic growth which will be a miserable 1.6% by the middle of next year and beyond. This is lower than any economic growth the RBA has ever forecast before.

This puts the RBA at odds with the International Monetary Fund in its report on Australia which said it: “finds that significant shifts in cyclical and structural components of labor [sic] demand and supply in recent years have temporarily reshaped labor [sic] market dynamics, driving headline indicators to overstate cyclical tightness.” This seems like IMF-style diplomatic speak for “the RBA has got it wrong”.

We at the Australia Institute have argued earlier that the NAIRU is an unhelpful concept and likely to seriously mislead policy makers toward making decisions that punish the unemployed. Be that as it may, the IMF is right to draw our attention to alternative interpretations of the data. Ordinary people do not feel like they are in an overheated economy.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor is opposing reform to negative gearing and capital gains tax. He says he wants to “re-establish home ownership as the centrepiece of the Australian Dream”. But whose home are we talking about?

Remember that the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing only apply to houses you don’t live in.  We like to call these ‘investment properties’. But while the word ‘investment’ conjures up the idea of building new things like businesses, houses and infrastructure, most ‘housing investment’ is merely swapping existing dwellings between already well-off people, all of whom are all minimising their tax bill.

While there’s much handwringing about new taxes and regulations leading to ‘investors fleeing the market’, what this usually means is a landlord selling to an owner-occupier, realising the Australian dream as it’s traditionally been thought of.

Winding back the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing will reduce demand from prospective landlords/investors and help prospective new homeowners enter the market. And if the governments are truly concerned about supply, they could prove this by properly investing in public housing and building public dwellings again at the rate we used to build them back in the 1940s to 1970s.

In an Oval Office presser this morning, President Donald Trump said of Spain:

“Spain actually said that we can’t use their bases… we could use that base if we want.

“We could just fly in and use it. Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it.”

But we’re sure that those nuclear-powered submarines Trump has promised Australia will get will be under our sovereign control, right? 

And those “joint facilities” like Pine Gap – we have a say in what happens there, right? 

Right? 

The Formula One Grand Prix in Melbourne is on this weekend.

We locals have already been kicked out of our own park, the noise has started and road closures are causing the usual traffic chaos.

But all Victorians, and by extension all Australians, pick up the $100 million annual tab for this.

Below is the basic financial results of the race from the annual report of the Grand Prix corporation. You can see that the Grand Prix makes about $100 million in ticket sales and costs about $200 million to put on, resulting in “Government Investment” of $100 million per year:

That “Government Investment” goes straight to the pocket of a US corporation, Liberty Media.

So if you watch the race this weekend, please enjoy it, because you paid for it.

Includes reporting from AAP

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has described the unfolding situation in the United Arab Emirates as a “consular crisis”, with 24,000 Australians stranded in the country.

One Sydney-bound flight is scheduled to leave Dubai Airport this morning, but those lucky enough to hold tickets are being warned it could be cancelled at short notice.

“This is a consular crisis that dwarfs … any that Australia has had to deal with in terms of numbers of people,” Penny Wong said in a radio interview this morning.

Last night Prime Minister Anthony Albanese UAE phoned President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayad el Nahyan, who has plenty on his plate, with more Iranian bombs falling on the country overnight.

Mr Albanese thanked him for the hospitality shown to stranded Australians and discussed restarting commercial flights.

The PM also spoke with his New Zealand counterpart Christopher Luxon.

Across the Middle East, it’s estimated there are now 115,000 Australians unable to get home. Australia’s embassy in Saudi Arabia has warned citizens in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dhahran to take shelter.

Senior Liberal Andrew Hastie has branded Prime Minister Anthony Albanese‘s tabling of the coalition’s internal review into its disastrous 2025 election result a “boss move”.

Speaking to ABC radio, he also says the post-WWII rules-based world order is “defunct”.

That that construct is defunct in a sense. We’ve got a different President who is mercantilist when it comes to his sort of economics. I think he’s an apex opportunist. And my concern foremost by making those comments is to wake Australia up. We’ve only got 30 odd days worth of fuel. If our shipping lines are cut, then our whole economy could grind to a halt very quickly. Never mind the fact that our industrial base is also shrinking. And that makes us vulnerable to world events.

AAP

Donald Trump has castigated one of the United States’ closest allies, comparing British Prime Minister ‌Keir Starmer unfavourably to Winston Churchill over Britain’s limited support for US strikes on Iran.

“This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump said at the White House, referencing Starmer’s legendary World War Two predecessor.

The Oval Office comments ‌on Tuesday were Trump’s third broadside against Starmer this week as Washington’s campaign of air strikes against Iran stoked concerns among some US partners who see the war as reckless and a violation of international law.

Trump and his aides have often scolded European ‌allies over their immigration policies, lower-than-pledged military spending and hostility to far-right movements.

And Trump’s often tepid support for Ukraine and his threats to seize Danish territory have raised fears in Europe about the stability of a transatlantic alliance facing growing threats from Russia.

Trump now says the US will cut ‌off all trade with Spain after the European country refused to let the US military use its bases for missions linked to strikes on Iran.

“Spain has been terrible,” Trump ‌told reporters during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, adding that he had told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to “cut off all dealings” with Spain.

“We’re going to cut off all ‌trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain,” he added.

Starmer has said Britain didn’t take part in the US-Israeli assault on Tehran because any British military action must have a “viable, thought-through plan” and he did not believe in “regime change from the skies”.

But he has since allowed the US to use UK bases to launch what he called limited and defensive strikes to weaken Tehran’s capabilities, after Iran hit US allies in the region with drones and missiles.

On Monday, ‌a British base in Cyprus ‌was hit by a drone that ⁠Cypriot officials said was likely launched by Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.

During a White House meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump vented frustration that the ​US had not been able to land its military jets at Britain’s strategically important air base, Diego Garcia.

“I’m not happy with the UK,” Trump said, unprompted, during a portion of the meeting that was open to the press.

“It’s taken three, four days for us to work out where we can land. It would have been much more convenient landing there as opposed to flying many extra hours. So we are very surprised.”

Trump had told the Telegraph on Monday that Starmer had appeared to be “worried about the legality” of the strikes on Iran.

Despite Trump’s ‌fraught relations with Europe overall, ​the Republican US president and the center-left Labour leader had until recently maintained upbeat personal ties.

Britain has for decades prided itself on its relationship with the US, aided by leaders such as Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair cultivating ​strong relationships with ‌their counterparts, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

The two countries’ “special relationship” spans intelligence sharing and military co-ordination.

“It’s very sad to see that the relationship is obviously not what it was,” Trump told the Sun ​newspaper in an interview published on Tuesday. He added that he never thought he would see Britain become a reluctant partner, and instead heaped praise on France and Germany.

Britain, France and Germany all released a joint statement in response to the Iranian attacks on Saturday, saying they were in close contact with the US, Israel and partners in the region, and were calling for a resumption of negotiations.

Top of the morning.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan as the Emirates came under more attacks from Iran overnight. Thousands of Australians remain stranded in the UAE, which Foreign Minister Penny Wong says is a “consular crisis”. One Sydney-bound plane departed Dubai Airport today.

The coalition’s disastrous 2025 election campaign has been laid bare after the PM tabled his leaked copy of the review in parliament yesterday (which we revealed first!). This morning, Andrew Hastie branded the PM’s decision to table the review as a “boss move”.

There’s a lot happening today: apart from another busy day in Parliament we’re expecting key inflation data at 11:30am and Canadian PM Mark Carney is in Sydney.

Let’s get into it.