I have warned repeatedly that Australia’s labour market has been living in a ‘fool’s paradise’. The nation’s unemployment rate remains historically low at 4.3% and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) expects unemployment to remain at this low level. However, Australia’s labour market is not nearly as rosy as the official unemployment suggests. First, Roy
There has been a clear trend in all Australian elections over the last twenty years of voters moving away from voting on election day, with an increasing number of voters choosing pre-poll voting as an alternative.
Tasmania has lagged behind the rest of the country in moving away from ordinary election-day voting, both at state elections and federal elections, but there was a big drop between last year’s election and this year’s election.
Risk markets were unable to move much overnight as the latest US initial jobless claims came in slightly higher than expected (until revised by Sharpie by the Fanta Fuhrer) while a lot of Fedspeak around the slowing US economy led Wall Street to closed mixed at best. Oil prices pushed lower while the USD was
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DXY was soft. AUD up. CNY is stalled. Gold is signalling Waller cuts! Metals not so much. Big bear tries again. EM hugs the bubble. Junk is lagging badly. Yields did the opposite to gold. The bubble inflates. It looks like a new and dovish Fed chair is front-running. Bloomberg. Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller is emerging
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In late July, Australia test-fired a new US-made long-range missile. Its range is 500km, but that can be doubled, easily reaching Indonesian targets. Duncan Graham reports.
Were our friends to the north fearful, seeing this armed streaker as a threat? Tariffs, Gaza and Ukraine have elbowed other news aside, so reaction has been limited. The Indonesian media has yet to make a fuss.
As with other wars, questions of provocation, self-defence and divine right or entitlement are central themes of what the Western mainstream media have had to say about the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the attacks on Iran by the US and Israel in June 2025.
As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the world is drifting as close to another nuclear confrontation as it has been in decades.
US President Donald Trump’s tariffs are having two broad impacts on the global economy – they are eroding international confidence in US leadership and disrupting global supply chains, and causing rapid geographic restructuring of international trade.
An amazing thing has happened. Our taxpayer-funded think-tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has commissioned analysis by Robert Macklin which shows that the public debate on Australia’s defence has been biased.
Exorbitant land costs are the primary driver of Australia’s high home prices. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), residential land values, which underpin the housing market, increased by 8.8% between 2023 and 2024, reaching $7.7 trillion. Residential land values increased from 1.1 to 2.9 times Australia’s GDP over 35 years, ending in 2023-24.