The federal government’s election pledge to reduce student debt for about three million Australians will be a legislative priority for the first week of the new parliament. University graduates will have their debt reduced by 20%, but e61 Institute economists Jack Buckley and Matthew Maltman have concluded that people in the top third of income-earners
Westpac with the credit card tracker. The Westpac-DataX Card Tracker Index* was largely unchanged over the first two weeks of July. At 137, the latest weekly read continues to hold around the lower end of the range seen since mid-May. The quarterly growth pulse is holding in the 0.9-1.1% range that has prevailed for
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Drew Hutton has been credited with co-founding the Greens with Bob Brown. Hutton was the lead Queensland Greens Senate candidate for many years and ran for the party in numerous elections. Following his retirement from parliament, he founded Lock the Gate and led a successful campaign against coal seam gas. However, on June 24, Drew
Goldman with the note. …the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs (CCFEA) meeting chaired by President Xi on July 1 called for building a “unified national market” to discourage local protectionism, as well as regulating disorderly price-cutting and excessive competition among producers. For background, the CCFEA held a meeting on the “healthy development of
Scott Maynard, managing director of electric vehicle (EV) maker Polestar in Australia, has called for an end to tax breaks for large four-wheel-drive utes. Maynard says the fringe benefits tax (FBT) concession “continues to disproportionately serve the sale of dual cab utes and not what I would consider to be a far more progressive style
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We know that we are wrecking our economy with crazy high gas prices. We also know that this is a direct result of subsidising gas exports to China, which it sends back as battleships. We know that Japan resells huge quantities of cheap Aussie gas across Asia at a markup. We know that we need
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Yesterday, I started paying for ChatGPT. I am not the only one. The Market Ear. Silicon smackdown: Will OpenAI ever be matched? OpenAI has become the AI industry’s dominant force, with 800M users and a $300B valuation—but the race is far from over. As Gavin Baker notes, an Apple-Grok partnership could be the strategic counter
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's recent Six-day visit to China was important. China is Australia's largest trading partner.From Beijing perspective it was certainly a success.As the Communist Party's propaganda sheet, the Global Times, observed "the relationship is now flying in the stratosphere" after years of strained ties under the previous Morrison government.
Less than two months before Australia went to the polls for May’s federal election, the expectation was that the Coalition would achieve a shock victory, becoming the first opposition to unseat a federal government after a single term since the Great Depression. Then, as the spotlight turned to then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, his frontbench,
The ferrous complex continues to squeeze with seasonality. Previous squeezes in the past year suggest a price cap around $110. Right where Indian exports will surge. Is there anything to it? Not really. So far, we have had excuses such as Chinese property mega-stimulus. Albo grovelling. A new dam. For example: The massive economic stimulus
Tasmanian election results can often be simplified to totals for each party in each electorate. But votes aren’t cast for parties, they’re cast for candidates. When candidates are elected or excluded, preferences don’t always flow to fellow members of the same party (or “leakage”). A particularly efficient distribution of votes within a party group can also allow a party to compete for an extra seat beyond what the party totals might suggest.
Last night, with a spare half-hour and my brain fried from a day of reading and writing, I decided to dive into the eleventy million streaming apps on my iPad. The first one I opened, Disney, served up M*A*S*H as an option, and for some reason, the "Captain Tuttle" episode immediately popped into my head.