Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) receive significant subsidies in Australia. The federal government loses more than $500 million in tax revenue each year as a result of the Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) exemption for BEVs. This figure is expected to rise as the number of BEVs on the road increases. Under the FBT exemption, someone leasing
The AFR’s education editor, Julie Hare, published an alarmist article on the tiny reduction in international student enrolments, which she labelled a “plunge”. The Department of Education data showed that there were 925,905 total international student enrolments in the year to July 2025, down a tiny 1.1% from last year’s record high of 936,348 enrolments.
Pier, Queenscliff Victoria AUD/USD EUR/USD USD/JPY GBP/USD Gold (by day) WTI (by day) Brent Australia 200 US S&P 500 UK 100 Japan 225 Sorry chaps for some reason there are issues with the charts tonight. Some wouldnt come up at all in
Statistics New Zealand this week released migration data, which showed that only 13,066 net overseas migrants landed in New Zealand in the year to July. This was well below the decade average of 49,000 and more than 120,000 lower than the late 2023 peak. The decline in net overseas migration has been driven by the
Australia is beginning to resemble George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth from the novel 1984. First, the Albanese government performed a policy-180 and announced that Australians under the age of 16 would be banned from viewing YouTube. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is seeking to expand Australia’s draconian media restrictions globally at this month’s United Nations General
Recently on Twitter (also known as X), I came across a series of charts purporting to show the trend in certain search terms on Google indicative of financial stress. Fake charts are increasingly common, so I thought it would be best to do my own research on Google search trends to see if I could
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released the monthly CPI indicator for August, which recorded a jump in headline inflation to 3.0%—the highest result since July 2024. In better news, the policy-relevant trimmed mean inflation moderated to 2.6% in August, down from 2.7% in July. The main driver of the rise in headline CPI
Australia’s government and media want us to believe that climate change is the most serious environmental concern. They say that Australia must reach its net zero promises to avoid “dangerous climate change”, ignoring the reality that Australia is a tiny (1%) emitter on the global stage. Last week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unveiled Labor’s long-awaited
The ferrous complex plods on. Caught between the approach of Simandou, Capanema, Gara Gjeblet on one hand and the shutdown of Chinese green steel on the other. The balance is unusually solid blast furnace output for the season. Honestly, if you had shown me that chart in 2019, I would have told you iron ore
In the years since the pandemic arrived, Melbourne has gone from having one of the strongest economies in the nation and being a drawcard for internal migration to the butt of jokes and criticism. In some ways, this criticism is justified; the Victorian labour market and economy today are performing nowhere near as strongly in