The Seventh Intergenerational Report (IGR) released today by the Treasurer Jim Chalmers looks all the way out to 2066 and yet is mostly focused on the present and the fad-like demand of AI and data centres. Each iteration of the IGR is less about the projections than its focus.
In their appearance before the House Economics Committee on Friday, the executive of the Reserve Bank made it quite clear that we can expect more interest rate rises to come, but made little suggestion that real wages will be improving any time soon.
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It’s official: not even the World Cup can make Australians travel to the United States anywhere close to the degree they did before Trump came to power. As I have noted before, when a World Cup is held in a country, the number of Australians travelling there usually spikes. For the USA, the opposite occurred.
The latest data from the National Accounts shows that gambling losses reached a new, all-time high of $36 billion in the 2025-26 financial year. Losses went up $1.2b more than in 2024-25, which is the biggest increase in three years.
Australia’s usual model of general practice relies heavily on private businesses earning revenue for each service they provide. That can work reasonably well where there are lots of patients and doctors (i.e. cities). It works less reliably in a town of a few thousand people, where maintaining a viable practice can depend on rents, accommodation, hospital arrangements and whether somebody can cobble together funding from three levels of government.
Barnaby might not understand the velocity of money, but neither does anyone else, and to be honest, the entire concept of it on inflation is pretty disputed, so trying to argue against him on that score is a mug’s game. The same goes for the One Nation and LNP’s policy of letting people raid their super.
In a sign of the brutal impact of the Reserve Bank’s three interest rate rises, more than 1 million Australians worked multiple jobs in the June quarter for the first time. When cost of living pressures rise, one of the more dramatic impacts we see in the economy is more people needing to work more than one job to make ends meet.
David Farley, the One Nation MP who won the Farrer by-election in May, is “poised to quit One Nation” according to the Saturday Paper. It wouldn’t be the first time a One Nation MP has quit the party soon after being elected. In fact, that’s been the fate of 25 of the 52 MPs that have ever represented the party in Australian parliaments.
Musicians, performers and other artists may worry that being too political will alienate their audiences. But polling shows that audiences are far more likely to take action if their favourite Australian artists invite them to.
The latest greenhouse gas emissions data for the March 2026 quarter were released on Friday - as ever with no fanfare or advance notice - by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW). They showed that in the past year, Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions fell 1.6%.
