Jacquelin Magnay in the Oz reports Peel, 36, faces an anxious time as she undergoes a series of tests with physiotherapists to determine the next steps.

Peel feel awkwardly on landing during a jump at the team training camp in Airolo in Switzerland just days before the team was due to head to Livigno where the Olympic aerial competition will take place.

The Olympic competition is not until February 17, giving Peel some time to recover if the strain is not serious. However the pyschological impact of an injury so close to the competition and the possible limitations of training on the Olympic venue, cannot be understated. Peel immediately transferred to Zug for an MRI to assess the seriousness of the injury.

Peel (right) is an Olympic Games veteran and winner of the world title in 2015 and 2021, pioneering repeated landings of a triple jump in the women’s competition.

She is one of Australia’s favourites to win a medal and is also one of the contenders to be a flag bearer for the opening ceremony, which will be held on Saturday morning Australian time.

Peel, from Canberra, had been hoping to avenge a fifth placing at the Beijing Olympics — just missing her landing in the freezing conditions — and win an elusive Olympic gold at her fourth Games.

Just last week the 36 year old had told Code sports that she was feeling strong and had regained confidence in performing the big tricks.

I am feeling good with the triples, she had said, referring to the triple twisting triple somersault trick that is considered the hardest in the women’s competition.

Microsoft fell 2.8%, while Intuit and Atlassian slid around 11% each. Adobe and Datadog dropped over 7% each and Oracle slipped 4.3%.

CrowdStrike sank 4.5% and Snowflake dropped 10.6%, while Salesforce lost 8% and Accenture was down 10%.

Palantir bucked the trend, rising 7% on strong results that reinforced investor enthusiasm for demand tied to AI.

The S&P 500 software and services index dropped 4%, on pace to log its fifth consecutive day of losses.

The retreat in tech shares followed lingering concerns over how quickly newer, more capable artificial intelligence models could disrupt established businesses — reviving questions over whether today’s perceived AI winners can protect pricing power and long-term growth.

We've got an expensive market and expectations are really high. Many areas, especially around AI, are priced for perfection. That’s just got us in a skittish environment, said John Campbell, senior portfolio manager, Allspring Global Investments.

Healthcare stocks came under pressure after Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk warned that it expected a steep decline in annual sales. The company’s U.S.-listed shares dropped 12%.

Rival Eli Lilly fell 4.6%, while other obesity drugmakers Viking Therapeutics and Structure Therapeutics were down 3.7% and 6.4%, respectively.

Investors were still digesting a sharp selloff in gold and silver following the nomination of former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh, a development traders viewed as hawkish.

Away from technology, became the first retailer ever to hit $1 trillion in market valuation, with its shares rising 2.4%.

Mega-cap movers, Alphabet dipped 1%, while Amazon dropped 2.7%.

Both the companies — members of the Magnificent Seven — are due to report later this week. Their results will be scrutinized on whether companies can show tangible returns on surging capital expenditure.

Advanced Micro Devices and server maker Super Micro Computer, both due to report after the close, fell over 2.5% each.

Meanwhile, Walt Disney named theme parks head Josh D'Amaro as CEO, placing a longtime insider at the helm and ending succession uncertainty. Its shares were marginally lower.

PayPal forecast 2026 profit below estimates, sending its shares plunging 20%.

At 1:16 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.81%, to 49,006.27, the S&P 500 lost 1.22%, to 6,891.45 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 1.93%, to 23,135.95.

With one quarter of the S&P 500 set to report quarterly results this week, analysts expect companies to have grown their earnings nearly 11% in the December quarter, up from an estimate of about 9% at the start of January, according to LSEG data.

Pfizer shares fell 3.4% despite posting fourth-quarter profit above estimates, while rose 2.5% after quarterly results.

PepsiCo shares gained 4.3%, with the brand announcing a price cut on core brands such as Lay’s and Doritos.

Meanwhile, legislation to end a U.S. government shutdown narrowly cleared a procedural hurdle in the House of Representatives, setting up a vote on final passage later in the day.

The partial shutdown has postponed releases of key jobs data on Friday along with the JOLTS report, originally expected on Tuesday. ↑

Australians have been fed two simple stories about ageing.

The first is the rich Boomer: asset-rich, mortgage-free, sitting comfortably on housing wealth and blocking opportunities for younger generations.

The second paints older people as frail, dependent, clogging hospital beds and draining public resources.

According to new research, both are dangerously wrong.

New findings from COTA Australia’s State of the Older Nation report reveal a confronting reality.

Nearly one in four Australians over 50 is living in poverty — not tightening their belts but actually living in poverty.

The report shows that nearly one in five older Australians rent and fewer than half say their housing is secure or affordable. Older women, in particular, are now one of the fastest-growing groups at risk of homelessness.

Health tells the same story. Almost half of older Australians struggled to access healthcare last year due to cost or wait times and one in seven skipped medication because they couldn't afford it.

These pressures compound over time and expose the real divide in Australia today. The divide isn't between generations; it’s within them.

That reality is made worse by ageism. The report found that 38% of older Australians have experienced ageism since turning 50, most commonly at work but also in health care and government services.

The consequences are significant. One-third of people retired earlier than they planned.

More than one in five retirees would consider returning to work — but many won't even try because they expect to be dismissed because of their age.

When older people are locked out of work, we lose skills and productivity. When they can't access timely healthcare, pressure builds elsewhere in the system.

Fixing these issues doesn't just help older Australians — it improves outcomes across the board.

Of course, some older Australians are doing well. About a quarter are financially secure. But another quarter are living in poverty, and the rest are managing — often just one rent rise, one health bill or one family crisis away from falling over.

A failed experiment from Australia’s central bank came back to haunt the nation, a leading economist has said, putting the economy out of step with global counterparts.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) on Tuesday raised the cash rate by 0.25 basis points, bringing it to 3.85%, a move set to hit Aussie mortgages and spendings.

It means Australia has become an outlier among its peers in reversing a downward cycle on interest rates, with the inflation rate of 3.8% sitting higher than other major economies.

The so-called narrow path strategy ex-RBA Governor Phillip Lowe discussed in 2023 ∼ which sought to return inflation to the target 2-3% band without pushing up unemployment ∼ had ultimately failed to do the job, EQ Economics managing director Warren Hogan said.

The idea is that they didn't raise rates as much as they would have done in the past, he said.

“And they certainly didn't raise rates as high as similar economies such as in the United States, the UK, Canada and New Zealand did in the hope that we would get a return of inflation to target, without the recession or big rise in unemployment.

“So that policy is essentially an experiment, it’s never been done before … and as much as it did not get inflation under control, it’s failed because it’s now five years of above target inflation.

That’s too long.

In announcing the rate hike, the RBA said in a statement that inflation picked up materially in the second half of 2025.

The board noted growth in private demand, household spending and investment, rising housing prices and a tight labour market in making its decision.

The Board judged that inflation is likely to remain above target for some time and it was appropriate to increase the cash rate target, it said.

RBA Governor Michele Bullock would not be drawn on further hikes but said current forecasts had inflation remaining above the target band into 2027.

We're trying to target inflation over the next one to two years given the time it takes interest rates to flow through to the economy, she said.

Mr Hogan suggested the RBA was wrong to cut rates last year, saying they could eventually need to go above the 5% or more in order to properly squash inflation.

The reality is we didn't get inflation under control with a cash rate of 4.35% and that was with 400 basis points or 425 basis points of rate hikes behind it, he said.

We're in a position now where they're (the RBA is) raising rates, Mr Hogan said. Nobody else is having to do this.

“It’s because we followed a different policy strategy.

That is we didn't raise rates as much as we probably should have. We certainly didn't raise rates as much as other countries did.

A discussion on whether the RBA had cut too early was worth having — but believed the RBA was right, Shane Oliver, the chief economist at AMP, said.

It’s tempting to conclude, 'Oh, well, they cut prematurely and they should have waited longer', he said.

“But my take on it is the RBA had to respond to information they had at the time.

The information they had at the time was that inflation was in retreat.

Mr Oliver had on Tuesday hoped the RBA would not raise rates, saying the recent inflation figure could be an outlier based on underlying numbers.

He said it was possible Australia was lagging comparable nations such as the UK and Canada, after their rates had fallen having sat above the 3% mark.

I don't see any logical reason why I should be more inflation-prone than other countries, he said.

There is a productivity argument to say we're more inflation-prone than the US but I don't think that applies really to countries like the UK or Canada for example.

Both men agreed that inflation could not be allowed to become chronic and that fiscal policy had contributed to Australia’s current economic position.

Barnaby Joyce, who yesterday told the Coalition to get back together in the House of Representatives, says he’s added to the surge in support for One Nation since he defected in December.

Speaking to ABC News Breakfast, he also says he’s added to the acceptability of the fringe party.

I'm definitely part of it … I'm not going to go with faux modesty, I think I'm part of it. It gives people licence that they have the capacity to, I don't know, go to dinner and say, actually I'm a One Nation voter.

On whether he thinks there will be other Nationals MPs joining Joyce in defecting to One Nation, he says:

No, I don't. What they're following is obviously the policies of One Nation and they're following policies of One Nation because the policies obviously resonate with the community as reflected in the polls.

An example of Joyce’s point here is when Liberal MP Phil Thompson introduced an amendment to Labor’s antisemitism laws last month, to ban the burning of the Australian flag. His amendment looked practically identical to an amendment that Joyce was also putting forward for One Nation. Thompson’s amendment was voted down by the government and Joyce’s was dropped because it was essentially the same.

Sadly, I'm not convinced that the Liberal Party really grasps the seriousness of the seismic realignment of centre-right politics over which it is presiding; I'm not sure the Liberals really understand that they're in the Last Chance Saloon; and nor do they appreciate (or take any responsibility for) the implications this has for our country. Unless the federal Liberals can speedily unite under a leader with authority in the electorate and with plausible plans to tackle voters' worries, there’s now the real prospect of a complete meltdown on the conservative side of politics. And that’s despite the reality that anything that takes the pressure off a deeply underwhelming Labor government just guarantees that our national decline will continue.

After two years of governmental inaction against rising Islamist extremism, despite numerous anti-hate speech laws already on the statute books, the Liberal Party’s rushed decision to back Labor’s hastily drafted laws against ill-defined hate speech (legislation that they had earlier rejected and which the Nationals continued to oppose) has left many of its natural supporters wondering just how committed it is to principles like free speech.

The fact that Sussan Ley failed to call a joint partyroom meeting to resolve the stalemate inside the (now former) Coalition, as is the longstanding practice, has left many angry that they had turned a summer of holding the government to account into a week of self-induced pain, yet again.

Not to mention the undeniable reality that under this government, hate speech laws have been used to cancel more Israeli visa holders than deport Islamist hate preachers; and so you can see why the Nationals raised legitimate concerns about the reach of new laws.

Inside the centre-right, conservatives are increasingly concerned that the Liberal Party is chasing teal votes to the detriment of the values and priorities that once underpinned the party of Menzies. Meaning, in these days of global information reach, it’s more than possible that the collapse of voter trust that’s afflicted Britain’s Conservatives ∼ who failed to control Britain’s borders, pursued net zero with messianic zeal, ran down defence spending, and failed to rein in bloated government ∼ is starting to take root here; a local symptom of the general disillusionment with politics-as-usual at a time of increasing economic and social strain.

Even though the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government initially did control Australia’s borders and repeal the carbon tax, and later initiated AUKUS; and even though the Coalition from opposition did successfully defeat Labor’s divisive voice, it’s failure to make a contest of last year’s election and its subsequent inability to hold a poor government to account is making natural conservative voters increasingly desperate.

That’s why any failure to quickly and cleanly resolve the current impasse could become an existential crisis.

If it is not already.

Because after a near 10% decline in living standards over the past three years, exacerbated by government decisions and out-of-control spending ∼ coupled with a manifest decline in social cohesion, fanned by governmental inaction and double standards ∼ the need for a strong alternative to the current government has never been greater.

Yet as things stand, it looks like the only thing that the parliamentary Liberals can agree on is that Sussan Ley won't make them competitive at the next election.

Since the Liberals' last significant federal success in 2013, when the Coalition won 46% of the primary vote, the party organisation has declined in concert with the revolving door leadership, and internal arguments over whether to compete with the teals or fight Labor.

In Victoria, shortly after the election, membership had reportedly declined from 15,000 to 9000 (with the average age being 68) and in NSW, some 5000 had reportedly let their membership lapse and 600 applicants had had their membership refused in the previous few years.

It would plainly be worse now, given the Coalition’s primary vote decline from 31% last May to just 21% in the latest Newspoll. So as well as sorting out leadership and policy in Canberra, the party needs a better campaign machine and a larger, younger and more diverse membership that’s less controllable by factional string-pullers — at a time when Australians are ever more reluctant to be tagged as political partisans.

While Labor is losing votes too, most of the One Nation surge is the disillusioned former Coalition vote — even though, despite the defection of former deputy PM Barnaby Joyce, One Nation still looks more like Pauline Hanson’s personal fiefdom than a credible party of potential government. When it won 11 seats in Queensland in 1998, it actually facilitated the formation of a Labor government before imploding. And the party turned out to lack room enough for both Hanson and Mark Latham.

Yet people give Hanson points for consistency and she’s been around long enough for her warnings about immigration and energy to manifest as our new lived reality. Can One Nation get away with coasting along on little more than slogans because that’s all people expect of Hanson, or will the party transition, as Reform has done in the UK, with the arrival of backroom political professionals into a serious player rather than a placeholder for discontents?

There’s no doubt that is Hanson’s intention but before naive pundits beat their chest, our preferential voting system is radically different to the UK, and the demands on a party to field well-credentialed candidates and run a nationwide campaign can't be underestimated. But Hanson has made a career of besting those who underestimate her. And the Liberals have their own talent deficit.

Once upon a time, our politicians were people who had successfully done something else in life and then chose parliamentary service as a way to give back. Now they're in the parliament because most can scarcely get a job in the real world. There are some exceptions but sadly, when the country is led by a man with almost no career, academic, military or other achievement, who remains as much the student radical as he once was, marching for Palestine and fighting Tories, it’s hard to disagree with the view that our current crop of MPs are pygmies compared to their predecessors.

It’s vital that the next few weeks confirm there are still people in the Liberals' parliamentary ranks whose characters are bigger than their egos and whose dedication is to a stronger Australia rather than their next promotion. People prepared to do the intellectual hard-work necessary to formulate feasible policy to deal with our nation’s challenges (immigration, energy, housing and Labor’s official disdain for our country’s symbols and culture), as well as being able to clearly articulate it then to voters. Right now, more and more Australians fear our best years are in the past — and unless the centre-right gets its house in order and fast, it’s hard to say that isn't true.

You came to celebrate a festival of light and freedom and you were met with the violence of hatred, the Prime Minister solemnly said, addressing the families of those who had been killed or wounded on that terrible day. But the carefully crafted words that followed fell short of what the moment demanded:

I am deeply and profoundly sorry that we could not protect your loved ones from this evil.

The implications of that could not were stark: there was, the phrase suggested, nothing more the government could and should have done to prevent the horror occurring. This was, in other words, anything but an apology ∼ that is, an expression of remorse ∼ despite widespread headlines to the contrary. It was no more and no less than an expression of grave regret for events said to lie beyond the government’s control.

That matters because apologies, when sincerely meant, anchor our moral lives in ways that mere regret cannot. An apology marks the admission of transgressions ∼ duties not met, values ignored, bonds of trust broken ∼ and in doing so, reaffirms those obligations' enduring significance. It signals that we were actors in the harm and confronts the impact of our decisions. And it promises that we will learn from the shortcomings and ensure that our conduct, in future, does not drift too far from our principles.

In all of those ways, an apology goes well beyond a statement of sympathy, regardless of how heartfelt that sympathy may be. Looking backwards, it concedes that we ought to have acted differently; looking forward, it expresses a resolve to change.

The authors of the Christian Bible recognised this in stressing the distinction between metameleia ∼ regret without transformation ∼ and metanoia, the reorientation of judgment that follows recognition of failure and issues in new patterns of behaviour. Their predecessors in the Hebrew Bible drew an equally forceful moral divide between charatah, the sting of regret, and teshuvah, the commitment to repair the wrong and not repeat the wrongdoing. In both traditions, what makes the difference, bridging the gap between lofty aspiration and lived conduct, is a willingness to frankly shoulder responsibility.

But assuming responsibility is what Albanese did not do, presenting the government as unable to prevent, and as having done nothing to fuel, the sustained escalation of murderous antisemitism. Instead of reckoning squarely with his government’s conduct, the Prime Minister offered sympathy shorn of the acknowledgment of fault, sorrow cleansed of its political cost.

There will be time, in the months ahead, to lay those claims of impotence and innocence to rest. But there is, in all this, a paradox, brought into sharp relief by the now habitual portrayal of Australia Day as a moment for expressing remorse about European settlement. Labor has for years asked us to bear the guilt, and to apologise repeatedly, for deeds in which present-day Australians played no part; yet here, where the events were at least partly under the government’s control, responsibility is shunned and a genuine apology ∼ one that might help heal the scars ∼ is withheld.

To think that this reflects a base calculus is hardly irrational. Talk is often cheap—- but it is never cheaper than when it takes the form of apologising for the alleged misdeeds of long-gone others or of political adversaries. And it is more rewarding still in an age eagerly seeking secular ∼ and not unduly demanding ∼ substitutes for once-essential, but now increasingly discarded, rituals of religious repentance.

Little wonder, then, that we, together with so much of the West, have witnessed an explosion of cheap contrition, in which the growing ubiquity of specious apologies debases their value like an inflated moral currency. Nor is it surprising that, as the worth of apologies plummets, their forms become ever more contrived: the statement that regrets the offence that may have been taken, rather than the action that caused it; the rueful insistence that we as a nation failed, thereby implicating no one by implicating everyone; the curdled language of lawyer-scripted admissions designed not to accept blame but to deflect it.

Yet the effects of this outpouring go far beyond the bouts of normative dyspepsia it provokes. What has vanished, most troublingly, is the willingness to answer honestly, in the here and now, for the consequences of what one has done.

Max Weber articulated the danger this poses with extraordinary clarity, long before it became a commonplace of political debate. Where responsibility is displaced or denied, he warned, the moral field of politics collapses into one of two outcomes: either the triumph of fanatics, who believe the immeasurable damage they wreak will be redeemed by some ultimate salvation, or a descent into unadorned opportunism, in which disastrous errors are concealed by evasions, obfuscations and deceptions.

No democratic political system can retain its legitimacy under those conditions. Without the willingness to confront outcomes - which is at the heart of what it means to take responsibility - there are no lessons learned and no errors corrected; without apologies that rise above mouthing I'm sorry, shattered confidence cannot be rebuilt; and without credible promises, there can be no secure basis on which to plan a shared future.

But these are possible only, Weber cautioned, when leaders possess a high level of personal and political maturity: for the capacity to scrutinise the realities of life ruthlessly, to withstand them and to measure up to them inwardly requires the will to adulthood (Mündigkeit) that turns the resolve to face facts soberly into a settled habit. Those who lack that maturity are, in Weber’s words, not equal to the task they have chosen, not equal to the challenge of the world as it really is — they are, that is, not equal to politics as a calling, no matter how immense their talent may be for politics as a mere profession.

That is why the death-rattles, not only in Australia but throughout the West, of the ethic of responsibility echo an older and darker moral pattern - the world of Shakespeare’s bleakest and most foreboding play, Troilus and Cressida, in which moral language survives solely as a means of self-exculpation, and in which apologies collapse into excuses. Characters acknowledge harm, even genuinely lament it, yet refuse the self-implicating turn that would bind regret to reckoning.

And as Shakespeare sought to show, sensing England’s slide toward chaos and violence, when apology becomes just another way of avoiding having to answer for one’s deeds, fine words can only deepen wounds that cry out for healing.

The victims of the massacre at Bondi deserve better. Above all, they deserve the truth — and with it, leaders willing to unflinchingly shoulder the burden of responsibility the truth so justly, yet so searingly, imposes.