Max Hatzoglou reports in the Sunday Australian India opener Smriti Mandhana and No.3 Jemimah Rodrigues supercharged its team to a record 6-176 total at Adelaide Oval after electing to bat first at the coin toss.

Australia lost 3-32 early in the run chase, including the big wicket of Perry in her milestone match, before Ash Gardner struck 57 off 45 to give the hosts a glimmer of hope.

But it wasn't enough Australia were held to 9-159 after 20 overs to go down 2-1 (4-2 points) in the series.

Georgia Wareham (12) and Annabel Sutherland (14) contributed late to try and steer home the unlikely run chase.

Perry, who became the first women to play 350 games for Australia, was out bowled in the fourth over after missing a turning delivery coming down the wicket.

It was India off-spinner Shreyanka Patil (3-22) who claimed the big scalp in her return to the side.

Shree Charani (3-32) and Arundhati Reddy (2-35) were also influential with the ball to help steer India to the crucial win as attention now turns to three ODIs and a one-off Test to complete the series.

Mandhana’s crushing 82 off 55 set her new highest score for T20 internationals in Australia, beating her previous best of 66.

It was also the 29-year-old’s 33rd international fifty in the format in a knock which featured 11 boundaries, including three sixes.

Rodrigues' 59 off 46 was her first T20 international fifty in Australia and the 15th of her short-form career.

Australia allrounder Annabel Sutherland led with the ball with 2-34 in what a largely expensive showing from Shelley Nitschke’s bowling cohort.

Quick bowler Kim Garth was the most economical with 1-25 from three overs, going at 8.3 an over.
↑

In the last six months, U.S.-domiciled investors have pulled some $75 billion from U.S. equity products, with $52 billion flowing out since the start of 2026 alone, the most in the first eight weeks of the year since at least 2010, according to LSEG/Lipper data.

The shift comes despite a weakening of the dollar against other currencies, which makes buying overseas assets more expensive for U.S. investors. It’s a compelling sign that the diversification away from U.S. assets by some international investors in the past year is gaining traction among U.S. investors.

Since the global financial crisis ended in 2009, the buy America trade has rewarded investors at home and abroad thanks to a strong economy and earnings growth and dominance in the tech sector leading to outsized gains in U.S. stocks.

More recently, the AI boom pushed the S&P 500 index to record highs last year, a strong buffer from U.S. President Donald Trump’s unpredictable approach to trade policy and diplomacy, as well as his attempts to undermine Federal Reserve independence.

But as concerns have grown about the possible risks from AI, as well as the costs involved, the lure of Wall Street stocks has ebbed. The surge in value in the U.S. megacap tech stocks that have led gains until now are making investors pickier and many are spotting more attractive opportunities elsewhere.

Bank of America’s February fund manager survey showed investors switched from U.S. equities to emerging market equities at the fastest rate in five years.

I've had lots of conversations with our wealth business in the U.S. this year, said UBS’s head of European equity strategy and global derivatives strategy Gerry Fowler.

They're all talking about investing more offshore because at the end of the year, they looked at the performance of foreign markets in dollars and they're like, wow, I'm missing out.

U.S. investors have poured some $26 billion into emerging-market equities so far this year, with South Korea the largest single country destination, with an inflow of $2.8 billion, followed by Brazil, with $1.2 billion, LSEG/Lipper data shows.

One of the clear results of Trump’s policies has been the 10% decline in the dollar against a basket of currencies since last January. While that is a disadvantage for U.S. investors hunting for opportunities abroad, dividends in dollar terms from better performing overseas markets will also be plumped up.

In the last 12 months, the S&P 500 has risen around 14%. In dollar terms, Tokyo’s Nikkei is up 43%, Europe’s STOXX 600 has surged 26%, Shanghai’s CSI 300 has returned 23% and Seoul’s KOSPI has doubled in value.

Investors are also re-evaluating the seemingly unstoppable rally in the shares of artificial intelligence powerhouses like Nvidia, Meta and Microsoft and the risks posed by sky-high valuations. They are seeking 'value' in traditional industrial companies and defensive stocks which can feature heavily in some overseas equity markets such as those in Germany, the UK, Switzerland or Japan.

Laura Cooper, global investment strategist at Nuveen, said the rotation on Wall Street away from tech and other so-called growth stocks into value stocks is playing out on a global level.

Increasingly we are seeing U.S. investors look at the global landscape from a valuation perspective, she said, flagging the cyclical growth upswing predominantly in Europe and Japan.

European banking stocks, one example of cyclical stocks that typically benefit when economic growth picks up, surged 67% last year and are up a further 4% so far in 2026.

When you overlay the valuation story with the growth story, we are seeing that rotation for U.S. investors as well, Cooper added.

U.S. stocks are still far more expensive than those elsewhere. The S&P 500 trades at roughly 21.8 times the expected earnings of its components, while stocks in Europe trade at roughly 15 times' forward earnings and those in Japan and China trade at 17 and 13.5 times respectively.

Kevin Thozet, portfolio adviser at Carmignac, said his team have observed that flows of U.S. capital moving into Europe have accelerated since around mid-2025.

LSEG/Lipper data shows that since Trump’s inauguration in January last year, U.S.-domiciled investors have poured nearly $7 billion into European equity products, compared with an outflow of roughly $17 billion during the four years of Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021.

If I'm taking a very long-term view, it’s, maybe, this idea of a great global rotation, Thozet said.

We have seen Burke struggle with this problem before, but it landed with a massive thud this week when another cohort of 11 so-called ISIS brides and their 23 children left the al-Roj detention camp in northeastern Syria.

They were on their way to Australia, the country the women turned their backs on to join their ISIS fighter husbands. If it weren't for Syrian authorities ∼ who turned them back for not following correct processes ∼ women who chose to join an Islamic State caliphate would have landed in Australia by now.

Anthony Albanese’s two most senior allies in government ∼ Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Burke ∼ have treated the return of these women (at least some of whom may well be guilty of significant terrorism offences for travelling to declared areas, or terrorism hot spots) as first and foremost a political issue, rather than a profoundly serious matter of national security.

Passing the buck has been their default response. This national security debacle is a gift to those political parties, such as One Nation, tapping into rampant voter frustration. But its main significance is the policy disaster that Australians have been forced to shoulder.

The Albanese government has been exposed as mouthing words but having no national security plan — a policy of it wasn't us, we're not to blame.

Its decision to outsource to third parties the return of ISIS brides who may pose ongoing terrorism threats in Australia is untenable.

It is barely two months after ISIS-inspired terrorists ∼ who shared the same ideology as the ISIS brides who went to the Middle East to join the Islamic caliphate ∼ butchered 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney. The nation is in no mood for playing political games at the expense of national security.

Yet Albanese, Burke and Wong are up to their necks in political shenanigans, with the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister being forced to clean up after Burke’s mess.

This week, Albanese’s new hands-off policy ∼ a policy not to have a plan ∼ was laid bare. It has come at precisely the wrong time for the nation’s security.

Inquirer has been told there is a reason this latest cohort of ISIS brides has spent the longest time in Syrian camps. They have been classified as being of the greatest danger to Australians if they returned.

A former national security official told Inquirer this week that the current cohort of women trying to return to Australia are more likely to be the true believers, more likely to have been assessed as the most difficult to integrate into the community, the most likely to propagate radicalisation on the Australian community.
↑

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson could be forced to speak to police as part of their investigation into the disgraced former prince, The Sun reports.

Sources said the family’s friendship with [Jeffrey] Epstein has destroyed everything and left the monarchy in crisis".

A convicted paedophile, Epstein was found dead in his New York City prison cell in 2019 while he awaited trial.

The US Department of Justice released three million files with documents citing Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and Ms Ferguson’s alleged involvement with the disgraced global financier.

Both have denied all wrongoing and a spokesperson for Ms Ferguson said last year she had severed ties with Epstein as soon as she was aware of the extent of the allegations.

Following Thursday’s arrest of Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, Fergie is nowhere to be seen.

According to The Sun, Ms Ferguson, 66, left the country shortly after Andrew was evicted from the Royal Lodge.

She is thought to be either sequestered in the United Arab Emirates, or staying with her sister in Australia.

While it is not confirmed that Ms Ferguson is in Australia, it is considered a strong possibility for her future relocation.

Her sister, Jane Ferguson Ludecke, lives on the Central Coast of New South Wales.

Ms Ferguson has not been seen in public since September 2025.

One of her daughters is believed to be with her.

Sources told The Sun that Ms Ferguson’s last remaining hope to make money is a tell-all book about how her family’s friendship with Epstein has destroyed everything and left the monarchy in crisis but she’s ruled that out apparently.

That information may have to be told to the police first.

It comes as sources said Mr Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest will be catastrophic for Princesses Beatrice, Eugenie and their mother, none of whom had made plans to celebrate the former prince’s 66th birthday.

The plan was to spend a quiet and lonely 66th birthday at Wood Farm as no one was coming round to celebrate with him, not even Fergie or their two children Beatrice and Eugenie, a source said.

He was expecting to spend the day with seven dogs, instead he had 15 coppers at his door.

The team of Thames Valley Police officers, supported by Norfolk Police, arrived with stealth, speed and surprise.

Mr Mountbatten-Windsor’s daughters are understood to be in a state after their father’s arrest yesterday.
↑

A minimum age to ride an e-bike is being introduced as part of sweeping reforms to NSW e-bike use.

The Minns government says a legal minimum age between 12 and 16 will be recommended in an expert review led by Transport for NSW, which will also consider whether children and teenagers have the skills and maturity to safely carry passengers.

There are about 760,000 e-bikes in the state and the law allows children of any age to ride them.

Under the new framework, NSW Transport will lead a review into the appropriate age restriction for e-bikes and, alongside the NSW Office for Youth and Young People, will listen directly to parents and young people before making a final decision on the appropriate age threshold in June this year.

As part of the sweeping changes, the Minns government has given new powers to police to seize and crush illegal e-bikes.

They have also announced a trial of dyno units that measure e-bike speeds in roadside compliance checks.

The state will adopt the European safety and performance standard, ensuring e-bikes perform like bicycles and the current crop of high-powered, illegal motorbikes masquerading as e-bikes are removed from the state’s roads and footpaths".

Under this standard, e-bikes must have a maximum power output of 250W, with a maximum speed of 25km/h.

No power assistance will be possible after 6km/h if the rider isn't pedalling the e-bike.

The standard also includes strict battery, electrical and fire-safety requirements as well as anti-tampering protections to prevent power and speed limits being altered, a government statement read.

The European standard will be implemented on March 1, 2029.

A week or so after the Coalition’s catastrophic 2025 election defeat, the surviving Liberals returned to Canberra to choose a replacement for vanquished leader Peter Dutton.

Sussan Ley had confirmed her candidacy. So too had Angus Taylor.

And for a few hours at least, a third contender was in the mix.

After claiming victory in a tight and bitter rematch with Zoe Daniel in the bayside Melbourne seat of Goldstein before it was officially declared, Tim Wilson teased at an unlikely tilt at the Liberal leadership.

Wilson eventually ruled himself out, declaring it’s not my time in a statement that very much implied he thought his time would eventually come.

To his supporters, Wilson is a doggedly determined political warrior, the clearest modern-day advocate of classical liberalism, and living proof the party can win back its prized urban heartlands from teal independents.

To his critics, he’s arrogant, abrasive and utterly shameless. Who else considers running for leader before the AEC declares their seat?

Less than a year after being resurrected from what he describes as political death, the 45-year-old is a step closer to the summit of the Liberal party.

Taylor, the new leader, appointed him shadow treasurer, giving him the chance to shape an economic agenda but also a platform to promote an alternative, optimistic vision for a party that has been almost wiped out in the capital cities.

It also sets up a clash of ideologies with the Australia-first Andrew Hastie, the man most colleagues believe he will compete with to eventually replace Taylor.

The Liberal party we want is back, which is a party focused on how we're going to build the future, Wilson said in an interview with Guardian Australia.

It’s clear to me that we lost our mojo and I came back to help find that mojo again.

Within 48 hours of his new appointment, Wilson accused the Reserve Bank of not focusing on inflation, labelled the top income tax bracket punitive and declared an end to the John Howard-era mindset that has captured the party.

While good leaders don't shy away from a fight, the greater the difference between voters' views and a political party’s perception of the national interest, the harder the challenge of leadership and the greater the likelihood of political failure.

The argument used against the Liberal Party, most notably by its former leader Malcolm Turnbull, is that by moving to the right the party is leaving the electorate behind and dooming itself to fail.

There is some evidence that the electorate has moved marginally left, especially on issues where the Liberals have failed to make a contest like climate; but on many hot-button issues it has actually become more conservative.

In two papers published early last year, The Australian Population Research Institute argued that large electoral majorities did not favour the political class’s orthodoxy that high immigration and cultural diversity were unambiguously good for Australia.

While there are dangers here with clumsy language, sensitively and intelligently handled, big change here is exactly what the electorate is looking for. Perhaps it’s new Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s focus on the cultural issue of protecting the Australian way of life, as well as the economic one of restoring Australians' standard of living, that explains the early positive reaction to his elevation.

The TAPRI study, published last February, showed 80% support for reducing migration numbers, 67% support for dealing with skills shortages by raising wages and improving skills training for locals, 67% opposition to increasing ethnic and other forms of diversity, and 58% support for selection policy that takes into account a migrant’s ability to fit into the Australian community.

A further study published in March 2025 found that while 66% of all voters wanted a sharp reduction in the migrant intake, especially of temporary migrants, this was also the view of 58% of Labor and Greens voters. These figures are almost certain to have increased in the wake of the Bondi massacre.

It’s worth noting that while people born overseas are just over 30% of the population, they're only 20% of voters.

Even so, the TAPRI study shows that 77% of Asian-born migrants want lower immigration while English-speaking and European migrants are even likelier than the Australian-born to want lower migration and likelier to want fitting into Australia to be part of migrant selection policy.

And while Asian migrants are more pro-diversity than other Australians, even among them there’s still 50% opposition to using migration to increase diversity.

The most reliable and comprehensive guide to voters' attitudes over time is the Australian National University’s Australian Election Study, which has been asking much the same questions of a representative sample of voters since 1987. On migration issues, the AES reinforces TAPRI’s findings.

The most recent AES report, released in November, showed that 53% of 2025 voters wanted immigration reduced, with only 14% wanting it increased; whereas at the 2022 election the percentage wanting it increased was actually slightly higher than that wanting it reduced. Between 2022 and 2025, the percentage thinking migrants were good for the economy dropped by 10 points and the percentage thinking migrants increased crime rose by 10 points. In 2025, at 50%, voter support for turning back asylum-seeker boats was actually stronger than in 2013.

On other issues, too, the electorate is becoming more conservative. Between 2022 and 2025, the percentage wanting less tax rose from 39 to 42 while the percentage wanting more social spending fell from 31 to 30. As well, the percentage thinking that climate change was a serious threat dropped from 66 to 57, while those thinking it was not increased from 34 to 43.

Based on the totality of voters' responses, the AES judges that voters at the 2025 election leaned slightly to the left with an averaged score of 4.93 out of 10 (where 10 is right and 0 is left). Yet at the previous 2022 election, despite the electorate leaning ever so slightly to the right with a score of 5.05, Anthony Albanese still had a strong win. What’s more, the Coalition still won elections (just) in 2016 and 2019 with an electorate that leaned slightly left. Interestingly, the study shows that voters thought the Coalition was no more right-wing under Peter Dutton in 2025 than it had been under Scott Morrison in 2022; indeed, the Coalition was perceived by voters to have been just as right-wing under Turnbull in 2016 as in the two most recent elections.

When the 2025 Election Study results were released last November, the media focused on the finding that, for the first time, voters felt that Labor (on 32%) was better placed to manage the economy than the Coalition (with just 28%). Yet management of the economy was cited by only 12% of voters as the most important election issue, down from 28% in 2013.

In fact, by far the most significant result was that only 34% of voters in the 2025 study said they always voted for the same party, compared with 63% in 1987. But even this volatility is not especially recent, with more than 50% of voters rusted on at only one of the past seven federal elections. The study reveals about 20% of Coalition voters and about 30% of Labor voters have considered changing their votes during the campaign in every election since 1987.

What this tells me is that election results have more to do with how people view leaders and leadership; it’s leadership after all that most shapes most people’s views on most issues. For the Liberals, in other words, the problem is less that voters have moved away from them but that they have not provided much leadership on the issues voters care about.

Quite apart from the fact that the Liberals in 2025 inexplicably failed to campaign for their energy policy or against Labor’s unrealised capital gains tax policy, plus failed to hammer the fact that government policy had exacerbated the worst fall in living standards in the developed world, the key factors in their humiliation were the collapse of TV in shaping people’s political perceptions, the rise of social media (in which the Coalition was largely MIA) and antipathy towards Dutton who, however unfairly, the study showed had the least voter appeal in its history.

Far from needing to persuade the Australian public that migration numbers are too high and that all migrants must accept Australian values, what this says to me is that on immigration, Taylor is pushing on an open door. Based on the best available data, promising to protect the Australian way of life is exactly what voters want — as well as what our country needs, as the Bondi massacre has put up in flashing neon lights.

Meaning that far from being too right-wing for the electorate, for the first time in years the Liberals are actually taking voters where they want to go.

Like many of our current pathologies, its roots lie in the heady days of the 1960s. And if the crisis has proved so hard to contain, it is because the ideas and attitudes forged in that period have continued to command allegiance long after the conditions that gave them plausibility fell away — turning inherited reflexes into instruments of chaos and disorder.

At the heart of the changes that shook Australia towards the close of the Menzies era was the emergence of protest movements incubated within rapidly expanding universities. Although multiple influences were at work, developments overseas were especially important.

That influence was reinforced through several channels. For the first time, youth travel occurred on a mass scale: in the 1960s, cheaper fares and rising incomes lifted overseas departure rates among those aged 20-24 more than six-fold.

Meanwhile, television became a primary source of nightly news, transforming political events ∼ including those overseas ∼ into vivid, broadly shared spectacles. Complementing both developments was the diffusion of a distinct youth culture that celebrated oppositional attitudes.

It is consequently unsurprising that the earliest stirrings echoed the US civil rights movement: the Freedom Rides of early 1965 captured the nascent mood.

But it was, of course, the Vietnam War that transformed scattered nuclei of activism into a national phenomenon.

As in the US, the campaign against the war entrenched a new radicalism within Australian universities, marked by revolutionary rhetoric sharply at odds with the tone and posture of the peace movement of the 1950s.

Dominated by communist fronts, that earlier movement had concentrated on attracting fellow travellers from the unions, the ALP and the churches.

It was therefore shaped by a persistent quest for respectability that ∼ although continually undermined by slavish adherence to the Soviet line ∼ left a clear imprint on its leadership style. Consistent with that orientation, its rhetoric during the Vietnam era focused on securing the withdrawal of Australian troops and a negotiated settlement to the war.

By contrast, beginning with the Sydney University ALP Club in 1966, student activists cast the Vietcong as model revolutionaries and replaced the traditional peace movement’s imagery ∼ designed to elicit sympathy through photographs of napalmed children and burning villages ∼ with stylised portrayals of heroic guerillas. Rejecting calls for negotiation as talk into thin air, they embraced a Manichean worldview in which Australians confronted a stark choice between remaining an outpost of imperialism and supporting the forces of progress — that is, between their own soldiers and those they were fighting.

Nor were these radicals especially committed to nonviolence at home. On the contrary, Maoist factions treated violence as revolutionary, particularly when directed at the police and even more so at rival radical groups — producing brawls that culminated in 1978, when Maoists hurled an alleged Trotskyite through a plate-glass window.

Yet these groups remained numerically insignificant. In the tussles for control of the 1970 Moratorium, they were readily outplayed by the traditional peace organisations' battle-hardened Communist cadres, whose overriding objective was to garner support within the labour movement and across the electorate.

At a time when the ALP Right remained a formidable force ∼ particularly in the pivotal states of NSW and Victoria ∼ and when institutions, including the police, still commanded broad respect on the left, assembling wide-ranging support required that demonstrations remain orderly.

The prominence of the give peace a chance motif reinforced the insistence on nonviolence. The result was that the extremists were marginalised and restrained ∼ physically so in Brisbane ∼ allowing the massive nationwide demonstrations of May 8, 1970 to proceed almost entirely peacefully. That was less true of the subsequent Vietnam protests and of the highly confrontational attempts to impede the Springboks' tour in 1971. Yet despite those blemishes, the May 1970 marches conferred on mass demonstrations an enduring legitimacy they had never previously possessed.

A momentous consequence of that legitimacy ∼ and of the subsequent rise to power of the baby boomers, whose worldview had been shaped by the Moratorium ∼ was a far-reaching transformation of the legal framework.

Until then, regulations governing street protests had been squarely directed at maintaining public order: statutory offences legislation and municipal by-laws treated permission to occupy public spaces for rallies and marches as a privilege, granted subject to clear duties and constraints.

The report of the South Australian Royal Commission chaired by Justice Charles Hart Bright and the Public Assemblies Act 1972 (SA) that followed, marked the advent of a different era, in which the authorities had to stringently justify any restrictions.

Entrenching that shift was the High Court’s controversial decision in Brown v Tasmania (2017), which ∼ drawing a very long bow from the already contentious implied freedom of political communication ∼ appeared to elevate even highly disruptive protest into a constitutional entitlement.

However, as the Age of Aquarius gave way to the Age of Rage, the conditions that had once kept mass demonstrations peaceful ebbed away.

Respect for Australian institutions, including the police, curdled into hostility towards a settler colonial state; in an era of political fragmentation and rival echo chambers, the search for a broad base yielded to the imperative of seizing attention; the collapse of the ALP Right and the capture of taxpayer-funded institutions by the far left relaxed the normative and organisational constraints on extremism; and as an apocalyptic mindset ∼ typified by the green left ∼ eclipsed the hopeful, often utopian, spirit of the Vietnam years, violence came to seem not merely permissible but necessary, given the perceived enormity and urgency of the stakes.

As a result, the unrestrained aggressiveness of social media spilled from the screen into the street, its rhetorical assaults readily hardening, once enacted in the public square, into the real thing.

Already evident in Extinction Rebellion’s massively disruptive protests, those currents have, in the recent demonstrations, metastasised.

Supercharging their force ∼ and the threat they pose ∼ is the alliance between the far left and radical Muslims whose virulent antisemitism, contempt for liberal democracy and repudiation of Australian institutions imports a jihadist logic that prizes confrontation over coexistence.

Caught between that reality, a commitment to an ill-defined, entirely ahistorical right to protest and the High Court’s ever-changing jurisprudence, governments have struggled to respond.

Although circumstances are nowhere near as dire, historian Detlev Peukert’s judgment of the Weimar Republic’s failure to master street violence rings shockingly true: The republic oscillated between impotence and over-reaction: either constitutional scruples paralysed it, or emergency powers hollowed out its legitimacy.

That is precisely where we now stand — for here too, as with the shibboleths of multiculturalism and of Indigenous self-determination, we remain in thrall to the spent inheritance of a vanished age.

In the end, every liberal democracy, if it is to endure, must give its enemies enough rope to hang themselves — but not enough to hang others. Striking that balance demands a cold, hard view of the world as it is. We have adamantly refused to take it. Unless we open our eyes, it is only a matter of time before we are swinging in the wind.