Dan Batten in the Oz reports: Through my time with the Victoria set-up, I'm well aware of the MLC’s growth and the Unicorns' ambitions, Peake told the club website.

They've built a consistently strong roster with aggressive openers, classy middle-order batting, and world-class bowling attacks. I'm excited to be a part of a successful tournament this summer, as we aim to land our first championship at the Oakland Coliseum.

The Geelong young gun joins his Renegades coach Cameron White at the Unicorns, with White named as their new coach in January.

Having seen Peake’s talents first-hand, White believes he can help them win the title.

Bringing in a player of Ollie’s potential to the Unicorns is a huge boost to our Championship hopes for this season, White said.

His form and experience as Australia’s age-grade captain and in the last BBL show he has what it takes in terms of building an innings and boundary-hitting prowess. I look forward to working with him in the coming months.

The Unicorns have had a partnership with Cricket Victoria since the opening season in 2023.

Peake will play alongside Australian internationals Matt Short (captain), Aaron Hardie, Cooper Connolly and Xavier Bartlett and joins Indian great Ravi Ashwin as a new signing.

Former Geelong Cricket Club quick Brody Couch is also part of the Unicorns squad.

Iran could attend talks with the United States in Pakistan if Washington abandons its policy of pressure and threats, a senior Iranian official told Reuters, adding that Tehran rejects negotiations aimed at surrender.

Equities extended declines late in the session after reports that U.S. Vice President JD Vance had called off his trip to Pakistan for peace talks.

Stocks have rallied in recent weeks on the belief that a peace deal could be on the horizon.

There’s two things going on — what is the resolution going to be or the path going to be for Iran, but in the meantime if that wasn't there, you've got really good expectations for earnings coming in and the companies are pretty much reporting that way and the economy is doing fine, said Thomas Martin, senior portfolio manager at GLOBALT Investments in Atlanta.

The wild card is indeed what happens with Iran, and nobody knows, and it’s baffling to me to think that people think that it’s going to be OK.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 293.18 points, or 0.59%, to 49,149.38, the S&P 500 lost 45.13 points, or 0.63%, to 7,064.01 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 144.43 points, or 0.59%, to 24,259.96.

The benchmark S&P index had earlier been up as much as 0.4% on the day.

Earlier economic data from the Commerce Department showed U.S. retail sales increased more than expected in March as the war with Iran boosted gasoline prices and led to a record surge in receipts at service stations.

Retail sales jumped 1.7% last month, the largest rise since March 2025, after an upwardly revised 0.7% gain in February and above the 1.4% estimate of economists polled by Reuters.

Optimism around AI and upbeat earnings have cheered investors, with first-quarter growth expectations of around 14%, according to LSEG data.

J.P. Morgan raised its year-end target for the S&P 500, citing AI and tech-driven earnings, while Amazon said on Monday it will invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, signaling megacap companies are still willing to spend massively on the AI technology. Amazon shares closed up 0.66%.

The S&P 500 energy index rose 1.31% as the sole advancer among the major S&P sectors due to another jump in crude prices on Middle East tensions.

UnitedHealth jumped 7% after the healthcare conglomerate raised its annual profit forecast and beat Wall Street expectations for the first quarter, and was the biggest boost to the Dow, contributing roughly 138 points to the upside.

Apple shares also garnered attention, losing 2.52% after the company said CEO Tim Cook would hand over the reins to longtime hardware boss John Ternus.

Investors were also digesting comments from Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, whose confirmation hearing wrapped up in the Senate on Tuesday.

Warsh said he had made no promises to President Donald Trump about cutting interest rates, as he tried to assure U.S. senators mulling his confirmation to lead the U.S. central bank that he would act independently of the White House while pursuing broad reforms.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis has promised to block Warsh’s confirmation until the Department of Justice ends an investigation into current Fed Chair Jerome Powell that Tillis says threatens the central bank’s independence.

The impasse could affect monetary policy, especially as Trump has vowed to fire Powell if he does not leave when his term ends in May.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 2.67-to-1 ratio on the NYSE and by a 2.53-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.

The S&P 500 posted 50 new 52-week highs and four new lows while the Nasdaq Composite recorded 144 new highs and 62 new lows.

Volume on U.S. exchanges was 18.08 billion shares, compared with the 18.4 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.

Drilling for oil in Australian territory is the equivalent of dropping every last dollar into the dusty arcade claw machine while the entire Labor cabinet cheers go for it!, knowing the whole game is rigged.

When Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen this week said that decisions about whether to drill should be based on the economics and the engineering and if it meets the environmental approvals, then it can happen and should happen, it was as if he had had nothing to do with the economics or the environmental approvals.

Look at the first budget of the Albanese government, which cancelled a swag of grants announced for diesel storage and petroleum drilling and instead decided to fund the Environmental Defenders Office, which then took Beetaloo drilling projects approved by former Resources Minister Keith Pitt to the NT Supreme Court.

A new anti drilling bureaucracy

Last year, they brought in reforms so that businesses need to deliver a net gain for biodiversity, a new bureaucracy in a federal Environmental Protection Agency with the power to issue stop-work orders, and forced abatement of carbon emissions under the guise of a carbon tax masquerading as the Safeguard Mechanism.

Bowen and the rest of the Albanese government, who went on to spend the next four years talking about reducing emissions, know the system has been gamed so much, with everything stacked against any new proponent, only a fool would try.

Bowen blames engineering as the issue. Any drilling must pass those economics and engineering tests, he says. But it wasn't too hard for them to drill in the 1970s in the Bass Strait, one of the world’s most dangerous stretches of water, home to the roaring forties and shipwrecks galore, and its oil production softened Australia’s exposure to the last global petroleum crisis.

Just too difficult in Oz

But, now in 2026, Mr Bowen wants us to believe that drilling is just too difficult in Australia.

Australia’s oceans are apparently scarier than they were 50 years ago. More terrifying than Russian icy seas or the deep swell off the Gulf of Mexico, where some of the deepest oil rigs produce millions of barrels of oil.

In the 1970s, we produced 70% of our own petroleum from local oil and refineries.

Now we rely on imports and there’s no guarantee we'll have fuel past mid-May.

The government measures fuel security by counting empty service stations, even though these aren't the main suppliers for big buyers like farmers or miners.

Zelots making sure we don't drill

It has everything to do with the government, which forced existing wells to be capped, who armed those who oppose petroleum on ideological grounds with taxpayer-funded court cases and who provide minimal transparency in relation to activist groups masquerading as charities.

Zealots staff environmental departments, industry super funds are forced to buy politically correct investments, and geologists find themselves busier with paperwork than getting dirty, forced to deal with both state and federal departments to handle what is a state resource.

Australia’s oil is both attainable and comparable to the best reserves in the world. The biggest impediment is not sub-arctic temperatures or deep oceans, but the government itself. No investor is going to sink billions into the Albanese claw machine for drilling, knowing that they will never win.

One-eyed passion

Bowen insists projects need to stack up environmentally, while disregarding foreign companies dynamiting pristine forests for wind turbines or NSW’s EnergyCo, in its one-eyed passion for building transmission towers spanning thousands of kilometres, no matter how much biodiversity goes under the bulldozer.

The game works for them — they get the prize. If we eased environmental approvals, as we do for transmission lines, sped up payments and granted landowners underground rights, we could produce Australian oil within six months.

Mr Bowen says any development needs to stack up economically but one must ask the question: with crude oil prices surging toward $144 a barrel and domestic fuel security evaporating, how exactly does refusing to develop our own resources make good economic sense?

The game was never meant to be won. It has been rigged to ensure the only people walking away with any plush toy from behind the glass are the ones Mr Bowen has already decided should win.

We have skills, technology and the guts to claim the prize for oil. The only thing we don't have is a government that’s prepared to let us play a fair game.

It’s easier to see the bite in the small towns, on the quieter streets, because when the shop shuts, it doesn't reopen; darkened windows sit as an empty reminder of what used to bring people together between the post office and the IGA.

Another day older and deeper in debt!

Over the coffee machine in one cafe, the owner confides that he thinks his business is done because he can't sell enough lattes and eggs to pay the four-figure power bill; even with the crowd out front, and the line at the till, with good staff and good food, every month he goes deeper into debt.

You see it in statistics from the Australian Securities & Investments Commission which show that 14,722 businesses entered insolvency in the 2025 financial year.

Statistics from the Australian Energy Regulator released this week show that more than 6200 electricity customers were disconnected in the last quarter, with the average account holder owing $2600 at the time of disconnection.

Thousands of businesses are going insolvent, and thousands of people are being disconnected from power.

And they tell us it's betting cheaper

Yet the same bureaucrats tell us power is getting cheaper and assure us renewables will send bills down. Just not before we go out of business.

The smart ones try to get out quickly, listening to their heads rather than their entrepreneurial hearts. They watch their plans fall apart — how they turned a shabby old house into a lively spot for coffee and tea, a place where the lonely or elderly could meet and talk, a bit of sophistication in a town where the only other choice is the pub.

Today’s world, which Defence Minister Richard Marles aptly described in his National Press Club speech as defined by disorder, offers no such consolation.

There is chaos enough, but no sign of the order it is meant to produce. As the crises deepen and the prospects for order recede, prudence has a single meaning: to build the strength required to meet threats whose contours we can dimly discern but whose timing and precise nature remain inherently uncertain.

That imperative goes to the heart of Australia’s defence posture and will frame the debate about the 2026 National Defence Strategy. But a central insight, articulated by Arthur Tange, secretary of the Department of Defence from 1970 to 1979, retains all its force: Until you're talking dollars, you're not talking strategy.

Translating spendings into capability

The issue, however, is not simply how much is spent but whether that spending translates into capability. And on both counts there are grounds for concern.

Defence spending has certainly risen under Labor, though a significant share of the increase results from the AUKUS program the Coalition initiated. But the government’s decision to inflate the headline defence-to-GDP ratio by including pension and veterans' expenditures - items previously excluded - falls well short of clarity and candour.

The effect is far from trivial: the change alone lifts the ratio from just over 2% of GDP to the 2.8% Marles highlighted in his address.

No less important, once the definition is expanded in this way, the additional spending required to reach the government’s 3% target is dramatically reduced to just a further 0.2% of GDP.

No contribution to capability

The issue is not merely one of accounting. Those items were left out for good reasons: however justified they may be on other grounds, they do not directly contribute to military capability.

Including them obscures the fundamental question — whether Australia is allocating sufficient resources to build the forces our strategic circumstances demand.

As for the spending increase Marles announced - of $53bln over the next decade - it largely reflects amounts the government promised some time ago, and whose value has, since then, been significantly eroded by higher than expected inflation.

Nor is there any certainty the increases will actually eventuate.

The forward estimates, which cover the next four years, will include only a quarter of the projected uplift; that implies that the average increase in annual outlays in the subsequent six years must be roughly double that in the forthcoming budget — by which time any greater spending will be worth even less. Long experience suggests that such steeply backloaded promises are more easily made than honoured.

Not closing the freeriding gap

But even if those increases are delivered, they will still do little to narrow the gap between Australia’s defence effort and that of the US — a gap that, rightly or wrongly, fuels American concerns about free-riding.

On a standard, core-defence basis, Australian per capita spending over the forward estimates averages about $2430 a year, up only modestly from $2340. The US already spends around $4290 per person — close to twice as much.

And if the Trump administration’s 2027 defence budget is enacted, US per capita spending would exceed $5710, making the disparity starker still on even the most expansive assumptions about Australia’s own outlays.

Concerns about the efficiency of our spending are, if anything, just as pressing. Some few years ago, Mark Thomson and I surveyed the major reviews of how the Australian Defence Force acquires and maintains its weapons systems.

Regurgitating the malaise

One finding stood out: every review raised concerns remarkably similar, if not identical, to those identified by its predecessors.

As Paul Rizzo put it in his review of naval sustainment, the failures were longstanding, well known to Defence, and the subject of many prior reports.

There have, to be sure, been numerous remedial efforts. But it is difficult ∼ usually impossible ∼ to determine whether they have been effective.

Rarely have reforms been followed by systematic retrospective assessment: the kind of post-mortem that would establish whether the changes worked and, if not, why they failed.

The contrast with the US is instructive. Between 1989 and 2000, the American defence system underwent unprecedented change; in 1995 alone there were 23 major initiatives targeting defence procurement.

Shuffling the bureaucratic placemats

Recognising that the effects would take time to emerge, US policymakers commissioned a comprehensive, bottom-up appraisal in 2009. The results informed, and continue to drive, further rounds of reform.

There have, however, been no appraisals of comparable scale, rigour and transparency in Australia. Instead, having repeatedly shuffled the bureaucratic placemats without genuinely changing the menu, we stagger from acquisition mishap to capability fiasco and back again.

What makes this all the more striking is that our defence establishment has no shortage of senior personnel who might undertake analyses of that kind — indeed, it is remarkably top-heavy.

Here, too, the comparison with the US is telling. Australia has 248 star-ranked officers across a force of roughly 90,000 — one senior officer for every 363 personnel.

Four times the numbwer of officers

The US has around 848 star-ranked officers across 1.3 million active-duty troops — around one for every 1530. On that basis, Australia has roughly 4.2 times as many senior officers per service member as the US.

The contrast extends beyond structure to experience. Almost all serving US generals came up as majors and lieutenant colonels during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, most often accumulating four to six combat tours.

A significant number also commanded brigades or divisions in those theatres, gaining hard-won understanding of operational command.

By contrast, Australian general officers have typically had one or two deployments, measured in months rather than years.

Only those from the special forces approach anything like the combat exposure of their American colleagues. Despite that, Australia’s military senior officers are, by international standards, extraordinarily well paid.

World's highest paid

The Chief of the Defence Force, to take but one example, earns about $1m a year — making the position almost certainly the highest- compensated military chief in the democratic world, with nearly three times the official salary of the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The disparity is even more striking when set against force size: Australia’s CDF earns the equivalent of around $10,340 for every thousand uniformed members of the ADF, compared with $3600 for Canada’s Chief of Defence staff and a mere $320-$380 for the US Chairman — whose salary is spread across a force 15 times larger.

That combination - an outsized upper layer and generous individual remuneration - raises legitimate questions about whether the ADF’s command structure reflects strategic necessity or institutional inertia. And the same questions arise even more acutely about the civilian establishment.

No one could reasonably expect Defence to be a paragon of efficiency: the complexity of its tasks makes it inevitable that there will be a great deal of muddling through.

Just turning up the volume

Yet it is also clear that we could do better. And it is clear too that spending increases, such as those Marles touted, may end up being no more sensible than turning up the volume on a faulty amplifier.

There is a compelling case for greater outlays but they must be accompanied by reforms that go beyond changing administrative labels — something given only token attention in Marles’s address.

It could, of course, be that voters are happy with what they are being given: Pharaonic commitments, made to be forgotten; creative accounting, which dresses a drab reality in gilt and glitter; and a defence establishment, both uniformed and civilian, that marches to its own drum.

But that will do us little good should the evil day dawn. As the curtain of illusion is ripped away, and lives are lost that could have been saved, we may learn, too late, that what we called strength was just expensive stagecraft.