Shedders eat your heart out. Ingham family is building a massive Aldi distribution centre, the size of 15 soccer fields, and twice as tall as its neighbour, the Bradfield airport's main terminal building. It will be central to the German supermarket's network and Aldi will install the latest robotics technology. Investors will be offered the interest in the complete facility, making it the largest individual industrial asset to hit the market. The Ingham family will retain a 50% stake and use the proceeds to back the roll out of more massive warehouses on the overall 182ha site it controls. The Ingham & Co Industrial Estate at 475 Badgerys Creek Road in Bradfield was bought by the Ingham family in the 1960s which was critical to its NSW poultry operations. The site produced over 50.1 million fertilised eggs a year and closed down in 2019, with the land turned to cattle breeding. The late tycoon Bob Ingham sold the Inghams Enterprises poultry operations to private equity firm TPG in 2013 but kept the property development business and 900ha of land across WA, Queensland and NSW. The property business has been transformed into a fully-fledged real estate company with sites in Queensland and WA as well as NSW. Ingham Property Group is now a private family business owned by Bob Ingham's four children: Lyn Ingham, Debbie Kepitis, Robby Ingham and John Ingham. The Aldi project is the first element of the overall estate. The first stage consolidated three normal-sized industrial lots to make a 22ha footprint for Aldi's new 87,000sq m NSW Automated Distribution Centre. The building will be over a half kilometre long and 47.5m high. — Ben Wilmot in the Daily Telegraph today.
Technology is driving the bus
Wall Street’s main indexes closed more than 1% higher on Wednesday, bouncing back from a three-day selloff with a boost in sentiment from technology and chip stocks, which rose ahead of Nvidia’s quarterly results, Reuters reports on yesterday's website. [click to continue reading]
Investors will look to the latest report from Nvidia, the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker and the world’s most highly valued company, for reassurance that the appetite for spending on AI remains strong enough to support lofty valuations across the technology sector.
The Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index rallied sharply ahead of the report with big gainers including Astera Labs and ARM Holdings .
Technology is driving the bus again today, and the AI theme. We've swapped back from yesterday’s concerns about rising rates and potential inflation and are leaning more into the all-things-AI story,
said Carol Schleif, chief market strategist at BMO Private Wealth in Minneapolis. It’s actually a little bit unusual because you would expect the market to sit pretty quiet waiting for Nvidia’s results later today. But there’s clearly a lot of optimism.
The lack of a resolution to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran had sent U.S. indexes lower in the last three days as investors worried that elevated oil prices would boost inflation enough to lead the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.
On Wednesday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson said the exchange of messages between Iran and the U.S. has continued. President Donald Trump said negotiations with Iran were in the final stages and that the U.S. may have to attack Iran even harder but would wait and see if they can reach a deal.
While investors are still monitoring fluctuating energy prices and inflation, Schleif said they really want to look beyond what’s going on in the Middle East
and focus on the potential of AI.
Also supporting stocks, the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield eased on Wednesday after rising for three straight days and touching a 16-month high.
According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 gained 79.06 points, or 1.08%, to end at 7,432.67 points, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 398.33 points, or 1.54%, to 26,269.04. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 647.44 points, or 1.31%, to 50,011.32.
Stocks gradually added to gains following the release of minutes from the Federal Reserve’s last meeting, which showed more officials saying the central bank should lay the groundwork for a possible rate hike. Bets for a Fed rate hike in December were choppy after the meeting and recently showing a 36.8% probability, down from 42% on Tuesday, according to the latest data from CME Group’s FedWatch, opens new tab tool.
Citing uncertainty around issues such as oil prices, tariffs and AI, Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at Annex Wealth Management, said after the minutes that it’s hard to take any of their forward guidance as more than just mere guesswork.
Among the 11 major S&P 500 sectors, big gainers included consumer discretionary and technology. On the flip side, energy dropped with oil prices.
Consumer staples slipped with pressure from Target. Shares in the retailer declined after it warned of a challenging macroeconomic backdrop even as it doubled its annual sales growth forecast.
Falling oil prices boosted sentiment around airline stocks with Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Alaska Air advancing.
Intuit shares declined after Reuters, citing an internal memo, reported that the company is laying off about 3000 employees.
NEWS:
🎪
Albo team
devoid of any
business
acumen
It's been a common complaint since Jim Chalmers delivered last Tuesday's federal budget: this government doesn't get the private sector, reports The Australian today's website.
[click to read more]
That blind spot, goes the argument, is why Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his Treasurer and the team seem to be surprised by the breadth of anger about its proposed taxation changes, particularly its capital gains tax hike.
There’s not anyone with business experience around the cabinet table,
one industry figure grumbled to The Australian's Margin Call column.
Is that criticism fair?
In an effort to weigh the charge, Margin Call has done an investigation into the ASIC company records of the Albanese government’s Expenditure Review Committee, the key brains for the federal budget.
The results are mostly what you would expect from a group of people who are, almost to a person, purebred creatures of the Labor Party, public service and trades union movement.
Start with the chair of the ERC, the Prime Minister. Over his 63 years he has had two directorships: for a couple of years as a member of the board of NRL club the South Sydney Rabbitohs and, before that, a directorship of a radio station (2HD), which was owned by the Labor Party.
That’s perhaps more corporate experience than some might expect from our PM, who before entering the parliament in 1996 worked as a Labor Party machine man and staffer.
His deputy Prime Minister, Richard Marles, has three company entries, all directorships related to his previous employers, the Transport Workers Union and Australian Council of Trade Unions.
That’s two more directorships than Treasurer Chalmers whose single entry was on the board of the Chifley Research Centre, the Labor Party’s official think tank, of which he was briefly the executive director before entering parliament in 2013. Before that, today’s Treasurer worked for the ALP’s national machine and as a staffer for multiple Labor politicians, culminating in his lengthy stint in Wayne Swan’s office during the Rudd-Gillard era.
The combined records of three of the PM’s top sources of advice, Foreign Affairs minister Penny Wong, Finance minister Katy Gallagher and Health Minister Mark Butler, are almost entirely unblemished with the private sector.
Although, let the record show that Wong was employed as a lawyer at Duncan and Hannon before leaving to work for the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (also Butler’s former employer). Gallagher did her pre-parliament apprenticeship at the public service’s union, the Community and Public Sector Union.
After a lengthy stint in the public service, Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development Catherine King worked for about two years at KPMG in its consulting division until parliament beckoned in 2001. Her office declined to clarify whether that consulting work was for the public sector (we suspect so) or the top end of town
.
Still more jarring, Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino was a director of a board that had nothing to do with the union movement or the Labor Party. Even more heretically for the Labor man, it was called Market Beacon Pty Ltd. It seems to have been in operation while Mulino ∼ who has a PhD from Yale in economics ∼ was doing work for consultancy Pottinger. His office declined to comment on the company.
Is private sector work history a taboo topic for members of the Albanese government ERC?
The Market Beacon also counted Paul Stokes as a director, but was deregistered in 2014 when Mulino went into Victorian state politics before jumping into the federal arena in 2019.
Why does any of this matter? Well, some might say it points to a uniformity of experience at the peak of this government that makes it prone to either dismissing, or entirely disregarding, the views of the private sector.
One of the most fascinating features of this past week is who is now making those criticisms. Business and industry associations have been whining about that alleged trait of the Albanese government for years.
Criticism by Kevin Rudd’s former press secretary, Lachlan Harris, on the government’s proposed capital gains tax change show this budget is something new.
Harris, an unusually entrepreneurial figure in the Labor tribe, told the Sydney Morning Herald the capital gains tax hike would make it much, much harder for young Australians to start businesses, to work in small businesses
.
This is not just for tech start-ups in Surry Hills: this is businesses in Box Hill and Castle Hill,
he said in surely the most devastating line anyone has said about this budget.
I really would urge the PM and treasurer (to) consider carefully whether this policy needs to be significantly adjusted so that a lot more consultation can occur over a long period of time,
he added.
The word from the PMO is that the government plans to push the measures through the parliament (with the Greens backing in the Senate) as fast as possible. The hope is that the campaign will then peter out.
Perhaps. Although viral memes of the PM as Australia’s omnipresent silent business partner suggests the government’s private sector problem might not be so easily fixed.
LOCAL CHATTER:
NEWS:
🚛
Fuel costs
skrocket
for truckies
Sharon Middleton’s family trucking business now spends $315,000 weekly on fuel after costs doubled virtually overnight, revealing the extreme toll of recent price shocks, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reports today.
Sharon Middleton, who runs Whiteline Transport with her husband Bob, has seen the weekly diesel bill jump by almost $120k since fuel prices spiked.
The national trucking company, which employs 60 people and operates 30 trucks between Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, is now spending about $315k a week to keep its fleet on the road.
Our fuel spend overall has doubled — it’s been a massive expense and it happened so quickly we barely had any time to react,
the 64-year-old said.
At first, we were trying to work out whether the fuel crisis (brought on by the Iran War) was real, whether it would last long term and what the actual cost impact would be.
We were speaking to multiple fuel companies to see how they were going to handle it, but while all that was happening, the pump was still ticking over, the dollars kept rising and we were left with massive fuel bills.
Cashflow pressures, with more frequent supplier payments required as credit limits are reached sooner, have also hit hard. And some remote fuel stops Whiteline relies on are short on supply.
When you're in the middle of the Nullarbor and get to a location with no fuel, it’s not like you're driving a car and can just do a U-turn,
she said. You've got 100 tonnes and multiple trailers.
Ms Middleton said the nearly 50-year-old business, which transports staples like parcel freight, building products and groceries, had not faced such pressure since the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 global fuel shocks.
All of us in trucking find it hard to understand why there’s such a difference in price between petrol and diesel at the pumps,
she said, noting her fleet has been paying more than $4 a litre for diesel in some remote locations.
We've seen a significant drop in petrol prices, but diesel hasn't come down anywhere near what it should.
She called on the government to strengthen Australia’s fuel security.
At the very least, we need to ensure fuel security and make sure we've got ample supply,
she said.
[click the intro to return other stories]
�
Massive
wakeup call
… anybody
listening?
The global fuel shock has become a massive wake-up call
for Australia to undertake an urgent change to stop soaring energy prices reports the news.com.au website today. [click to read more]
The global fuel shock is a massive wake-up call
for Australia to back our rich natural resources to deliver lower-cost, reliable energy supplies for families and businesses, industry leaders say.
They warn declining domestic crude oil production and refinery closures have left the nation exposed by the Middle East conflict, with activism blocking efforts to explore and develop rich oil, gas and coal resources.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive officer Tania Constable said governments needed to listen to families and businesses suffering from high energy prices, instead of noisy foreign-funded activists who are sabotaging supply and driving prices up".
She urged governments to get the exploration drills running across the nation", singling out the Great Australian Bight and Queensland’s Taroom Trough - described as a sea of oil
by Premier David Crisafulli.
Ms Constable said the nation was likely to remain heavily dependent on liquid fuels until cost-effective, reliable electrification became a reality - particularly in job-creating regional industries like mining, long-haul trucking and farming.
The current situation is a massive wake up call for Australia to get serious about increasing lower-cost, reliable energy supply for mining, other businesses and households,
she said.
Australia needs patriotic policies to back in its natural wealth, great industries, strong innovative capabilities and our can-do attitude.
This starts with pragmatic technology-neutral policies so we can use the rich bounty of Australian resources and our industrial ingenuity for national benefit.
Ms Constable listed measures to make Australia less reliant on foreign oil, including a technology-neutral approach
to fast-track coal, oil and gas projects in the same way as critical minerals or metals ventures.
She urged taking the handcuffs off energy exploration and development
by using artificial intelligence to accelerate approval processes, plus accrediting states and territories to issue key decisions.
Billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart said Australia urgently needed a return to commonsense energy and fuel policy", saying the nation was blessed with enormous natural resources
yet had some of the highest energy prices in the developed world".
Increasingly we have become one of the hardest countries to build production, the record of our massive decline from almost entirely fuel sufficient, to needing to import approximately 96 per cent of our requirements, and refineries closed too, speaks for itself,
Mrs Rinehart said.
Australia is unable to defend itself without a secure fuel and electricity supply, immediately building a large fuel reserve is essential.
Oil and gas explorer and producer Beach Energy’s chief executive officer, Brett Woods, said the Back Australia campaign came at a critical time as we navigate global energy supply threats".
It is vital that domestic producers, who supply up to three-quarters of the east coast market demand, be supported by a gas policy framework that encourages domestic exploration, development, and production,
he said.
Westpac Institutional Bank chief executive Nell Hutton said small and agricultural businesses with less financial buffers were already finding things a bit tough
during the oil shock.
The challenge is how long it will take before supply routes normalise. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to open fully today, it would take at least a few weeks for those supply lines to normalise,
she said.
[click the intro to return to front page]
🎭
Rough sleepers
rough choices
Rough sleepers are in public, but the public look away. This Adelaide program could provide an answer. Street Connect allows people to flag the location of a rough sleeper, triggering an outreach worker to visit them writes The Guardian website. [click to read the rest of the story].
On a cold, bright autumn morning in the Adelaide parklands, curious dogs and mostly incurious humans pass by tents half-hidden in bushes.
After Bikram Lama ∼ the birdman
of Sydney ∼ died last year, thousands of people streamed past his body, oblivious.
People walk past those sleeping rough every day, in every Australian city, and increasingly in regional areas.
Rough sleepers are both the most visible and the most invisible homeless people. They're in public but the public avert their eyes.
A program in Adelaide is helping rough sleepers be seen. Locals who spot them can make a notification on a website called Street Connect by dropping a pin on a map, along with details of the person spotted.
That triggers outreach workers to check on them.
The Toward Home Alliance team ∼ a complicated, compassionate, chronically under-resourced network of outreach services ∼ searches the city in a grid, adding extra checks wherever those pins are dropped.
They leave water, protein bars, Band-Aids and tampons and ask rough sleepers what else they need. They know people’s names and their backstories.
Some they check in on are keen for a chat, others not so much.
Street Connect is a way for the community to be able to help inform us, and direct us to areas of concern that we're not seeing
, says Toward Home’s senior manager, Shaya Nettle.
It’s also really helpful for identifying and responding to community hotspots. It ensures we're not missing things.
Outreach workers check the location of every dropped pin within 12 hours, but Nettle says people should still call emergency services if there’s a critical situation.
But she says people to be mindful of the fine line between checking in on someone and respecting their space. If a person is with their own tent or bedding, that is still their home.
That’s their private space,
she says. But if you're genuinely concerned … just say 'hey, I just want to check you're OK'.
We'll often call out 'hello, are you OK?' They'll respond with a yes or a movement or a 'hello' or a 'leave me alone' or a wave, and that’s OK.
She says it is common for homeless people to feel invisible. And they often become conditioned to making themselves invisible … trying to diminish their presence or their exposure,
she says.
Any level of normalising them in a human, daily experience is really important.
That starts with eye contact, a hello. If you're going to get a coffee anyway, offer them one.
Nettle describes homeless services as the emergency department of the community, echoing the way hospital bed block
at the end of patients' visits ripples all the way down to the ED.
Cost of living and interest rate pressures lead to a really highly contested
private rental market, increasing pressure on community and public housing.
People are then stuck for longer in transitional care and crisis accommodation and stuck longer sleeping rough.
People might slip into homelessness because of family and domestic violence, drug and alcohol issues, mental illness, job loss, rent increases or even relocating for a different job and being unable to find somewhere to live.
[click the intro to return to front page]
COMMENT:
Murrurundi Times news site with items covering national news and Upper Hunter region including the township of Murrurundi
Federal Court has ruled against a women-only app founder in a landmark transgender discrimination case, forcing her to pay compensation and sparking fears about women’s rights, writes Peta Credlin in the Sunday Telegraph today. [click to read more]
On Friday afternoon, as I sat down to work on this column, I honestly didn't know where to focus first.
Was the biggest issue the loss of integrity in our public life, after the Prime Minister ("my word is my bond") admitted saying 50 times he would not change any of the rules around investment properties but did it anyway?
Or was it the reality, confirmed in the budget papers, that under Labor’s record high immigration, Australia will hit 30 million people by 2030, despite nowhere near enough housing for those here now? Or was it the revelation that Labor has just brought in death duties by stealth?
Giggle v Tickle
As I debated all of this, the Federal Court handed down its decision in the long-running Giggle v Tickle case, where Sall Grover, a woman and founder of a women’s online networking app (called Giggle For Girls) was accused of discrimination against a transgender woman, the biologically male Roxanne Tickle, who sought to join the women-only app.
In a devastating blow for the rights of women and girls in this country, the court rejected scientific fact and declared that sex was more than biology (it isn't), and so Grover lost and now owes compensation to Tickle.
The fact that the taxpayer-funded Human Rights Commission was a part of this legal action to deny all women our biological rights is appalling. The fact that Grover now has to rely on donations from ordinary people to defend rights that should not need defending says everything about the state of woke policy and activist courts in Australia.
But what’s perhaps most galling of all is that we are only in this position of denying chromosomal reality because Julia Gillard, ironically the first female prime minister, stripped the word woman
from the sex discrimination act. Before then, this case would never have got to court.
Anyone for any toilet
But what this latest decision does (and let’s hope it gets overturned when Sall Grover heads to the High Court), is that women’s sport, toilets, access to medical services, schools, clubs, domestic violence shelters, prisons ∼ the whole box and dice ∼ are open slather to any man who declares he is a woman.
Gender used to be what you called yourself, sex is what XY or XX made you. Not any more, thanks to this decision. And Gillard too, who changed the law just TWO DAYS before she was rolled by Kevin Rudd in June 2013 — how dare she lecture anyone on misogyny.
But on Friday afternoon, the bad news kept coming.
To add Labor insult to Labor injury, dropped out when they hoped no-one was watching was news from the Victorian government that not only was Daniel Andrews going to get a bronze statue in his honour but that it was already being made. You can't make this stuff up, can you?
In memory of stupidity
Given Victoria has a daily interest bill of $24 million, a $130,000 statue is a rounding-error but it’s the attempt to force Victorians to honour the man who locked them up for two years, ruined businesses, blew out debt, kowtowed to China, dialled up woke and made the once-proud state an international laughing stock that’s tipped people over the edge.
Am I the only one asking how the heck did we get here?
And, more to the point, how do we turn it around or, God forbid, is it even possible?
Never trust any leader again
If Albanese is allowed to get away with his massive budget lie, then we will never be able to trust any leader again. And if we can't ask questions before an election and base our decisions on what they tell us and hold them to it, then democracy is dead.
For all of Labor’s talk about intergenerational equity, the budget hits younger Australians the hardest. The PM says breaking his word on negative gearing is about them, but how can it be when they will never be able to use negatively gearing (as he has) to build up a nest egg but those doing it now can keep it up?
Buy a new-build property instead, Labor tells investors. But again, how’s that fair for young people given this is what they typically buy as a first home and, now, they're going to face even more competition as investors move in? Even Labor’s own budget papers admit that these changes will likely increase rents (as they did in the Keating era before he was forced to back down) and do little to increase the stock of available homes.
And then there’s the tax on aspiration (CGT changes) before they get you from the grave (the hit on trusts).
Liberal backbone
Thankfully, the Liberals have finally found a bit of policy backbone, and a bit of political mongrel.
Angus Taylor’s reply to Labor’s budget speech felt like the start of the Coalition getting its mojo back. He made the bold move to end bracket creep once and for all by indexing income tax thresholds, meaning low- and middle-income earners won't get punished for getting ahead. On migration, he went for the jugular and landed a bullseye if the hyperventilating from Labor MPs is any guide. The PM in particular was hysterical, declaring it was un-Australian to divide people between those who are migrant and those who are not.
That is not what Taylor did. He divided them between Australian citizen and non-citizen and said that, under the Coalition, only citizens would get access to the pension, the dole, the NDIS and other welfare.
Help for no commitment
Now what is unfair about that? Why should your taxes carry people who have made no formal commitment to this country? Right now, people can live here for decades, take the money and never pledge loyalty to Australia and its people. Taylor says not any more.
Add in the Treasurer’s announcement of a new Working Australians Tax Offset (a pollster-named handout if ever there was one) of $250 a year (or $4.80 a week) and rightly people are angry. In his budget speech, Jim Chalmers called his WATO meaningful
but what’s meaningful about 68 cents a day when the cost of everything has skyrocketed? It’s not meaningful, it’s insulting.
(And I might add, it’s still not even the $275 Albanese promised off their power bills).
Albo's right for a change
Anthony Albanese said that this budget is full of Labor values
and it is — the socialist values
that attack the fair-go, break trust, and hit middle Australia even harder
For the Liberals, there could be no better ground than this to fight Labor.
If the Coalition holds its nerve and campaigns every day like its life depends on it (because, frankly, it does) then this budget could well be the beginning of the end for the Albanese government.
But only if they work, day and night, to take the fight up to Labor. Labor is the target, not each other and not One Nation.
THUMBS UP
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price: Her emotional, fighting speech in the Senate is a must-watch as she demanded culture
takes a back seat to better protect Aboriginal children.
THUMBS DOWN
Military witch hunt: Another $43m in Labor’s budget to investigate soldiers on top of the $350m that the Brereton process has cost taxpayers already.
Murrurundi Times news site with items covering national news and Upper Hunter region including the township of Murrurundi
"Promises and pie-crust," Jonathan Swift wrote in 1738, "are made to be broken." Vladimir Lenin, who liked the line, treated it as a slogan. Anthony Albanese treats it as a principle, Henry Ergas points out in the The Australian today. [click to read more]
The Prime Minister’s defence for repudiating assurances he had insistently reiterated ∼ indeed, for the 50th time
∼ is that Australia faces a crisis of intergenerational equity. But as Jonathan Pincus and I demonstrated on these pages, the claim is analytically incoherent and empirically threadbare. Nor, even if there were such inequities, would that justify the abrupt abandonment of repeatedly affirmed undertakings.
Serious governments seek democratic consent for contentious measures they had previously assured voters they would not introduce. John Howard did so with the GST: having ruled it out, he reversed openly, took it to the 1998 election, and proceeded only on the mandate he won there.
Greatest tax take in commonwealth history
The reason the Albanese government has not followed suit is neither urgency nor necessity. It is fear: fear that despite the opposition’s parlous state, voters would punish a government that has spent freely, governed carelessly and is now poised to extract the greatest tax take in commonwealth history.
The budget’s own numbers make the reality plain. Even accepting Treasury’s assumptions, the budget measures will increase housing supply over the next decade by less than one-third of 1%, while housing demand is likely to rise more than 15 times as quickly. This is not serious economic reform. It is a revenue grab wrapped in the language of moral urgency.
Corroding public trust
The inevitable result of that gap between political rhetoric and political practice is to corrode public trust. Trust, after all, is not a natural disposition; it is a social achievement, slowly accumulated and quickly squandered.
The word itself reveals the point. The Old English treow
lies behind both truth
and trust
; since at least the 15th century, to trust
someone has meant to believe that when he says what he will do, he speaks truthfully. Governments can sustain trust only by being truthful and trustworthy — and the institutional form through which those virtues manifest themselves is the promise.
A promise is what binds words to conduct, declarations to action, and electoral consent to subsequent government. Governments owe fidelity to their promises not merely for their own political advantage; they owe it because a healthy democratic life depends upon citizens being able to assume and assess fidelity to public commitments.
Governments need to mean what they say
The credibility of promises is also more broadly crucial to the viability of a free society, whose very essence is that people must order their lives amid continual uncertainty. Promises, including the promise that laws will not be changed capriciously, are what give individuals, families and businesses stable ground on which to plan. As Hannah Arendt wisely observed, they build islands of predictability
in the ocean of uncertainty
— islands that matter most to those with the fewest resources to absorb sudden policy shocks.
A young couple relying on an investment property to finance homeownership, a retiree dependent on hard-earned savings, a small business weighing expansion: all rely on governments meaning what they say.
But promises can only fulfil that stabilising role because they belong to the grammar of commitment: to the forms of obligation whose value lies in their relative insulation from changing convenience. A promise abandoned the moment it becomes burdensome is worth no more than the loyalty that melts away at the first sign of difficulty.
The preservation of credible public commitments is especially vital in Australia, where suspicion of the political process long predates contemporary disenchantment. Distrust of politicians was, as John Hirst emphasised, constitutive of the colonial polity itself. The men who entered politics were not thought fit to be trusted - and despite outstanding exceptions, many weren't.
Pioneering scholars of mass behaviour
The endless Australian debate over the accountability of parliamentarians reflected that suspicion. Both the Burkean trustee ∼ who is guided only by the light of his own judgment ∼ and the instructed delegate had their advocates. But it was the latter conception, entrenched by the emerging Labor Party, that ultimately prevailed. Labor parliamentarians were to be mere instruments: controlled by the ALP’s extra-parliamentary wing, bound by a pledge to uphold the platform and required to submit to caucus discipline on pain of political excommunication.
The Australian mass party thus emerged, from the beginning, as an institutional response to distrust: a mechanism designed less to cultivate confidence in politicians than to contain the risks they posed once elected. And Australian voters learned to scrutinise the distance between promise and performance with an intensity rare in comparable democracies. When that gap widened too far, confidence collapsed.
It is against this background that the events of the past three years must be seen. The Albanese government’s record on the central tax promises of two successive elections ∼ stage three, superannuation, and now negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount ∼ does not just constitute a litany of broken commitments; it constitutes the accelerated dismantling of an already tarnished public asset.
The predictable effect is an even more accelerated crisis of political representation. The four-decade arc from 1975’s 4% third-party vote to 2025’s 34% highlights its seemingly inexorable progression.
Withdrawing faithfulness
Those voters who have spurned the major parties are not ideological partisans of any third force; they are observant citizens who, having grasped what the parties no longer deliver, exercise the only sanction the system leaves them. Unable to meaningfully demand or expect faithfulness to a program from parties whose programs have ceased to bind, they withdraw their own faithfulness from those parties altogether.
The alternatives may not be especially attractive nor particularly unifying — but negative coalitions, aimed at punishing a detested foe, form more easily than positive ones precisely because they require only shared aversion rather than common aspiration. In these conditions, anti-system parties flourish, their capacity to aggregate voters a symptom not of democratic renewal but of democratic exhaustion.
To make things worse, governments confronted by a perpetually seething electorate are naturally tempted to govern through stealth and administrative manoeuvre, further impairing the trust whose disappearance produced the crisis of representation in the first place. And when a real, rather than confected, emergency arrives, they discover they can no longer summon the loyalties and willingness to sacrifice on which the survival of free societies ultimately depends.
Public language becomes tactical
No society can govern itself for long on the assumption that public language is merely tactical. Governments that repeatedly break faith with the electorate may secure temporary advantages. But they do so by undermining the confidence that policies announced today will survive long enough to shape behaviour tomorrow. As that confidence erodes, both the effectiveness of public policy and force of democratic authority unravel.
That is the deeper significance of the Albanese government’s conduct. It is not merely bad policy. It is the depletion of a civic inheritance that free societies squander far more easily than they rebuild. Yes, promises can be cracked like pie crusts. But in the end, public trust cracks with them. Lenin, sheltered by brutal authoritarianism, never had to learn that lesson. With the fabric of our democracy rapidly fraying, it is high time Anthony Albanese did.
FEATURE:
Created by DiDa - http://www.faico.net/dida/
Ω
Some years ago, I was involved in a positive change in Australian sport that has parallels with the issues before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
Skinning
the
cat!
Frank Lowy in The Australian
T
hrough this change, a form of social cohesion was achieved. I believe this is a concrete example of how ethnic divisiveness was transformed into loyalty to Australia. It shows how social change can take effect and bind a community.
This submission is made in the hope that the commission may find something useful in the method my team and I used to achieve this goal.
I want to emphasise that I am not equating racial aggression in a sports stadium with nationwide antisemitism. The two are not comparable.
Rather, I am sharing the architecture of a cultural shift that took place in soccer, said to be the most popular sport on Earth. In Australia, it is the most popular and fastest-growing sport, with more than 1.9 million participants nationwide, according to Football Australia’s 2024 National Participation Report.
Australians have long loved soccer but historically this failed to translate into professional organisation, largely because of competition from other football codes, poor administration, financial instability and blatant ethnic factionalism.
In the Australia of the 1950s and 1960s, soccer was plagued by ethnic rivalries. It was a period of high migration and every week ethnic teams settled old scores they had imported from countries once at war with one another in Europe.
Winning hearts and minds
Passion was high and rioting was common. Players often needed protection, and in extreme cases — such as supporters running on to the field with iron bars — armed police had to separate the sides. As a code, soccer was fragmented and was not a mainstream sport. Sometimes announcements were in foreign languages and, generally, Australian families tended to stay away.
For decades, serious but unsuccessful attempts were made to de-ethnicise the game. My team finally achieved this because we had the cultural confidence to pull the ethnic factions into the mainstream.
Our success did not come from the use of hard power alone, by forcing change with rules and regulations. Soft power ∼ winning the hearts of the soccer community and inspiring pride in being Australian ∼ was crucial too.
Dislike of Jews
Looking back, I think it may be possible to work respectfully and diligently to bring communities that strongly express antisemitism ∼ and other forms of racism ∼ into the mainstream to share Australian values.
In soccer, we didn't try to take people’s ethnic identity away; we worked to stop the expression of ethnic conflict in public. Similarly, it is probably not possible to eradicate a dislike of Jews, but it is possible to help people understand why, in Australian society, the public outpouring of this aversion is not right.
The social licence that has allowed for the open expression of anti-Jewish sentiment needs to be reworked. If this helps to curb antisemitism, it will likely be useful in curbing other forms of racism in Australia.
While my sons reported some antisemitism during their school days, I encountered very little in my first decades in business. When it did emerge, I confronted it directly and suffered no hardship as a result. Through my leadership positions in the Jewish community, I had a fair idea of the level of antisemitism in the country and it seemed low, although it did occasionally flare.
Openly celebrate massacre
When antisemitism burst on to the forecourt of Sydney’s Opera House on October 9, 2023, I was astonished. Australians were openly celebrating a massacre. Amplified by the powerful engine of social media, a new entitlement had emerged. People seemed not to have understood the privilege of free speech and freely abused it.
From the 1960s through the 1990s, attempts to de-ethnicise the game did not have lasting effect and in 2003, prime minister John Howard asked me to professionalise the sport.
It was dysfunctional and insolvent, with no international presence. For this task, I had several advantages, including:
● Strong government support, funding and leadership;
● In turn, this led to people of high standing with expertise in finance, law, government relations, sports governance, marketing and event management to join me, pro bono, to help;
● In turn, generous sponsorship from big business followed, so did broadcasting deals;
● Early generations of compatriots had passed, leaving children and grandchildren more amenable to change.
Creating a new structure
We needed to create a new structure and rally people to our cause. Rules-based change cannot have the intended impact without wide social and cultural acceptance. The Australian football family had three codes; rugby league, rugby union and Australian rules. We rebranded soccer as "football" and it became the fourth.
Then we began changing the game in three domains:
● In Australia;
● On the international stage;
● Within the global system of football confederations.
As it happened, each change impacted the next, creating a ripple effect.
Previously, in Australia, there had been a push towards replacing ethnic names with regional ones. We built on this and removed all trace of ethnicity for the new top league. There would be eight teams in the A-League, each carrying the name of a major city.
The teams, such as Brisbane Roar and Perth Glory, created their own character and regalia. Each team had players from a mix of backgrounds and were miniature versions of multicultural Australia. Their fans of all ethnicities entered though the same gate.
Wogball vanished
The "wogball" tag vanished and more teams were established. While ethnic affiliations remained in lower leagues, the main league was driven by high-spirited, inter-city tribalism. Acceptance of this increased exponentially as the Socceroos limbered up for the World Cup.
We had not been seen on the international stage for more than 30 years and we focused intensely on preparing them. In 2005, as they inched their way towards qualification, the football community grew increasingly engaged. When the Socceroos qualified, the country went wild.
In turn, this energised our next strategic move. For years, Australia had tried to leave the small Oceania Football Confederation and join the powerful Asian Football Confederation, but its door remained closed. After strong representation, in January 2006, it opened and Australia was welcomed into Asia.
Our world presence improved as did the quality of competition. The cumulative effect of all the changes shifted the perception of Australian football. Its Australian identity was baked in. We had achieved cohesion and professionalised the sport.
At every positive point, we had harnessed the enthusiasm to keep the vision alive. We'd used advertising, marketing, merchandise, celebrity personalities, events, international matches, interviews, media ∼ whatever we could ∼ to embrace and inspire the community.
OVERSEAS:
Three men were killed yesterday outside a San Diego mosque and two suspected shooters ∼ both teenagers ∼ were found dead in a nearby car along with anti-Islamic writing, officials said. Both suspects appeared to have shot themselves.
Two hours before the shooting, the mother of one suspect warned the police that her teenage son was suicidal and had gone missing with a companion, along with her vehicle and several weapons. The call set off a frantic, but ultimately unsuccessful, effort to find them. One of the victims was a security guard who may have prevented a more deadly massacre by intervening, the authorities said.
Politics
San Sifton writes in The New York Times history tells us that the party in power generally loses congressional seats in midterm elections. Yesterday's New York Times/Siena poll showed that Democrats should be in a good position to pick some up. Democrats had an 11-point lead when registered voters were asked which party's candidate they would support for Congress — well ahead of where voters ranked Democrats earlier in this cycle, writes Nate Cohn, our chief political analyst. Republicans hold narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate. Democrats need to gain three seats in the House and four seats in the Senate to flip control of Congress. And polling is an important bellwether for their chances. For Democrats in particular, they pose a problem. A month ago, the party expected a blue wave. Then the Supreme Court said a new congressional map in Louisiana, drawn to protect Black representation in Congress, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. After that, Republican-led states across the South went to work. Louisiana is crafting a new map. Florida drew one aimed at getting rid of four seats that leaned toward Democrats. Tennessee designed one that would give Republicans an additional seat. Voters in California and Virginia opted to go in the other direction, authorizing their leaders to draw maps that would create new Democratic seats. The Supreme Court in Virginia threw out that state's measure ∼ and four seats for the left ∼ early this month. One race to watch closely today is the Republican primary in Kentucky, where Representative Thomas Massie, who has clashed with President Trump, is trying to keep his seat against Ed Gallrein, a challenger backed by the president. Kentucky has an unpredictable political landscape.It's a deep-red state with a Democratic governor. One of its senators is an insider's insider, Mitch McConnell, who is retiring. The other is Rand Paul, an outsider libertarian.
Created by DiDa - http://www.faico.net/dida/
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The tik-toks have it
At Milan Design Week, just following Watches and Wonders, Jaeger-LeCoultre staged The Perpetual Timekeeper, a sprawling two-floor exhibition dedicated not to wristwatches, but to Atmos clocks-the mysterious, glass-encased objects that have quietly occupied one of the most intriguing corners of the maison's history since 1928. ROBB Report.
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Pollocks's $152m sale
The second-highest price Christie's registered in the Newhouse collection was $107.6 million for Constantin Brâncusi's gilt-bronze bust Danaïde (above), which sold on just one bid. This makes it the second most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction after Alberto Giacometti's $141 million Pointing Man. Newhouse bought the bust in 2002 at Christie's for a then-record $18.2 million. The Jackson Pollock's Number 7A, 1948, was the top seller at $152m.
The Murrurundi Times is owned, compiled and written by Des Dugan. Email
Wall Street’s main indexes closed more than 1% higher on Wednesday, bouncing back from a three-day selloff with a boost in sentiment from technology and chip stocks, which rose ahead of Nvidia’s quarterly results, Reuters reports on yesterday's website. [click to continue reading]
Investors will look to the latest report from Nvidia, the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker and the world’s most highly valued company, for reassurance that the appetite for spending on AI remains strong enough to support lofty valuations across the technology sector.
The Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index rallied sharply ahead of the report with big gainers including Astera Labs and ARM Holdings .
Technology is driving the bus again today, and the AI theme. We've swapped back from yesterday’s concerns about rising rates and potential inflation and are leaning more into the all-things-AI story,
said Carol Schleif, chief market strategist at BMO Private Wealth in Minneapolis. It’s actually a little bit unusual because you would expect the market to sit pretty quiet waiting for Nvidia’s results later today. But there’s clearly a lot of optimism.
The lack of a resolution to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran had sent U.S. indexes lower in the last three days as investors worried that elevated oil prices would boost inflation enough to lead the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.
On Wednesday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson said the exchange of messages between Iran and the U.S. has continued. President Donald Trump said negotiations with Iran were in the final stages and that the U.S. may have to attack Iran even harder but would wait and see if they can reach a deal.
While investors are still monitoring fluctuating energy prices and inflation, Schleif said they really want to look beyond what’s going on in the Middle East
and focus on the potential of AI.
Also supporting stocks, the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield eased on Wednesday after rising for three straight days and touching a 16-month high.
According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 gained 79.06 points, or 1.08%, to end at 7,432.67 points, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 398.33 points, or 1.54%, to 26,269.04. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 647.44 points, or 1.31%, to 50,011.32.
Stocks gradually added to gains following the release of minutes from the Federal Reserve’s last meeting, which showed more officials saying the central bank should lay the groundwork for a possible rate hike. Bets for a Fed rate hike in December were choppy after the meeting and recently showing a 36.8% probability, down from 42% on Tuesday, according to the latest data from CME Group’s FedWatch, opens new tab tool.
Citing uncertainty around issues such as oil prices, tariffs and AI, Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at Annex Wealth Management, said after the minutes that it’s hard to take any of their forward guidance as more than just mere guesswork.
Among the 11 major S&P 500 sectors, big gainers included consumer discretionary and technology. On the flip side, energy dropped with oil prices.
Consumer staples slipped with pressure from Target. Shares in the retailer declined after it warned of a challenging macroeconomic backdrop even as it doubled its annual sales growth forecast.
Falling oil prices boosted sentiment around airline stocks with Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Alaska Air advancing.
Intuit shares declined after Reuters, citing an internal memo, reported that the company is laying off about 3000 employees.
| 🎪 | Albo team devoid of any business acumen |
It's been a common complaint since Jim Chalmers delivered last Tuesday's federal budget: this government doesn't get the private sector, reports The Australian today's website. [click to read more]
That blind spot, goes the argument, is why Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his Treasurer and the team seem to be surprised by the breadth of anger about its proposed taxation changes, particularly its capital gains tax hike.
There’s not anyone with business experience around the cabinet table,
one industry figure grumbled to The Australian's Margin Call column.
Is that criticism fair?
In an effort to weigh the charge, Margin Call has done an investigation into the ASIC company records of the Albanese government’s Expenditure Review Committee, the key brains for the federal budget.
The results are mostly what you would expect from a group of people who are, almost to a person, purebred creatures of the Labor Party, public service and trades union movement.
Start with the chair of the ERC, the Prime Minister. Over his 63 years he has had two directorships: for a couple of years as a member of the board of NRL club the South Sydney Rabbitohs and, before that, a directorship of a radio station (2HD), which was owned by the Labor Party.
That’s perhaps more corporate experience than some might expect from our PM, who before entering the parliament in 1996 worked as a Labor Party machine man and staffer.
His deputy Prime Minister, Richard Marles, has three company entries, all directorships related to his previous employers, the Transport Workers Union and Australian Council of Trade Unions.
That’s two more directorships than Treasurer Chalmers whose single entry was on the board of the Chifley Research Centre, the Labor Party’s official think tank, of which he was briefly the executive director before entering parliament in 2013. Before that, today’s Treasurer worked for the ALP’s national machine and as a staffer for multiple Labor politicians, culminating in his lengthy stint in Wayne Swan’s office during the Rudd-Gillard era.
The combined records of three of the PM’s top sources of advice, Foreign Affairs minister Penny Wong, Finance minister Katy Gallagher and Health Minister Mark Butler, are almost entirely unblemished with the private sector.
Although, let the record show that Wong was employed as a lawyer at Duncan and Hannon before leaving to work for the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (also Butler’s former employer). Gallagher did her pre-parliament apprenticeship at the public service’s union, the Community and Public Sector Union.
After a lengthy stint in the public service, Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development Catherine King worked for about two years at KPMG in its consulting division until parliament beckoned in 2001. Her office declined to clarify whether that consulting work was for the public sector (we suspect so) or the top end of town
.
Still more jarring, Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino was a director of a board that had nothing to do with the union movement or the Labor Party. Even more heretically for the Labor man, it was called Market Beacon Pty Ltd. It seems to have been in operation while Mulino ∼ who has a PhD from Yale in economics ∼ was doing work for consultancy Pottinger. His office declined to comment on the company.
Is private sector work history a taboo topic for members of the Albanese government ERC?
The Market Beacon also counted Paul Stokes as a director, but was deregistered in 2014 when Mulino went into Victorian state politics before jumping into the federal arena in 2019.
Why does any of this matter? Well, some might say it points to a uniformity of experience at the peak of this government that makes it prone to either dismissing, or entirely disregarding, the views of the private sector.
One of the most fascinating features of this past week is who is now making those criticisms. Business and industry associations have been whining about that alleged trait of the Albanese government for years.
Criticism by Kevin Rudd’s former press secretary, Lachlan Harris, on the government’s proposed capital gains tax change show this budget is something new.
Harris, an unusually entrepreneurial figure in the Labor tribe, told the Sydney Morning Herald the capital gains tax hike would make it much, much harder for young Australians to start businesses, to work in small businesses
.
This is not just for tech start-ups in Surry Hills: this is businesses in Box Hill and Castle Hill,
he said in surely the most devastating line anyone has said about this budget.
I really would urge the PM and treasurer (to) consider carefully whether this policy needs to be significantly adjusted so that a lot more consultation can occur over a long period of time,
he added.
The word from the PMO is that the government plans to push the measures through the parliament (with the Greens backing in the Senate) as fast as possible. The hope is that the campaign will then peter out.
Perhaps. Although viral memes of the PM as Australia’s omnipresent silent business partner suggests the government’s private sector problem might not be so easily fixed.
| 🚛 | Fuel costs skrocket for truckies |
Sharon Middleton’s family trucking business now spends $315,000 weekly on fuel after costs doubled virtually overnight, revealing the extreme toll of recent price shocks, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reports today.
Sharon Middleton, who runs Whiteline Transport with her husband Bob, has seen the weekly diesel bill jump by almost $120k since fuel prices spiked.
The national trucking company, which employs 60 people and operates 30 trucks between Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, is now spending about $315k a week to keep its fleet on the road.
Our fuel spend overall has doubled — it’s been a massive expense and it happened so quickly we barely had any time to react,
the 64-year-old said.
Cashflow pressures, with more frequent supplier payments required as credit limits are reached sooner, have also hit hard. And some remote fuel stops Whiteline relies on are short on supply.
Ms Middleton said the nearly 50-year-old business, which transports staples like parcel freight, building products and groceries, had not faced such pressure since the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 global fuel shocks.
She called on the government to strengthen Australia’s fuel security.
At first, we were trying to work out whether the fuel crisis (brought on by the Iran War) was real, whether it would last long term and what the actual cost impact would be.
We were speaking to multiple fuel companies to see how they were going to handle it, but while all that was happening, the pump was still ticking over, the dollars kept rising and we were left with massive fuel bills.
When you're in the middle of the Nullarbor and get to a location with no fuel, it’s not like you're driving a car and can just do a U-turn,
she said. You've got 100 tonnes and multiple trailers.
All of us in trucking find it hard to understand why there’s such a difference in price between petrol and diesel at the pumps,
she said, noting her fleet has been paying more than $4 a litre for diesel in some remote locations.
We've seen a significant drop in petrol prices, but diesel hasn't come down anywhere near what it should.
At the very least, we need to ensure fuel security and make sure we've got ample supply,
she said.
| � | Massive wakeup call … anybody listening? |
The global fuel shock has become a massive wake-up call
for Australia to undertake an urgent change to stop soaring energy prices reports the news.com.au website today. [click to read more]
The global fuel shock is a massive wake-up call
for Australia to back our rich natural resources to deliver lower-cost, reliable energy supplies for families and businesses, industry leaders say.
They warn declining domestic crude oil production and refinery closures have left the nation exposed by the Middle East conflict, with activism blocking efforts to explore and develop rich oil, gas and coal resources.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive officer Tania Constable said governments needed to listen to She urged governments to get Ms Constable said the nation was likely to remain heavily dependent on liquid fuels until cost-effective, reliable electrification became a reality - particularly in job-creating regional industries like mining, long-haul trucking and farming.
Ms Constable listed measures to make Australia less reliant on foreign oil, including She urged Billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart said Australia urgently needed Oil and gas explorer and producer Beach Energy’s chief executive officer, Brett Woods, said the Back Australia campaign came Westpac Institutional Bank chief executive Nell Hutton said small and agricultural businesses with less financial buffers were families and businesses suffering from high energy prices, instead of noisy foreign-funded activists who are sabotaging supply and driving prices up".
the exploration drills running across the nation", singling out the Great Australian Bight and Queensland’s Taroom Trough - described as a
sea of oil
by Premier David Crisafulli.
The current situation is a massive wake up call for Australia to get serious about increasing lower-cost, reliable energy supply for mining, other businesses and households,
she said.
Australia needs patriotic policies to back in its natural wealth, great industries, strong innovative capabilities and our can-do attitude.
This starts with pragmatic technology-neutral policies so we can use the rich bounty of Australian resources and our industrial ingenuity for national benefit.
a technology-neutral approach
to fast-track coal, oil and gas projects in the same way as critical minerals or metals ventures.
taking the handcuffs off energy exploration and development
by using artificial intelligence to accelerate approval processes, plus accrediting states and territories to issue key decisions.
a return to commonsense energy and fuel policy", saying the nation was
blessed with enormous natural resources
yet had some of the highest energy prices in the developed world".
Increasingly we have become one of the hardest countries to build production, the record of our massive decline from almost entirely fuel sufficient, to needing to import approximately 96 per cent of our requirements, and refineries closed too, speaks for itself,
Mrs Rinehart said.
Australia is unable to defend itself without a secure fuel and electricity supply, immediately building a large fuel reserve is essential.
at a critical time as we navigate global energy supply threats".
[click the intro to return to front page]It is vital that domestic producers, who supply up to three-quarters of the east coast market demand, be supported by a gas policy framework that encourages domestic exploration, development, and production,
he said.
already finding things a bit tough
during the oil shock.
The challenge is how long it will take before supply routes normalise. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to open fully today, it would take at least a few weeks for those supply lines to normalise,
she said.
| 🎭 | Rough sleepers rough choices |
Rough sleepers are in public, but the public look away. This Adelaide program could provide an answer. Street Connect allows people to flag the location of a rough sleeper, triggering an outreach worker to visit them writes The Guardian website. [click to read the rest of the story].
On a cold, bright autumn morning in the Adelaide parklands, curious dogs and mostly incurious humans pass by tents half-hidden in bushes.
After Bikram Lama ∼ the birdman
of Sydney ∼ died last year, thousands of people streamed past his body, oblivious.
People walk past those sleeping rough every day, in every Australian city, and increasingly in regional areas.
Rough sleepers are both the most visible and the most invisible homeless people. They're in public but the public avert their eyes.
A program in Adelaide is helping rough sleepers be seen. Locals who spot them can make a notification on a website called Street Connect by dropping a pin on a map, along with details of the person spotted.
That triggers outreach workers to check on them.
The Toward Home Alliance team ∼ a complicated, compassionate, chronically under-resourced network of outreach services ∼ searches the city in a grid, adding extra checks wherever those pins are dropped.
They leave water, protein bars, Band-Aids and tampons and ask rough sleepers what else they need. They know people’s names and their backstories.
Some they check in on are keen for a chat, others not so much.
Street Connect is a way for the community to be able to help inform us, and direct us to areas of concern that we're not seeing
, says Toward Home’s senior manager, Shaya Nettle.
It’s also really helpful for identifying and responding to community hotspots. It ensures we're not missing things.
Outreach workers check the location of every dropped pin within 12 hours, but Nettle says people should still call emergency services if there’s a critical situation.
But she says people to be mindful of the fine line between checking in on someone and respecting their space. If a person is with their own tent or bedding, that is still their home.
She says it is common for homeless people to feel invisible. Nettle describes homeless services as the emergency department of the community, echoing the way hospital Cost of living and interest rate pressures lead to a People are then stuck for longer in transitional care and crisis accommodation and stuck longer sleeping rough.
People might slip into homelessness because of family and domestic violence, drug and alcohol issues, mental illness, job loss, rent increases or even relocating for a different job and being unable to find somewhere to live.
That’s their private space,
she says. But if you're genuinely concerned … just say 'hey, I just want to check you're OK'.
We'll often call out 'hello, are you OK?' They'll respond with a yes or a movement or a 'hello' or a 'leave me alone' or a wave, and that’s OK.
And they often become conditioned to making themselves invisible … trying to diminish their presence or their exposure,
she says.
Any level of normalising them in a human, daily experience is really important.
That starts with eye contact, a hello. If you're going to get a coffee anyway, offer them one.
bed block
at the end of patients' visits ripples all the way down to the ED.
really highly contested
private rental market, increasing pressure on community and public housing.
Federal Court has ruled against a women-only app founder in a landmark transgender discrimination case, forcing her to pay compensation and sparking fears about women’s rights, writes Peta Credlin in the Sunday Telegraph today. [click to read more]
On Friday afternoon, as I sat down to work on this column, I honestly didn't know where to focus first.
Was the biggest issue the loss of integrity in our public life, after the Prime Minister ("my word is my bond") admitted saying 50 times he would not change any of the rules around investment properties but did it anyway?
Or was it the reality, confirmed in the budget papers, that under Labor’s record high immigration, Australia will hit 30 million people by 2030, despite nowhere near enough housing for those here now? Or was it the revelation that Labor has just brought in death duties by stealth?
Giggle v Tickle
As I debated all of this, the Federal Court handed down its decision in the long-running Giggle v Tickle case, where Sall Grover, a woman and founder of a women’s online networking app (called Giggle For Girls) was accused of discrimination against a transgender woman, the biologically male Roxanne Tickle, who sought to join the women-only app.
In a devastating blow for the rights of women and girls in this country, the court rejected scientific fact and declared that sex was more than biology (it isn't), and so Grover lost and now owes compensation to Tickle.
The fact that the taxpayer-funded Human Rights Commission was a part of this legal action to deny all women our biological rights is appalling. The fact that Grover now has to rely on donations from ordinary people to defend rights that should not need defending says everything about the state of woke policy and activist courts in Australia.
But what’s perhaps most galling of all is that we are only in this position of denying chromosomal reality because Julia Gillard, ironically the first female prime minister, stripped the word woman
from the sex discrimination act. Before then, this case would never have got to court.
Anyone for any toilet
But what this latest decision does (and let’s hope it gets overturned when Sall Grover heads to the High Court), is that women’s sport, toilets, access to medical services, schools, clubs, domestic violence shelters, prisons ∼ the whole box and dice ∼ are open slather to any man who declares he is a woman.
Gender used to be what you called yourself, sex is what XY or XX made you. Not any more, thanks to this decision. And Gillard too, who changed the law just TWO DAYS before she was rolled by Kevin Rudd in June 2013 — how dare she lecture anyone on misogyny.
But on Friday afternoon, the bad news kept coming.
To add Labor insult to Labor injury, dropped out when they hoped no-one was watching was news from the Victorian government that not only was Daniel Andrews going to get a bronze statue in his honour but that it was already being made. You can't make this stuff up, can you?
In memory of stupidity
Given Victoria has a daily interest bill of $24 million, a $130,000 statue is a rounding-error but it’s the attempt to force Victorians to honour the man who locked them up for two years, ruined businesses, blew out debt, kowtowed to China, dialled up woke and made the once-proud state an international laughing stock that’s tipped people over the edge.
Am I the only one asking how the heck did we get here?
And, more to the point, how do we turn it around or, God forbid, is it even possible?
Never trust any leader again
If Albanese is allowed to get away with his massive budget lie, then we will never be able to trust any leader again. And if we can't ask questions before an election and base our decisions on what they tell us and hold them to it, then democracy is dead.
For all of Labor’s talk about intergenerational equity, the budget hits younger Australians the hardest. The PM says breaking his word on negative gearing is about them, but how can it be when they will never be able to use negatively gearing (as he has) to build up a nest egg but those doing it now can keep it up?
Buy a new-build property instead, Labor tells investors. But again, how’s that fair for young people given this is what they typically buy as a first home and, now, they're going to face even more competition as investors move in? Even Labor’s own budget papers admit that these changes will likely increase rents (as they did in the Keating era before he was forced to back down) and do little to increase the stock of available homes.
And then there’s the tax on aspiration (CGT changes) before they get you from the grave (the hit on trusts).
Liberal backbone
Thankfully, the Liberals have finally found a bit of policy backbone, and a bit of political mongrel.
Angus Taylor’s reply to Labor’s budget speech felt like the start of the Coalition getting its mojo back. He made the bold move to end bracket creep once and for all by indexing income tax thresholds, meaning low- and middle-income earners won't get punished for getting ahead. On migration, he went for the jugular and landed a bullseye if the hyperventilating from Labor MPs is any guide. The PM in particular was hysterical, declaring it was un-Australian to divide people between those who are migrant and those who are not.
That is not what Taylor did. He divided them between Australian citizen and non-citizen and said that, under the Coalition, only citizens would get access to the pension, the dole, the NDIS and other welfare.
Help for no commitment
Now what is unfair about that? Why should your taxes carry people who have made no formal commitment to this country? Right now, people can live here for decades, take the money and never pledge loyalty to Australia and its people. Taylor says not any more.
Add in the Treasurer’s announcement of a new Working Australians Tax Offset (a pollster-named handout if ever there was one) of $250 a year (or $4.80 a week) and rightly people are angry. In his budget speech, Jim Chalmers called his WATO meaningful
but what’s meaningful about 68 cents a day when the cost of everything has skyrocketed? It’s not meaningful, it’s insulting.
(And I might add, it’s still not even the $275 Albanese promised off their power bills).
Albo's right for a change
Anthony Albanese said that this budget is full of Labor values
and it is — the socialist values
that attack the fair-go, break trust, and hit middle Australia even harder
For the Liberals, there could be no better ground than this to fight Labor.
If the Coalition holds its nerve and campaigns every day like its life depends on it (because, frankly, it does) then this budget could well be the beginning of the end for the Albanese government.
But only if they work, day and night, to take the fight up to Labor. Labor is the target, not each other and not One Nation.
THUMBS UP
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price: Her emotional, fighting speech in the Senate is a must-watch as she demanded culture
takes a back seat to better protect Aboriginal children.
THUMBS DOWN
Military witch hunt: Another $43m in Labor’s budget to investigate soldiers on top of the $350m that the Brereton process has cost taxpayers already.
"Promises and pie-crust," Jonathan Swift wrote in 1738, "are made to be broken." Vladimir Lenin, who liked the line, treated it as a slogan. Anthony Albanese treats it as a principle, Henry Ergas points out in the The Australian today. [click to read more]
The Prime Minister’s defence for repudiating assurances he had insistently reiterated ∼ indeed, for the 50th time
∼ is that Australia faces a crisis of intergenerational equity. But as Jonathan Pincus and I demonstrated on these pages, the claim is analytically incoherent and empirically threadbare. Nor, even if there were such inequities, would that justify the abrupt abandonment of repeatedly affirmed undertakings.
Serious governments seek democratic consent for contentious measures they had previously assured voters they would not introduce. John Howard did so with the GST: having ruled it out, he reversed openly, took it to the 1998 election, and proceeded only on the mandate he won there.
Greatest tax take in commonwealth history
The reason the Albanese government has not followed suit is neither urgency nor necessity. It is fear: fear that despite the opposition’s parlous state, voters would punish a government that has spent freely, governed carelessly and is now poised to extract the greatest tax take in commonwealth history.
The budget’s own numbers make the reality plain. Even accepting Treasury’s assumptions, the budget measures will increase housing supply over the next decade by less than one-third of 1%, while housing demand is likely to rise more than 15 times as quickly. This is not serious economic reform. It is a revenue grab wrapped in the language of moral urgency.
Corroding public trust
The inevitable result of that gap between political rhetoric and political practice is to corrode public trust. Trust, after all, is not a natural disposition; it is a social achievement, slowly accumulated and quickly squandered.
The word itself reveals the point. The Old English treow
lies behind both truth
and trust
; since at least the 15th century, to trust
someone has meant to believe that when he says what he will do, he speaks truthfully. Governments can sustain trust only by being truthful and trustworthy — and the institutional form through which those virtues manifest themselves is the promise.
A promise is what binds words to conduct, declarations to action, and electoral consent to subsequent government. Governments owe fidelity to their promises not merely for their own political advantage; they owe it because a healthy democratic life depends upon citizens being able to assume and assess fidelity to public commitments.
Governments need to mean what they say
The credibility of promises is also more broadly crucial to the viability of a free society, whose very essence is that people must order their lives amid continual uncertainty. Promises, including the promise that laws will not be changed capriciously, are what give individuals, families and businesses stable ground on which to plan. As Hannah Arendt wisely observed, they build islands of predictability
in the ocean of uncertainty
— islands that matter most to those with the fewest resources to absorb sudden policy shocks.
A young couple relying on an investment property to finance homeownership, a retiree dependent on hard-earned savings, a small business weighing expansion: all rely on governments meaning what they say.
But promises can only fulfil that stabilising role because they belong to the grammar of commitment: to the forms of obligation whose value lies in their relative insulation from changing convenience. A promise abandoned the moment it becomes burdensome is worth no more than the loyalty that melts away at the first sign of difficulty.
The preservation of credible public commitments is especially vital in Australia, where suspicion of the political process long predates contemporary disenchantment. Distrust of politicians was, as John Hirst emphasised, constitutive of the colonial polity itself. The men who entered politics were not thought fit to be trusted - and despite outstanding exceptions, many weren't.
Pioneering scholars of mass behaviour
The endless Australian debate over the accountability of parliamentarians reflected that suspicion. Both the Burkean trustee ∼ who is guided only by the light of his own judgment ∼ and the instructed delegate had their advocates. But it was the latter conception, entrenched by the emerging Labor Party, that ultimately prevailed. Labor parliamentarians were to be mere instruments: controlled by the ALP’s extra-parliamentary wing, bound by a pledge to uphold the platform and required to submit to caucus discipline on pain of political excommunication.
The Australian mass party thus emerged, from the beginning, as an institutional response to distrust: a mechanism designed less to cultivate confidence in politicians than to contain the risks they posed once elected. And Australian voters learned to scrutinise the distance between promise and performance with an intensity rare in comparable democracies. When that gap widened too far, confidence collapsed.
It is against this background that the events of the past three years must be seen. The Albanese government’s record on the central tax promises of two successive elections ∼ stage three, superannuation, and now negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount ∼ does not just constitute a litany of broken commitments; it constitutes the accelerated dismantling of an already tarnished public asset.
The predictable effect is an even more accelerated crisis of political representation. The four-decade arc from 1975’s 4% third-party vote to 2025’s 34% highlights its seemingly inexorable progression.
Withdrawing faithfulness
Those voters who have spurned the major parties are not ideological partisans of any third force; they are observant citizens who, having grasped what the parties no longer deliver, exercise the only sanction the system leaves them. Unable to meaningfully demand or expect faithfulness to a program from parties whose programs have ceased to bind, they withdraw their own faithfulness from those parties altogether.
The alternatives may not be especially attractive nor particularly unifying — but negative coalitions, aimed at punishing a detested foe, form more easily than positive ones precisely because they require only shared aversion rather than common aspiration. In these conditions, anti-system parties flourish, their capacity to aggregate voters a symptom not of democratic renewal but of democratic exhaustion.
To make things worse, governments confronted by a perpetually seething electorate are naturally tempted to govern through stealth and administrative manoeuvre, further impairing the trust whose disappearance produced the crisis of representation in the first place. And when a real, rather than confected, emergency arrives, they discover they can no longer summon the loyalties and willingness to sacrifice on which the survival of free societies ultimately depends.
Public language becomes tactical
No society can govern itself for long on the assumption that public language is merely tactical. Governments that repeatedly break faith with the electorate may secure temporary advantages. But they do so by undermining the confidence that policies announced today will survive long enough to shape behaviour tomorrow. As that confidence erodes, both the effectiveness of public policy and force of democratic authority unravel.
That is the deeper significance of the Albanese government’s conduct. It is not merely bad policy. It is the depletion of a civic inheritance that free societies squander far more easily than they rebuild. Yes, promises can be cracked like pie crusts. But in the end, public trust cracks with them. Lenin, sheltered by brutal authoritarianism, never had to learn that lesson. With the fabric of our democracy rapidly fraying, it is high time Anthony Albanese did.
Skinning
the
cat!
Frank Lowy in The Australian
T
hrough this change, a form of social cohesion was achieved. I believe this is a concrete example of how ethnic divisiveness was transformed into loyalty to Australia. It shows how social change can take effect and bind a community.
This submission is made in the hope that the commission may find something useful in the method my team and I used to achieve this goal.
I want to emphasise that I am not equating racial aggression in a sports stadium with nationwide antisemitism. The two are not comparable.
Rather, I am sharing the architecture of a cultural shift that took place in soccer, said to be the most popular sport on Earth. In Australia, it is the most popular and fastest-growing sport, with more than 1.9 million participants nationwide, according to Football Australia’s 2024 National Participation Report.
Australians have long loved soccer but historically this failed to translate into professional organisation, largely because of competition from other football codes, poor administration, financial instability and blatant ethnic factionalism.
In the Australia of the 1950s and 1960s, soccer was plagued by ethnic rivalries. It was a period of high migration and every week ethnic teams settled old scores they had imported from countries once at war with one another in Europe.
Winning hearts and minds |
Passion was high and rioting was common. Players often needed protection, and in extreme cases — such as supporters running on to the field with iron bars — armed police had to separate the sides. As a code, soccer was fragmented and was not a mainstream sport. Sometimes announcements were in foreign languages and, generally, Australian families tended to stay away.
For decades, serious but unsuccessful attempts were made to de-ethnicise the game. My team finally achieved this because we had the cultural confidence to pull the ethnic factions into the mainstream.
Our success did not come from the use of hard power alone, by forcing change with rules and regulations. Soft power ∼ winning the hearts of the soccer community and inspiring pride in being Australian ∼ was crucial too.
Dislike of Jews |
Looking back, I think it may be possible to work respectfully and diligently to bring communities that strongly express antisemitism ∼ and other forms of racism ∼ into the mainstream to share Australian values.
In soccer, we didn't try to take people’s ethnic identity away; we worked to stop the expression of ethnic conflict in public. Similarly, it is probably not possible to eradicate a dislike of Jews, but it is possible to help people understand why, in Australian society, the public outpouring of this aversion is not right.
The social licence that has allowed for the open expression of anti-Jewish sentiment needs to be reworked. If this helps to curb antisemitism, it will likely be useful in curbing other forms of racism in Australia.
While my sons reported some antisemitism during their school days, I encountered very little in my first decades in business. When it did emerge, I confronted it directly and suffered no hardship as a result. Through my leadership positions in the Jewish community, I had a fair idea of the level of antisemitism in the country and it seemed low, although it did occasionally flare.
Openly celebrate massacre |
When antisemitism burst on to the forecourt of Sydney’s Opera House on October 9, 2023, I was astonished. Australians were openly celebrating a massacre. Amplified by the powerful engine of social media, a new entitlement had emerged. People seemed not to have understood the privilege of free speech and freely abused it.
From the 1960s through the 1990s, attempts to de-ethnicise the game did not have lasting effect and in 2003, prime minister John Howard asked me to professionalise the sport.
It was dysfunctional and insolvent, with no international presence. For this task, I had several advantages, including:
● Strong government support, funding and leadership;
● In turn, this led to people of high standing with expertise in finance, law, government relations, sports governance, marketing and event management to join me, pro bono, to help;
● In turn, generous sponsorship from big business followed, so did broadcasting deals;
● Early generations of compatriots had passed, leaving children and grandchildren more amenable to change.
Creating a new structure |
We needed to create a new structure and rally people to our cause. Rules-based change cannot have the intended impact without wide social and cultural acceptance. The Australian football family had three codes; rugby league, rugby union and Australian rules. We rebranded soccer as "football" and it became the fourth.
Then we began changing the game in three domains:
● In Australia;
● On the international stage;
● Within the global system of football confederations.
As it happened, each change impacted the next, creating a ripple effect.
Previously, in Australia, there had been a push towards replacing ethnic names with regional ones. We built on this and removed all trace of ethnicity for the new top league. There would be eight teams in the A-League, each carrying the name of a major city.
The teams, such as Brisbane Roar and Perth Glory, created their own character and regalia. Each team had players from a mix of backgrounds and were miniature versions of multicultural Australia. Their fans of all ethnicities entered though the same gate.
Wogball vanished |
The "wogball" tag vanished and more teams were established. While ethnic affiliations remained in lower leagues, the main league was driven by high-spirited, inter-city tribalism. Acceptance of this increased exponentially as the Socceroos limbered up for the World Cup.
We had not been seen on the international stage for more than 30 years and we focused intensely on preparing them. In 2005, as they inched their way towards qualification, the football community grew increasingly engaged. When the Socceroos qualified, the country went wild.
In turn, this energised our next strategic move. For years, Australia had tried to leave the small Oceania Football Confederation and join the powerful Asian Football Confederation, but its door remained closed. After strong representation, in January 2006, it opened and Australia was welcomed into Asia.
Our world presence improved as did the quality of competition. The cumulative effect of all the changes shifted the perception of Australian football. Its Australian identity was baked in. We had achieved cohesion and professionalised the sport.
At every positive point, we had harnessed the enthusiasm to keep the vision alive. We'd used advertising, marketing, merchandise, celebrity personalities, events, international matches, interviews, media ∼ whatever we could ∼ to embrace and inspire the community.
Three men were killed yesterday outside a San Diego mosque and two suspected shooters ∼ both teenagers ∼ were found dead in a nearby car along with anti-Islamic writing, officials said. Both suspects appeared to have shot themselves.
Two hours before the shooting, the mother of one suspect warned the police that her teenage son was suicidal and had gone missing with a companion, along with her vehicle and several weapons. The call set off a frantic, but ultimately unsuccessful, effort to find them. One of the victims was a security guard who may have prevented a more deadly massacre by intervening, the authorities said.
Politics
San Sifton writes in The New York Times history tells us that the party in power generally loses congressional seats in midterm elections. Yesterday's New York Times/Siena poll showed that Democrats should be in a good position to pick some up. Democrats had an 11-point lead when registered voters were asked which party's candidate they would support for Congress — well ahead of where voters ranked Democrats earlier in this cycle, writes Nate Cohn, our chief political analyst. Republicans hold narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate. Democrats need to gain three seats in the House and four seats in the Senate to flip control of Congress. And polling is an important bellwether for their chances. For Democrats in particular, they pose a problem. A month ago, the party expected a blue wave. Then the Supreme Court said a new congressional map in Louisiana, drawn to protect Black representation in Congress, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. After that, Republican-led states across the South went to work. Louisiana is crafting a new map. Florida drew one aimed at getting rid of four seats that leaned toward Democrats. Tennessee designed one that would give Republicans an additional seat. Voters in California and Virginia opted to go in the other direction, authorizing their leaders to draw maps that would create new Democratic seats. The Supreme Court in Virginia threw out that state's measure ∼ and four seats for the left ∼ early this month. One race to watch closely today is the Republican primary in Kentucky, where Representative Thomas Massie, who has clashed with President Trump, is trying to keep his seat against Ed Gallrein, a challenger backed by the president. Kentucky has an unpredictable political landscape.It's a deep-red state with a Democratic governor. One of its senators is an insider's insider, Mitch McConnell, who is retiring. The other is Rand Paul, an outsider libertarian.
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The tik-toks have it
At Milan Design Week, just following Watches and Wonders, Jaeger-LeCoultre staged The Perpetual Timekeeper, a sprawling two-floor exhibition dedicated not to wristwatches, but to Atmos clocks-the mysterious, glass-encased objects that have quietly occupied one of the most intriguing corners of the maison's history since 1928. ROBB Report.
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Pollocks's $152m sale
The second-highest price Christie's registered in the Newhouse collection was $107.6 million for Constantin Brâncusi's gilt-bronze bust Danaïde (above), which sold on just one bid. This makes it the second most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction after Alberto Giacometti's $141 million Pointing Man. Newhouse bought the bust in 2002 at Christie's for a then-record $18.2 million. The Jackson Pollock's Number 7A, 1948, was the top seller at $152m.
The Murrurundi Times is owned, compiled and written by Des Dugan. Email