Our political world is being shaken by two connected forces — public hostility towards the Albanese government over its budget tax rises and the historic surge of One Nation transforming the political right in Australia and threatening the Coalition as a viable alternative government. Since the budget, most opinion polls point to a potential earthquake in politics — suggesting Pauline Hanson's One Nation might emerge even stronger from the tsunami of criticism about Jim Chalmers' budget. Of course, it is far too early to pick any lasting trend. But the energetic reception for Liberal leader Angus Taylor's budget reply is contradicted by the superior primary vote for One Nation. Post-budget polls show the centre-right of politics is being re-made, and this remaking will transform the next election. The three parties - One Nation, Liberals and Nationals - are united in seeking to defeat Labor, yet they are locked in a bitter competition among themselves with "life or death" consequences. The coming crisis of centre-right relations is implanted in the polls. Post-budget, this paper's Newspoll showed Hanson's party leading the Coalition by 27-20%, the Resolve Political Monitor had a 24-23% edge for One Nation over the Coalition, while the SkyNews Pulse/YouGov poll recorded One Nation in front at 25-23%. Herein is the pivotal issue: will One Nation remain the leading centre-right party? This is still unlikely, given the renewed strength of the Liberals under Taylor. The reality, however, is that Hanson's vote probably won't suffer a sudden retreat. The dilemma for the Liberals is that many Hanson voters are voting against the system, the two-party model, and ∼ set upon disruption ∼ they don't care what Taylor says and won't even listen to him. Meanwhile, Labor is ready to strike: Anthony Albanese and Chalmers now declare the Liberals and the Coalition can only form a government with the support of Pauline Hanson. And while Hanson has support within the right, an overall majority of voters reject her and won't preference One Nation on the ballot. Labor's future election pitch is obvious: "A vote for the Liberals is a vote for Hanson." This will resound across urban Australia. It will mostly be a net negative for the Liberals in city and suburban seats. The post-budget core realities are stark: One Nation threatens the survival of the Nationals, the governing capacity of the Liberal Party and the ability of the Liberal and Nationals to form a tenable coalition in office. As a consequence, One Nation constitutes an escape clause for the Albanese government at what might become its time of deepest vulnerability — Paul Kelly The Australian today.
Struggles on the field as cricket's Stanlake makes a comeback
Bulldogs made the Storm work hard beating them 30-20 while in the two AFL games St Kilda overlorded Fremantle 104-74 and Richmond struggled beating Essendon 74-56. [click to read more]
Robert (Crash) Craddock in this morning’s Oz warns Australian batsmen beware. The nets are no longer your safe haven. The towering inferno is back.
All 204cms of him.
Billy Stanlake, the tallest bowler to play for Australia, will play for his country for the first time in seven years on next week’s three match 50-over tour of Pakistan.
That’s good news for Stanlake but chastening news for Australia’s batsmen who, as Test selection chief George Bailey pointed out, loathe facing his Word travels quickly in Australian cricket. The grumbles from Australian batsmen facing Stanlake’s rib-ratters in the nets at a training camp last year were music to the ears of selectors always on the hunt for someone or something different.
And Stanlake, with his height, bounce and pace (he’s clocked 150kph) is certainly a one-off commodity.
So when the like of Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc were rested, it made sense to look at a player the selectors once hoped would be their version of South African skyscraper Morne Morkel.
So will he terrorise his own men in the nets?
It’s quite a comeback. Stanlake last played a white-ball game for Australia on November 8, 2019 in a T20 game against Pakistan in Perth when he took a tidy 0-19 from four overs.
Then he was gone. Mother Cricket is a funny old thing because she normally ensures no player gets it all.
Stanlake is blessed with freakish height but we're not playing basketball here - like a lot of tall fast bowlers his body has been extremely tested by the unique stresses and strains of his craft.fast, hostile and nasty'' work in the nets.
It’s very exciting to be back,'' said Stanlake, who will play the first leg of the tour in Pakistan before being replaced for the 50 and 20 over series in Bangladesh.
There has been a lot of hard work over the last four or five years with injuries.
I wouldn't call it tough or hard. It was just frustrating. I wanted to get back to this level and that’s something I used as motivation. I never got down on myself or felt sorry for myself.
Maybe I am a little bit more subdued than when I was younger when I was one speed every net session but I definitely try and have those intensity sessions that’s for sure.''
Fundamentally the picture looks really solid
U.S. stocks rose on Friday, with the Dow reaching an intraday record high, as investors cheered signs of progress in talks to end the Middle East conflict and a strong corporate earnings season, Reuters reports on today's website. [click to continue reading]
The S&P 500 notched its eighth consecutive weekly gain, its longest since a nine-week streak ended in December 2023.
Semiconductor stocks, which have driven recent Wall Street gains, were mostly higher. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose, lifted by gains in Qualcomm, while Nvidia slipped.
The U.S. has made some progress toward a deal with Iran, though more work remains, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said differences between the two sides remained deep.
Earnings season looked really good and the economic data, save a few outliers, looked pretty solid so fundamentally the picture looks really solid,
said James St. Aubin, chief investment officer at Ocean Park Asset Management in Santa Monica, California.
The war has been one major speed bump along the road for at least the equity market but I think the headlines today looked encouraging and that was probably helping at the margin.
According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 gained 27.84 points, or 0.36%, to end at 7,473.56 points, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 50.87 points, or 0.20%, to 26,346.27. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 294.90 points, or 0.59%, to 50,580.56.
Shares of U.S. computer makers surged following strong results from China’s Lenovo Group, which reported a better-than-expected 27% jump in quarterly revenue. Dell Technologies hit a record high while HP Inc gained.
Long-dated government bond yields were lower, having pulled back from recent highs. The yield on benchmark U.S. 10-year notes fell 2.6 basis points to 4.558%.
The bond market seems to be cooling off and yields are coming down from where they were starting to peak earlier this week and I think that’s very encouraging too,
St. Aubin said.
Kevin Warsh was sworn in as chair of the Federal Reserve on Friday, taking the helm at a pivotal moment for the U.S. economy as higher gasoline prices tied to the Iran conflict fuel inflation and weigh on consumer sentiment.
Estèe Lauder rose after the cosmetics maker and Spanish perfumery Puig ended talks for a potential merger.
Workday gained after the human resources software provider exceeded expectations for first-quarter revenue and profit.
NEWS:
🎪
Even Ken
doesn't believe
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has warned that young workers are on track to pay higher taxes while receiving virtually no real wage increases under the plan handed down in Jim Chalmers' fifth budget, as business declares the proposed overhaul of capital gains tax will deliver a sledgehammer blow to the government’s aim to improve productivity, reports The Australian today's website.
[click to read more]
The Australian can also reveal the Coalition is threatening to block Labor’s NDIS reform bill from passing the parliament in the first half of the year unless Anthony Albanese agrees to hold a months-long public inquiry into his proposed overhaul of the CGT and negative gearing, complicating Labor’s aim of striking a quick deal with the Greens.
As the Prime Minister prepares to back down on higher taxes on discretionary testamentary trusts following accusations they amounted to a death tax
, business groups are demanding further concessions, while cabinet secretary Andrew Charlton said the concerns being aired by small business founders on the CGT were valid
.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry yesteray declared the proposed CGT and trust reforms undermined the Treasurer’s productivity package in the budget, while the Minerals Council of Australia warned it would hit mining investment.
Mr Henry, Treasury secretary during the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments, warned that the budget’s forecast of further sluggish productivity growth was among the issues condemning young workers to a difficult future.
Writing in The Australian, Mr Henry said the budget does not lack ambition
but was not as ambitious as many of the reform packages delivered through the 1980s and 1990s. But he said it broke the cardinal rule of not offering a fiscal bribe to those who see themselves as losers
.
Arguing that Mr Chalmers did not have the fiscal room to use the revenue from tax hikes on investments to deliver big relief for workers, Mr Henry suggested the government would need to pursue further structural tax reforms to shift the dial in favour of young workers
.
According to the budget papers, we won't see a surplus for another decade, even if future governments book all the revenue gains from bracket creep. Which they won't, of course,
Mr Henry wrote. Long before then, young Australian workers, the most disadvantaged group of taxpayers, will have given up on our political system. We cannot wait another decade for structural tax reforms that shift the dial in favour of young workers.
Mr Henry said the tax system was not giving workers a break and would Mraw even more from them
, despite Mr Chalmers declaring his goal from the budget was to better align taxes paid through wages and investments. The budget estimates that taxes withheld from workers' pay packets will increase from 45% of total tax receipts to 47.5% over the next four years,
Mr Henry said.
The Australian tax system delivers virtually no increase in the real pre-tax incomes of young workers yet relies on these same workers to provide an ever-increasing share of total tax revenue. These are the same people who, because of the structure of the tax system, have been denied the opportunity to buy their own home. They are the generation that must shoulder the burden of more than a trillion dollars of government debt. And they are the people who are going to have to live with the consequences of climate change.
Mr Henry’s intervention comes as the Albanese government’s proposed budget reforms face difficulties on multiple fronts, with business warning the overhaul on CGT and trusts will lead to higher overall taxes on employers and further deteriorate Australia’s competitiveness.
The Prime Minister yesterday left the door open to exempting all testamentary trusts from a minimum 30% tax rate on distributions, while claiming the budget proposal did not amount to an inheritance tax. We'll work through the legislation,
he said, when asked if he would exempt all future testamentary trusts from a minimum 30% tax rate.
There is concern within Labor that Mr Chalmers is only prepared to provide concessions to start-ups in the tech sector, leaving entrepreneurs in other industries at a disadvantage.
Mr Charlton, the Assistant Technology Minister, conceded the proposed CGT regime doesn't interact well
with small businesses that have a low capital base.
LOCAL CHATTER:
Jelle van den Berg and his Man Mountain exhibition (sample above) is on in God's Waiting Room (the church hall) alongside the museum. This is the last weekend to see, and buy, his works — it will be taken down during next week.
♦♦♦♦
The Maverick boys (sorry, we thought it was the girls) ARL footballers beat Denman on our local Wilson Memorial Oval this afternoon 46-18.
♦♦♦♦
A red-bellied black snake was found in a wall cavity near an operating theatre at John Hunter Hospital recently. It was found in a store room, where surgical supplies like sutures were kept. One hospital staffer said the snake had been sighted for three days before it was caught. Another staffer said the snake catcher had several attempts and eventually had to cut out part of a wall in a storage area. No one knew how it got in.
the Newcastle Herald reports.
NEWS:
🌀
The mounting
aged care
tsunami
The aged care system is already failing 200,000 older Australians waiting for care, the brutal truth is we did not fail to predict this crisis — we chose not to solve it, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reports today.
Economics often comes down to one brutally simple principle: supply and demand.
When demand exceeds supply, prices rise, queues form and shortages emerge. We see it in housing, childcare and electricity. Now we are watching the same slow-motion train wreck unfold in aged care.
Australia’s oldest baby boomers turn 80 this year. For the next decade, about 80,000 Australians will turn 80 every year.
That matters because the need for health and aged care services explodes in our late 70s and 80s. More people need home care. More need help with meals, transport and medication.
More will eventually require residential aged care. None of this is a surprise. Governments have known this wave was coming for decades, yet Australia still rations aged care services while pretending the system is coping.
On paper, the budget announcements sound reassuring. The government says it is delivering 32,000 additional Support at Home places in the coming financial year, on top of 83,000 places by the end of this financial year. That would bring the total number of Australians receiving support to 420,000 by 30 June 2027. To the casual observer, those numbers sound enormous.
But today around 200,000 older Australians are already waiting for home care services. These are not future applicants. These are people who have been assessed as needing care right now, or who are awaiting assessment.
Some are waiting for basic domestic help. Others need assistance with showering, dressing or medication. The average wait is close to a year. In the meantime, families are left to carry the burden while juggling work, finances and their own health problems.
A recent call to an ABC talkback program says it all. The caller’s father had been stuck in a hospital bed for weeks. After battling through mountains of paperwork, the caller finally got the news she had been praying for — he had been approved for residential aged care. She was ecstatic.
Then came the crushing blow: Yes, his need for care is approved, but there are no places. It may be nine months or more before we can admit him.
That neatly sums up the crisis. Even if 420,000 Australians are receiving Support at Home services by 30 June 2027, Treasury figures suggest there could still be 37,000 people waiting — unless packages are freed up because recipients either move into residential care or die. And the demographic wave keeps growing.
About 80,000 Australians turn 80 every year. Even if only half need support ∼ probably optimistic ∼ by 30 June 2027 we could still have 117,000 Australians needing care and waiting for it. The arithmetic is merciless. Demand is growing far faster than supply.
When governments ration services in a market where demand exceeds supply, queues are inevitable. That is exactly what is happening in aged care. Waiting times for residential care are now around a year as well.
Families and friends are forced to fill the gaps. Hospital beds are clogged with older patients who cannot safely return home but cannot access aged care either.
Last year the government lifted the market price cap for aged care accommodation from $550,000 to $750,000 so providers could build new facilities and modernise old ones. But it did not equally increase funding for financially disadvantaged residents.
Providers could effectively receive accommodation funding based on $750,000 from wealthier residents, while support for low-means residents was closer to $300,000.
For many providers, especially not-for-profits, the economics quickly became ugly. Some openly warned they could not continue taking large numbers of financially disadvantaged residents because the funding gap was simply too large.
The Budget throws money at the problem — increasing the accommodation supplement for homes with high numbers of low-means residents. Some homes may eventually get support equivalent to about $580,000.
But here’s the rub: the extra funding doesn't start until March 2028. And even then? It still falls $170,000 short of the indexed $750,000 market cap.
Too little. Too late. Problem not solved.
[click the intro to return other stories]
👯
More sleezebag
on allegedly
sleezy royal
An historian has alleged that the former Duke of York’s was on a shortlist of 11 'prominent names' accused of sexual abuse
, reports the news.com.au website today. [click to read more]
Ten thousand duchesses having their toes sucked could not have done more to batter Buckingham Palace’s image than historian Andrew Lownie in a matter of months.
His scorching 2025 biography of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of The House of Windsor, irrevocably unmasked the former prince as having the morals and character of Rasputin’s shadier brother.
Now Lownie is back, adding 40 pages to the newly released paperback edition of Entitled, in which he alleges that Andrew was on a 2025 FBI shortlist of 11 'prominent names' accused of sexual abuse during investigations by the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force
.
Lownie writes that this FBI document alleges Andrew took part in orgies on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, of him requesting 16-year-old blondes
, of him being seen dirty dancing with a 'young girl'
and was given sexual favours to keep him 'happy'.
The new Entitled also adds Russian and Chinese spying to the disgraced, dumped duke’s story, not to mention a buffet of new, grubby claims about prostitutes, a former Miss Slovakia and Andrew lurking outside the bedroom of a pregnant woman.
But back to the 2025 FBI document, a PowerPoint specifically, which, Lownie writes, alleged that the former Duke of York had taken part in orgies on Epstein’s private jet
, been given sexual favours to keep him happy
on the instructions of Ghislaine Maxwell and been seen dirty dancing with a young girl
on Little Saint James.
One woman, whose name is redacted, said she was told 'to make Prince Andrew happy' by doing the 'exact same things that she did for Epstein because he is good friends with [Ghislaine] Maxwell'. However, the document hasn't been verified and does not establish guilt.
This FBI document is not the only instance, Lownie claims, of Andrew’s name appearing in US intelligence circles. Lownie writes that he was passed an American intelligence document, dated January 15, 2026 and headed Political: Corruption Andrew M-W; RU/PRC
.
The document reads: RIS [Russian intelligence services] originally developed … networks using figures such as Jeffrey Epstein for access to political and business leaders, and to control any possible domestic law enforcement actions
.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (AMW) was cultivated by RIS to cultivate a figure close to the British Royal Family as 'protection' for them to conduct both intelligence and corruption operations within EU/UK/US. Using AMW as a front provided legitimacy to corruption operations worldwide.
According to the document, Andrew was not blackmailed or otherwise coerced into this role
but was a willing participant in these schemes due to financial, sexual and personal reward
. However, Lownie stresses, It wasn't suggested that Andrew was knowingly getting in bed with Russian intelligence
.
However, he also writes that there were plenty of people the former HRH did try to get into bed with.
One employee at the British embassy in Bangkok told Lownie that staff were told to book two hotel rooms for Andrew — one 'official' one and one for his antics with prostitutes
.
Then there was a trip to Prague in 2003: Andrew’s office arranged with a friend of his in the capital to pay €10,000 for a former Miss Slovakia to spend the night with him
.
Then that night, a party was thrown in his honour full of the great and good — where he apparently turned up with his Miss Slovakia but left early. He obviously had no interest besides as a rendezvous for his tryst
.
The next year, in 2004, Andrew was invited to open a luxury Bahamas resort: He sent in a litany of demands that included a hefty appearance fee and a request for 16 year-old blondes
.
There’s more, of course.
Take this charming scene. The pregnant wife of a well-known Scottish businessman meets Andrew at a public dinner. What did the charmer do? He cracked obscene jokes, made innuendos about sleeping with her and then waited for her outside her room when she returned to it that evening
, Lownie writes.
Or this one. Andrew, a senior army officer told Lownie, would send pictures of naked women to senior service personnel.
Here is one final wonderfully karmic anecdote. While Andrew was in the navy he was seconded to a nuclear submarine, during which time he generally behaved like an a**e to everyone,
one crew man told Lownie.
Unfortunately one day, the duke left his kid leather flying gloves behind in the control room and so, the submariner took them into the bathroom and did something unspeakable and then returned the glove
.
As Lownie points out, this did much to raise the morale of the crew
.
[click the intro to return to front page]
🛅
What if
and when
options
Australian government plans for 'worst-case scenario' retail fuel rationing, documents reveal. With warnings world oil supplies are expected to hit 'red zone' by August, the Albanese government has outlined its powers to enforce daily purchase limits for motorists writes The Guardian website. [click to read the rest of the story].
Contained in documents obtained by Guardian Australian under freedom of information, one option the government has outlined to arrest a local fuel supply shortage is to impose a maximum transaction value per vehicle per day
— a rationing rule limiting how much fuel a single vehicle can buy at a service station over a 24-hour period.
Rationing has not been needed and the government has said it does not expect it to be required, with the March plan a worst-case scenario
.
But there is now expected to be increasing pressure on fuel supplies internationally, with the International Energy Agency warning on Friday that oil markets will enter the red zone
by August as stocks dwindle amid an export shortage from the Middle East.
Documents from the DCCEEW, show government officials have options for rationing if management of fuel by the petrol industry ∼ stressed as the government’s first preference ∼ proves inadequate.
The documents span the period from February 21 to March 17, covering the early part of the Iran war after US-Israel strikes on Iran began on February 28.
Under the Liquid Fuels Emergency Act, the federal energy minister, Chris Bowen, can declare a liquid fuel emergency, with powers including directing fuel supply and even rationing in extreme examples.
Even at the height of the crisis, Bowen and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, publicly ruled out the need for fuel rationing.
Bowen said on March 26 a liquid fuel emergency plan, which has existed since 2006 and discussed rationing measures like banning jerry cans, was just a guide
and the government wouldn't do it that way
.
Other countries have enacted various responses to the fuel crisis, including limiting purchases and asking citizens to reduce travel, according to the IEA. The Australian government asked people to consider voluntary measures such as using public transport.
According to notes from a March 3 meeting of the National Oil Supply Emergency Committee, representatives from Victoria raised interest in thinking in future about what will rationing look like
. One participant ∼ details of which were redacted ∼ wanted to consider what demand rationing might look like and messaging around this
.
The meeting resolved that DCCEEW would consider work on how rationing under an liquid fuel emergency declaration would work under a future worst-case scenario, and what messaging might look like
.
The release of other documents, including a cabinet document titled Triggers to support liquid fuel security
and an executive council document on regulations for a liquid fuel emergency, were refused.
By March 17, Nosec was advancing discussions around rationing. An executive summary of that meeting stated it would begin conversations next week around planning for fuel rationing/restrictions, noting hesitations around signalling and tempering public panic
.
As early as March 9, documents from a liquid fuel group note that fuel rationing was among options to respond to supply disruptions
. The heavily redacted document notes the minister’s powers under the Liquid Fuels Emergency Act, including rationing ∼ restriction on the amount of fuel users can purchase
∼ or directing that fuel suppliers make supply available for certain users.
The government has added to stocks since the crisis began, securing 600m litres of diesel and 100m litres of jet fuel in 14 additional cargoes from Singapore, China, Brunei and other nations. The budget also included a $10bln fuel security package.
Another document titled Background to the National Oil Emergency Demand Restraint Strategy, which is otherwise heavily redacted, discusses possible settings around regulated retail rationing
.
It suggests, in a serious fuel shortage, controls could be placed on either bulk or retail sales of petroleum products and further customer demand side management responses
, in hopes of ensuring other users have petroleum supply for as long as possible
.
The document goes on to say the government’s preference was for industry to respond to a fuel emergency in the first instance, before the minister’s powers were enacted to direct supply.
Depending on the severity and expected/actual duration of an emergency, people may be restricted in their fuel consumption for certain periods of time,
it states.
It is anticipated that mandatory controls would only be introduced if market based measures did not achieve desired outcomes.
State and territory governments, as well as the petroleum industry and other key stakeholders
, would be consulted and given input to such measures.
[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:
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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:
Moscow and several major cities across the European part of Russia sweltered under record-breaking spring heat this week. Photo: Arthur Novosiltsev/Moskva News Agency
The Moscow Times writes the relationship between Russia and China is a marriage of convenience where one party ∼ Russia ∼ likes to pretend they need each other equally. They don't. Unlike Moscow, whose options have been sharply curbed under Western sanctions, Beijing remains deeply integrated into the global economy. Putin visits China every year to shore up this relationship. But this year's trip was notable for coming hot on the heels of U.S. President Donald Trump, who claimed to have secured "fantastic trade deals" while offering few specifics. Putin's visit was similarly short on breakthrough agreements, including any guarantees about the future of the long-delayed Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline. But experts who spoke to The Moscow Times said the trip ∼ whose pageantry closely mirrored Trump's earlier visit ∼ shows that for all China's overtures to Washington, it still sees itself as aligned with a global order that challenges U.S. hegemony. Russian markets responded poorly to the continued uncertainty surrounding Power of Siberia 2, with Gazprom shares falling 3.5%. The reaction indicated that, despite all the warm words, many remain unconvinced that the meeting meaningfully improved Russia's position. What else happened this week: ■ Russia held three days of nuclear exercises involving hundreds of aircraft, missile launchers and submarines. The drills were announced a day after a joint exercise with Belarus in which the two countries' armies practiced deploying nuclear weapons from makeshift launch sites. Even before its invasion of Ukraine, Russia used nuclear drills to signal strength to its adversaries. ■ A state auction to sell a 67.2% stake in Russia's third-largest gold producer failed to attract any bidders. The $2.22 billion stake was seized last year from billionaire lawmaker Konstantin Strukov, who was accused of illegally gaining control of the company through his government position. Yuzhuralzoloto is the most high-profile nationalized asset to be put up for auction since Domodedovo Airport, which also failed to attract bidders in January. ■ Authorities in the Krasnodar region said they had completed the cleanup of an oil spill caused by Ukrainian drone attacks on the Tuapse oil refinery. Even before the announcement, local environmentalists warned that officials were playing down the spill to avoid scaring off tourists. ■ Britain sparked backlash at home and abroad after following Washington's lead and eased sanctions on Russia's oil industry to help ensure fuel supplies. The trade license allows purchases of oil products made from Russian crude in third countries and permits the maritime transport of LNG from two Russian production plants. ■ Moscow threatened Latvia with an "appropriate response" and warned that NATO would not protect it after accusing Riga of allowing Ukraine to launch drone attacks from its territory. Latvia accused Russia of launching a disinformation campaign capitalizing on Riga's own political crisis triggered by Ukrainian drones straying into its airspace. ■ Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the prospect of Russia ever returning to Eurovision, saying that the competition had become too "satanic."
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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
U.S. stocks rose on Friday, with the Dow reaching an intraday record high, as investors cheered signs of progress in talks to end the Middle East conflict and a strong corporate earnings season, Reuters reports on today's website. [click to continue reading]
The S&P 500 notched its eighth consecutive weekly gain, its longest since a nine-week streak ended in December 2023.
Semiconductor stocks, which have driven recent Wall Street gains, were mostly higher. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose, lifted by gains in Qualcomm, while Nvidia slipped.
The U.S. has made some progress toward a deal with Iran, though more work remains, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said differences between the two sides remained deep.
Earnings season looked really good and the economic data, save a few outliers, looked pretty solid so fundamentally the picture looks really solid,
said James St. Aubin, chief investment officer at Ocean Park Asset Management in Santa Monica, California.
The war has been one major speed bump along the road for at least the equity market but I think the headlines today looked encouraging and that was probably helping at the margin.
According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 gained 27.84 points, or 0.36%, to end at 7,473.56 points, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 50.87 points, or 0.20%, to 26,346.27. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 294.90 points, or 0.59%, to 50,580.56.
Shares of U.S. computer makers surged following strong results from China’s Lenovo Group, which reported a better-than-expected 27% jump in quarterly revenue. Dell Technologies hit a record high while HP Inc gained.
Long-dated government bond yields were lower, having pulled back from recent highs. The yield on benchmark U.S. 10-year notes fell 2.6 basis points to 4.558%.
The bond market seems to be cooling off and yields are coming down from where they were starting to peak earlier this week and I think that’s very encouraging too,
St. Aubin said.
Kevin Warsh was sworn in as chair of the Federal Reserve on Friday, taking the helm at a pivotal moment for the U.S. economy as higher gasoline prices tied to the Iran conflict fuel inflation and weigh on consumer sentiment.
Estèe Lauder rose after the cosmetics maker and Spanish perfumery Puig ended talks for a potential merger.
Workday gained after the human resources software provider exceeded expectations for first-quarter revenue and profit.
| 🎪 | Even Ken doesn't believe |
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has warned that young workers are on track to pay higher taxes while receiving virtually no real wage increases under the plan handed down in Jim Chalmers' fifth budget, as business declares the proposed overhaul of capital gains tax will deliver a sledgehammer blow to the government’s aim to improve productivity, reports The Australian today's website. [click to read more]
The Australian can also reveal the Coalition is threatening to block Labor’s NDIS reform bill from passing the parliament in the first half of the year unless Anthony Albanese agrees to hold a months-long public inquiry into his proposed overhaul of the CGT and negative gearing, complicating Labor’s aim of striking a quick deal with the Greens.
As the Prime Minister prepares to back down on higher taxes on discretionary testamentary trusts following accusations they amounted to a death tax
, business groups are demanding further concessions, while cabinet secretary Andrew Charlton said the concerns being aired by small business founders on the CGT were valid
.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry yesteray declared the proposed CGT and trust reforms undermined the Treasurer’s productivity package in the budget, while the Minerals Council of Australia warned it would hit mining investment.
Mr Henry, Treasury secretary during the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments, warned that the budget’s forecast of further sluggish productivity growth was among the issues condemning young workers to a difficult future.
Writing in The Australian, Mr Henry said the budget does not lack ambition
but was not as ambitious as many of the reform packages delivered through the 1980s and 1990s. But he said it broke the cardinal rule of not offering a fiscal bribe to those who see themselves as losers
.
Arguing that Mr Chalmers did not have the fiscal room to use the revenue from tax hikes on investments to deliver big relief for workers, Mr Henry suggested the government would need to pursue further structural tax reforms to shift the dial in favour of young workers
.
According to the budget papers, we won't see a surplus for another decade, even if future governments book all the revenue gains from bracket creep. Which they won't, of course,
Mr Henry wrote. Long before then, young Australian workers, the most disadvantaged group of taxpayers, will have given up on our political system. We cannot wait another decade for structural tax reforms that shift the dial in favour of young workers.
Mr Henry said the tax system was not giving workers a break and would Mraw even more from them
, despite Mr Chalmers declaring his goal from the budget was to better align taxes paid through wages and investments. The budget estimates that taxes withheld from workers' pay packets will increase from 45% of total tax receipts to 47.5% over the next four years,
Mr Henry said.
The Australian tax system delivers virtually no increase in the real pre-tax incomes of young workers yet relies on these same workers to provide an ever-increasing share of total tax revenue. These are the same people who, because of the structure of the tax system, have been denied the opportunity to buy their own home. They are the generation that must shoulder the burden of more than a trillion dollars of government debt. And they are the people who are going to have to live with the consequences of climate change.
Mr Henry’s intervention comes as the Albanese government’s proposed budget reforms face difficulties on multiple fronts, with business warning the overhaul on CGT and trusts will lead to higher overall taxes on employers and further deteriorate Australia’s competitiveness.
The Prime Minister yesterday left the door open to exempting all testamentary trusts from a minimum 30% tax rate on distributions, while claiming the budget proposal did not amount to an inheritance tax. We'll work through the legislation,
he said, when asked if he would exempt all future testamentary trusts from a minimum 30% tax rate.
There is concern within Labor that Mr Chalmers is only prepared to provide concessions to start-ups in the tech sector, leaving entrepreneurs in other industries at a disadvantage.
Mr Charlton, the Assistant Technology Minister, conceded the proposed CGT regime doesn't interact well
with small businesses that have a low capital base.
♦♦♦♦
The Maverick boys (sorry, we thought it was the girls) ARL footballers beat Denman on our local Wilson Memorial Oval this afternoon 46-18.
♦♦♦♦
A red-bellied black snake was found in a wall cavity near an operating theatre at John Hunter Hospital recently. It was found in a store room, where surgical supplies like sutures were kept. One hospital staffer said the snake had been sighted for three days before it was caught. Another staffer said
the snake catcher had several attempts and eventually had to cut out part of a wall in a storage area. No one knew how it got in.the Newcastle Herald reports.
| 🌀 | The mounting aged care tsunami |
The aged care system is already failing 200,000 older Australians waiting for care, the brutal truth is we did not fail to predict this crisis — we chose not to solve it, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reports today.
Economics often comes down to one brutally simple principle: supply and demand.
When demand exceeds supply, prices rise, queues form and shortages emerge. We see it in housing, childcare and electricity. Now we are watching the same slow-motion train wreck unfold in aged care.
Australia’s oldest baby boomers turn 80 this year. For the next decade, about 80,000 Australians will turn 80 every year.
That matters because the need for health and aged care services explodes in our late 70s and 80s. More people need home care. More need help with meals, transport and medication.
More will eventually require residential aged care. None of this is a surprise. Governments have known this wave was coming for decades, yet Australia still rations aged care services while pretending the system is coping.
On paper, the budget announcements sound reassuring. The government says it is delivering 32,000 additional Support at Home places in the coming financial year, on top of 83,000 places by the end of this financial year. That would bring the total number of Australians receiving support to 420,000 by 30 June 2027. To the casual observer, those numbers sound enormous.
But today around 200,000 older Australians are already waiting for home care services. These are not future applicants. These are people who have been assessed as needing care right now, or who are awaiting assessment.
Some are waiting for basic domestic help. Others need assistance with showering, dressing or medication. The average wait is close to a year. In the meantime, families are left to carry the burden while juggling work, finances and their own health problems.
A recent call to an ABC talkback program says it all. The caller’s father had been stuck in a hospital bed for weeks. After battling through mountains of paperwork, the caller finally got the news she had been praying for — he had been approved for residential aged care. She was ecstatic.
Then came the crushing blow: Yes, his need for care is approved, but there are no places. It may be nine months or more before we can admit him.
That neatly sums up the crisis. Even if 420,000 Australians are receiving Support at Home services by 30 June 2027, Treasury figures suggest there could still be 37,000 people waiting — unless packages are freed up because recipients either move into residential care or die. And the demographic wave keeps growing.
About 80,000 Australians turn 80 every year. Even if only half need support ∼ probably optimistic ∼ by 30 June 2027 we could still have 117,000 Australians needing care and waiting for it. The arithmetic is merciless. Demand is growing far faster than supply.
When governments ration services in a market where demand exceeds supply, queues are inevitable. That is exactly what is happening in aged care. Waiting times for residential care are now around a year as well.
Families and friends are forced to fill the gaps. Hospital beds are clogged with older patients who cannot safely return home but cannot access aged care either.
Last year the government lifted the market price cap for aged care accommodation from $550,000 to $750,000 so providers could build new facilities and modernise old ones. But it did not equally increase funding for financially disadvantaged residents.
Providers could effectively receive accommodation funding based on $750,000 from wealthier residents, while support for low-means residents was closer to $300,000.
For many providers, especially not-for-profits, the economics quickly became ugly. Some openly warned they could not continue taking large numbers of financially disadvantaged residents because the funding gap was simply too large.
The Budget throws money at the problem — increasing the accommodation supplement for homes with high numbers of low-means residents. Some homes may eventually get support equivalent to about $580,000.
But here’s the rub: the extra funding doesn't start until March 2028. And even then? It still falls $170,000 short of the indexed $750,000 market cap.
Too little. Too late. Problem not solved. [click the intro to return other stories]
| 👯 | More sleezebag on allegedly sleezy royal |
An historian has alleged that the former Duke of York’s was on a shortlist of 11 'prominent names' accused of sexual abuse
, reports the news.com.au website today. [click to read more]
Ten thousand duchesses having their toes sucked could not have done more to batter Buckingham Palace’s image than historian Andrew Lownie in a matter of months.
His scorching 2025 biography of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of The House of Windsor, irrevocably unmasked the former prince as having the morals and character of Rasputin’s shadier brother.
Now Lownie is back, adding 40 pages to the newly released paperback edition of Entitled, in which he alleges that Andrew was on a 2025 FBI shortlist of 11 'prominent names' accused of sexual abuse during investigations by the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force
.
Lownie writes that this FBI document alleges Andrew took part in orgies on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, of him requesting 16-year-old blondes
, of him being seen dirty dancing with a 'young girl'
and was given sexual favours to keep him 'happy'.
The new Entitled also adds Russian and Chinese spying to the disgraced, dumped duke’s story, not to mention a buffet of new, grubby claims about prostitutes, a former Miss Slovakia and Andrew lurking outside the bedroom of a pregnant woman.
But back to the 2025 FBI document, a PowerPoint specifically, which, Lownie writes, alleged that the former Duke of York had taken part in orgies on Epstein’s private jet
, been given sexual favours to keep him happy
on the instructions of Ghislaine Maxwell and been seen dirty dancing with a young girl
on Little Saint James.
One woman, whose name is redacted, said she was told 'to make Prince Andrew happy' by doing the 'exact same things that she did for Epstein because he is good friends with [Ghislaine] Maxwell'. However, the document hasn't been verified and does not establish guilt.
This FBI document is not the only instance, Lownie claims, of Andrew’s name appearing in US intelligence circles. Lownie writes that he was passed an American intelligence document, dated January 15, 2026 and headed Political: Corruption Andrew M-W; RU/PRC
.
The document reads: RIS [Russian intelligence services] originally developed … networks using figures such as Jeffrey Epstein for access to political and business leaders, and to control any possible domestic law enforcement actions
.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (AMW) was cultivated by RIS to cultivate a figure close to the British Royal Family as 'protection' for them to conduct both intelligence and corruption operations within EU/UK/US. Using AMW as a front provided legitimacy to corruption operations worldwide.
According to the document, Andrew was not blackmailed or otherwise coerced into this role
but was a willing participant in these schemes due to financial, sexual and personal reward
. However, Lownie stresses, It wasn't suggested that Andrew was knowingly getting in bed with Russian intelligence
.
However, he also writes that there were plenty of people the former HRH did try to get into bed with.
One employee at the British embassy in Bangkok told Lownie that staff were told to book two hotel rooms for Andrew — one 'official' one and one for his antics with prostitutes
.
Then there was a trip to Prague in 2003: Andrew’s office arranged with a friend of his in the capital to pay €10,000 for a former Miss Slovakia to spend the night with him
.
Then that night, a party was thrown in his honour full of the great and good — where he apparently turned up with his Miss Slovakia but left early. He obviously had no interest besides as a rendezvous for his tryst
.
The next year, in 2004, Andrew was invited to open a luxury Bahamas resort: He sent in a litany of demands that included a hefty appearance fee and a request for 16 year-old blondes
.
There’s more, of course.
Take this charming scene. The pregnant wife of a well-known Scottish businessman meets Andrew at a public dinner. What did the charmer do? He cracked obscene jokes, made innuendos about sleeping with her and then waited for her outside her room when she returned to it that evening
, Lownie writes.
Or this one. Andrew, a senior army officer told Lownie, would send pictures of naked women to senior service personnel.
Here is one final wonderfully karmic anecdote. While Andrew was in the navy he was seconded to a nuclear submarine, during which time he generally behaved like an a**e to everyone,
one crew man told Lownie.
Unfortunately one day, the duke left his kid leather flying gloves behind in the control room and so, the submariner took them into the bathroom and did something unspeakable and then returned the glove
.
As Lownie points out, this did much to raise the morale of the crew
.
| 🛅 | What if and when options |
Australian government plans for 'worst-case scenario' retail fuel rationing, documents reveal. With warnings world oil supplies are expected to hit 'red zone' by August, the Albanese government has outlined its powers to enforce daily purchase limits for motorists writes The Guardian website. [click to read the rest of the story].
Contained in documents obtained by Guardian Australian under freedom of information, one option the government has outlined to arrest a local fuel supply shortage is to impose a maximum transaction value per vehicle per day
— a rationing rule limiting how much fuel a single vehicle can buy at a service station over a 24-hour period.
Rationing has not been needed and the government has said it does not expect it to be required, with the March plan a worst-case scenario
.
But there is now expected to be increasing pressure on fuel supplies internationally, with the International Energy Agency warning on Friday that oil markets will enter the red zone
by August as stocks dwindle amid an export shortage from the Middle East.
Documents from the DCCEEW, show government officials have options for rationing if management of fuel by the petrol industry ∼ stressed as the government’s first preference ∼ proves inadequate.
The documents span the period from February 21 to March 17, covering the early part of the Iran war after US-Israel strikes on Iran began on February 28.
Under the Liquid Fuels Emergency Act, the federal energy minister, Chris Bowen, can declare a liquid fuel emergency, with powers including directing fuel supply and even rationing in extreme examples.
Even at the height of the crisis, Bowen and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, publicly ruled out the need for fuel rationing.
Bowen said on March 26 a liquid fuel emergency plan, which has existed since 2006 and discussed rationing measures like banning jerry cans, was just a guide
and the government wouldn't do it that way
.
Other countries have enacted various responses to the fuel crisis, including limiting purchases and asking citizens to reduce travel, according to the IEA. The Australian government asked people to consider voluntary measures such as using public transport.
According to notes from a March 3 meeting of the National Oil Supply Emergency Committee, representatives from Victoria raised interest in thinking in future about what will rationing look like
. One participant ∼ details of which were redacted ∼ wanted to consider what demand rationing might look like and messaging around this
.
The meeting resolved that DCCEEW would consider work on how rationing under an liquid fuel emergency declaration would work under a future worst-case scenario, and what messaging might look like
.
The release of other documents, including a cabinet document titled Triggers to support liquid fuel security
and an executive council document on regulations for a liquid fuel emergency, were refused.
By March 17, Nosec was advancing discussions around rationing. An executive summary of that meeting stated it would begin conversations next week around planning for fuel rationing/restrictions, noting hesitations around signalling and tempering public panic
.
As early as March 9, documents from a liquid fuel group note that fuel rationing was among options to respond to supply disruptions
. The heavily redacted document notes the minister’s powers under the Liquid Fuels Emergency Act, including rationing ∼ restriction on the amount of fuel users can purchase
∼ or directing that fuel suppliers make supply available for certain users.
The government has added to stocks since the crisis began, securing 600m litres of diesel and 100m litres of jet fuel in 14 additional cargoes from Singapore, China, Brunei and other nations. The budget also included a $10bln fuel security package.
Another document titled Background to the National Oil Emergency Demand Restraint Strategy, which is otherwise heavily redacted, discusses possible settings around regulated retail rationing
.
It suggests, in a serious fuel shortage, controls could be placed on either bulk or retail sales of petroleum products and further customer demand side management responses
, in hopes of ensuring other users have petroleum supply for as long as possible
.
The document goes on to say the government’s preference was for industry to respond to a fuel emergency in the first instance, before the minister’s powers were enacted to direct supply.
Depending on the severity and expected/actual duration of an emergency, people may be restricted in their fuel consumption for certain periods of time,
it states.
It is anticipated that mandatory controls would only be introduced if market based measures did not achieve desired outcomes.
State and territory governments, as well as the petroleum industry and other key stakeholders
, would be consulted and given input to such measures.
[click the intro to return to front page]
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.
Moscow and several major cities across the European part of Russia sweltered under record-breaking spring heat this week. Photo: Arthur Novosiltsev/Moskva News Agency
The Moscow Times writes the relationship between Russia and China is a marriage of convenience where one party ∼ Russia ∼ likes to pretend they need each other equally. They don't. Unlike Moscow, whose options have been sharply curbed under Western sanctions, Beijing remains deeply integrated into the global economy. Putin visits China every year to shore up this relationship. But this year's trip was notable for coming hot on the heels of U.S. President Donald Trump, who claimed to have secured "fantastic trade deals" while offering few specifics. Putin's visit was similarly short on breakthrough agreements, including any guarantees about the future of the long-delayed Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline. But experts who spoke to The Moscow Times said the trip ∼ whose pageantry closely mirrored Trump's earlier visit ∼ shows that for all China's overtures to Washington, it still sees itself as aligned with a global order that challenges U.S. hegemony. Russian markets responded poorly to the continued uncertainty surrounding Power of Siberia 2, with Gazprom shares falling 3.5%. The reaction indicated that, despite all the warm words, many remain unconvinced that the meeting meaningfully improved Russia's position. What else happened this week: ■ Russia held three days of nuclear exercises involving hundreds of aircraft, missile launchers and submarines. The drills were announced a day after a joint exercise with Belarus in which the two countries' armies practiced deploying nuclear weapons from makeshift launch sites. Even before its invasion of Ukraine, Russia used nuclear drills to signal strength to its adversaries. ■ A state auction to sell a 67.2% stake in Russia's third-largest gold producer failed to attract any bidders. The $2.22 billion stake was seized last year from billionaire lawmaker Konstantin Strukov, who was accused of illegally gaining control of the company through his government position. Yuzhuralzoloto is the most high-profile nationalized asset to be put up for auction since Domodedovo Airport, which also failed to attract bidders in January. ■ Authorities in the Krasnodar region said they had completed the cleanup of an oil spill caused by Ukrainian drone attacks on the Tuapse oil refinery. Even before the announcement, local environmentalists warned that officials were playing down the spill to avoid scaring off tourists. ■ Britain sparked backlash at home and abroad after following Washington's lead and eased sanctions on Russia's oil industry to help ensure fuel supplies. The trade license allows purchases of oil products made from Russian crude in third countries and permits the maritime transport of LNG from two Russian production plants. ■ Moscow threatened Latvia with an "appropriate response" and warned that NATO would not protect it after accusing Riga of allowing Ukraine to launch drone attacks from its territory. Latvia accused Russia of launching a disinformation campaign capitalizing on Riga's own political crisis triggered by Ukrainian drones straying into its airspace. ■ Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the prospect of Russia ever returning to Eurovision, saying that the competition had become too "satanic."
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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