Adam Pengilly reckons in the Sunday Oz the best sound which came out of Penrith this week was the roar from its star players when they were told Peter Wallace would take over from Ivan Cleary as coach in 2028 - and Panthers officials are hoping it can be enough to convince Nathan Cleary to stay.

The coach-in-waiting’s relationship with the club’s star player - who could command close to $2 million per season on the open market from November 1 with an increase to the salary cap - is going to be pivotal to their hopes of retaining him.

It’s not lost on many at Penrith that when Cleary made his NRL debut at age 18, Wallace was the Panthers' club captain.

Then-coach Anthony Griffin handed Cleary his debut probably earlier than dad Ivan would have before he returned as coach.

But it’s what happens after Ivan leaves which has everyone guessing.

There is significant respect between Nathan Cleary and Wallace, a man Ivan recommended take over from him, leading to his rapid appointment.

It’s akin to going into bat after Bradman.

If the Wallace connection is enough to convince Nathan to sign a new deal, the Panthers will be immediately vindicated.

Wallace is a character very much cut from the Ivan mould: introverted, cool under pressure and relatable to players.

I knew he (dad) didn't want to coach forever. He and mum wanted to enjoy a life that didn't revolve around the week in, week out season, Cleary said at Brisbane Airport.

“As much as footy has dominated our lives for so long and we are so passionate about it, there is a point to having a life outside of it.

As it went on, it started to become a reality that his departure was going to be sooner rather than later. It’s a weight off his shoulders and it lets him focus on what’s ahead.

The fear for Penrith now is an exodus of stars on the back of Ivan’s shock exit, as at least nine high-profile off-contract stars — 12 in total — look set to hit the player market on November 1.

All three major U.S. stock indexes veered sharply lower, each shedding more than 1% as a jump in benchmark Treasury yields, reflecting surging energy prices and concerns about long-term inflation, offered an attractive alternative to higher-risk equities.

Despite the selloff, the S&P 500 logged its seventh straight weekly gain, its longest since a nine-week streak ended in December 2023.

The Nasdaq and the Dow fell on the week, with the Nasdaq snapping a six-week winning streak.

There’s a realization that the market had gotten way ahead of itself, said Kenny Polcari, chief market strategist at Slatestone Wealth in Jupiter, Florida. It wasn't paying enough attention to what the bond market and economic data is telling it. It was caught up in this momentum AI trade.

Crude prices surged after combative comments from U.S. President Donald Trump and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi raised doubts as to whether their countries' fragile truce would hold and dampened hopes that normal traffic through the crucial Strait of Hormuz would soon resume.

Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded with few tangible results, and Beijing offered no clear help toward resolving the U.S.-Iran conflict.

It certainly was encouraging to see both countries engaging again at the highest level. Historically, these type of events bring about headlines outlining various commitments, said Matthew Keator, managing partner at the Keator Group, a wealth management firm in Lenox, Massachusetts. This week’s meeting seemed like more of a reset in relations between the two countries and less short-term, quantifiable results.

The yield on 10-year Treasury notes , an indicator of global borrowing costs, touched its highest level since May 2025, when markets were reeling from Trump’s Liberation Day tariff proclamation.

Global bond yields also jumped on growing evidence of the Iran war’s widespread economic damage.

Yesterday marked Jerome Powell’s last day as U.S. Federal Reserve chair, a position he has held through the pandemic, periods of inflation, and interest rate hiking and cutting cycles.

Incoming chair Kevin Warsh is saddled with the potential need for a rate hike if a protracted Iran war leads to sticky inflation.

The weakness today is highlighting the concerns that the recent (inflation) numbers aren't transient, and it’s hard to envision the new chair communicating anything other than a neutral policy stance at best until we see some consistent, meaningful change in the data, Keator added.

The odds of the Fed hiking interest rates by 25 basis points in December are approaching 40%, up from 13.6% a week ago, according to CME Group’s FedWatch tool.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 537.29 points, or 1.07%, to 49,526.17, the S&P 500 lost 92.74 points, or 1.24%, to 7,408.50 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 410.08 points, or 1.54%, to 26,225.15.

Among the 11 major sectors in the S&P 500, energy shares jumped 2.3%. The 10 remaining sectors lost ground, with materials and utilities suffering the steepest percentage losses.

The Philadelphia SE Semiconductor Index slid 4%, dragged lower by stocks that have benefited from the AI hyperscaler phenomenon.

Nvidia and AMD fell by 4.4% and 5.7%, respectively, while Intel dropped 6.2%.

Microsoft rose 3.1% following the disclosure of a new position in the company taken by Bill Ackman’s hedge fund Pershing Square.

Dexcom jumped 6.6% following the medical device maker’s announcement that it will appoint two independent directors and revamp a board committee in collaboration with activist investor Elliott Investment Management.

Ford dropped 7.5%, retreating from a near 21% surge over the last two sessions on optimism over the automaker’s energy storage business.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 3.88-to-1 ratio on the NYSE. There were 128 new highs and 187 new lows on the NYSE.

On the Nasdaq, 1,121 stocks rose and 3,623 fell as declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 3.23-to-1 ratio.

The S&P 500 posted 12 new 52-week highs and 32 new lows while the Nasdaq Composite recorded 53 new highs and 151 new lows.

Volume on U.S. exchanges was 19.32 billion shares, compared with the 18.13 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.

It’s all very well welcoming people to Gadigal country in Sydney but how about we talk about the reality of life for so many Aboriginal people living outside our big cities.

Because it is the life lived in town camps ∼ best described as hellholes by Alice Springs local Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price ∼ that’s far more urgent today than who arrived 250 years ago.

We're not supposed to talk about Sharon Granites any more ∼ the sweet little five-year-old abducted last weekend ∼ because she’s dead. Her family want her described as Kumanjayi Little Baby for cultural reasons.

Modern day aboriginal culture

But it’s modern-day Aboriginal culture ∼ the unemployment, family dysfunction, and substance abuse that characterises remote Australia ∼ that’s led to her tragic, premature death.

The bed that this little girl was abducted from was a grotty mattress on a filthy floor, in a room full of empty Jim Beam bottles. Her father was in jail and there'd been a bit of a party before she disappeared. The DNA of two persons has been found on her underwear. Her accused killer was a frequent prison inmate too, not long released.

We talk a lot about reconciliation for the wrongs of the past. But what about rectifying the wrongs of the present? We argue incessantly about the failures of government to end Indigenous disadvantage but what about the failures of Aboriginal people too?

Town camps natorious

The town camps around Alice Springs have been notorious for years. Very few residents have real jobs, very few of the children go to school regularly, the police often feel powerless to enforce the law because they won't be supported by woke magistrates and weak governments and child protection officers feel they can't do what they otherwise would, for fear of creating another stolen generation.

Just because people happen to be Aboriginal doesn't mean that different standards apply.

The government says that this is not the time to talk about policy change. But if it’s not done now, everyone will move on until the next child dies.

Ask yourself this, would the outrage be different if this little girl and her alleged killer were from a nice suburb in the city? Where are the activists?

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.