Tag: Australia

Commentary The decision by the Victorian Labor government to cancel the 2026 Commonwealth Games is a major blow to the regional communities—promised world-class sporting events and infrastructure—and an assault on the reputation of the state; indeed the nation. The Games had been scheduled to showcase regional Victoria, with major events in Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, Shepparton, and the Latrobe Valley. Just ...

Rising construction costs have slowed for the first time in two years as a drop in new home builds eases demand for materials and labour. The cost of building a home or renovating recorded its lowest average increase last month since September 2020, with potential knock-on effects for the housing market and inflation. The national quarterly average growth rate eased to ...

SYDNEY—An Australian project management firm has filed a lawsuit against Twitter Inc. in a U.S. court seeking cumulative payments of about A$1 million ($665,000) over alleged non-payment of bills for work done in four countries, court filings showed. Sydney-based private company Facilitate Corp. on June 29 filed the suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District Of ...

Australia will launch a temporary task force known as a “fusion cell” to combat the growing issue of investment scams. Led by the competition watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and the financial services regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the fusion cell will draw experts from both public and private sectors to minimise losses. These ...

Commentary Australia is a federation, although for decades now it has been hard to notice. But COVID-19 may have changed everything. In a functioning federation, like the United States, states revel in competition and distinguishing themselves from each other. While California appears to be going woke and broke at the moment, Florida is where “woke goes to die” and where ...

Australia’s corporate regulator has placed at the top of its agenda the regulation of artificial intelligence development in the financial markets amid the “new and different ” risks attached to the quickly evolving technology, partly driven by the fear of being “left behind”. In a recent speech at a financial markets forum, Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) chairman Joe ...

Commentary The Australian federal government is proceeding with plans to ban Nazi symbols. That’s fair enough, I suppose, if the ban is confined to just two images—the swastika and the double lightning bolt SS. Such a prohibition might be unwelcome news to a few extremist motorcycle groups, but most of us share a reasoned detestation of those unambiguous marks of ...

Highly politicised, “woke” curriculums and disruptive classrooms have led to less engaging lessons, pushing many young Australians to call it quits before graduating high school. Australian education expert Kevin Donnelly said the decade-low high school retention rates are the result of students becoming disengaged throughout COVID as they lost face-to-face interaction with their peers and teachers. “When you look at ...

Commentary Handout culture is rampant in society today. People are seen as victims, and government handouts have become the natural response to any form of misfortune—great, small, or imagined. It, therefore, came as no surprise that the response to recently announced increases in indexation to student debt was a call for another government handout. In an open letter, a crossbench ...

Commentary The corporate campaign backing a change to Australia’s Constitution is the latest installment in large business bludgeoning not just customers, but everyone, over woke causes. It’s a form of crony capitalism verging on fascism. It’s bad for the country, and it is bad for the government. Large companies are primed for it by the ideas of “stakeholder” capitalism. This ...

Commentary The government of Western Australia is promising a complete overhaul of firearms legislation, with some new restrictions having already passed in May. Regardless of what is drafted, any new laws will end up passing through Parliament because the Labor government maintains control of both lower and upper houses, allowing it to introduce virtually any legislation unimpeded. Of course, on ...

Commentary It is consoling to learn that the Chinese ambassador to Australia is concerned about how we spend our taxes. What, I wondered, could he impart to us about the expenditure of taxes by the Chinese authorities? Perhaps we could be building dozens of coal-fired power stations, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is doing? Perhaps a massive expansion of ...

Commentary China is diminishing in the eyes of most of the rest of the world, especially with other Asians. That is a key conclusion to emerge from a massive global survey conducted by the famous Pew Research Center. Pew’s weighing of a range of global opinions on China makes clear that Asians, in particular, but also Americans and, to a ...

Australia will provide the Philippines with drone equipment, training, and other technology to strengthen its Coast Guard maritime domain, awareness, and protection capabilities. The announcement follows a visit to the Philippines by Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong on May 18 and comes as the Southeast Asian nation is engaged in an increasingly hostile maritime dispute with Beijing. Wong told journalists ...

Australian farmland values rose for the ninth consecutive year in 2022 due to strong demand and robust performance of the agriculture sector. According to the latest report by Rural Bank, which specialises in financial services for farmers, the national median price of Australian farmland jumped 20 percent to $8,506 (US$5,652) per hectare in the past year. In contrast, the average ...