At the end of 2024, Australia’s mortgage affordability was the worst on record, with households required to sacrifice a record share of their incomes to repay the median-sized new mortgage. There was also a record gap between the median home price and borrowers’ capacity to pay, assuming traditional affordability metrics. So far this year, the

Last year, prominent immigration propagandist and managing director of the Australian Housing and Research Institute, Michael Fotheringham, blamed the nation’s housing shortage on ‘greedy’ households consuming too many homes. “We are consuming more houses for the number of people we have. That is a bigger driver for shortfall in housing than migration”. “The number of

Mark Scott is one of Australis’s greediest rent-seekers. Every year, Scott plunders $1.2m from Sydney University as its vice-chancellor. It’s no wonder he remembers Harvard so well, hobnobbing with the Great Gatsby. Three decades ago, I embarked on an exciting adventure to Harvard to complete a graduate degree, accompanied by my wife and two young

South Australia is touted as the mainland’s leader in renewable energy. According to AEMO, South Australia generates over 70% of its electricity from renewable sources, with significant contributions from wind and solar power. As shown above, wind farms are the largest source of electricity in South Australia, generating 6,651 GWh in the 2022-23 reporting period.

Or, at least I think it’s Launch Week. I’ve got a couple of new books out this week, which I wrote about on ASB last Friday. They’re very different (Romance!), but also the same (SPLODEY!) I’ll post an essay here about it later this week.

If you didn’t read the Boob on Friday and want a sneak preview, I’m building a new stack over here to help run this new project, which I’m working on with my daughter while she travels through Europe. (Anna is my official location scout.)

One of the big stories of 2025 has been the rise of independents. There was a notable increase in the number of independents who stood at this election, but that in itself is not the most important factor. There is a tremendous range in how well an independent might poll, and how serious their campaign might be.

So for this post I wanted to track how high the independent vote has reached, how that vote breaks between a number of categories of different types of independents, and how that has translated into victories or close calls.

MacroBusiness, for years, has blamed much of Australia’s productivity slump on ‘capital shallowing’, which occurs when the nation’s population grows faster than business, infrastructure, and housing investment. This situation leaves workers with less capital, resulting in less output per hour and a lower growth rate per capita. As a stylised example, assume that you run