The Department of Home Affairs released temporary visa data for Q4 2024, revealing 2,250,000 temporary visa holders in Australia, excluding visitors, at the end of 2024. This was a record for the December quarter, representing a 116,000 increase over the same period in 2023. There were also roughly 470,000 more temporary visas in Australia than
DXY is back. AUD is tariffied. Auld lead boots is the big question as the tariffs land. Oil keeps bleeding. Gold to the moon. The Crap Complex—dirt, miners, junk, EM—pooed its pants. Curve flattened. Stocks eased. Trump applied his tariffs. “Today, I have implemented a 25% Tariff on Imports from Mexico and Canada (10% on
All he had to do was keep saying, ‘I’ll lower the cost of everything.’ Instead, he has hatched the most disastrously inflationary energy policy I have ever seen. Peter Dutton said gas “will be incredibly important” for the grid and insisted he is eager accelerate new projects such a Narrabri in NSW to ensure more
Over the past decade, the number of cafes nationwide has reached an unsustainable level, and many are struggling to survive. I moved to my home suburb of Ashburton, Melbourne, in 2006. At the time, the local High Street shopping strip had only a few cafes. The number of cafes peaked at around a dozen in
CoreLogic released its first auction results for 2025, with final clearance rates crashing to new lows in the week ending 26 January. The national final auction clearance rate fell to 55.6%. This was the lowest result since the final week of 2022 when housing market conditions were adjusting to successive cash rate increases. The decline
International Reads: Costco to raise hourly pay for most US store workers to over $30 – Reuters Trump says US could soon put 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada – Reuters Trump’s grant gambit threatens to wreck the goldilocks economy he inherited – CNN Americans tipping less as frustration over prices and prompts grows,
Asian stock markets are doing well to absorb the latest Fed and ECB meetings with the added volatility of a Japanese inflation print and subsequent BOJ comments giving Yen a reprieve after the USD fell all week. Indeed, the USD is strengthening against most of the majors again as the Clown in the Oval Office
Will Australia’s real ambassador to the US please stand up? Golfing great Greg Norman hinted he was called upon once again to act as a bridge between the Australian government and Donald Trump, helping to arrange a meeting between the president and ambassador Kevin Rudd. MB has noted many times that Rudd chum is blood
Every opinion poll released in 2025 has shown the Albanese Labor government trailing Peter Dutton’s Coalition on both primary and two-party prefered vote. In recent elections, Victoria has represented a stronghold for the federal Labor Party. The 2022 federal election saw Labor win 24 out of 39 Victorian seats and 54.83% of the two-party preferred
Ambos, police, doctors, nurses, mental health workers: wage claims, strikes, walkouts, burnouts, suicide. All of these crises are linked in several different ways. Paramount is the federal immigration-led economic model that piles people upon people—often from a Third World where life is cheap—while the states that govern most of the front-line services are left to