Read the national news blog for rolling coverage of today’s top stories.
Read the national news blog for rolling coverage of today’s top stories.
The potential of a third budget surplus is speculation, Treasurer Jim Chalmers says, as he refuses to hint on whether there will be a March budget before the election.
Asked if he would like to see a budget on March 25, Chalmers said it is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s decision on when to hold the election and whether there would be a budget beforehand.
“I’ve seen speculation about third surplus. And I would urge caution on that front. We are deliberately cautious and conservative when it comes to budgets, we were at the first three and will be in the fourth,” he said.
“I think there is cause for additional caution and conservatism because there has not been anything yet that we have seen which would make us think that there will be a substantial difference to the budget bottom line than what we forecast in December in the midyear budget update.
“There will be a number of considerations when it comes to [election] timing.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has dodged a question on whether there will be rate cuts after inflation hit 2.4 per cent, saying it is not for him to give advice to the Reserve Bank of Australia.
The bank is due to announce interest rates in February, as the official cash rate has been 4.35 per cent. Governor Michele Bullock has regularly cited that inflation was still too high to cut interest rates.
“I’m not going to make any sort of commentary which can be confused with giving free advice to the independent Reserve Bank or making prediction about the decision that they will take when they meet on the 18th and 19th of February,” Chalmers said.
“I respect the independence of the Reserve Bank too much to try and make predictions, or to give them free advice, or to try and colour in for them the decision that they will make independently.
“What we’ve seen play out in other countries is that you have to pay for much lower inflation with much higher unemployment. Australia has shown that there is a better way to go about it, we’re seeing the fruits of some of those efforts in the inflation numbers today.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has welcomed Australia’s inflation rate falling to its lowest level in more than three years.
The annual rate of inflation fell from 2.8 per cent to 2.4 per cent in the 12 months to the end of September.
Speaking in Melbourne, Chalmers said these numbers were better than the market expected and are lower than the forecasts for inflation.
“These numbers are better than expected and better than forecast. What they show is we are making very meaningful, very substantial and now sustained progress in the fight against inflation,” he said.
“It means that headline inflation is now at an almost four-year low and now sits in the middle of the Reserve Bank’s target band and underlying inflation is now at its lowest in three years.”
Chalmers used his opening speech to attack the former Coalition government’s handling of the economy, saying the latest inflation numbers are almost a third of the 6.1 per cent inflation rate Labor inherited.
“Inflation was much higher and rising fast under the Liberals and when we came to office, we’ve been able to get on top of this inflation challenge and to get it down in a very meaningful way,” Chalmers said.
“Our political opponents, Peter Dutton and the Coalition, are focused on conflict and culture wars and they would make people worse off and take Australia backwards … if Peter Dutton had his way, Australians would have been thousands of dollars worse off, and they will be worse off still if he wins the election.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers is speaking after Australia’s inflation rate fell to its lowest level in more than three years. You can watch via the video player below.
The 2021 Australian of the year, Grace Tame, claims one of the prime minister’s staffers secretly backed her decision to wear a T-shirt with the words F— Murdoch to a function at The Lodge on Saturday.
She wrote on the Crikey news site today that they had told her as she was leaving, “there are many of us here who wish we could wear that shirt”.
Albanese on Monday criticised Tame for wearing the T-shirt for the official meet-and-greet alongside other former Australians of the Year, saying he “thought it was disrespectful of the event and of the people who that event was primarily for”.
In Crikey, Tame said many unnamed guests at the function posed with her in her T-shirt and congratulated her on her stance, including an unnamed staffer.
Calling the prime minister “Anthony”, she noted his criticism and said: “My message to Rupert, the malignant media mogul with disproportionate influence over public discourse, is apparently less convenient to his current campaign.
“The prime minister doesn’t need my advice, and I’m sure he isn’t interested in it either. I don’t envy him or his job. I can only imagine it’s a poison chalice, and I’ve no desire to hold another one of those. I just hope he remembers that while pressure and privilege may come from the plutocracy, in this country (for now at least), his power still comes from the people.”
Australia’s inflation rate has fallen to its lowest level in more than three years, paving the way for the Reserve Bank to deliver an interest rate cut in February.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday reported that through the final three months of 2024, consumer prices climbed by 0.2 per cent. This took the annual rate to 2.4 per cent, down from 2.8 per cent in the 12 months to the end of September.
It’s the lowest inflation result since the March quarter of 2021.
The closely watched measure of underlying inflation rose by 0.5 per cent in the quarter, the lowest rate since mid-2021. The annual underlying inflation rate dropped to 3.2 per cent.
The result was due partly to the federal government’s electricity subsidies, but prices for a range of other goods and services also eased. The cost of building new homes actually fell by 0.2 per cent in the quarter, taking the annual rate of growth down to 2.9 per cent. It peaked at almost 21 per cent in mid-2022.
Rents rose by 0.6 per cent in the quarter, after a 1.6 per cent climb in the September quarter. This took annual rent growth down to 6.4 per cent, driven in part by the federal government’s increase in Commonwealth Rent Assistance.
The result for the quarter is substantially lower than had been expected by the Reserve Bank, which holds its first meeting of the year on February 17 and 18.
The bureau’s head of prices statistics, Michelle Marquardt, said the 0.2 per cent quarterly increase, after a similar lift in the September quarter, was the lowest lift in inflation since the depths of the COVID pandemic.
She said non-discretionary inflation fell to 1.8 per cent while, for discretionary goods, it was 3.2 per cent.
“Non-discretionary inflation was lower than discretionary inflation for the first time in nearly four years,” she said.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has started notifying the 690,000 Australian households across New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia that will vote in a different federal electorate after new boundaries were drawn last year.
Among those are 360,000 households in NSW that will vote for a different seat in this year’s federal election, which is due by May.
The seat of North Sydney, held by independent MP Kylea Tink, has been abolished, as has the Labor-held Melbourne seat of Higgins, paving the way for the seat of Bullwinkel in Perth’s eastern suburbs to be created.
The redistributions have affected 200,000 Victorian households and 130,000 West Australian households.
Impacted households will receive letters notifying them of the redistribution, while the AEC will also run advertisements on social media to spread awareness ahead of the election.
Australia’s newly appointed Chief Scientist Tony Haymet has said he is “not worried at all” about the development of DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up that has attracted privacy concerns from some senior Australian politicians.
DeepSeek, which was established only in 2023, enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity on Tuesday after demonstrating breakthrough AI models with comparable services to chatbots such as ChatGPT but at a fraction of the cost. It became the No.1 app on the Australian app store, hours after rocking the US sharemarket.
While voicing “real concern” about the potential of censorship and security breaches from DeepSeek on the Today show this morning, Haymet said that Australia would be a “big winner out of the competition in AI”.
“There’s a huge opportunity for Australian engineers and scientists to hook up with Australian companies or overseas companies because this is truly a global endeavour,” Haymet said.
“The great benefits to Australia are going to be seen all over in financial technology, in agriculture; our Defence Forces are going to be able to use this to know everything that’s going on in our territorial waters. You know, it’s really going to impact many areas of our society.”
In an interview with ABC News on Tuesday, Federal Science Minister Ed Husic urged Australians to be “very careful” when choosing to download DeepSeek.
“I think it does come down to governments and businesses doing some of the thinking around this and obviously if there are any issues that present themselves, particularly from a national security perspective. We’ll always keep an open mind and act if we need to,” Husic said.
Embattled casino operator Star Entertainment has said it will receive $60 million for the proposed sale of the events centre at its Sydney casino to the group that operates its Lyric theatre, but this might not help it stay afloat.
Star said it has agreed to a binding arrangement for the sale of The Star Sydney Event Centre to Foundation Theatres Pty Ltd for $60 million.
“The Star has worked closely with the team at Foundation Theatres since they acquired the sublease for the Sydney Lyric in 2011,” Star chief executive Steve McCann said.
“We continue to work on a number of other potential non-core asset transactions.”
But there are no guarantees it will help with the “material uncertainty” over its ability to stay solvent.
Star said the proceeds would be held as restricted cash by its lenders, and there is no certainty it will count towards the $150 million in capital that it needs to raise to access $100 million in fresh loans from its lenders.
Earlier this month, Star reported that it continued to burn through its remaining cash – leaving it with just $78 million – which prompted Morningstar’s analyst to warn the company might not survive until its results in late February.
Star made a loss of $8 million in the second quarter on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) basis, an improvement on the $18 million loss in its first quarter.
“While discussions continue with respect to a range of different solutions, there is no certainty that any of these negotiations will result in one or more definitive arrangements that might materially increase the group’s liquidity position. In the absence of one or more of those arrangements, there remains material uncertainty as to the group’s ability to continue as a going concern,” Star said at the time.
Inflation data for the December quarter, to be released at 11.30am today, is tipped to ease, but it may not be enough to convince the Reserve Bank to reduce the cash rate at its next meeting on February 17 and 18.
Among the factors that might stoke caution is the flow of government subsidies, including those reducing electricity and rent prices, which have been viewed by some economists as distorting the true inflation rate.
Increased global certainty, partially triggered by the Trump administration’s tariff plans, makes the economic outlook less clear. The changing composition of the Reserve Bank board at the end of February might entice the current board to leave the cash rate unchanged.
The federal government will also pay close attention to today’s inflation numbers, with government MPs believing that an interest rate cut in February could trigger an election for early April.
You can read more about the impact of today’s inflation data from Shane Wright here.