Paul J. Berating

Today's Top Stories

⚡ Top Story

Inflation pressures set to expand despite fuel reprieve

Annual trimmed mean inflation is tipped to rise despite the easing of fuel prices, as the impacts of the Iran war flow through to the broader economy.

Bowser goes down a few cents and Treasury sends out the bunting. Meanwhile the Iran war's seeping into every container ship, every freight invoice, every loaf of bread — and trimmed mean inflation climbs because that's what it does when a war in the Strait of Hormuz meets a economy that imports everything that isn't a rock. The petrol pump is a magic trick. The numbers underneath are the rabbit dying in the hat.

SMH · Rob Harris

A decade on, the ABS is still rehearsing the same fall

A scathing review of the 11 August census warns the ABS still has critical security gaps to close — a decade after the 2016 collapse.

Ten years on from the night the ABS site fell over like a card table at a wedding, and the review's found the same holes in the fence. Lessons learned, apparently — just not by the people running the count.

Michael West Media · AAP

War crimes office wants to know who tipped the cameras off

The office prosecuting Roberts-Smith couldn't keep his arrest off the morning bulletins and has now asked the corruption watchdog to find out who in the building was running the press list.

Someone in the building tipped off the cameras so the perp walk had a film crew. The office investigating war crimes can't keep a Tuesday morning arrest off the front page. Talleyrand ran a foreign ministry on whispers; we can't run a press embargo for forty minutes. Refer it to the NACC — they'll investigate it the way the AFP investigates the AFP.

SMH · Matthew Knott

Hockey's AUKUS jitters: just ring Trump, mate

Former ambassador Joe Hockey says he's nervous about AUKUS and reckons the fix is Albanese cold-calling Donald Trump to build the relationship.

Hockey wants Albanese to cold-call Trump like he's flogging solar panels in Penrith. The man who couldn't sell a budget to his own party room is now selling phone diplomacy. Talleyrand built alliances through cunning. We're building ours through the redial button.

Guardian Australia · Australian Associated Press and Petra Stock

Power bills to fall up to 10% as renewables and batteries hit record share of grid

Default market offer prices drop 3.4%–10.7% in NSW and south-east Queensland from July, with renewables meeting nearly half of national power in 2025. South Australian flat-rate customers cop a 1.4% rise.

Bills down ten per cent because the wind blew and the sun came up — the same physics that's been on offer since the Carboniferous. Took us a decade of culture war about coal to discover the cheapest electron is the one nobody has to dig up. Meanwhile South Australia cops a 1.4% rise because reality refuses to be uniform across a continent.

SMH · Paul Sakkal

Coalition discovers the stopwatch

Michaelia Cash questions why charges against Ben Roberts-Smith came together quickly while the ISIS brides decision took three weeks.

Cash wants to know why the AFP moved fast on Roberts-Smith and slow on the returning brides — as if the answer isn't that one case had a Federal Court judgment sitting on the desk and the other didn't. The Coalition's discovered prosecutorial timelines are a wonderful thing when you've got nothing else to say at the dispatch box.