My business (and I personally) will qualify for the proposed tech startup carve out… but it's terrible policy. If these tax changes are so damaging that the Government needs to create special exemptions for tech companies and a subset of small businesses, that's an admission the underlying policy has serious flaws. Why should founders, employees and investors in one industry get relief while everyone else wears the cost?? What about the medium-sized manufacturers, retailers, healthcare businesses, agricultural businesses, professional services firms and the thousands of ASX-listed companies that employ millions of Australians? And what about the 7.7 million Australians who invest in shares outside super? They don't get a carve out despite facing much higher tax on successful long term investments. That gaping hole in the policy hasn't been fixed! This $77 billion transfer from the productive private sector and aspirational younger Australians to government will make Australia less competitive, discourage investment, productivity and entrepreneurship, and push more capital towards foreign investors who are often exempt from Australian CGT altogether. It's a massive own goal for the country.

The Government's budget backflip makes their tax grab so confusing that you will need an accountancy degree to understand them. Just scrap these changes - which were not asked for or voted upon - and come up with a REAL plan for economic growth.

Australian net long term and permanent arrivals for the year to April came in at 223.2k, the highest figure on record.

Memo to the people telling me I’m a terrible fella for saying I will recommend a vote only to candidates who will change the Sex Discrimination Act and ban puberty blockers: don’t waste your time. My hide is far too thick to worry about your criticisms of me. Instead tell Labor and the Greens they must change their unfair and anti-democratic gender policies.

A week ago, Grattan released a report, called "Out of gas". I think it's something quite profound and awe-inspiring to behold. This is the last gasp of the credulous climate absolutists. Like seeing the last Thylacine, or Dodo. Grattan now occupies this exquisite remnant habitat of deep-Melbourne-progressive-globalist-elite-academia. They aren't aware this habitat doesn't actually have a place in the new political world order. They're smart enough and honest enough to know that the transition required to switch from fossil-fuels to renewable-electrified systems will require massive costs and coersion to bring about. And they're honest enough to look you in the eye, and state in plain language that it should and must be done anyway. Because climate targets are paramount, right? They show absolutely no awareness of the enormous betrayal that the mainstream would sense (if they read long academic reports) at the admission that the project is expensive, and requires economic pain and impingement of liberties to accomplish. It was always meant to be an initiative to reduce cost-of living pressures, and usher in new industrial productivity, right? The whole paper is weirdly oblivious to dominant policy mindsets, variously more (or less) intelligent and honest, which their position fails to cohere with: There's the dumb (or dishonest) transition advocates who persist in the narrative that electrification actually costs less than traditional energy. The market will get things done, if only we let it, or maybe just nudge it to get it unstuck. But really costs are lower, and people will wake up and adopt the right preferences imminently, mostly driven by the superiority and increased affordability of green alternatives. This is D'Ambrosio, Bowen, or Kean. But this Grattan report offers them no comfort, because of how bleakly they announced that all the miracle-cures like bio-gas, green hydrogen etc don't scale well, and how expensive the abandonment of shared infrastructure is. Then there's the savvy compromisers, like Minns and Malinouskas, who have whole-heartedly embraced gas as a cleaner alternative to coal. Not just a transition fuel, but something to be grown and developed. They're deeply concerned about costs and affordability, and wouldn't contemplate strong coercive measures, like banning gas appliances, or paying industry to shut off production while gas infrastructure is slowly disassembled. And of course, there's the climate and energy realists, who now represent the Taylor, Cananvan, Joyce, Hanson, everyone right of the left wing of Labor, who get that Net Zero is neither achievable nor necessary, as the plan to electrify everything with renewable energy isn't going to work at all, in Australia or elsewhere. And with the rest of the world not moving to net-zero either, the pain that Australia is justified in experiencing to lead the fast-thinning pack of climate absolutists is pretty close to zero. Grattan's report, which elevates emissions targets above everything, won't even register with them. So Grattan's stance here, declaring the transition to be expensive and painful, but unavoidable and essential, puts them firmly on the path to intellectual irrelevance. This is the last stand of the righteous-but-honest, climate-absolutist intellectual pitching to the mainstream. I admire their ignorance of political realities. In the same kind of way I admire the athletic and instinctive movements of the last Tasmanian Tiger filmed in captivity, still very much its own creature in the moment, detached from the doom that their lonely existence portends to the informed onlooker. 1/

General Omar Bradley called it the most dangerous mission of D-Day. He was not wrong. At 6:30am on June 6, 1944, 225 Army Rangers approached a 100-foot sheer cliff face on the Normandy coast called Pointe du Hoc. Their mission: climb it. The cliff was vertical. The Germans were at the top with full visibility of everyone below. As the Rangers fired grappling hooks upward, the Germans cut the ropes. Shot the men hanging on them. Dropped grenades over the edge onto the climbers beneath. The Rangers kept climbing. It took roughly 40 minutes. Men fell. Men were shot off the ropes. The ones behind them grabbed the ropes and kept going. They reached the top. Then came the gut punch: the massive 155mm artillery guns they had been sent to destroy were gone. The Germans had moved them inland before the invasion. The entire mission had been sent to destroy guns that weren't there. Most commanders would have regrouped and called it done. The Rangers fanned out. Two miles inland, they found the guns, hidden in an orchard, already aimed at Utah Beach and loaded to fire. They destroyed every one with thermite grenades. Then they dug in. Cut off, with almost no ammunition, no reinforcements, and no resupply, 225 men held Pointe du Hoc against relentless German counterattacks for two full days. When relief finally arrived, only 90 Rangers could still stand and fight. Their names are carved on a memorial in Normandy. Most Americans today cannot name a single one.

Is there a way to define Sex other than biologically? "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." ~ Humpty Dumpty, as quoted by Lord Atkin in his dissent in Liversidge v Anderson [1942] AC 206. Atkin, ironically, was a Queenslander.

Howard’s tax changes were so powerful they even dramatically increased house prices in Ireland, Spain, New Zealand, the UK, France and Canada.

Indeed - while some will say the almost 30 years since the Blairite experiment began, the preceding Thatcher was a "classical liberal" (not a conservative) & her grasping culture & successors dismantled many of the defences to what came after. There is such a thing as "Society".

Labour productivity had NEVER fallen over a 4 year period UNTIL the election of this Labor government. If you want to understand why things are costing more, why interest rates are going up and why your living standards are going backwards, this is the answer.

CHART OF THE DAY: Perhaps the most important story in global markets / geopolitics right now. China's oil imports plunged to ~6.6m b/d in May, according to @Vortexa data, down ~38% vs 2025 average (or ~4m b/d). I wrote this @Opinion column in early May: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

I had a great chat with Ben and Doomberg last night. I would definitely recommend listening!

Since the Treasurer's productivity roundtable last year, productivity has FALLEN.

Let's check in on Australian productivity growth.... Oh.....That's not gone well...

Australian vs American labour productivity growth since the last quarter prior to the pandemic.

Nitrogen fertilizers trade is half of what it used to be