Gina Rinehart, James Packer, and a network of wealthy business figures among major financial backers of right-wing lobby group Advance Australia prior to the 2025 election. Stephanie Tran reports. In the 2024-25 financial year Advance reported $13.5 million in receipts. However, the sources of only $5.3 million of the funds
This is my last edition as Editor as I am leaving Firstlinks to become Commsec’s Equity Market Strategist.
Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance, Mark LaMonica, will take over the role until a permanent replacement is found.
It’s been a privilege to work at Firstlinks. I came here three-and-a-half years ago to help Graham Hand. He wanted to focus ...
“Israel’s President Herzog should be arrested on arrival [to Australia] for the crime of incitement to genocide,” UN Commissioner Chris Sidoti told MWM. Australia invites a president accused by the United Nations of inciting genocide. So what now? When the Albanese Government quietly confirmed that Israel’s President Isaac Herzog would
The Queensland government has become the latest to be sucked into the idea that housing abundance will magically solve the housing crisis.
In justifying why the government was selling a swathe of vacant state owned land to the private sector, with no mandates for social housing at all, the Deputy Premier, Jarrod Bleijie, dropped lines that you’d think ...
The disability accommodation new build program is worth about $4 billion so far, dominated by a handful of big investment funds, but it needs a shakeup.
Spinifex is an opinion column. If you would like to contribute, contact us to ask for a detailed brief.
Sign up for our free newsletter.
Since the National Disability Insurance ...
The Reserve Bank raised the base interest rate by a modest 0.25% yesterday. But even modest moves carry outsized consequences for many. Harry Chemay reports. “The Board judged that inflation is likely to remain above target for some time and it was appropriate to increase the cash target rate.” So
The RBA has increased interest rates to tame inflation and there’s no shortage of knee jerk reactions. About how it hurts homeowners (of course); about what the RBA will do next, even though almost no one forecast the rate rise a mere four months ago; and about how the government is or isn’t to blame, depending on which side of politics you support.
A ...
While the latest Division 296 draft legislation may have dispensed with an unrealised capital gains tax component, it still has the whiff of a wealth tax about it. That’s because the effective tax rate on earnings, including any realised capital gains, is tied to the Total Superannuation Balance (TSB) and not just the earned income itself.
Though ...
Australians who went to fight for ISIS were prosecuted, their families vilified, while former IDF soldiers fighting for Israel walk freely among us. Andrew Brown reports on the double standards. Australians like to believe our justice system is governed by principle, and crimes judged by what was done, not by
Many people are encouraged to think that their super fund is much like a bank, where they deposit money, earn interest and draw the money out when they retire.
That is a mistake because super funds are nothing like banks. A super fund is structured as a trust. A trust is legal entity that means someone holds property or assets (e.g. money, shares or ...
Following two decades of ‘low-inflation’ in the 2000s and 2010s, inflation spiked up suddenly in 2021 after the Covid lockdowns unleashed a fiscal and monetary flood of cheap money. The ‘return’ of inflation in 2021 awakened a sudden resurgence in interest in the implications of inflation for investors.
Over the past couple of years, I have heard and ...
In a recent email to his Wall Street Journal readers, Jason Zweig posed multiple-choice questions. The answers would provide investors with lessons.
The first started with a lead-in, asking readers to remember all those headlines about the US stock market being super concentrated in the ‘Magnificent Seven’, then he posed the question, “The S&P 500 ...
Gina Rinehart, James Packer, and a network of wealthy business figures among major financial backers of right-wing lobby group Advance Australia prior to the 2025 election. Stephanie Tran reports. In the 2024-25 financial year Advance reported $13.5 million in receipts. However, the sources of only $5.3 million of the funds
This is my last edition as Editor as I am leaving Firstlinks to become Commsec’s Equity Market Strategist.
Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance, Mark LaMonica, will take over the role until a permanent replacement is found.
It’s been a privilege to work at Firstlinks. I came here three-and-a-half years ago to help Graham Hand. He wanted to focus ...
“Israel’s President Herzog should be arrested on arrival [to Australia] for the crime of incitement to genocide,” UN Commissioner Chris Sidoti told MWM. Australia invites a president accused by the United Nations of inciting genocide. So what now? When the Albanese Government quietly confirmed that Israel’s President Isaac Herzog would
The Queensland government has become the latest to be sucked into the idea that housing abundance will magically solve the housing crisis.
In justifying why the government was selling a swathe of vacant state owned land to the private sector, with no mandates for social housing at all, the Deputy Premier, Jarrod Bleijie, dropped lines that you’d think ...
The disability accommodation new build program is worth about $4 billion so far, dominated by a handful of big investment funds, but it needs a shakeup.
Spinifex is an opinion column. If you would like to contribute, contact us to ask for a detailed brief.
Sign up for our free newsletter.
Since the National Disability Insurance ...
The Reserve Bank raised the base interest rate by a modest 0.25% yesterday. But even modest moves carry outsized consequences for many. Harry Chemay reports. “The Board judged that inflation is likely to remain above target for some time and it was appropriate to increase the cash target rate.” So
The RBA has increased interest rates to tame inflation and there’s no shortage of knee jerk reactions. About how it hurts homeowners (of course); about what the RBA will do next, even though almost no one forecast the rate rise a mere four months ago; and about how the government is or isn’t to blame, depending on which side of politics you support.
A ...
While the latest Division 296 draft legislation may have dispensed with an unrealised capital gains tax component, it still has the whiff of a wealth tax about it. That’s because the effective tax rate on earnings, including any realised capital gains, is tied to the Total Superannuation Balance (TSB) and not just the earned income itself.
Though ...
Australians who went to fight for ISIS were prosecuted, their families vilified, while former IDF soldiers fighting for Israel walk freely among us. Andrew Brown reports on the double standards. Australians like to believe our justice system is governed by principle, and crimes judged by what was done, not by
Many people are encouraged to think that their super fund is much like a bank, where they deposit money, earn interest and draw the money out when they retire.
That is a mistake because super funds are nothing like banks. A super fund is structured as a trust. A trust is legal entity that means someone holds property or assets (e.g. money, shares or ...
Following two decades of ‘low-inflation’ in the 2000s and 2010s, inflation spiked up suddenly in 2021 after the Covid lockdowns unleashed a fiscal and monetary flood of cheap money. The ‘return’ of inflation in 2021 awakened a sudden resurgence in interest in the implications of inflation for investors.
Over the past couple of years, I have heard and ...
In a recent email to his Wall Street Journal readers, Jason Zweig posed multiple-choice questions. The answers would provide investors with lessons.
The first started with a lead-in, asking readers to remember all those headlines about the US stock market being super concentrated in the ‘Magnificent Seven’, then he posed the question, “The S&P 500 ...
