Blogotariat

Monday 4:38pm – As everyone had called, the Liberal Party has lost their third seat in South Australia’s to Labor’s Charlotte Walker. That is a 4-2 split. It’s worth remembering that traditionally these 4-2 splits are rare. Prior to 2025, Labor had gained two 4-2 splits (with the Democrats the fourth “left” senator) in NSW in 1990 and 1998, two in Tasmania in 2007 and 2010, and one in Western Australia in 2022.

South Australia was the most certain for 2025, but 4-2 splits also remain possible in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, with the possibility of a 4-1-1 split in Tasmania also possible.

A Scottish developer is rehashing a green hydrogen project in Western Australia that it first announced in 2022, after landing 16,000 hectares of land.

Final determinations on electricity "safety net" prices will see some Australian households pay up to nearly 10% more for their power in 2025-26.

A survey of oil and gas industry CEOs ahead of a national conference concedes climate and environmental requirements are "increasingly challenging to meet."

Victoria has given environmental approval to its share of the Marinus Link project, with requirements to better protect certain trees and landscapes.

Queensland wind farm celebrated as the first to be approved by newly elected LNP government becomes the first to be retrospectively rejected using extraordinary planning powers.

At the end of 2024, Australia’s mortgage affordability was the worst on record, with households required to sacrifice a record share of their incomes to repay the median-sized new mortgage. There was also a record gap between the median home price and borrowers’ capacity to pay, assuming traditional affordability metrics. So far this year, the

The post Return of the housing Hunger Games appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Last year, prominent immigration propagandist and managing director of the Australian Housing and Research Institute, Michael Fotheringham, blamed the nation’s housing shortage on ‘greedy’ households consuming too many homes. “We are consuming more houses for the number of people we have. That is a bigger driver for shortfall in housing than migration”. “The number of

The post Why Australian households are shrinking appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Mark Scott is one of Australis’s greediest rent-seekers. Every year, Scott plunders $1.2m from Sydney University as its vice-chancellor. It’s no wonder he remembers Harvard so well, hobnobbing with the Great Gatsby. Three decades ago, I embarked on an exciting adventure to Harvard to complete a graduate degree, accompanied by my wife and two young

The post Australia should Trumpify its universities appeared first on MacroBusiness.

South Australia is touted as the mainland’s leader in renewable energy. According to AEMO, South Australia generates over 70% of its electricity from renewable sources, with significant contributions from wind and solar power. As shown above, wind farms are the largest source of electricity in South Australia, generating 6,651 GWh in the 2022-23 reporting period.

The post South Australia faces blackout future appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Or, at least I think it’s Launch Week. I’ve got a couple of new books out this week, which I wrote about on ASB last Friday. They’re very different (Romance!), but also the same (SPLODEY!) I’ll post an essay here about it later this week.

If you didn’t read the Boob on Friday and want a sneak preview, I’m building a new stack over here to help run this new project, which I’m working on with my daughter while she travels through Europe. (Anna is my official location scout.)

One of the big stories of 2025 has been the rise of independents. There was a notable increase in the number of independents who stood at this election, but that in itself is not the most important factor. There is a tremendous range in how well an independent might poll, and how serious their campaign might be.

So for this post I wanted to track how high the independent vote has reached, how that vote breaks between a number of categories of different types of independents, and how that has translated into victories or close calls.

MacroBusiness, for years, has blamed much of Australia’s productivity slump on ‘capital shallowing’, which occurs when the nation’s population grows faster than business, infrastructure, and housing investment. This situation leaves workers with less capital, resulting in less output per hour and a lower growth rate per capita. As a stylised example, assume that you run

The post Australia’s economy shallows out appeared first on MacroBusiness.