More rate hikes in 2026; Coalition at odds; challenger brands winning mobile battle

More rate hikes in 2026; Coalition at odds; challenger brands winning mobile battle

News in brief

The reaction from the Federal Opposition to the rate hike yesterday in parliament was fierce, with Opposition leader Sussan Ley calling on PM Anthony Albanese to take responsibility for the rate hike, given he took responsibility for the three rate cuts last year. It is one of the few areas the opposition parties believe they have some traction at the moment.

 

The three Nationals senators who broke shadow cabinet rules by voting against the government’s anti-hate group laws would have to spend six months off the frontbench as a condition of the Coalition getting back together, Sussan Ley has stipulated. The Nationals are considering the deal, though media reports suggest it isn’t to their liking.

 

Telstra and TPG Telecom, which owns the Vodafone and iiNet brands, are losing customers to alternative providers Aussie Broadband and Superloop, due to the latter’s better service and cheaper prices, according to research by JPMorgan.

 

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired xAI for $US250bn, as the world’s richest man combines his two largest private ventures to pursue his ambition to win the AI race by developing data centres in space.

 

TikTok in the US is now owned by American interests, but it has come under fire for its new privacy terms, which allegedly suppress videos critical of ICE and Donald Trump, and apparently prevent some users for sending direct messages with the word “Epstein” in them.

Fear-o-meter

In the RBA’s words, after announcing a 25-basis point increase in interest rates.

 

“While inflation has fallen substantially since its peak in 2022, it picked up materially in the second half of 2025. The Board has been closely monitoring the economy and judges that some of the increase in inflation reflects greater capacity pressures. As a result, the Board considers that inflation is likely to remain above target for some time.

 

“Capacity pressures reflect, in part, the greater momentum in demand seen in recent months. Growth in private demand has strengthened substantially more than expected, driven by both household spending and investment. Activity and prices in the housing market are also continuing to pick up.

 

“Financial conditions eased over 2025 and it is uncertain whether they remain restrictive. Credit is readily available to both households and businesses and the effects of earlier interest rate reductions are yet to flow through fully to aggregate demand, prices and wages …

 

“Various indicators suggest that labour market conditions remain a little tight and that they have stabilised in recent months, in line with the pick-up in momentum in economic activity ...

 

“Uncertainty in the global economy remains significant but so far there has been little or no depressing effect on the Australian economy; indeed, recent growth and trade in Australia’s major trading partners has surprised on the upside.”

Fear & Greed Q+A today

On why the RBA board chose to increase rates, and why the unanimous decision raised eyebrows:

 

“I thought we may get something like a five–four type of decision. There are nine people on the RBA board, two of those are internal, one is the Treasury Secretary and the rest are external, independent members. We know from the review that the board has historically taken the recommendation from the RBA staff, but given economists were clearly in disagreement about what to do, [it] wasn’t a completely foregone conclusion. We also know that last year, in July, the decision to hold rates steady was not unanimous. So I did expect it to be a bit closer. I’m a little bit worried that maybe the decision wasn’t as independent as we would like it to be — although I wasn’t there and I don’t know. It just struck me as odd that it was completely unanimous when there were reputable economists, including ourselves, who thought rates didn’t necessarily have to be hiked.”

A pick-up in inflation over the past six months has opened the way for more interest rate increases this year, following on from yesterday’s 0.25 percentage point hike by the Reserve Bank. The official cash rate rose for the first time in two years on the back of a pick-up in private demand. The RBA said the increase in inflation was more broad-based and more persistent than first thought and upgraded its inflation forecasts to be “materially higher”. It expects the consumer price index to rise above 4 per cent by the middle of this year. The underlying rate is expected to peak at 3.7 per cent – well above the bank’s two to three per cent target.

Greed-o-meter

Rank	Program	# episodes	Streaming minutes
1	Bluey	154	45.2 billion
2	Grey's Anatomy	455	40.9 billion
3	Stranger Things	41	40.0 billion
4	NCIS	497	36.8 billion
5	SpongeBob SquarePants	323	34.3 billion
6	Bob's Burgers	302	34.1 billion
7	Family Guy	455	33.4 billion
8	The Big Bang Theory	281	32.4 billion
9	Law & Order SVU	583	26.8 billion
10	Criminal Minds	359	24.1 billion

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Bluey is the most-streamed show in the United States for a second year running. The Australian animated series about a family of dogs living in Brisbane came in ahead of Grey's Anatomy with an incredible 45.2 billion minutes of streaming. And if you want to break it down even further, each episode is only seven minutes long, which means this result is equivalent to every child under 10 in the US watching 170 episodes of Bluey across the year. Sure, rough maths, but no matter how you cut the numbers - Bluey is a phenomenal success story.

Listen to today's episode 🎧 

Source: Nielsen / ABC