Tech stocks surge; battle for NRL rights; Aussie unis drop down rankings
Published: June 01, 2026
Tech stocks surge; battle for NRL rights; Aussie unis drop down rankings
News in brief
An AFR poll shows One Nation surging past Labor to become the country’s most popular political party, following the federal budget. That’s triggered a flurry of activity from all sides trying to explain the result or at least take some advantage from it.
One of the big four audit and accounting firms, KPMG, is set to lose high profile clients after the company said confidential client data had been shared and potentially used to win new business with other clients.
The battle among broadcasters to own the National Rugby League is heating up with Foxtel, offering to buy the sport’s entire suite of free-to-air and streaming rights to counter, and cut out, media rival Nine Entertainment.
The University of NSW tops the Australian universities, and only four make the top 100, in the latest Centre for World University Rankings. Overall local unis have slipped down the rankings this year, with the research centre saying it reflects inadequate funding.
Ford Motor Company’s share price on Wall Street is up 50 per cent in the past four weeks and has nothing to do with selling cars, or launching a new EV range. A month ago, Ford announced a new energy subsidiary to power AI centres, and the market loves the idea.
Fear-o-meter
The tech sector has become bifurcated. There are the AI stocks, and the rest. Many of the rest, including a bunch listed on the ASX, are SaaS companies, and their share price have been hammered this year as AI threatens to undermine their business models.
Broadly, the local tech stocks are running against the trend. The Wall Street tech index is up 15 per cent this year, which has accounted for pretty much all of the S&P500’s rise.
Closer to home, the share markets in Japan and Taiwan are all near record levels. Taiwan has overtaken India as the world’s fifth largest share market, mainly thanks to the rally in the world’s largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
However, Wall Street trumps all. The value of the US stock market, according to Bloomberg is $US78 trillion. The US market is one-third bigger than the next nine markets combined.
Fear & Greed Q+A today
On why the downturn in the housing market looks a little different to previous cycles:
This is a bit of a perfect storm. And I think it’s fair to say at the end of last year the market was peaking because cyclical factors like affordability and serviceability were stretched — severely stretched in some markets.
But then since then we started to see things like 75 basis points of rate hikes, a global oil crisis, consumer sentiment just completely falling off a cliff in April and holding at very low levels.
And now we’ve seen the budget handed down, which adds further downside risk to the housing market.
Most downturns in Australia you can pretty much point at one thing — rising interest rates or credit tightening or a global shock. That’s not the case this time around. There’s this multitude of factors creating a lot of demand-side headwinds.
Local tech stocks surged yesterday, with battered companies like WiseTech Global, Pro Medicus and Xero leading the ASX200. While on Wall Street, and on Asian bourses, tech stocks have led indices to record highs, the failure of the local tech stocks to ignite has been part of the reason that the ASX has underperformed this year.
Accounting software group Xero is now the biggest of the local tech stocks, worth just shy of $14 billion. Its share price surged eight per cent yesterday, but it’s down 29 per cent this year.
One-time wonder stock, WiseTech Global is next. It jumped nine per cent yesterday but is still off 43 per cent in 2026.
Pro Medicus is a tech-based company, though it’s part of the healthcare index. Its share price is down 35 per cent this year, but after announcing two contract wins yesterday, its share price jumped nine per cent.
Not all tech stocks have done poorly. Data centre group NextDC is an outperformer. It’s up 26 per cent this year on the back of some big contract wins. TechnologyOne has also performed strongly.
Greed-o-meter
| Job | Salary after 3 yrs $ | 3 yr growth % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dentistry | 128,900 | 43.7 |
| 2 | Medicine | 115,000 | 43.8 |
| 3 | Engineering | 103,000 | 45.1 |
| 4 | Law & Paralegal Studies | 100,000 | 42.9 |
| 5 | Computing & Information Systems | 100,000 | 44.7 |
| 6 | Pharmacy | 97,700 | 87.2 |
| 7 | Business & Management | 95,000 | 46.2 |
| 8 | Health Services & Support | 93,000 | 32.9 |
| 9 | Teacher Education | 92,600 | 28.1 |
| 10 | Psychology | 91,300 | 30.8 |
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New data shows dentistry graduates are earning almost $130,000 pa after three years in the workplace. The second-highest-paid recent graduates are in medicine, then engineering. But the profession with the greatest growth in earnings across that three year period is pharmacy - jumping by more than 87pc, according to the 2025 Quality Indicators of Teacher and Learning (QILT) longitudinal study.
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Source: QILT, reported in News Ltd papers
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