Australia is preparing major changes to how the Big Four accounting firms operate after a wave of scandals shook trust in the sector.
Welcome to Talking Business, a podcast produced in Melbourne Australia, built on the traditional lands of the Kulin Nation. The podcast is available on the Acast site, my own website, the Apple podcast store or wherever you go to get your podcasts. Or you can get it at the Business Acumen website at businessacumen.biz
I am Leon Gettler. My job is review and monitor the week’s news in business finance and economics. I bring it all to you every week.
For the most exclusive access to leading economists and business leaders from around the world, subscribe to Talking Business from my website leongettler.com or whatever your favourite podcast platform is.
This is episode number 22 in our series for 2026 and today’s date is Friday July 3
First, I’ll be talking to Meredith Walsh, founder of FlowJam Festival in the US about how 44% of Gen Z and Millennials are now actively choosing low or no-alcohol options at events, and consumers are increasingly paying for belonging, transformation, and intentional experiences over traditional nightlife culture. What’s especially interesting from a business perspective is that many of these alcohol-free and sponsor-light events are becoming surprisingly profitable.
And I’ll be talking to EY regional chief economist Cherelle Murphy about Australia’s high underlying inflation figures and what we can expect from the RBA.
But first let’s talk to Meredith Walsh
So what’s happening in the news?
So here’s a head-spinner. The Trump administration is actively unwinding decades of sanctions on Iran as part of a broader peace deal — one that also aims to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bring global energy prices down. They’ve already authorised Iranian oil sales in US dollars and signed a 14-point agreement on June 17th promising to lift all sanctions on a set schedule. But banks are terrified. One wrong move and they’re looking at billion-dollar fines — BNP Paribas paid nearly a billion back in 2014 for exactly that. And there’s another wrinkle: some in Congress think the White House is trying to sidestep a law that requires congressional approval for any nuclear deal. This one is far from settled.
The Bank for International Settlements — basically the central bank for central banks — has put out a pretty stark warning about the AI spending boom. The five biggest tech hyperscalers are on track to spend over a trillion dollars on AI between now and the end of next year. The BIS is saying that if the returns don’t materialise, we could see a sudden pullback in investment that rattles financial markets globally. They’re drawing comparisons to the canal boom of the 1830s, the railway bubble of the 1840s, and the dotcom crash. All genuine technological breakthroughs — all attracted far more capital than could ever be justified by actual commercial returns.
The Supreme Court handed down a big decision Monday — actually two decisions — that will reshape how much control the president has over independent agencies. The headline grab: Trump cannot fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. The court ruled 5-4 that Congress put guardrails around Fed governors for good reason, and that letting the president sack them at will would blow a hole in central bank independence. Cook herself said the whole thing was never really about mortgage fraud allegations — it was political pressure to cut rates, and she refused to play along. But here’s the twist — in a separate ruling the same day, the court said Trump can fire FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, overturning a 90-year precedent protecting independent agency heads. So the Fed is safe for now, but legal experts are asking an uncomfortable question: if independence is now considered unconstitutional everywhere else, how long before someone challenges the Fed’s special status?
Australia’s auction market is in rough shape. Fewer than half of homes taken to auction last weekend actually sold — a clearance rate of 49%, with Sydney hitting its lowest point since the early COVID days of April 2020. Economists at AMP are tipping home prices to fall around 5% over the next year, with recent federal budget changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax spooking investors. Adelaide was the one bright spot. The Treasurer says don’t read too much into a week or two of data — but sellers are clearly getting cold feet.
This one is pretty extraordinary. The Christian Brothers — the Catholic order facing hundreds of abuse compensation claims — say they’ll be broke by September. But survivors and their lawyers are furious, pointing out that years ago the order quietly transferred billions of dollars worth of school assets — think Waverley College, St Kevin’s in Toorak — to a separate education trust, mostly for just a dollar each. That trust now holds over $2.3 billion in property and $345 million in cash. Critics are calling it a deliberate strategy to put assets out of reach. One lawyer compared it to the James Hardie asbestos playbook. The Brothers say the transfers were routine governance. The courts are now going to take a hard look at whether they can be unwound.
Two junior EY employees, who were working at Commonwealth Bank on a consulting gig, have been fired and charged by police after they snooped on the private banking records of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and at least one senior EY partner. The pair — a 21-year-old and a 25-year-old — are due in court this Tuesday. They face charges of unauthorised access to restricted data, and the younger one also faces a charge related to distributing that personal information in a harassing way. It’s a pretty brazen move given that CBA explicitly trains seconded staff not to access accounts out of curiosity, and the system even prompted them to confirm they were authorised before letting them in. The bank logs all access and caught them pretty quickly. The timing is awkward for the big consulting firms — this is happening right as rival KPMG is dealing with its own data scandal, where a whistleblower exposed auditors using client information to win new business, which has already brought down several senior executives there.
KPMG is having a rough year. The federal government’s Treasury department just released a paper proposing much tougher regulation for the big accounting firms — partly a response to a whistleblower scandal at KPMG involving misuse of client data and insider auditing practices. Several top execs already left earlier in the year, including the CEO and chairman, and now eight more partners are heading out the door, including a senior consulting leader who managed huge government contracts. On the regulation side, Treasury wants to give ASIC (the corporate watchdog) real teeth — the power to investigate and fine the big four firms (PwC, EY, Deloitte, KPMG), potentially up to $200 million for serious breaches. Other ideas on the table: mandatory limits on how long a company can keep the same auditor, forcing audit firms to split off their consulting arms to avoid conflicts of interest, capping partnership sizes (like law firms), and requiring stronger governance with independent directors. This all comes a few years after the PwC tax leak scandal, which caused a similar shakeup. The government had been hesitant to add more rules after that mess, which is part of why this paper took over two years to come out. Public submissions are open until August 12. Meanwhile inside KPMG, things are tense — partners just learned their pay will drop significantly next year (officially 13%, though many expect worse). And the firm even tried blocking partners from leaving during the peak audit season. There’s also a retirement scheme payout. Some partners are racing to claim before the scandal drags down their earnings and therefore their payout any further.
Australia’s competition watchdog is taking Amazon to court — and pushing for a serious penalty. Here’s the gist: back in July 2024, Amazon started running ads on Prime Video, even for customers who’d paid an annual fee specifically to avoid ads. Customers in the UK and Europe got partial refunds when this happened to them, but Australians didn’t get that option — and the ACCC says that was a deliberate call by Amazon’s senior leadership, not an oversight. The ACCC’s chief, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, has now sued two Amazon subsidiaries in the Federal Court, accusing the company of using unfair contract terms with over a million Australian customers between November 2023 and August 2025. Basically, the terms let Amazon make major changes — like adding ads — without owing customers a refund. She’s not just after a slap on the wrist either. She wants a penalty big enough that it actually stings — not just a “cost of doing business” Amazon shrugs off. Legally, that could run up to a third of Amazon’s local revenue, which means a fine as high as $1.3 billion. Amazon says it’s reviewing the case and has cooperated with the investigation throughout. A few other details: Amazon did tweak its contract terms twice during the investigation — first in March 2025 (vaguely promising it “may” refund some customers, which the ACCC didn’t think was good enough), then again in August 2025, when it finally committed to proper pro-rata refunds. That’s why the case only covers the period up to August 18, 2025. Beyond the fine, the ACCC also wants Amazon to publicly admit wrongdoing, plus compensation for affected customers and legal costs covered.
Every state and territory government except Western Australia is heading for a serious fiscal reckoning. Combined state debt is forecast to nearly quadruple from around 270 billion dollars before COVID to almost a trillion dollars by 2030. The interest bill is the killer — for Victoria alone, it’ll hit 12 billion a year, swallowing nearly 10% of the state’s entire budget. Queensland, NSW and Tasmania are in similar strife. S&P Global says interest costs for most states are heading toward 8 to 10% of revenue — before COVID it was around 3%. Something has to give, and that something will likely be services.
Australia’s corporate regulator has taken a swipe at the big wealth management platforms — the ones financial advisers use to manage client investments. ASIC says they’re simply not doing enough to protect customers, and in some cases have actually gone backwards on consumer safeguards since the last review. This matters because these same platforms were at the centre of the Shield and First Guardian collapses, where over a billion dollars in retirement savings was lost. ASIC found one platform conducted just 21 document checks over more than a year — and flagged problems with three quarters of them. The regulator’s message was blunt: in the age of AI, there’s no excuse for this level of manual, error-prone oversight.
Karl Stefanovic’s days on Australian commercial TV appear to be over — and not because Nine dumped him. Both Channel 7 and Network Ten have privately ruled out hiring him, because they’re worried advertisers will walk. The issue is his podcast, where he’s platformed figures like English activist Tommy Robinson. Nine cut him loose with six months left on a two-million-dollar contract, but the two sides have quietly settled for a six-figure payout, avoiding a messy court fight. Stefanovic, for his part, says he’s free and independent and is doubling down on the podcast. Whether that pays the bills at his level is another question entirely.
Big news out of Wollongong — an Aussie battery tech company called Sicona has just landed a $45 million government grant, and what they’re building could genuinely change how we charge electric vehicles, power AI data centres, and keep drones in the air longer. Sicona spun out of University of Wollongong research, and their secret sauce is a silicon-carbon material that replaces graphite in battery anodes. The upshot? Batteries that are 20% more energy-dense and charge dramatically faster. We’re talking cutting EV charging time from 30 minutes down to 10. The grant comes from ARENA — the Australian Renewable Energy Agency — through the Albanese government’s Future Made in Australia policy. Sicona will use the money to build a production facility at BlueScope’s Port Kembla precinct, starting with 230 tonnes of the material a year. Founder and CEO Christiaan Jordaan says the applications go well beyond EVs. He’s talking drones carrying heavier loads for longer, humanoid robots, and — interestingly — AI data centres. Nvidia and others are apparently redesigning data centres to store energy directly in the server rack itself, and Sicona’s high-density, fast-response batteries are exactly what that architecture needs. Jordaan is pretty candid about the challenges of manufacturing in Australia — energy costs, construction costs, and the lack of an existing battery ecosystem all make it harder than, say, China or South Korea. But he argues labour costs are actually comparable to the US, and that streamlining planning approvals for critical technologies would make a real difference. On the numbers — phase one gets them to $23 million US in annual export revenue. Full commercial scale? That jumps to around $420 million a year. They’re also doubling their workforce from 36 to 72 in this first stage, and Jordaan says they have plans to move further downstream into actual battery cell manufacturing. It’s a good reminder that Australia has serious potential in the battery supply chain — we just need the policy settings and investment to match.
Australia is cracking down on social media companies that aren’t doing enough to keep kids under 16 off their platforms. The government’s new laws double the fine for non-compliance to $99 million, and companies like Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat can now be forced to hand over internal documents — think emails, board minutes, that kind of thing — or face fines up to $1.65 million. The eSafety Commissioner has flagged that none of the major platforms are really pulling their weight, even though the ban has been in place since December and around five million underage accounts have been deactivated. No company has actually been fined yet, despite most teens apparently finding workarounds pretty easily. The Communications Minister basically said the tech giants have been dragging their feet and the government’s done playing nice. PM Albanese wants the new laws passed quickly and is hoping for the same cross-party support that got the original ban through. The Greens reckon the real fix is tackling harmful algorithms and data harvesting, not just age bans. Meanwhile, Meta says it’s already using AI to hunt down underage accounts, with plans to expand that to Australia.
And that’s it for this week.
And next week, I’ll be talking to Investment Markets CEO Darren Connolly about the investment consequences of the Budget.
And I’ll be talking to RMIT economist Jonathan Boymal about why Australian property prices have dipped.
For the most exclusive access to leading economists and business leaders from around the world, subscribe to Talking Business from my website leongettler.com or whatever your favourite podcast platform is.
If you like Talking Business, please leave us a review with Apple podcasts.
Remember, we are independent media – the very few of us left – and it’s all written in my voice. Nice and conversational.
The Talking Business podcast has a global audience close to 35,000 and we are chasing 50,000. We’ll get there with your help so please pass Talking Business to friends, colleagues and family.
Thank you in advance.
In the meantime you can find me on Facebook, Twitter or X as it’s now known, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.
If you want to contact me, email me at leon@leongettler.com. I answer all emails.
Also in my spare time, I have a copywriting business. If anyone needs newsletters, blogs, articles or advertorial, email me.
Looking forward to the next episode of Talking Business next week
