RBA holds rates at 4.35%. But it’s looking to when it needs to raise rates to curb a rise in inflation.
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 https://www.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 28 in our series for 2026 and today’s date is Friday August 14
First, I’ll be talking to Dylan Winik, Oceana CEO at Nayax, a global fintech leader in cashless payment technology servicing unattended devices like vending machines, self-serve car wash, EV chargers and coffee machines. We’ll talk about scaling and the future of fintech and retail.
And I’ll be talking to RMIT professor Sinclair Davidson about how, or if, Victoria’s new premier Ben Carroll can save the state’s economy.
But first let’s talk to. Dylan Winik
So what’s happening in the news?
The RBA held its cash rate steady at 4.35% for a second meeting in a row, a unanimous call that markets had already priced in. Governor Michele Bullock’s board is betting that rising unemployment and a cooling property market will do enough of the work to bring inflation back down without further hikes — though they left the door open to raising rates again if inflation surprises to the upside.
Some context on where things stand:
- Inflation has been stubbornly above the RBA’s 2-3% target for roughly five years, and the bank’s new forecasts don’t see it hitting the 2.5% midpoint until late 2027.
- Unemployment is sitting around 4.4%, with hiring still solid — the RBA calls the labour market “a little tight” even though it expects joblessness to tick up.
- Housing is cooling, especially in Sydney, where prices have dropped 5.3% from their peak (though a median home there still costs about A$1.24 million/$870,000).
- All four of Australia’s major banks think the RBA is finished hiking and will hold before eventually cutting.
The wildcard is the Iran situation — deadlocked talks to end the US-Iran conflict are keeping oil prices elevated, which is a risk to the inflation outlook. Trump reportedly made fresh demands on Iran, dimming hopes of a quick resolution. This puts the RBA roughly in step with the US Fed, which has also held rates for five straight meetings (albeit with three dissenters wanting a hike). Not everyone’s convinced the RBA is done, though — KPMG’s chief economist said he wouldn’t be surprised to see another hike in the coming months, given the bank’s primary mandate is price stability.
Austal, the shipbuilder, has finally opened its books to South Korea’s Hanwha after years of saying no. Hanwha’s offering up to $1.2 billion for Austal’s US shipbuilding arm — basically letting Austal’s shareholders keep the Australian business for free. The real story is the politics behind it. Trump wants more US Navy ships built, and wants South Korean shipbuilders doing it. Austal has the yards and contracts Hanwha needs, so getting Austal out of the way suits both Trump and Hanwha. Making Austal’s resistance harder to sustain: a wave of US government contract claims just landed, timed right before its annual results, big enough to turn an expected $110 million profit into a $113 million loss. Rather than release that ugly number alone, Austal paired the downgrade announcement with news of Hanwha’s bid and its decision to grant four weeks of due diligence. The market loved the bid news enough that shares jumped almost 20% despite the shocking loss. Now the interesting question is whether Australia response will be in kind — possibly merging what’s left of Austal with WA’s Civmec or the government’s submarine builder ASC, to build a genuine national shipbuilding champion at Henderson. Austal could even use some of Hanwha’s payout to buy back Hanwha’s stake later and keep the company Australian-controlled. Bottom line: after two rocky years of missteps, Austal’s shareholders seem ready to just take the deal and move on.
KPMG’s general counsel Louise Capon and HR head Dorothy Hisgrove have resigned days before facing a parliamentary grilling over the firm’s failure to properly investigate a whistleblower — with payouts of around $2m each reportedly expected. The backstory: senior audit partners, including then-COO Eileen Hoggett, allegedly used confidential client documents to poach work from rivals. A whistleblower flagged this internally in 2024 under an NDA promising a real investigation, but it didn’t happen properly — the claims only surfaced when Senator Deb O’Neill raised them in parliament this March. KPMG first called them “unsubstantiated,” but a deeper probe found them largely true. The fallout: ex-CEO Andrew Yates and chairman Martin Sheppard both departed, and Hoggett was fired (so gets no payout — new CEO John Sams reportedly found she’d stashed confidential papers in her locker). Yates may also miss his usual ~$4m exit deal due to reputational conditions in his contract. Capon and Hisgrove were both closely tied to the mishandled response — it’s since emerged they’d actually pushed for tougher action against Hoggett early on but were overruled. O’Neill says she’ll seek a copy of the internal investigation. Capon was also named in an earlier, separate whistleblower case involving conflicted NSW government work. The timing is awkward: this all breaks the day before a vote on letting KPMG appoint an external chair — Michael Ebeid, who’d previously accused O’Neill of lying and had to apologize publicly.
.Raphael Arndt, who runs Australia’s $330 billion sovereign wealth fund, is basically saying “we’re not betting the house on any single AI winner.” His logic: this feels like the dot-com era all over again — huge thematic shift, but total uncertainty about which companies, countries or tech stacks actually come out on top. So instead of chasing the hot AI names everyone else is piling into, the Future Fund is spreading exposure across the whole value chain — chipmakers like Nvidia, data centre infrastructure, software platforms, even geographically across countries. Interestingly, they’ve actually been underweight on this AI boom because of their usual value-investing discipline, so they’re now playing catch-up a bit — they’ve got about $2.1 billion in Nvidia-type exposure and $2 billion in Alphabet, which is modest compared to big industry super funds like AustralianSuper or HESTA. Arndt won’t call it a bubble outright — there’s real earnings growth behind these companies — but he’s flagging real risks: chip shortages, labour shortages, power constraints, and just how much capital (we’re talking near $800 billion this year from the big tech players, heading toward a trillion) is getting sucked away from other investments. There’s also a geopolitical angle — he’s basically saying countries that fall behind on AI capability risk becoming strategically dependent on others for things like healthcare, defence and finance.
Car insurance in Australia has jumped about 50% over the past six years, and the corporate regulator ASIC isn’t happy about how insurers are explaining it. They surveyed thousands of customers and found something telling: nearly a third of people who called to complain about a price hike got a lower quote on the spot. Yet most people never bother — two-thirds just renew automatically, and 40% don’t even try to negotiate or shop around. ASIC’s commissioner Alan Kirkland basically says loyalty doesn’t pay off here — if you can get a discount just by calling, that tells you the first quote wasn’t the insurer’s best offer. He’s also annoyed that insurers bury the reasons for price increases in fine print, and that many don’t clearly tell customers they could save up to 20% by paying annually instead of in installments (over half of customers didn’t know this). That said, insurers aren’t making it all up — analysts point out that Australians are buying pricier SUVs and EVs, which cost more to fix (SUVs now make up 65% of new car sales, up from 37% a decade ago). EVs are especially tricky since insurers don’t have much long-term data on repair costs, so they price in extra risk. Insurers say claims costs are up 47% since 2020, but ASIC’s message to customers is simple: call your insurer at renewal time and push back.
Melissa Donnelly, the 44-year-old head of the Community and Public Sector Union, is taking over as secretary of the ACTU (Australia’s peak union body), replacing Sally McManus after her decade in the role. She’s the youngest person in the job in 20 years and the first working mum to lead it — a shift that reflects how union membership has changed from mostly blue-collar men to more public-sector women. Donnelly’s top priority is cost-of-living pressures, plus continuing the push for worker protections around AI. She’s a former industrial lawyer who got into union work fighting the Howard government’s WorkChoices laws early in her career, and she’s spent the last seven years running the CPSU, where membership grew 23%. There’s a cute detail in the piece: she said her 8-year-old son helped her decide to take the job, comparing it to being brave enough to go down a scary water slide. She officially starts August 30 and will be formally elected next year. One wrinkle: she’s resigning her position on Labor’s national executive, and has had to field questions about whether that makes her too close to the government.
New OECD numbers show Australia’s effective corporate tax rate sits at 28.5% — only Colombia is higher among developed economies, at 32.9%. The OECD average is 22%. Australia hasn’t touched its headline company tax rate since the Howard government cut it from 36% to 30% back in 2002, while most of the rest of the world has been quietly lowering theirs. Economists are warning this is a competitiveness problem — multinationals compare after-tax returns across countries, and a persistently high rate can just mean Australia loses those investment dollars to somewhere cheaper. There’s also a revenue angle: Australia leans unusually hard on company tax relative to GDP — 6.4%, versus a 3.9% OECD average. The Productivity Commission floated a fix — cut the rate for small and mid-sized businesses to 20%, funded by a new cash-flow tax on all businesses — but Treasurer Jim Chalmers didn’t take it up after big business pushed back, since many of them would’ve ended up paying more overall. Old Treasury modelling suggests roughly two-thirds of the benefit from a company tax cut eventually flows through to workers via higher wages, not just shareholders — which is worth raising assuming it’s purely a “help big business” move.
The US has thrown its weight behind Australia’s push to break China’s grip on rare earths, with a $400 million conditional loan to Sunrise Energy — a scandium miner backed by Robert Friedland. The news sent Sunrise’s shares up 18% on Monday, part of a huge run that’s pushed the Sydney-listed company’s value to roughly A$3.2bn (over the past year. The loan comes from the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital and comes with strings attached: Sunrise has to meet certain legal and technical conditions, and the US gets first right of refusal on the output. It’s a big signal of how close the mining ties between Australia and Washington have become, as the US looks to secure critical minerals outside China’s supply chains. Sunrise’s project — called Syerston — is near Parkes, a rural NSW town famous for its Elvis festival and its radio telescope (the one that helped beam the moon landing to the world). Production is slated to start in the second half of 2028, and it could be a real boost for the town. Rio Tinto also has a nearby prospect, though that’s tied up in a review of its titanium business. As for scandium itself, it’s a rare earth with a surprisingly wide range of uses: strengthening aluminum in cars and planes, golf clubs, bike frames, semiconductor coatings, oil refinery tracing, and even hydrogen fuel cells. It’s also key to chips that handle radio-frequency selection in phones. Friedland, Sunrise’s co-chair and top investor, called the loan “a landmark moment” for Australian mining, tying it to the broader idea that control over critical minerals is now central to industrial and defence strength. Sunrise is also now eyeing a US stock exchange listing, though that’ll need shareholder, court, and regulatory sign-off first.
And the profit reporting season continues. Westpac has posted a 2% increase in unaudited net profit to $1.8 billion for the third quarter of 2026. Commonwealth Bank has reported a 7% increase in net profit to $10.9 billion for the full-year ended June 30. Suncorp Group has posted a 34.2% decrease in net profit to $1 billion in its result for the financial year ended June 30. Listed-energy provider AGL Energy has reported a 575% surge in profit to $756 million over the year ended June 30, but that masks a 1.7% slump in underlying profit to $631 million. Listed online job board company Seek has posted a drop-off in profit, with profit after tax declining from $238.3 million last year to a $306.5 million loss for the full year ended June 30. Contact Energy has posted a 27.8% surge in net profit to $NZ423.4 million ($A353 million) over the 12 months to June 30. Car Group, which owns Australia’s CarSales, South Korea’s Encar, the US’s Trader Interactive, Brazil’s webmotors and Chile’s chileauto, posted a profit of $314 million, up 14%. Southern Cross Media group, the newly merged media giant behind the free-to-air Seven Network, West Australian Newspapers and Triple M and Hit radio networks, reported $1.9 billion in revenue, down 4.5%, and profit of $9.9 million, down 58%. SGH announced a 35% rise in net profit after tax to $655.3 million for the 12 months ended June 30. The revenues of Life360 have surged 38% year-on-year to $US159 million ($A225.3 million) while subscription revenue has surged 31% year-on-year to $115.6 million. Automotive parts supplier Amotive has posted a 181.4% surge in net profit to $75.1 million for the year ended June 30. The Centuria Industrial REIT has posted an increase in net profit to $160.4 million for the year ended June 30, up from $133.1 million the year before. ASX-listed coal miner Coronado Global Resources has posted a $US418 million ($A592.5 million) net loss for the six months ended June 30, a 142% drop from the $US172.4 million loss posted in the previous corresponding period. Mortgage insurer Helia has posted a 25.2% drop in net profit to $100 million for the six months to June 30. Bravura Solutions has posted a 49.4% surge in net profit to $110.9 million for the full year ended June 30. Arena REIT net rent to gross revenue, a key measure of tenant rental affordability, remained stable at 10.0% for the period to 31 March 2026. Computershare’s management EBIT was $436. million, down 4.2%.
And that’s it for this week.
And next week, I’ll be talking to Max Buontempo, managing director of Roma Foods which is scaling its retail and distribution footprints across Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia,
And I’ll be talking to EY Regional chief economist Oceania Cherelle Murphy about the latest RBA decision on interest rates.
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.
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Looking forward to the next episode of Talking Business next week
