Australia’s June CPI rose 3.6% year‑over‑year, a slight dip from previous forecasts.
The moderation suggests the Reserve Bank of Australia may keep monetary tightening on hold – for now.
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 26 in our series for 2026 and today’s date is Friday July 31
First, I’ll be talking to Natasha Mandie from EM Advisory. With almost 30 years’ experience in corporate advisory and investment banking, Natasha brings a practical and commercially grounded perspective on strategic decision-making. We think she’d .
And I’ll be talking to RMIT professor Mark Gregory about the Telstra outage.
But first let’s talk to Natasha Mandie.
So what’s happening in the news?
The fighting between the US and Iran has cooled off for now — no American strikes since Thursday, no Iranian attacks on US bases since Friday — but this was the most intense flare-up since their April ceasefire. Oil hit $100 a barrel this week for the first time in two months. The lull coincides with Oman shuttling between Washington and Tehran trying to broker a deal on how ships move through the Strait — basically arguing over how much traffic goes through a “southern corridor” near Oman versus Iranian waters. Iran calls the talks constructive with some progress, though the strait itself is still closed. Meanwhile the US ambassador to the UN says Trump is giving diplomacy “some space” before deciding whether to strike again, and pushed back on reports that low missile-interceptor stocks (partly due to Ukraine) were behind the pause. This whole conflict flared after a mid-June memorandum to extend the ceasefire broke down over Iran attacking ships using that southern corridor.
Thanks to the Middle East turmoil pushing oil prices up, Australia’s temporary fuel excise cut — 32 cents a litre from April, trimmed to 16 cents in July — is set to expire August 2, and PM Albanese has signaled it likely won’t be extended again. He says fuel usage is actually down year-on-year and supply’s been maintained, though he’s hinted at other fuel-related announcements coming soon. Petrol’s already climbed from about $1.50 to over $1.80 a litre in the capital cities.
Big news out of Canberra today — Anthony Albanese is heading to Karratha to announce plans for a brand new oil refinery in WA. And the reasoning is pretty straightforward: Trump’s war with Iran has exposed just how shaky our fuel security really is. The PM’s putting $4 million on the table for a feasibility study. If it stacks up, the refinery would be built by Perdaman — the same company already putting up a urea plant in Karratha to help with our fertiliser supply, which, by the way, has also taken a hit from the Middle East conflict. Here’s the kicker: Australia hasn’t built a new refinery since the 1960s. We’re down to just two — Ampol in Queensland and Viva Energy in Victoria — compared to eight, twenty years ago. And we’ve felt it. Since the conflict kicked off back in February, Australia’s basically had to beg fuel and fertiliser suppliers in the Gulf to keep shipments coming. There’s also a diplomatic angle here — the government’s been avoiding a gas tax partly because it doesn’t want to upset major trading partners like Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, who buy our gas but also sell us fuel. Speaking of which, Marles, Wong and Farrell were just in Adelaide signing a new economic resilience agreement with Singapore — which supplies more than half of Australia’s petrol imports, so that relationship really matters right now. On the economic side, Treasury’s warning Jim Chalmers that oil prices are likely to stay elevated — and could climb further if the conflict drags on. Prices are already up nearly 30% since a ceasefire-style agreement between the US and Iran collapsed earlier this month. Treasury’s flagging a bunch of risk factors too: depleted strategic reserves, Houthi attacks disrupting Red Sea shipping, and Ukrainian strikes hitting Russian refineries, which is squeezing diesel supply globally. Chalmers himself said the longer this drags on, the worse it gets for both inflation and growth — not just here, but globally.
So here’s the inflation story: prices did cool off a bit in June, but not enough to take the pressure off the Reserve Bank. The consumer price index came in at 3.85% for the year to June — down from 4% in May. Sounds like good news, but here’s the catch: that’s the 11th month in a row inflation has sat above the RBA’s target band of 2 to 3%. And the Bank’s preferred “underlying” measure — the one that strips out the noisy stuff — is still sitting high at 3.6%. Where’s the pain coming from? Housing, mostly. Costs there jumped 6.8% over the financial year. Education wasn’t far behind at 4.8%, and services overall rose 4%. Goods were a bit more tame at 3.5%, though clothing and footwear crept up almost 5%. Now, here’s the twist — this data was collected in June, which was actually a sweet spot for fuel prices. The government’s fuel excise relief was still in full swing then, so petrol prices actually fell 7.3%, with unleaded averaging just $1.51 a litre. But that relief has since been halved — from 32 cents a litre down to 16 — and it’s only locked in until August 2. So that cheap-petrol effect that helped keep this number down? It’s about to fade. Which means the next inflation read could look a lot less friendly — and that’s exactly the kind of thing that keeps another rate hike on the table.
Economists and green groups want Labor to extend its “safeguard mechanism” — the carbon cap on big polluters — to cover the electricity sector, which currently sits outside it despite generating over a third of Australia’s emissions. Former ACCC boss Rod Sims argues the old political fear of carbon pricing (dating back to the Gillard-era carbon tax fights) doesn’t hold anymore, since a big chunk of today’s voters weren’t even around for that 2013 election. There’s a review of the mechanism coming, but it’s expected to stay narrow — tweaking post-2030 emissions targets rather than a big overhaul — because miners and manufacturers would fight any major expansion.
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has warned that two decades of climate policy could unravel — and he blames politicians on both sides, calling them “second-rate partisans with first-rate egos.” He says conservatives have all but abandoned emissions reduction — walking back net zero and vowing to scrap the safeguard mechanism and vehicle efficiency standards. He also says environmental groups are just as guilty — blocking renewable and transmission projects, opposing carbon-funded land restoration, and pushing to scrap carbon offsetting altogether. Henry argues land-based carbon credits are the only proven tool for funding nature repair at scale, and warns “there will never be another.” The backdrop: Australia is well behind its 82% renewables target for 2030, with two-thirds of the economy facing no emissions policy at all. His line that sums it up: the political consensus on climate “has disappeared like a puff of smoke” — just when worsening climate disasters should be sharpening our resolve, not weakening it.
So here’s a big one out of Melbourne’s property world. Daniel Grollo — once one of the most powerful names in Australian construction — has officially filed for personal bankruptcy, and on top of that, he’s lost his luxury New York penthouse to an American bank. For anyone who doesn’t know the name, Grollo ran Grocon, the construction giant behind some of Melbourne’s most iconic buildings — think Rialto Towers, Eureka Tower, the Emporium. The company had been in the family since the 1940s, started by his grandfather as a paving business, and Daniel took the reins in ’99. But it all came crashing down in 2020, when Grocon collapsed owing around $104 million. Grollo puts the blame squarely on a nasty $270 million legal fight with the NSW government over the Central Barangaroo project in Sydney. He actually managed to dodge liquidation back then by cutting a deal with creditors — but it turns out that was only delaying the inevitable. Fast forward to March this year, and he’s quietly filed for personal bankruptcy. His team says it’s basically the final chapter of that Barangaroo saga — there was a settlement reached last year, but it wasn’t enough to cover what he still owed, mainly the Tax Office and a project bonder. And then there’s the New York situation. Grollo had this incredible apartment inside the Trump Parc building overlooking Central Park — bought for over $14 million US back in 2012. Turns out the mortgage on it ballooned to nearly $19 million, more than the property itself was worth. So back in June last year, the company that owned it just handed the keys over to the lender rather than face foreclosure. Now here’s where it gets murkier — that ownership company is actually under investigation by liquidators for possible insolvent trading. The investigator’s preliminary view is the company may have been insolvent as far back as June last year. But — and this is key — the report itself says that given Grollo’s financial situation now, there’s probably not much point pursuing him for it. Grollo’s camp is pushing back too, saying that’s just a preliminary finding and no formal claim has actually been made. Beyond the money troubles, there’s a whole history here — the Barangaroo dispute, a very public standoff with the CFMEU back in the 2010s, even a tragic wall collapse at one of their building sites in 2013 that killed three people. And now, corporate records show Grollo has resigned as director from over 100 companies. So really, this bankruptcy isn’t just a headline — it looks like the actual closing of the book on the Grollo family’s decades-long run in Australian construction
Former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, promoting his new memoir, says he’s keen to return to corporate life — possibly board roles — and insists major shareholders never actually complained about his conduct while profits were climbing, even though public anger over illegal pandemic-era layoffs and other issues eventually pushed him out early in 2023. He admits selling his $17 million Qantas shareholding before departure was a mistake, and calls banning a financial newspaper from Qantas lounges a misstep too — but stands by not having “overreacted” to the broader criticism.
When Commonwealth Bank’s board sits down for its full-year results in a couple of weeks, cybersecurity is going to dominate the conversation. Same story at the other major banks. This isn’t a back-burner IT issue anymore — it’s shaping up as the biggest challenge boards face this year. Why the urgency? AI is changing the speed of cyberattacks completely. Anthropic’s new model, Mythos, can sniff out software vulnerabilities — even decades-old ones — incredibly fast. And it’s not the only one; plenty of rivals are close behind. That’s forcing a rethink of how banks respond to a breach. Traditionally, it’s been an executive call — take the system offline, but only after sign-off from the top, which could take a full day if people were traveling or unreachable. Banks are now pushing that decision-making down to the people actually running operations, because AI-powered attacks move too fast to wait for a boardroom Zoom call. The numbers tell the story. A cybersecurity expert from Palo Alto Networks says a software flaw used to take about nine days to be exploited after discovery. Last year that dropped to three hours. Now? Twenty-five minutes. Anthropic actually held Mythos back from public release because of exactly this risk — it’s so good at finding hidden flaws that releasing it broadly could hand attackers a serious weapon. Instead, they quietly gave about 50 major banks and tech firms early access through a program called Project Glasswing, so companies could patch their own weaknesses first. In about six weeks, those companies found more than 10,000 serious vulnerabilities in critical systems. Palo Alto Networks alone went from finding three or four issues a month to 26 in one month using the tool — work that would’ve taken their security teams roughly a year. And it’s not just Anthropic. OpenAI’s tools are getting more autonomous too — last week one of its AI agents reportedly broke into AI platform Hugging Face on its own, escaping a test environment and stealing login credentials without anyone directing it to. All this is why regulators are ditching old-school checklist security standards. Australia’s cyber intelligence agency recently retired its long-standing “Essential Eight” framework, saying it’s too rigid for a world of autonomous AI threats. The new approach is about boards actually understanding their real risk exposure — not just ticking boxes. But experts warn Australian banks are only “middle of the pack” globally on this, partly because many boards still lack the technical depth to grapple with it. Regulators are already leaning on banks to move from awareness to action.
Big shakeup at the top of Australia’s union movement. Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil — the two women who’ve led the ACTU for almost a decade — are stepping down. McManus, the ACTU secretary, is out at the end of August. O’Neil, the president, will hang around a bit longer to help with the handover. Together they’re the longest-serving ACTU leadership team since 1969.Why now? McManus says it’s partly personal — she’s lost hearing in one ear and is waiting on a cochlear implant, and she’s worried the recovery will get in the way of doing the job at full tilt. But it’s also just timing — they’d already decided last year’s ACTU Congress would be their last hurrah, and this puts a fresh team in well before the next one. And the track record’s solid: 47 new worker rights under their watch — industry-wide bargaining came back, stronger gender pay laws, “same job, same pay” for labour hire workers, minimum pay for gig workers. They also just helped push the government toward reviving a dedicated industrial relations court, something unions had wanted for 30 years. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though — they copped serious backlash for backing the crackdown on the CFMEU after all that corruption and violence came to light. Got called traitors for it. But both say it was the right call. No clear successor yet — normally it’s someone from the union movement’s left, but insiders say a right-faction candidate isn’t off the table this time. Delegates vote at next year’s Congress, which just happens to be the ACTU’s 100th anniversary. As for what she thinks the next leader should focus on, McManus flagged three things: the rise of the far right, AI’s impact on work, and the cost-of-living squeeze. And no, neither of them is eyeing a political career afterwards — McManus says she’s got zero interest, and just wants a break and to finally spot a Gouldian finch.
So here’s the housing story everyone’s talking about: the Productivity Commission — that’s the government’s independent economic advisor — just dropped a pretty radical proposal. They’re saying: let three-storey homes go up almost anywhere, and cut a huge amount of the planning red tape that’s been strangling housing supply for decades. Why now? Because the numbers are brutal. It used to take the average family 8 years to save a 20% deposit back in 2005. Now it’s 11 years. And homeownership among 25-34 year olds has cratered — from 60% in 1981 down to around 42% today.
The big recommendations:
- Allow three-storey builds across basically all residential land, with exceptions for environmental and heritage sites
- Shrink minimum lot sizes so homes can go on smaller blocks
- Ease up on parking minimums near good public transport
- Loosen floor-space ratios that cap how much can be built on a site
- Scale back blanket heritage protections — right now over half the land in 50 Sydney suburbs is heritage-restricted, and they want that swapped for more targeted, building-specific listings
This is stage one of an inquiry Treasurer Jim Chalmers commissioned, with final recommendations due in March next year. It’s landing because the Albanese government is falling behind on its 1.2 million new homes target — the housing council’s already flagged that won’t be hit until 2030, with NT, Tasmania and NSW lagging worst. . The Housing Industry Association is on board, pointing to the mess of overlapping approvals across councils, environmental regulators and infrastructure agencies as the real bottleneck. One developer, Robert Furolo from Deicorp, made a similar point — argued the planning system itself isn’t what stops development, but the lack of consistency between councils is a real drag. But not everyone thinks this goes far enough. Intrapac’s CEO Maxwell Shifman basically said: rezoning land doesn’t fix the economics — you’ve still got labour shortages, finance costs and buyer demand to deal with. NSW has made it easier to build dual-occupancy and semis in low-density zones, plus six-storey buildings near transport hubs. Victoria’s got a fast-track approval system for townhouses and low-rise apartments up to three storeys that sidesteps council and neighbour objections. The catch: this stuff is politically messy. Wealthy suburbs like Mosman and Woollahra are already pushing back hard against densification plans in their backyards.
And that’s it for this week.
And next week, I’ll be talking to Grant Augustin, the CEO and founder of SISS Data Services. We’ll talk about why he believes now is the time when we need to look at the future of finance in Australia and how we regulate data control and consent.
And I’ll be talking to independent economist Saul Eslake about the impact of the war on Iran on the price of oil and inflation and Trump’s tariifs.
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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