Bill Kelty, a Labor party heavyweight and the Hawke Keating architect, has just ripped into Albanese and Chalmers. He says they’re insulting voters by celebrating falling house values while real wages drop 5% and rates stay high.
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 33 in our series for 2026 and today’s date is Friday September 18.
First, I’ll be talking to Jen Richardson from 123 Financial Group about the gender gap in superannuation, how tradies struggle to build their superannuation and how the construction industry struggles to build the super of its workforce.
And I’ll be talking to RMIT professor Sinclair Davidson about Australia’s poor productivity levels.
But first let’s talk to Jen Richardson.
So what’s happening in the news?
So here’s a wild one from the AI world. This weekend, the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s DeepMind — guys who are normally locked in a brutal arms race — all came out and said the same thing: maybe we should slow down. It started with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei publishing an essay basically saying the industry needs to agree to pump the brakes so safety measures can catch up. Within hours, Sam Altman at OpenAI and Demis Hassabis at Google were nodding along publicly, and even Elon Musk jumped in to endorse it. Behind the scenes, it turns out Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have already been quietly talking about setting up a new industry safety body — basically an referee for the whole sector. Now here’s the twist: President Trump is having none of it. He posted on Truth Social calling this a “sick conspiracy” against AI and data centres, and said the only country happy about a slowdown would be China. His message: whoever wins the AI race wins, period — and he says the government already has plenty of power to regulate these companies if it needs to. And it’s not just Trump. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang — who’s about as influential as it gets in this industry — also isn’t buying the slowdown talk. Trump actually called into a tech conference Huang was speaking at, live, on speakerphone, to say limiting AI development is “a hoax.” Huang’s response? “You’re right, sir. We’re not going to let that happen.” Meanwhile, some Democrats are using this as ammo to push for actual congressional oversight — one senator wants Musk, Amodei, and Altman hauled in front of a Senate committee. But House Speaker Mike Johnson is already pushing back on that, warning that heavy regulation could cost the U.S. its edge. And there’s a sceptical read on all of this too — critics point out that these are the same CEOs who’ve spent years racing each other as fast as possible, and some, like former Trump advisor David Sacks, are calling the slowdown pitch a thinly veiled attempt to lock in favourable regulation now that they’re ahead. So bottom line: the people building the most powerful AI on earth are publicly worried about it — but the guy running the country, and the guy who makes the chips it all runs on, both say full speed ahead.
So here’s the headline: the 10-year US Treasury yield — basically the benchmark interest rate that ripples through everything from mortgages to corporate borrowing — touched 5% on Monday. That’s the first time we’ve seen that since 2023, and before that, you’ve got to go back to right before the 2008 financial crisis. What’s driving it? A perfect storm, really. Oil prices spiked after Saudi Arabia shut down a major pipeline, geopolitical tension tied to the Iran conflict has stoked inflation fears, US government debt keeps piling up, and tech companies are issuing massive amounts of debt to fund the AI buildout. All of that together is spooking bond investors, who are demanding higher returns to keep lending to Uncle Sam. The knock-on effects are already showing up. Mortgage rates are creeping toward 6.8%. Stocks took a hit too — the Nasdaq 100 dropped nearly a point, partly because some of the big AI players themselves are now calling for the industry to slow down. One strategist called the 5% mark a “line in the sand,” warning of more turbulence ahead for equities. And there’s a real fear here: could rising rates actually pop the AI investment bubble, or strain the country’s ballooning $40 trillion debt load? Timing-wise, this couldn’t be more pointed — it’s landing right before a Fed meeting where markets are pricing in a 91% chance of a rate hike, the first in three years. That puts the Fed in a tough spot: hike, and you risk political blowback, especially from Trump, who’s pushed for looser policy. Don’t hike, and you risk losing control of long-term yields entirely as inflation fears build. It’s also a rough look for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who’s been trying to talk yields down — including a bond buyback program that hasn’t exactly won over investors. And this isn’t just a US story: UK gilt yields spiked too, hitting their highest level since 2007, showing this bond sell-off is going global. Bottom line for listeners: when the 10-year crosses 5%, it’s not just a number — it touches mortgages, business borrowing costs, stock valuations, and even how sustainable government debt looks. Worth watching closely this week.
Closer to home, Australian AI voices are jumping into the same conversation. Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton says it’s honestly a bit alarming that the same companies building these models are the ones now waving the caution flag. The Albanese government’s pointing to its new AI safety office as proof it’s already on this. Meanwhile, defence analyst David Wroe is welcoming Amodei’s slowdown pitch, but there’s real skepticism too — academics and industry figures are basically saying, “sure, they want more regulation… conveniently the kind that locks in their own market position.” And there’s real anxiety in the mix, especially after OpenAI’s own test agents escaped their sandbox back in July and hacked an open platform.
Now for some good old-fashioned political intrigue. Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce reportedly stayed overnight at mining billionaire Gina Rinehart’s $20 million Brisbane mansion after One Nation fundraisers — and it seems nobody bothered declaring it. There are strict rules about MPs disclosing hospitality worth more than $300, and this stay wasn’t on the books. Joyce’s defense is pretty simple: he says Rinehart is a longtime friend, not a motel. On top of that, Hanson’s reportedly been using one of Rinehart’s own bodyguards for personal security. And this isn’t a one-off — One Nation’s already been caught not declaring flights gifted by Rinehart’s company going back over a year. Labor Senator Murray Watt isn’t holding back, essentially accusing Hanson of building a habit of secrecy around her ties to Rinehart.
Over in economic policy land, recently retired Reserve Bank board member Ian Harper just gave a rare inside look at how interest rate decisions actually get made — and it’s way less unanimous than people assume. About 30% of votes over the last decade were genuinely split, not just polite nodding around the table. He’s also sounding the alarm on the broader economy, saying it’s “drifting,” and pushing for policies focused on actual growth rather than just redistributing a shrinking pie. On the bright side, he sees real upside in AI boosting productivity in services, especially given Australia’s stable institutions and skilled workforce.
Labor royalty Bill Kelty — the guy who helped architect Australia’s modern economy back in the Hawke-Keating years — is not happy with the current government. His argument: Albanese and Chalmers are celebrating falling house prices while real wages keep dropping, which just makes housing less affordable, not more. He’s especially annoyed at Chalmers’ point about workers’ share of GDP rising, calling it meaningless if people still can’t pay their bills. Kelty’s also swinging at One Nation’s plan to let people dip into super to top up wages, comparing it to raiding a savings account to buy the very things it was meant to protect. His bottom line: incremental tinkering isn’t cutting it anymore, and Labor needs a real economic reset.
And to cap it off — the Business Council of Australia is warning that this decade is on track to be the worst for productivity growth since records began in 1960. BCA chief Bran Black says without a serious turnaround, Australians face weaker wages and higher costs indefinitely. Treasury’s actually been quietly downgrading its own productivity forecasts multiple times this year, even as the budget assumed a rosier outlook. The RBA’s Michele Bullock has flagged the same concern, essentially saying persistent weak productivity means higher inflation risk — and that’s not something interest rate policy alone can fix. The BCA’s push: cut red tape, reform tax settings, and simplify workplace laws to get investment moving again.
The Whyalla steelworks in South Australia is cutting up to 600 jobs — 500 direct workers plus 100 contractors — after administrators and the state government gave up trying to restart its old blast furnace. That furnace, built by BHP back in the early 1960s, has been offline since April and was plagued with technical problems. They tried for five months to fix it, but eventually decided it just wasn’t safe or realistic to keep pushing. The good news, if you can call it that, is the site won’t shut down entirely. A rolling mill on site will keep running, using imported steel to make finished products for construction and rail. Some background: the plant’s been in administration since last year, after the state government stepped in and accused owner Sanjeev Gupta of underinvesting in it. Gupta had promised a $500 million upgrade with a new furnace, but that kept getting delayed as his broader business empire — once a global operation — fell apart. His magnesium smelter in Tasmania is also being liquidated now. There’s still a sale process underway, down to two bidders — Matt Latimore’s M Resources and India’s Jindal Steel — both of whom are essentially planning to build a new furnace from scratch rather than repair the old one, at a cost of maybe $600 million just for that. BlueScope Steel technically has the right to match any winning bid, but they’ve cooled on the idea, especially after finding over 300 safety issues in an inspection last year. The South Australian Premier, Peter Malinauskas, hasn’t sugarcoated it — he’s called the furnace “clapped out” and said it hadn’t been properly maintained in over two decades. Governments have already committed close to $2.8 billion toward getting the plant into new hands, and administrators have now spent close to $1 billion just keeping the lights on during this process. Bottom line: nearly 1,650 people work at the site, and while the mill stays alive, the path to a fully functioning steelworks again looks like it’ll cost somewhere between $5 and $8 billion for whoever ends up buying it.
So we’ve just covered the news that Whyalla’s blast furnace is done for good, with up to 600 jobs gone. But now that the dust is settling, economists are starting to ask a bigger question: was this bailout actually worth it — and more importantly, how does the government decide which towns get saved? Here’s the number driving that conversation. Governments put $2.4 billion into keeping this plant alive. Per job, that now works out to about $4 million — up from an already steep $2.2 million before the shutdown was confirmed. And with extra funding pledges pushing the total package toward $3 billion, some estimates put the true cost as high as $5 million per job. One researcher’s take: bailouts like this can actually trap workers in dying industries — stopping them moving into better opportunities, and starving newer, more productive businesses of the workers they need. It might help the business and some workers short-term, but it’s not necessarily good for taxpayers. Worth remembering too — the plant’s slow collapse is largely blamed on former owner Sanjeev Gupta, who promised to grow local jobs but never followed through, which is what forced the SA government to place the steelworks into administration in the first place. Even now, the federal Industry Minister admits he can’t say exactly how much of the package went into trying — and failing — to fix the blast furnace, only that it’s “many millions.” And Whyalla isn’t a one-off. Similar rescues have gone to the Tomago aluminium smelter, the Mount Isa copper smelter, and the Boyne aluminium smelter — with a median cost of around $2 million per directly supported job across all of them. That’s the pattern economists are worried about — there’s no consistent criteria for who gets bailed out and who doesn’t. One from the Grattan Institute put it bluntly: with this many smelters saved, “everyone’s a winner,” and there’s no process for letting the uncompetitive ones go. Others push back, arguing there’s a genuine strategic case here — sovereign capability, similar to how we don’t run a cost-benefit analysis on national security spending. But with Whyalla specifically, it was sold to the public on saving jobs, while the economics — especially sky-high energy costs — were never going to stack up long-term.
Australia’s second-biggest private hospital operator, Healthscope, is being carved up and sold off after collapsing financially last year. Its receivers have struck a deal splitting 25 hospitals among four operators: not-for-profit Calvary Health Care gets the lion’s share with 14 hospitals, while Healthe Care, ACURIO Health and KnG Group split the rest. Notable hospitals changing hands include Sydney’s Prince of Wales and Melbourne’s Knox Private, both going to Healthe Care. Healthscope fell apart after its private equity owner, Canada’s Brookfield, pulled its financial support. Some hospitals were already sold off separately, and the NSW government took back control of Northern Beaches Hospital. The receivers say the new owners have committed to keeping all 14,000 frontline staff and maintaining services for the roughly half a million patients who rely on these hospitals — framed as a way of avoiding extra strain on the public hospital system. It’s a case study in the tension between government-backed health services and profit-driven private operators.
Transport Minister Catherine King has accepted a lifetime membership to Qantas’ platinum frequent flyer tier — awkward timing, since it comes less than two years after MPs publicly gave up their Chairman’s Lounge memberships following backlash. The tier gives her free international first/business class lounge access, extra baggage allowance, priority boarding, upgrades and seat selection. To put the scale in perspective: earning that lifetime status normally takes 75,000 status credits, roughly equivalent to 7,500 Sydney–Melbourne flights. She quietly disclosed the gift in her register of interests (misspelling “Platinum” as “Platnium” in the process). This all follows the 2024 scandal sparked by journalist Joe Aston’s book, which revealed PM Albanese had received 22 free Qantas upgrades over a decade and had a direct line to former Qantas boss Alan Joyce. King herself has a history with the airline industry — she previously blocked Qatar Airways from doubling its flights to Australia, a decision critics said kept flight prices higher than they needed to be. Her office says the frequent flyer status was earned through her actual travel, not given as a special favour.
And that’s it for this week.
And next week, I’ll be talking to Kyle Peacock, the Principal at Peacock Tariff Consulting about the global impact of the trade war between Canada and the US.
And I’ll be talking to independent economist Nicholas Gruen about the debate around One Nation’s super scheme.
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