The record for Sydney’s wettest year in history is set to be broken by the end of the week, as a major weather system across Australia’s east coast continues to bring intense rainfall from north Queensland all the way to Tasmania.
The amount is just 64mm short of the current wettest year on record in 1950 that recorded 2194mm across the whole year.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) confirmed on Wednesday it has lodged documents in the Federal Court of Australia and will seek penalties against the companies.
The Australian sharemarket has extended its rally with more sharp gains on Wednesday morning following Wall Street’s best session in two years.
The S&P/ASX200 is up 1.5 per cent, or 101.2 points to 6,800.5 points at midday AEDT, adding to Tuesday’s $81 billion lift to the local market.
The Australian sharemarket is well on its way to a bumper week.Credit:Louie Douvis.
The lifters: All big four banks are higher, with each having raised their variable mortgage rates by 0.25 per cent following Tuesday’s cash rate increase by the RBA.
The laggers: Coal miners New Hope, White Haven Coal and Yancoal have slipped between 2.8 per cent and 3.5 per cent, following a 0.3 per cent drop in the commodity price.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has diverged from the Australian course, lifting the official cash rate by 50 basis points to 3.5 per cent at its October meeting.
It comes a day after the Reserve Bank of Australia snapped a run of four consecutive 50 basis point hikes to lift the official cash rate by 25 basis points.
The summary record from today’s monetary policy meeting suggested the RBNZ flirted with an unprecedented triple-rise of 75 basis points.
“The committee considered whether to increase the OCR [official cash rate] by 50 or 75 basis points,” the bank’s governor, Adrian Orr, said in a statement.
It is New Zealand’s eighth consecutive rise since last October and the fifth consecutive hike of 50 basis points as the RBNZ looks to tame headline inflation of 7.3 per cent.
Circling back to an interview from earlier today, and Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones has appeared on Sky News to defend federal cabinet’s lack of consensus when it comes to the much-talked about stage three tax cuts.
The cuts, which were legislated by the Morrison government, were supported by Labor at the federal election.
is ensuring that we don’t add to or make a bad situation even worse.
that you’ve got your eyes on those stage three tax cuts.
Jones: We’ve got our eyes around repairing the budget, ensuring that we don’t make a bad situation worse and ensuring that we try and put some sustainability into the budget moving forward.
Stefanovic: Is it true the reports suggesting that the right of the party don’t want the stage three tax cuts changed, but the left do.
Australia’s stage three tax cuts will cost seven times as much as similar cuts that caused a political storm in Britain when measured as a share of economic output, according to new figures that will be used to urge the federal government to rethink the $243 billion cost
The Australian cuts are forecast to be worth 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product when they begin in 2024 but will increase in size in the following years, in contrast with British cuts that amounted to only 0.1 per cent of GDP before they were scrapped last week
Greens leader Adam Bandt will cite the comparison, done by the Parliamentary Library in recent days, to intensify calls to stop the stage three tax cuts going ahead despite an election promise from Labor to keep them in place
With Treasurer Jim Chalmers vowing to put economics ahead of politics in tough decisions in the October 25 budget, the government is debating whether to make a swift decision to change the tax package in the wake of the financial turmoil in the UK last week or leave the question for next year
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