The Reserve Bank of Australia is odds on to hold interest rates steady, but first home buyers are still about to get a significant leg up.

Economists and bond traders expect the central bank to leave the cash rate at 3.6 per cent when it wraps its latest monetary policy meeting on Tuesday after inflation came in hotter than expected.

A jump in the monthly consumer price index from 2.8 per cent to three per cent in August validated the Reserve Bank’s cautious approach in cutting rates, online property marketplace Domain’s chief economist Nicola Powell said.

Opposing forces in the economy, including rising inflation, soft economic growth and a robust labour market, were causing the central bank to exercise caution, Chartered Accountants ANZ chief economist Richard Holden said.

It was even possible the bank had already delivered its final cut this cycle, he said.

The Reserve Bank has lowered mortgage rates three times since February, shaving more than $270 from monthly repayments for an average home loan of $600,000.

Boosted with extra purchasing power, increased demand from prospective homebuyers has driven home prices to fresh highs after seven months of consecutive growth, according to Cotality’s home value index.

While Dr Powell doesn’t expect more interest rate relief until at least November, first-home buyers will receive another boost on Wednesday.

The federal government’s expanded first-home buyer guarantee scheme, which enables eligible Australians access to five per cent deposits, will slash the time it takes to save for a home.

In Sydney, where property price caps for the scheme have been lifted to $1.5 million, a couple on a dual disposable income of $123,674 will see their time to save for a deposit cut from more than 10 years to less than three years.

Homebuyers in Melbourne and Brisbane will save five years and nine months, while Adelaide purchasers will have the deposit hurdle lowered by five years and seven months.

There are downsides to the scheme, Dr Powell noted.

A lower up-front deposit meant more debt overall and a higher risk of slipping into negative equity if prices fell, while extra demand from first-home buyers would further bid up home prices.

Housing Minister Clare O’Neil said the scheme would help young Australians start building equity in their own home rather than paying off someone else’s mortgage.

“That’s life-changing,” she said.

Rising rental costs have further boosted the value proposition of the scheme to first-home buyers, Cotality head of research Eliza Owen said.

In Sydney, even if a first-home buyer shaved just six years off their time to save for a deposit, that would save them $251,000 on rent for a median rental of $801 a week.

“Even though a smaller deposit means paying more interest over time, it could still work out cheaper for renters,” Ms Owen said.

It’s a cosmic irony that a book deeply critical of the Australian government should be among the winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, author Rick Morton says.

His book about the robodebt scandal, Mean Streak, has won the non-fiction category, making Morton one of six winners to receive the prestigious $80,000 prize.

Currently in Paris writing a novel, Morton has mixed feelings about the win, and says he’s wondered why he has the opportunity to write books, when others never did.

“I have a very complicated relationship with acknowledgement and also with money … don’t get me wrong I’m excited about it, but it also just felt so weird,” he said.

The robodebt scheme chased more than half a million people on Centrelink payment for debts that had been created using an illegal method of “income averaging”.

Morton has already won two Walkley awards for his coverage of the royal commission into the scandal.

“It wasn’t just a bad mistake or bad policy, it was literally a conspiracy … this thing was illegal and yet they did it anyway, and it ruined people’s lives,” he said.

The winners of Australia’s richest literary prize were announced at the National Library of Australia in Canberra Monday night, and will share in a $600,000 prize pool.

Geraldine Fela has won the history category with Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis, while the poetry award has gone to David Brooks for The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems.

Michelle de Kretser has added to her Stella Prize win, taking out the fiction category with Theory & Practice.

Leo and Ralph by Peter Carnavas won the children’s book award, and The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland won the award for young adult book.

For the first time the awards have been held under the aegis of Writing Australia, which was established in July as part of government funding body Creative Australia.

“Each of these works brings a unique perspective, whether it is giving voice to critical moments in our history, sparking imagination in young readers, or offering new ways to think about the world around us,” said Writing Australia director Wenona Byrne.

The awards have at times been controversial since they were launched in 2008, with both Labor and Liberal prime ministers intervening in the judging process.

The 2025 winners were selected by an independent panel of judges with shortlisted entries receiving $5000.

2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Winners

* Australian History – Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis by Geraldine Fela

* Children’s Literature – Leo and Ralph by Peter Carnavas

* Fiction – Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

* Non-fiction – Mean Streak by Rick Morton

* Young adult literature – The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland

* Poetry – The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems by David Brooks

Optus should be forced to accept outside technical help to restore public faith in the telco’s ability to manage triple-zero calls after two recent outages on its network, a consumer group says.

Scrutiny of embattled Optus has intensified after it apologised on Monday for 4500 customers in the NSW town of Dapto being unable to make emergency calls for eight hours on Sunday morning.

The revelation comes after the Singtel-owned company on September 18 suffered an outage that hit households in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and has been linked to three deaths.

That incident, subject to an Optus probe and a federal communications watchdog investigation, sparked expectations of a meeting between Communications Minister Anika Wells and Singtel executives, who are visiting Sydney this week from Singapore.

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network wants Ms Wells to use licensing powers to mandate independent technical oversight of emergency and network reliability systems at Optus. 

“This would provide some assurance that there is strict oversight preventing further failures,” network chief executive Carol Bennett said in a statement.

“The community must have confidence that the emergency call system works 100 per cent of the time when they most need it.”

Griffith University competition and retail expert Graeme Hughes said the best outcome from talks between Ms Wells and Singtel would be a “mandatory systemic overhaul guaranteed by the parent company’s resources and overseen by an external and impartial review board”.

“Optus’s second triple-zero service failure in less than two weeks illustrates that the current model has collapsed, pushing the issue into a state of dangerous systemic fragility,” associate professor Hughes told AAP.

“The localised September 28 Dapto outage confirmed the repeated failure of the fundamental ‘camp-on’ failsafe, endangering public safety.”

The camp-on mechanism is when a triple-zero call fails to connect from a phone user’s network and then is automatically routed through another provider.

Optus chief executive Stephen Rue, under pressure to keep his job, has admitted regular processes were not followed on the September 18 outage, which occurred during a network firewall upgrade.

This month’s issues come after Optus in 2024 paid more than $12 million in penalties for breaching emergency call rules during a nationwide network outage a year earlier that caused significant disruption.

In the 2023 incident, Optus failed to provide emergency call access to 2145 people and subsequently did not conduct welfare checks on 369 people who tried to call triple zero, the communications watchdog found.

Mr Rue took over as the company’s chief executive in 2024 from Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who resigned after the nationwide outage.

President Donald Trump says he will impose a 100 per cent tariff on all films produced overseas that are then sent into the US, repeating a threat made in May that would up-end Hollywood’s global business model.

The step signals Trump’s willingness to extend protectionist trade policies into cultural industries, raising uncertainty for studios that depend heavily on cross-border co-productions and international box-office revenue.

“Our movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America, by other Countries, just like stealing candy from a baby,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social.

However, it was not immediately clear what legal authority Trump would use to impose a 100 per cent tariff on foreign-made films.

The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on how the tariffs would be implemented.

Top US studios Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount Skydance and Netflix also did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Comcast declined to comment.

“There is too much uncertainty, and this latest move raises more questions than answers,” said PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore.

“For now, as things stand, costs are likely to increase, and this will inevitably be passed on to consumers,” he said.

The president had first floated the idea of a movie tariff in May but offered few details, leaving entertainment executives unsure whether it would apply to specific countries or all imports.

After the announcement in May, a coalition of American film unions and guilds sent a letter to Trump, urging him to support tax incentives for domestic film production in a reconciliation package being drafted in Congress, aiming to help return more movie and television projects to the US

The US film industry recorded a $US15.3 billion ($A23.3 billion) trade surplus in 2023, backed by $US22.6 billion ($A34.4 billion) in exports to international markets, according to the Motion Picture Association.

Studio executives told Reuters earlier this year that they were “flummoxed” by how a movie tariff might be enforced, given that modern films often use production, financing, post-production and visual effects spread across multiple countries.

Hollywood has increasingly relied on overseas production hubs such as Canada, the UK and Australia, where tax incentives have attracted big-budget shoots for films ranging from superhero blockbusters to streaming dramas.

At the same time, co-productions with foreign studios have become more common, particularly in Asia and Europe, where local partners provide financing, access to markets, and distribution networks.

Industry executives also warn that a broad tariff could affect the thousands of US workers employed on overseas shoots, from visual effects artists to production crews, whose work is often coordinated across multiple countries.

More than one-in-five homes were sold off-market in Sydney in 2024, according to an analysis by a website aiming to create more of these transactions.

The Quiet List analysed 30,000 real estate transactions across 10 local government areas in Sydney in 2024 and found 20.5 per cent were sold off-market.

“We’re not saying it’s a trend,” Quiet List CEO William Laing told AAP on Monday.

He explained properties had always sold off-market and his company’s analysis merely confirmed anecdotal figures from within the real estate industry.

“We’re just saying this is a really interesting figure and justifies why we think our business is necessary today,” he said.

Launched in April, The Quiet List worked to match sellers and buyers in off-market transactions, Mr Laing said.

The app allows buyers to specify what they are looking for – say, a Bondi Beach two-bedroom with parking for under $1.5 million – and receive matches based on those preferences, he explained.

“So similar to a dating app, right?”

Mr Laing said buyers using agents, which is common in the US, was a new trend that had cemented itself in Australia over the past decade. 

“Would-be home buyers are showing that they are very happy to pay to have an experienced professional help them in acquiring their next home,” he said.

Mr Laing said there were myriad reasons why someone would sell-off market and it was not done to just save money on listing fees.

“Prestige markets, I would say, have had the longest tradition with vendors valuing privacy, buyers valuing opportunity,” he said.

But it was clear from the data that off-market sales were no longer at just the high end of the market, Mr Laing said.

Companies that take part in collusive cartels could soon be exposed by artificial intelligence.

The consumer watchdog has set its sights on suppliers who work together to raise prices on government contracts in a practice known as “bid rigging”.

A form of cartel conduct, bid rigging occurs when businesses discuss and agree among themselves who should win a tender and at what price, instead of competing against each other.

Though it is illegal, bid rigging can be difficult to identify.

But the NSW government will soon share reams of tender data with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to identify suspicious patterns as part of a landmark deal.

“We want to be able to reward law-abiding businesses by punishing those businesses that choose to break the law by entering into conspiracies – when it comes to bids, when it comes to prices, when it comes to other forms of collusive product,” NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey said.

“We want to make sure that taxpayers are getting full value for their money by ensuring that government procurement isn’t an opportunity for criminal cartel behaviour.”

AI will be used to process NSW government contract documents, submissions, and other information before the watchdog screens the data in search of patterns that could indicate potential cartel behaviour.

A study from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development estimated that improving competition and stopping collusion could save the government up to 20 per cent on its contracts.

The NSW government alone spends more than $42 billion every year on goods, services and constructions.

Delta Building Automation in 2024 was ordered to pay $1.5 million after an official offered to pay a competitor to put in a bid that would likely lose.

The bid was work offered by the National Gallery of Australia.

Another ACCC investigation led to action against two Sydney roof tiling businesses that allegedly rigged bids for tenders at the University of Sydney and a residential building project in 2019.

This latest collaboration would allow the consumer watchdog to take a more proactive approach to cartel activity investigations, ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said.

Similar data-sharing tools have already been used in Spain and South Korea, with the latter’s technology flagging about 80 cases a month.

The federal government had entered discussions with the ACCC over a similar deal while the South Australian government entered an agreement with the watchdog at the beginning of 2025, Ms Cass-Gottlieb said.

Businesses caught in cartel behaviour such as bid rigging can be fined up to $50 million, while individuals face up to a decade in prison.

Optus has apologised for a second triple-zero outage in as many weeks as failures to re-route calls through other networks are back in the spotlight.

The latest blackout – dubbed “unacceptable” by NSW Premier Chris Minns – is linked to a mobile phone tower in NSW that affected 4500 users in the Dapto area on Sunday between 3am and 12.20pm.

A review by the telco identified nine failed calls to triple zero, but Optus says those affected “are OK” and the issue has been rectified.

The NSW premier lambasted the failure in the Illawarra region as “clearly unacceptable.”

“NSW deserves full and transparent information from Optus about what went wrong yesterday, including when emergency services and the Telco Authority were notified,” Mr Minns said on Monday, referring to the state’s critical communications agency.

Police confirmed they received a request from Optus on Sunday morning to conduct welfare checks on a number of callers in the Dapto area who had attempted to contact triple zero and were unable to connect.

Optus has also reported one of the Dapto callers required an ambulance and used another phone to contact emergency services.

Another unable to reach emergency services have confirmed they “are OK”. Two calls were accidental and three were test calls.

Four welfare checks were referred to police but none required an emergency services response. Dapto is a southern suburb of Wollongong.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the government was holding the telco to account with a thorough investigation under way by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

“This can’t happen again. This is an absolutely shocking failure from Optus,” he told reporters on Monday.

The outage has also raised questions about the effectiveness of the camp-on mechanism, whereby if a triple-zero call fails to connect from the phone user’s network then it automatically is routed through another provider.

RMIT engineering academic Mark Gregory slammed Optus and other telcos for not investing necessary resources to deal with outages. 

“They don’t want people to really see how bad their networks actually are,” he told AAP.

“The networks are less reliable than they should be and that is because of the lack of investment in the networks and the systems that run those networks.”

He said the technical details of what happened in Dapto must be shared with the public, suggesting other towers powered by Telstra or TPG were not in range of customers.

Dr Gregory noted the onus was also on the federal government to empower the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman to enforce regulations.

“The telcos have invested heavily in lobbying, and the moment the government is listening to the telcos and not to the regulators,” he said.

Asked about domestic roaming and camp-on solution, ACCC chair Gina Gottlieb told reporters on Monday the watchdog had in a 2023 report recommended switching calls between the carriers in emergencies.

Carriers at the time noted congestion on the surviving network and technical parameters were key issues for temporary domestic roaming.

The Dapto triple-zero failure is the latest in a hat-trick of outages for the besieged telco. 

Nearly two years ago, Optus paid a $12 million fine after a technical issue left more than 2000 people unable to ring the emergency number.

On September 18, a more wide-ranging communications outage was linked to the deaths of three Australians.

Optus chief executive Stephen Rue blamed human error for that fault, triggered by a scheduled firewall upgrade in South Australia.

Normal calls were largely unaffected but the outage blocked about 600 triple-zero calls from connecting to emergency services in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and NSW.

The incidents have alarmed Communications Minister Anika Wells, who has requested discussions with representatives from Optus parent company Singtel, who are in Sydney this week.

Singtel’s share price dropped more than two per cent on Monday.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley criticised the prime minister for being in the UK while the “Optus crisis is getting worse here in Australia”.

“The entire triple-zero ecosystem needs an urgent inquiry, not just by the regulator, not just this tip-toeing around by the government,” she told reporters.

The families of two officers allegedly gunned down by Australia’s most wanted man in the line of duty have laid flowers at a police memorial where their names are etched in history. 

National Police Remembrance Day marks one of the most significant days in the policing calendar, offering a chance to pay tribute to those killed on the job.

No one knows that horror more than the families of Victorian police officers Neal Thompson and Vadim de Waart-Hottart, who were killed in the small town of Porepunkah on August 26 while trying to carry out a search warrant. 

Leading Senior Constable Thompson, a Victoria Police veteran of 38 years, was just a week away from retiring.

Hundreds of their colleagues are still involved in the search for Dezi Freeman, who is accused of firing the weapon that killed the men. 

The families of the slain officers attended the service at the police memorial in Melbourne’s St Kilda Road on Monday and laid flowers where their names have been etched to the honour board. 

Their names will be added to the national police memorial in 2026.

Victoria Police commissioner Mike Bush said no one would forget the events in Porepunkah where “two of our very brave, courageous officers had their lives taken.”

“Those tragic losses remind us of the uncertainty, and, should I say, the inherent dangers that policing brings with us,” Mr Bush said during the memorial. 

“To our friends and colleagues and the police who have left us, farewell. We honour you, and we will always remember you.”

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen also attended the memorial and acknowledged the increasing dangers police faced. 

“Today’s officers not only face the traditional risks of the job, but also rising extremism, growing conspiracies and the pressures of an online world where anger spreads faster than facts,” she said. 

A historical death was also added to the Melbourne memorial’s honour wall this year.

Constable Patrick Whyte died in the line of duty in 1866. Sadly none of his living relatives could make the memorial. 

Another touchstone to be added to the national memorial is that of decorated Tasmania Police Constable Keith Anthony Smith, who was shot dead while on duty in North Motton in June. 

A man remains before the courts charged with murdering Const Smith, a well-respected officer with 25 years’ experience.

He received the Commissioner’s Medal in 2011 and a 20-year clasp in 2021, as well as the National Police Service Medal in 2016.

A Tasmanian contingent including Commissioner Donna Adams and the fallen constable’s family will attend the national ceremony in Canberra.

At the Wall of Remembrance in Sydney, acting NSW police commissioner Peter Thurtell said “the force still felt the loss of three of our interstate colleagues”.

The state is adding the 2019 suicide of veteran Casino police officer Stephen Nixon to the wall, which the commissioner described as “a solemn tribute to courage, sacrifice and service”.

Premier Chris Minns also paid tribute to police accountant Curtis Cheng, gunned down 10 years ago by a radicalised Islamist teenager outside police headquarters in Parramatta. 

In Queensland, 97-year-old Trevor Price will pay tribute to his late grandfather, Constable Albert Price, who was murdered in 1905 at just 29. 

Memorials are being held across the nation.

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Share markets got off to a cautious start in Asia on Monday as investors braced for a possible shutdown of the US government, which would in turn delay publication of the September payrolls report and a raft of other key data.

President Donald Trump will meet with the top Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress later on Monday to discuss extending government funding. Without a deal a shutdown would begin from Wednesday, which is also when new US tariffs on heavy trucks, pharmaceuticals and other items go into effect.

A protracted closure could leave the Federal Reserve flying blind on the economy when it meets on October 29.

“If the shutdown lasts beyond the Fed meeting, the Fed will rely on private data for its policy decisions,” analysts at BofA wrote in a note.

“On the margin, we think this may lower the likelihood of an October cut, but only marginally.”

Markets imply a 90 per cent chance of a Fed cut in October, with around a 65 per cent probability of another in December.

The BofA analysts estimated a shutdown would subtract only a slight 0.1 percentage point from economic growth for every week it lasted, while noting the impact on financial markets had been minimal in the past.

They cautioned that should the government use the closure to lay off workers permanently, then it could have a more meaningful impact on payrolls and consumer confidence.

There is also much uncertainty about what might happen at a meeting of US generals and admirals in Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday, called by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth which Trump will reportedly attend.

Otherwise, analysts expected equities to be supported by buying for the new quarter which historically tends to be a positive one for stocks. The S&P 500 has gained 74 per cent of the time in the fourth quarters.

S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq futures were both up 0.2 per cent, having eased modestly last week.

EUROSTOXX 50 futures added 0.3 per cent, as did FTSE futures and DAX futures.

Japan’s Nikkei slipped 0.7 per cent, having risen 6.0 per cent for September so far, while South Korea bounced 1.2 per cent, bringing its gains for the month to 6.3 per cent.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan firmed 0.4 per cent, to be up almost 4.0 per cent for the month.

In bond markets, Treasuries found support at 4.17 per cent having been pressured last week by a run of upbeat US economic data, that led investors to pare back expectations for how low Fed rates might ultimately go.

A host of central bank speakers are on the diary this week, with at least four from the Fed and the European Central Bank appearing on Monday alone.

The dollar index was steady at 98.134 having benefited from the batch of better economic news last week. The euro held at $US1.1708 ($A1.7881), in the lower half of its recent $US1.1646 ($A1.7787) to $US1.1918 ($A1.8202) range.

The dollar stood at 149.49 yen, after rallying just over 1.0 per cent last week and away from the September low around 145.50.

In commodity markets, gold was holding just below a record high at $US3,764 ($A5,749) an ounce.

Oil prices slipped as crude started to flow through a pipeline from the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq to Turkey for the first time in 2-1/2 years.

Reuters reported OPEC+ will likely approve another oil production increase of at least 137,000 barrels per day at its meeting next Sunday.

Brent dropped 0.8 per cent to $US69.57 ($A106.25) a barrel, while US crude eased 0.9 per cent to $US65.14 ($A99.49) per barrel.

Coming clean on climate risks has proven “flawed” as a tool to steer investment away from fossil fuels and into renewables in line with global emissions goals, environmental groups have warned.

More than 50 climate finance groups from Australia and the rest of the world have made the plea to banks, insurers and other financial institutions to mark the 10-year anniversary of a seminal speech delivered by Mark Carney.

In 2015, the then-governor of the Bank of England warned climate change was “the tragedy of the horizon” and posed a major threat to the financial system.

Mondays’ statement from the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Market Forces and other groups says the tragedy spelled out in the decade-old speech “is not only unresolved, it is growing”.

“Ten years on, the crisis that was once on the horizon is now at our doorstep,” the letter read.

“The financial system is facing instability and potential collapse.”

The climate finance advocates are sounding the alarm as financial institutions worldwide falter in their commitments to managing climate risk.

Australia’s Macquarie Group pulled out of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance earlier this year, following the exit of a number of major US and European institutions from the group bound by a commitment to cleaner lending.

Despite recent backsliding, progress has been made on climate risk management in the financial sector over the past decade, concentrated on climate risk disclosure.

Climate reporting is largely voluntary but Australia has been an early mover on mandatory disclosure, with new rules for large public companies and financial institutions coming into force this year.

The letter, which includes the backing of WWF, US Sierra Club and Finance Watch, argues that transparency via voluntary climate-related disclosures are “essential” but insufficient on their own.

“The idea that better information alone would shift markets has proven flawed.”

“Major new investments in fossil fuel development continue to flow in the billions of dollars and investment in renewable energies remain insufficient.”

The letter calls on central banks and financial regulators to move beyond voluntary disclosure to mandate climate transition plans, including policies that both restrict financing to fossil fuel expansion and funnel more investment into renewables.

The climate groups also want mandatory climate risk disclosure and central banks to align monetary policy with the goals of the Paris Agreement, the global climate pact.

Market Forces, which endorsed the statement, called for “concrete action” from regulators to bring financial institutions into line.

“Increased climate risk disclosure has failed to stop big banks and investors pouring trillions into fossil fuel expansion that’s driving ever worsening economic, social, and environmental damage,” said chief executive officer Will van de Pol.

“Australia’s financial institutions and regulators must get on with the job of mitigating climate-related risks, by supercharging investment in renewable energy and ruling out support for new coal and gas.”