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Australia’s consumer prices rose 4.0 per cent in the 12 months to August, up from 3.5 per cent in July, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday.

Housing was the largest contributor, rising 5.7 per cent on the back of higher costs for new dwellings and electricity. New dwelling prices rose 5.4 per cent as builders passed on higher costs for materials and labour, said Rachael McCririck, the ABS head of price statistics.

Transport was the second largest contributor, up 5.6 per cent. Automotive fuel prices rose 14.8 per cent in August alone, compared with 7.5 per cent in July, which McCririck attributed to higher world oil prices and the unwinding of the remainder of the federal government’s fuel excise relief measures.

The trimmed mean, a measure of underlying inflation that excludes items with large price swings, held at 3.6 per cent for a third consecutive month. Fuel and electricity were both excluded from that measure in August.

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The board said the Middle East conflict had broadened, global energy prices were much higher than assumed and recent inflation was stronger than expected.

The Reserve Bank of Australia raised the cash rate target by 25 basis points to 4.60 per cent on September 29 because inflation remains elevated, the bank’s Monetary Policy Board said.

The board said some of the upside risks it flagged in August were materialising. The Middle East conflict has broadened and global energy prices are much higher than its August forecasts assumed.

“The Board remains focused on ensuring that high inflation does not become embedded,” the board said in a statement. The decision was unanimous.

The board said the three increases in the cash rate target since the start of the year had tightened financial conditions and the economy appeared to be slowing. But inflation was still too high, and it judged a further tightening was warranted to return inflation to target in a reasonable period.

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Larissa Waters has stepped down as leader of the Australian Greens. In a Facebook post, she said a downturn in the chronic kidney disease she has been quietly managing means her doctors have advised a slower pace of life than leading a political party allows. She will take medical leave and return to the Senate as one of the Greens’ two senators for Queensland.

Waters pointed to the party’s wins under her leadership, including the November 2025 overhaul of Australia’s 25-year-old environment laws and the push to split gun safety measures from hate speech laws after the Bondi Beach terror attack. The Greens have also used their Senate balance of power to stall National Disability Insurance Scheme reforms. We look at what her exit means for the party and who holds the numbers in the Senate now.

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An artificial intelligence agent being trained by OpenAI gained unauthorised access to an Australian government Medicare statistics website in June, the federal government said Thursday, calling the breach very serious but minor in its impact.

Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said the agent was refused information by the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, run by Services Australia. It then engaged in what he described as “misaligned behaviour” and got into the portal without authorisation.

“It is utterly unacceptable,” Marles told reporters in Sydney. He said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had delivered that message directly to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman overnight in New York.

The government said no individual’s medical data was accessed. The portal held aggregated Medicare and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme statistics, and Marles said the system itself was not compromised.

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Australia’s unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in August, even as employers added 39,000 jobs, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said Thursday. The number of unemployed people climbed by 28,000 over the same month.

Part-time employment rose by 46,000 people, while full-time employment fell by 6,000, according to the bureau. ABS head of labour statistics Sean Crick said a higher share of people who had been outside the labour force moved straight into unemployment compared with recent years. That pushed the participation rate up 0.2 percentage point to 67.1%.

The bureau cautioned that a recent change to how part of the survey is run could have an unintended effect on August’s seasonally adjusted figures, though its testing put any impact below normal sampling variability. It recommended trend data as the best guide to the labour market. The trend unemployment rate also rose marginally to 4.6%.

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National Australia Bank customers are locked out of their accounts online right now. NAB is experiencing a digital outage across multiple platforms including its mobile app, internet banking and phone services.

In its latest update, NAB confirms the issue is hitting a number of its digital channels, including the NAB app and internet banking. Calling won’t help either. The bank says customers may be unable to contact it by phone at this time.

There is one piece of good news. NAB says its ATMs remain available. So if you need cash, the machines are still working.

The bank says its teams are investigating and working to fix this as quickly as possible. It has apologised and says it will share updates as they become available. Earlier, NAB said no planned maintenance was scheduled.

The ABC first reported the outage this afternoon. On the independent tracker Entireweb Status, 55 outage reports were logged in the past hour, all but one from Australia. Those are user reports, so they show the spike rather than the full scale.

What we still don’t know: the cause, how many customers are affected, and when services will be back. NAB hasn’t said anything yet about cards or EFTPOS.

NAB has been here before. In July 2024, Down Detector showed nearly 1,400 outage reports at the peak of an app and internet banking failure. That one was fixed overnight.

This story is developing. For official updates, head to NAB’s service status page at nab dot com dot au.

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National Australia Bank customers are locked out of their accounts online right now. NAB is experiencing a digital outage across multiple platforms including its mobile app, internet banking and phone services.

In its latest update, NAB confirms the issue is hitting a number of its digital channels, including the NAB app and internet banking. Calling won’t help either. The bank says customers may be unable to contact it by phone at this time.

There is one piece of good news. NAB says its ATMs remain available. So if you need cash, the machines are still working.

The bank says its teams are investigating and working to fix this as quickly as possible. It has apologised and says it will share updates as they become available. Earlier, NAB said no planned maintenance was scheduled.

The ABC first reported the outage this afternoon. On the independent tracker Entireweb Status, 55 outage reports were logged in the past hour, all but one from Australia. Those are user reports, so they show the spike rather than the full scale.

What we still don’t know: the cause, how many customers are affected, and when services will be back. NAB hasn’t said anything yet about cards or EFTPOS.

NAB has been here before. In July 2024, Down Detector showed nearly 1,400 outage reports at the peak of an app and internet banking failure. That one was fixed overnight.

This story is developing. For official updates, head to NAB’s service status page at nab dot com dot au.

Follow us across all major podcasting platforms and social media channels for updates that matter. Your support keeps independent journalism alive!

For more in-depth coverage on these stories and other news affecting Australia and the world, subscribe to readmencari.com. Support our independent journalism by listening to our podcasts on all major platforms and considering a subscription to help us continue delivering fearless reporting free from financial and political influence.

Got a News Tip?

Contact our editor via Proton Mail encrypted, X Direct Message, LinkedIn, or email. You can securely message him on Signal by using his username, Miko Santos.

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We set our own news agenda, which is always based on facts rather than billionaire ownership or political pressure.

Despite the financial challenges that our industry faces, we have decided to keep our reporting open to the public because we believe that everyone has the right to know the truth about the events that shape their world.

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Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock used her last public appearance before next week’s board meeting to knock back questions about how she’ll vote, telling a CEDA audience in Sydney she doesn’t speak for the board and won’t discuss her own position.

Bullock did confirm the board has flagged inflation risk skewed to the upside since its last meeting, citing excess demand in the economy, a Middle East conflict now in its seventh month, and oil prices that remain elevated. She also said the Reserve Bank is watching for signs that AI-driven investment is outrunning company earnings, warning it “might not be a bubble, but it might be.”

The Monetary Policy Board meets September 28-29. The Reserve Bank’s Financial Stability Review, which will address the AI investment risk in more detail, is due October 1.

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Immigration Minister Tony Burke used a National Press Club address in Canberra, delivered on Citizenship Day, to detail Labor’s overhaul of the migration system after a six-week delay. Burke said net overseas migration has dropped to 292,000, down from 300,000 and 47 per cent below its post-pandemic peak, with the government aiming to bring the figure to 225,000 by 2028.

The changes affect three visa categories. Visitor visas will now carry a “no further stay” condition, student visas will only be extended for those advancing to a higher qualification and can no longer include family members, and working holiday makers face new caps of 45,000 second-year and 5,000 third-year visas. Burke also outlined a return to pre-2015 enforcement for the 77,000 visa overstayers in the country, backed by 100 new compliance officers and 250 extra detention beds, th

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Administrators have permanently closed the blast furnace at the Whyalla steelworks in South Australia, cutting the site’s workforce from 1,700 to around 1,200. KordaMentha partner Sebastian Hams told staff on Monday the furnace’s recovery had become unsustainable and its failure inevitable, with redundancies unavoidable despite efforts to redeploy workers first.

The furnace was more than 60 years old and hadn’t been relined since 2005. SA Premier Peter Malinauskas, who joined the announcement in Whyalla, said it had “not been well cared for or looked after, particularly by the previous owner,” but insisted the closure won’t change the state’s long-term plan for steelmaking in the city.

A $10.2 million transition package, split between the state and federal governments, will fund retraining, counselling and support for contractors. BHP and mining company Hallett are both looking to hire displaced workers. The sale of the steelworks continues, with two bidders still in the race, and Malinauskas expects a deal to close by year’s end, with a decision on the site’s next operator due before Christmas.

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