Climate change headaches; top states named; Big Pharma's tiny tax bill

It is Tuesday the 29^th of July 2025. Today, climate change is causing headaches in Canberra, especially for the Opposition, with a private member’s bill introduced calling for the government to drop emissions targets. Meanwhile the United Nations chief scientist tells Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to go harder on reducing emissions.

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News in brief

Western Australia is the top performing state, in economic terms, followed by South Australia, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and then NSW and the ACT, with NT last, according to CommSec’s latest State of the States report.

Global pharmaceutical giants, including Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, are paying a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars they earn from drug sales in local taxes, just as they lobby US President Donald Trump to force an overhaul of Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Helloworld Travel jumped 14 per cent yesterday, after it upgraded its full-year earnings guidance despite softer booking volumes. The jump in margins, in part, reflects stronger cruise bookings and a jump in its B2B business, Ready Rooms.

WiseTech Global has appointed a close associate of founder Richard White as chief executive, immediately triggering criticism of its corporate governance practices.

The US and EU have struck a tariff deal that will avert a transatlantic trade war between the two sides but still imposes American tariffs of 15 per cent on most imports from the bloc.

Fear-o-meter

Debating climate change and emissions targets in 2025 seems very retro. Pretty much everyone believes in climate change – even most National Party members – and the need to reduce emissions is self-evident.

True.

But it is still a debate we need to have, because as the economy transitions towards a renewable energy grid, we start to understand just how hard it is to get solar, wind and thermal power from rural Australia into households and businesses around the country.

The federal government has come around to supporting gas as a transition energy. It isn’t that big a stretch to suggest the Albanese government goes slower on its emissions targets simply because the infrastructure to achieve current targets – a 43 per cent reduction on 2005 levels by the end of the decade – won’t be in place.

Who's talking today?

On how Acadian Asset Management is using AI for investing:

"We use AI to find hidden patterns in massive data sets. So if you're looking at market data and you're looking for something like declining short interest, rising volumes and price strength, that's usually symptomatic of a short squeeze happening in the market. What the AI allows us to do is basically to look for that pattern over the 43,500 stocks that we cover. And so what we're leveraging there is the power of machine learning to basically see everything.

We also use AI... to forecast fundamentals. So the earnings of a company, a human analyst is going to rely on their intuition and historical experience to do that. The AI is doing the same thing, but it's learning from the data. So the AI is looking for where analysts have consistently over they've overestimated or underestimated earnings. And so the advantage that AI brings there is that AI can also be perfectly objective because it knows what the actual future earnings have been in the past and it's always correcting itself to hit those particular numbers."

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Greed-o-meter

Five of the biggest international drugmakers paid on average between 2pc and 4pc of their Australian sales in income tax, according to an analysis of earnings statements filed with the corporate regulator.

Company	Revenue	Tax
Johnson & Johnson	$1.45b	$27m
Pfizer	$1.1b	$43m
AstraZeneca	$870m	$12m
Novo Nordisk	$850m	$11m
Eli Lilly	$460m	$5m

Source: Australian Financial Review

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