It’s Friday the 22nd of August, and the Treasurer Jim Chalmers is flagging tax reform focused on three things: intergenerational fairness, encouraging businesses to invest, and creating a simpler, more sustainable tax system to fund services. He says there won't be an external tax review now following the three-day economic reform roundtable, with the government instead developing its own policies. And that might mean tackling superannuation concessions, family trusts and capital gains tax, potentially offset by lower income tax.

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News in brief

The S&P/ASX 200 set a new record yesterday, pushing through the 9,000 point mark for the first time. It was lifted higher by one of the busiest days on the corporate calendar this reporting season.

Commonwealth Bank has backflipped on plans to cut 45 call centre jobs it had replaced with an AI voicebot, after conceding to the Fair Work Commission that workloads had increased rather than declined.

Homes are often too big for the households that occupy them, according to new research from Cotality. Most new homes are built for families, but more than 60% of households are just one or two people, highlighting a major mismatch in Australia’s housing market.

Super Retail chief executive Anthony Heraghty has labelled organised crime attacks at its Rebel Sport stores in Victoria as “out of control”. The “industrial scale theft” resulted in a slight decline in Rebel’s gross margins for the year, but company still logged an almost 5% increase in sales.

Australian football is facing fresh warnings about match-fixing, with next year’s Women’s Asian Cup in Perth singled out as a major risk. Integrity experts say gaps in Australia’s laws and the rise of illegal offshore betting markets are leaving players and referees exposed.

Fear-o-meter

Lochlan Halloway, Equity Market Strategist at Morningstar, shares his thoughts on some of yesterday's earnings results:

"Valuations, particularly for large caps, looked stretched. However, results are coming through in the ballpark of market expectations, and this is not enough to upset the apple cart and trigger a broader de-rating.

Super Retail: Pleasingly, second-half trading momentum is holding up into the early weeks of fiscal 2026. We see a brighter year ahead for our retail coverage as rate cuts filter through to household spending. The surge in Westpac consumer sentiment on Wednesday is an encouraging sign.

Brambles: Underlying profit growth of 9%, and guidance for further double-digit growth in fiscal 2026 demonstrates there is still tremendous opportunity for the business. We are impressed by improvements in pallet quality and recovery of lost pallets, both of which have drastically reduced the cost to replace pallets over recent years. 

Goodman: Results were broadly in line with our expectations. Global trade uncertainty is weighing on demand for industrial space and delaying capital investment. Meanwhile, Goodman’s development pipeline is taking longer to progress, reflecting a pivot toward larger, more complex data centre projects.

The fallout from James Hardie’s Q1 result continued yesterday, with broker downgrades sending shares down another 10% after Wednesday’s 28% plunge. It was a jarring miss, especially so early in the fiscal year.

But the market reaction looks overdone to us – investors are probably still bruised from the AZEK deal. James Hardie is a high-quality business and has rarely traded at such a steep discount to fair value. To borrow from Buffett, while it’s better to have both a good business and good management, if you must choose one, pick the good business."

Fear & Greed Q+A today

Joe Lathan, Amazon's Country Manager for Project Kuiper, talks about the deal between Amazon and NBN Co to bring high speed internet to 300,000 regional and rural Australians. But the arrival of Amazon as a player in the satellite internet space in Australia has the potential to significantly increase competition for metropolitan markets too:

"The deal that we announced recently with NBN was specifically around replacing their Sky Muster services [but] Amazon will be bringing Kuiper services to Australia more generally. Customers will be able to buy direct from Kuiper. The network we are building has the flexibility, capacity, and performance to serve many different types of customers, whether that's residential customers all the way up through enterprises, government agencies. It's a very flexible network and we'll be bringing services to benefit homes, businesses, enterprises, government agencies, right across Australia. So that for me is the really exciting part of this."

Greed-o-meter

Each week media monitoring firm Medianet publishes its Media Visibility Index, ranking the topics covered by the Australian print and online media. It's weighted based on prominence, and then calculated as a percentage of the total number of media items seen during the week. There's a strong international theme this week, based on Donald Trump's meetings about the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing Gaza conflict.

Source: Medianet

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