It's Tuesday, the 30^th of September 2025. Today, the underlying federal budget deficit for the last financial year has come in at $10 billion, well below the forecast $27.9 billion, on the back of higher tax receipts due to the strong employment market. Company tax receipts were also higher. And there were higher contributions from super funds, due to their strong performance. Payments were about $4.6 billion lower - the majority of those relate to national partnership payments with the states. It means Australia’s debt is lower than forecast.

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News in brief

The chief executive of Optus’ Singaporean parent company Singtel will meet with Federal Communications Minister Anika Wells in Sydney as the telco struggles to meet its community obligations. Optus suffered another triple-zero outage on Sunday, that left customers south of Sydney unable to reach the Triple Zero network.

Home loan wars between the big lenders are back, with aggressive tactics particularly from Macquarie, triggering better deals for customers, though much of the competition doesn’t involve interest rates. In the latest salvo, Commonwealth Bank is offering 300,000 Qantas loyalty points for purely online home loan allocations.

Melatonin from some online suppliers has been found to have as much as four times the amount advertised, or even no melatonin at all, according to testing by the national drug regulator. Melatonin is widely used to help sleep.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump met overnight amid comments from Washington that an ambitious plan to end the war in Gaza is nearly complete.

China has officially opened the world's highest bridge to the public. The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge towers 625m above a gorge in the country's Guizhou province. The 1.5km bridge is made up of 93 segments weighing a collective 22,000 tonnes.

Fear-o-meter

What can the government do to Optus? Force the CEO to resign? Scold it for not meeting community standards? Threaten to remove its licence under the Telecommunications Act? Fine it?

Would any of those actions increase the likelihood of Optus not having another network outage? I don’t think so.

Optus is the number two telco in Australia. It is owned by Singtel and is needed by the government and consumers in this country to add a bit of competition into the market that for decades has been dominated by Telstra.

Triple-zero outages should never happen. The telcos should work together to ensure if one goes down, another steps in. And that’s what’s supposed to happen, but it didn’t. There’s not much the government can do to Optus that would improve the situation.

Fear & Greed Q+A today

On a surge in the number of self-managed super funds set up last year - one of the key findings of the Annual Benchmark Report shared at Class Ignite 2025:

 

"Based on ATO data... almost 42,000 Australians chose to establish an SMSF in FY25. That's a 27% increase on the year prior from 33,000. So  pretty staggering growth.

 

You wonder what was special about 2025 to see such a big increase, because we've been hovering at around 30,000 for a couple of years before then. We're obviously at a point in time when lots of people are discovering SMSFs and coming in droves. 

 

At Class we look at the actual demographics of those who are establishing... and we saw an increase from 80% to 86 % for Gen X and millennials combined... those 30 to 44 who chose to establish in FY25. So there's a hypothesis you could draw that either their super balances have reached a certain stage or technology has meant that it's cheaper than it might have been to establish and then administer a fund, and so they're getting into SMSFs a little bit earlier."

Greed-o-meter

Last week we looked at the items that saw the biggest price increases across the last 12 months (led by electricity and eggs). But in some cases, prices have actually declined over the same period.

Source: ABS, AMP

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