Updated weekly fuel prices

GDP Nowcast: Q1 2026

Summary

Australia's GDP is tracking +0.78% quarter-on-quarter (+2.93% through the year) based on data available as at 6 April 2026. If realised, this would be the strongest quarterly outcome in three quarters and would push annual growth to its highest since early 2023.

Updated Energy Benchmarks

Housing Tax Reform without Housing Reform

The Setup

The Albanese government is set to announce changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount in the May 12 budget. It will be framed as a landmark moment for housing affordability and intergenerational equity. It is neither. It is a modest tax adjustment to second-order mechanisms in a system whose first-order problems are not being touched.

Here is what the policy is, why it matters at the margin, and why it does little to fix housing purchase affordability and may even harm rental affordability.

Groupthink with a Group of One

Introduction

Before the war:

1. Iran didn't control the Strait of Hormuz. Now it does.
2. Iranian oil was sanctioned. Now it isn't.
3. Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Now it will.
4. US bases in the Gulf were assets. Now they are liabilities.
5. US inflation was declining. Now it is increasing.

That five-point summary, from financial analyst @TheMaverickWS, is the most concise strategic audit of Operation Epic Fury yet written. Each point is directionally clear, even if the margins of some are debated. One note on point one: control doesn't require a physical blockade. Iran's missile threat has been sufficient to make the risk calculus unacceptable to insurers and ship operators alike. The result is functionally identical – traffic has stopped. Together the five points describe a war that has actively worsened the situation on every dimension it claimed to be addressing. File it away. We will return to it.

CPI Reform Won't Fix Housing

Introduction

There is a growing chorus of voices arguing that Australia's Consumer Price Index is broken. The CPI, they say, fails to capture the real cost of living because it excludes house prices – the single largest purchase most Australians will ever make. The frustration is genuine. The lived experience of millions of Australians – particularly younger ones, renters, and aspiring first home buyers – diverges sharply from what the headline inflation number suggests. When the Treasurer announces that inflation is under control and real wages are growing, people who cannot afford to buy a home, or who are watching mortgage repayments consume an ever-larger share of their income, are understandably sceptical.

But the argument that the CPI should be reformed to include house prices, land costs, or mortgage repayments rests on a fundamental confusion about what housing affordability actually is. Housing is not one problem. It is three distinct problems, each driven by different forces, each requiring different policy responses, and each moving in different directions in response to the same policy lever. No single price index can combine all three in a way that remains conceptually coherent, policy-usable, and suitable as a monetary target – and trying to force them into one would produce a measure that misleads more than it illuminates, while damaging one of the most important instruments in Australia's macroeconomic framework.

Underlying the whole debate is a confusion between two things that are not the same: a headline indicator of lived economic pressure, and a target variable for monetary policy. The public wants the first. The Reserve Bank needs the second. Forcing a single number to do both jobs is the source of most of the confusion – and it cannot be resolved by reforming the CPI, because the two purposes are structurally in tension.

Let's start with the three housing affordabilities.

Energy Prices Update

 Global prices

From December through late February, all four benchmarks traded in a tight \$60–70 band, with Brent carrying its usual small premium over WTI and the Middle East grades clustered nearby. The Hormuz closure changed that almost instantly. Within days, prices spiked \$50–100 across the board – but the move was not uniform. WTI and Brent priced in a global supply shock; Oman and Dubai appear to have priced in that plus the direct disruption of their primary export route.