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New analysis shows revenue from reforming investor tax breaks could build tens of thousands of affordable rentals and cut rents for everyone by hundreds of dollars a year.

The report from Everybody’s Home models what happens when you stop pouring billions into investor tax breaks and start directing the revenue to build homes instead.

The $19 billion saving over five years is based on replacing the CGT discount with indexation and ending negative gearing including phasing it out for existing investors.

The findings show this reform could:

• Build approximately 29,000 to 42,000 public and community homes
• House around 12,000 to 17,000 households experiencing homelessness
• Reduce the national median rent by 0.7% to 1%
• In dollar terms, that means renters could save between $230 and $330 a year.

“The Federal Budget is the government’s chance to finally make housing work for all Australians, not just those who profit from it,” Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize said.

“Every year, billions of dollars line investors’ pockets and it’s pushing up the cost of housing for everyone else. These tax breaks give the wealthy a hand up while locking out first home buyers and leaving renters worse off. 

Market Update Preview

The new AppliedMMT dashboard is live this week — head to the beta dashboard link on the site to check it out. All the daily Treasury data, the flow phase model, vol shift, flow sentiment, and a handful of new model upgrades are now in one cleaned-up spot. I'll walk through what changed and how to use it.

On markets: April was a heck of a run, and we're now showing classic signs of technical exhaustion, we may need a pause here but I'm not convinced, with some caveats, that a big selloff is needed.

But here's the bigger story. While building out the dashboard, I came across a margin debt chart that genuinely jumped off the page. We're now seeing a divergence between price returns and margin debt growth that has only shown up at two other points in the last 50 years — and both times it preceded a major recession. Combined with what the deficit impulse is telling us about late 2026, the picture is getting clearer about where we are in this cycle. We're at least in the seventh-inning stretch.

Full breakdown below — including why I think the next leg higher is still on the table, and what the actual end-of-cycle trigger I'm watching for looks like.

With the government proposing to de-corporatise SA Water, this post tracks what happened to water prices in Adelaide under SA Water and raises some issues for whatever regulatory regime will replace SA Water.

The post SA Water Prices and Regulatory Change appeared first on Greg Ogle's After Dinner Political Economy.

The Wrap with Ebony Bennett

Every week Australia delays introducing a 25% gas export tax is costing us $350 million. It’s a lot of lost revenue to ignore when your government has announced it will cut 160,000 people from the NDIS ahead of the federal budget.

Yet, when the Prime Minister visited Perth this week, he seemed to kick the can down the road on a gas export tax in this budget, reassuring the mining industry that it “will not undermine existing contracts on gas exports”.

It’s a safe bet the political pressure to tax gas fairly will not diminish – the public supports it from Greens to One Nation voters, and it’s an issue that unites everyone from the head of the ACTU to the head of the Commonwealth Bank. As the political pressure will only keep growing, so too will the economic cost of not doing introducing a gas export tax, it will only become more obscene and more unfair as the weeks drag on.

Unfairness was as the heart of the Global Progressive Mobilisation I recently participated in in Barcelona, convened by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The contrast between the unashamed call to arms for bold progressive action there, and the aggressive commitment to incremental centrism at home could not be starker.

Read more >>

Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy

Editors’ Note: The title of the second chart in this post has been corrected. May 1, 10:40 am.  

Democrats have an extremism problem, and it’s not clear how they can solve it. After yet another gunman tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, liberals nobly renewed their commitment to moderation. “We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America,” wrote CNN’s Van Jones. Quite right. But the American Left has not exactly put itself in a good position to calm down its radicals.

Consider: last Wednesday, the New York Times hosted superstar streamer Hasan Piker for a podcast with writer Jia Tolentino. Piker has fantasized on camera about murdering landlords and once told his viewers that “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill [Florida Senator] Rick Scott.” He joked with Tolentino about “microlooting”—that is, shoplifting—and equivocated about whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die at the hands of his alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione.

Local council elections are often treated as a footnote to national politics, but your local government makes decisions every day that shape inequality in your community. From housing to social care, planning to procurement local councils hold real powers that can challenge – or entrench – inequality. Candidates will be happy to condemn the record […]

The post How to make this the equality election appeared first on Equality Trust.

Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The global economic impacts of the American-Israeli war on Iran are already being felt, particularly in Asia, through shortages of fuel and other necessities, the closure of factories and the loss of jobs. We are now on a path heading for a global recession, or even worse, a global depression. To sort out what potentially lies ahead and the likelihood of preventing the worst outcomes, Chris Hedges speaks with economist Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss the latest inflation figures, which are the first to include the impact of the war in Iran, and why the RBA should take a step back and look at all the data, before they meet to assess interest rates next week.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 30 April 2026.

Visit The Point for research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts at the Australia Institute and beyond.

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut

Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek

Show notes:

Another RBA rate rise won’t fix inflation – it will just smash households already hit by soaring fuel costs, by Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia (April 2026)

Few ideas are more daunting to an artist than opening up their creative process on the merciless sewer that is social media. Yet this is precisely what my dear friend Josh Steinman suggested when I shared my plan to write a symphony for America’s 250th birthday on a hot SoCal day in December 2024. “You should post live-to-tape updates with all of the mistakes, insecurities, decisions, and improvisation,” he proposed.

Thus began a process that no longer involved cloistered introspection. In the digital age, millions of creators vie for attention with stunts, AI slop, and general vapidity—yet almost none have capitalized on audiences’ desire for authenticity. What better way to be authentic than an egoless public struggle against oneself in the construction of a large-scale symphonic work!

In that initial pursuit of authenticity, the conduit for inspiration revealed itself in the form of a fundamental question: “What is America?” It is from meditating on that question that the American essence gathers through the rightly crafted language of music.

Music is a language. It is the most poetic language because it is the most abstract language, as words never seem to elucidate its emotional or spiritual power. There are, however, clear stylistic markers or syntactic structures that may evoke truths of specific peoples. America is no exception.