🚀Swift fever lift in February retail sales.
Good Evening
Australian retail turnover rose 0.3% (seasonally adjusted) in February 2024, according to ABS figures released today and thanks to Taylor Swift.
Job vacancies fall further in February but remain high, according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). There were 364,000 job vacancies in February 2024, down 24,000 from November.
Happy Easter
- Miko Santos, Editor
Up 0.99%, the S&P/ASX 200 closed 77.3 points higher.
A positive lead from the US on the last trading day of the week usually ends with a whimper in the Aussie market.
Highest ever. Even better, it was very broad-based (about 5 to 1 winners versus losers) and we closed near the session high.
Broad-based moves that close at or near the session high usually indicate unquenched excess demand that should be catered to in future sessions.
💡Evening’s Headlines
Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp will not run again in the October local government elections. Ms. Capp told ABC Melbourne this morning she would resign after six years as mayor "to seek new opportunities while Premier of Victoria, Jacinta Allan, recently declared that a tobacco licencing programme will be implemented by the state government.
A $26 million lifeline offered by some of Australia's largest companies to keep the cash transport company afloat has been turned down by Armaguard.
Master Builders Australia CEO Denita Wawn stated, "The latest data on apprenticeships and trainees confirms industry concerns that we are facing a critical labour shortage in the midst of a housing crisis."
After venue closures and festival cancellations, the Communications and Arts Committee will investigate the Australian live music industry's challenges and opportunities. Please submit by 30 April 2024.
Senator Tammy Tyrrell of Tasmania has announced that she is leaving the Jacqui Lambie Network but intends to continue serving in the Senate as an independent.
🗳️ AUS POLITICS
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has today welcomed $1 billion in new funding to help unlock domestic solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing across the entire supply chain.
The Australian Government announced the establishment of the Solar Sunshot program to grow solar PV manufacturing in Australia and provide a pathway for the rich history of local solar PV innovation to be commercialised.
The program will be delivered by ARENA, with development and design to be done in collaboration with the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW).
“ARENA has been at the forefront of building Australia’s solar PV industry through its support for research, innovation and large-scale deployment. This has helped solar to become our cheapest form of energy,” ARENA CEO Darren Miller said.
“We’re pleased to see the Australian Government recognise ARENA’s wealth of experience and close relationships with industry by calling on us to deliver the Solar Sunshot program.”
“To date, ARENA has invested more than $830 million towards 233 solar PV projects. We are ready to take on the next step alongside others in the solar industry to create a domestic solar manufacturing industry.”
THE CLIMATE COUNCIL also applauds the Federal Government's $1 billion pledge to domestic solar manufacturing, an effort that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and generate clean employment opportunities for future generations of Australians living in regional areas.
To recall, A report released this week by the Climate Council provides a roadmap to cut emissions by 75% by 2030 and includes recommendations to invest in clean technologies to stimulate economic growth in regions previously dependent on coal, oil and gas.
Australia can seize the decade by capitalising on our world-beating resources in renewable energy, and deep industry and manufacturing know-how. We can scale up clean ways of powering ourselves, making things, moving around and building our communities.
📈 INVESTMENT
ASIC prevails in Vanguard's first greenwashing civil penalty action.
Vanguard Investments Australia was found to have broken the law by the Federal Court when it made false statements regarding certain environmental, social, and governance (ESG) exclusionary screens that were applied to investments made in Vanguard index funds.
Vanguard acknowledged that it had made false or misleading statements and that it had engaged in behaviour that could have misled the public at a hearing before Justice O'Bryan on March 8, 2024.
Judge O'Bryan concluded on March 28, 2024, that Vanguard had repeatedly violated the ASIC Act by making false or deceptive claims regarding the ESG exclusionary screenings that were implemented on the Vanguard Ethically Conscious Global Aggregate Bond Index Fund. [ Continue Reading ]
📠 BUSINESS
ACC hears that many consumers are forced to make sacrifices due to rising grocery prices.
The consumer survey conducted as part of the ACCC's Supermarkets Enquiry reveals that a significant proportion of younger Australians and households with lower incomes allocate approximately 25% of their nett income towards grocery expenses.
In addition, households have informed the ACCC that they are allocating more time to compare prices for groceries in order to save money, replacing fresh food with frozen alternatives, and reducing their consumption of non-essential items.
Some people have also reported skipping meals or sacrificing meals to feed children properly.
Over 13,000 consumers have responded to the survey so far, and the ACCC is urging more people to do so before it closes on Tuesday 2 April. [Continue reading ]
🖥️ Technology
BYD Dolphin Sport: Cancelled Hotter electric hatch
There will be no more BYD Dolphins coming to Australia in the form of a hotter model.
Customers who had placed orders for BYD Dolphin Sports were contacted last week by the company's Australian distributor, EVDirect, to let them know their orders had been cancelled.
“The main reason [for the cancellation] is we’re focused on volume. We had some demand, but it wasn’t a large scale demand from a volume point of view,” EVDirect chief operating officer Mark Harland told CarExpert.
A credit towards an additional BYD product is being extended to these customers. [ Source ]
🌎 World Tonight
After the manufacturer of the tomato puree can accused a Nigerian woman of making a “malicious allegation” that hurt the company's sales, the woman could go to jail.
A new report from the UN found that every day, over 1 billion meals are wasted globally, leaving nearly 800 million people hungry.
At the age of 37, Simon Harris will become the youngest Taoiseach in Irish history when he succeeds former Prime Minister Leo Varadkar as leader of Fine Gael, the ruling party in Ireland.
As the pandemic raged, organised crime rings that fueled an "explosion" of cyberscam and human trafficking centres spread from South-east Asia to become a global network worth up to $3 trillion annually, according to the head of Interpol on Wednesday.
🏅 Fact Check
Legal loopholes don't help victims of sexualised deepfakes abuse
By Asher Flynn, Monash University; Anastasia Powell, RMIT University; Asia Eaton, Florida International University; Adrian J Scott, Goldsmiths, University of London in Melbourne
Sexual deepfake abuse silences women causing lasting harm, and laws to protect them are inconsistent.
In early 2024, pop megastar Taylor Swift became the centre of a disturbing controversy.
Millions of sexually explicit deepfake images of her flooded social media, raising concerns about the misuse of this Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Only after one image was viewed more than 47 million times, did social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), remove the content.
Swift's case provided a wake-up call to how easy it is for people to take advantage of generative AI technology to create fake pornographic content without consent, leaving victims with few legal options and experiencing psychological, social, physical, economic, and existential trauma.
The trend began in 2017, when a Reddit user uploaded realistic, but entirely fabricated, sexual imagery of female celebrities superimposed onto the bodies of pornography actors. [Continue ]
📰 Good News, Inspiring, Positive Stories
BizCover launches BizCover for Kids: Insurance for the smallest of all Australian businesses
In a bold move that rocked the insurance industry, Australia's leading online business insurance platform BizCover has launched its newest service to protect kids businesses called, BizCover for Kids.
BizCover for Kids specialises in providing tailored cover* for Australia’s youngest entrepreneurs while being backed by 8 new key players, including Toycover, Play Protector and Kidsinsure. The new products aim to provide similar protection as the ones currently trusted by over 220,000 Australian small businesses.
However, BizCover for Kids has been cleverly re-imagined for the playground. Starting today, ambitious young minds can protect their lemonade stands, block skyscrapers and other creations with multiple cover options previously reserved for grown-up businesses.