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Australian renters now need an annual income of $130,000 to comfortably rent an average unit, with even six-figure earners facing housing costs exceeding 30% of their income in capital cities and many regional areas, a new report has found.
The 2025 Priced Out report by national housing campaign Everybody’s Home showed a single person needs to earn at least $130,000 a year to comfortably afford the median national weekly rent for a unit ($566).
According to SEEK, the average salary in Australia is about $98,000 per year, while the report said the median salary is about $72,592.
The report, which analysed rental affordability for Australians earning between $40,000 and $130,000 a year, found rental stress has now extended well beyond low-income earners.
Rental stress is defined as a person spending more than 30% of their income on rent.
An income of more than $130,000 is needed to escape rental stress across capital cities, the report found, with Sydney and the Gold Coast among the most unaffordable cities in Australia
The size of Australia’s federal and state government debt compared to its economy has risen 3.8 times in the last two decades, according to analysis of OECD data by The Australian.
Universities could be forced to reduce the number of foreign students to a percentage of their total student numbers, under a range of proposals floated by the Coalition.
This comes as The Australian reports ‘A dumbing down of the entire country.’ A group of old-school academics has marked down modern university degrees, warning of widespread cheating and soft marking.
The former Queensland Labor government set aside $2.5bn as a contingency for a predicted shrinking of the state’s share of GST, but squandered it on renewables and hydrogen projects
Steel production at the Whyalla steelworks will be temporarily halted this week to allow "urgent" maintenance works to the blast furnace.
It comes as administrator KordaMentha warns they "do not currently have sufficient funding" to keep the plant operating for 12 months.
KordaMentha also says it may need to "compel" the steelworks' former owner to hand over financial information, claiming it is yet to receive "unfettered access" to records.
"Since taking control of OneSteel, we have identified that OneSteel has sustained a long period of underinvestment, inadequate or no maintenance, poor health and safety practices, has insufficient spare parts and inefficiencies operationally and financially."
KordaMentha administrator Lara Wiggins said in the affidavit
OneSteel was never really a business under Sanjeev Gupta’s ownership. Steelmaking was just a by-product of the magnate’s financial engineering.
As the public outcry from educators and parents intensifies in the wake of Four Corners investigation into Australia's broken childcare system, the reluctance of senior politicians responsible for overseeing the sector to do something to fix it is striking.
While the federal Greens have joined the growing calls for a royal commission into the system, the prime minister's response epitomised a serious flaw in the sector: a cycle of blame shifting between state and federal governments instead of real action.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged the Four Corners revelations, calling them "of deep concern," but when pressed on the issue, he handballed responsibility to the states.
Four Corners exposed the corporatisation of Australia's childcare sector, where profit often outweighs care.
Using national data, it revealed how the shift has come at the expense of quality.
In the past three years serious incidents have risen 27 per cent to 26,000, including serious injuries, trauma, ambulances called at childcare centres and children going missing or unaccounted for.
Given serious incidents are chronically under-reported, this is an alarming trend.
It coincides with the growing dominance of the for-profit sector, which now accounts for almost three quarters of long day care. Of the 300 to 400 new childcare centres opening each year, a staggering 95 per cent are for-profit.
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar said fresh Israeli strikes that have killed hundreds of Palestinians were not a “one-day attack” and that the military operation in Gaza would continue in the coming days.
Readout of President Donald J. Trump's Call with President Vladimir Putin:
Today, President Trump and President Putin spoke about the need for peace and a ceasefire in the Ukraine war. Both leaders agreed this conflict needs to end with a lasting peace. They also stressed the need for improved bilateral relations between the United States and Russia. The blood and treasure that both Ukraine and Russia have been spending in this war would be better spent on the needs of their people.
So at this stage, Russia has agreed to a limited and mutual energy and infrastructure 30 day ceasefire in Ukraine as part of the US-led initiative to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the White House has confirmed.
Putin has since stated that he is open to the idea of a truce but has demanded that certain key issues be addressed beforehand. These include the fate of Ukrainian troops encircled in Russia’s Kursk Region as well as guarantees that Kiev would not use the truce to rearm and refill its ranks.
Another domestic terror incident in Las Vegas at a Tesla service centre where a number of cars have been set alight in the early hours of the morning.
The FBI has extradited one of our “Ten Most Wanted” from Mexico — one we believe to be a key senior leader of MS-13, Francisco Javier Roman-Bardales.
He was arrested in Mexico and is being transported within the U.S. as we speak, where he will face American justice.
The Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD has unveiled a new charging system that it said could make it possible for EVs to charge as quickly as it takes to refill with petrol.
BYD’s Hong Kong-listed shares gained 4.1% on Tuesday to hit a record high.
Two new BYD models will be capable of receiving peak charging power of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling them to travel 400km (249 miles) on a five-minute charge, the BYD founder, Wang Chuanfu, said at an event livestreamed from the company’s Shenzhen headquarters on Monday.
An Italian newspaper has said it is the first in the world to publish an edition entirely produced by artificial intelligence.
The initiative by Il Foglio, a conservative liberal daily, is part of a month-long journalistic experiment aimed at showing the impact AI technology has “on our way of working and our days”, the newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, said.
The four-page Il Foglio AI has been wrapped into the newspaper’s slim broadsheet edition, and is available on newsstands and online from Tuesday.
The experiment comes as news organisations around the world grapple with how AI should be deployed. Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that BBC News was to use AI to give the public more personalized content.
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