Australia

The Victorian Liberal Party State Executive will convene at 5:30 pm on Friday 18 July 2026 to consider disendorsing Moira Deeming as a candidate for the November 2026 state election.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers kept it brief on Budget night. "We'll limit negative gearing for residential property to new builds from July next year. And we're replacing the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount with inflation-adjusted indexation, to restore the taxation of real gains," Chalmers said.

The Reserve Bank of Australia left the cash rate unchanged at 4.35% at its 16 June 2026 meeting, following three increases already delivered in 2026. The decision was unanimous, a deliberate pause rather than a pivot.

Partnered Health became aware on 23 June 2026 that a malicious actor had accessed some of its data, triggering an immediate response that included engaging specialist cyber experts to contain the incident and assess its full scope. The company publicly confirmed the attack on 15 July 2026.

Your mortgage, your suburb, your retirement plan. For a long time, rising house prices felt like the one thing Australians could agree on wanting. That assumption has cracked.

Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, posted a pointed thread on X on 14 July 2026 that left little room for diplomatic ambiguity. "There is a great deal of hubbub about a collective 'middle powers' strategy these days," Colby wrote.

Cotality's national Home Value Index dropped 0.4% in June 2026, the largest single-month fall recorded since December 2022. Drawn from Cotality's hedonic measure of dwelling values, that figure is not a rounding error; it signals the correction has gained real momentum.

The building at 420 Kent Street has survived deconsecration, a stint as a poor school and seven decades as a theatre company's home. What it could not survive, according to its landlord, was a week of queer arts programming.