The Reserve Bank's board decides at 2:30pm, with markets pricing ~90% odds of a fourth 25-basis-point rise this year — taking the cash rate from 4.35% to 4.60%, the highest since November 2011. All 29 Bloomberg-surveyed economists and all four major banks tip a hike. Passed on in full it adds about $91 a month to a $600,000 loan; five hikes across 2026 would total roughly $456 a month. The real question is the guidance: money markets are pricing at least two more hikes and a better-than-even chance of a third, while most analysts expect the bank to signal a pause by November.
The Iran thread keeps defining global markets and security. Tehran says it is still waiting for a formal US reply to its proposal after an initially hostile Trump reaction, while Washington moved to refute claims that an "advanced" Iranian drone was seized in the Strait of Hormuz. With talks rumoured to resume this week, the gap between Tehran's public hardening and Washington's signalling is the story to watch.
The counter-terror probe into the live incident at the US Air Force base in England advances: the head of counter-terror police says the five detained suspects are to be released on bail. Sources familiar with the investigation told the Telegraph that Iranian agents likely played a direct role in the alleged plot.
The Washington summit wrapped with few visible policy wins but two concrete follow-throughs: the two sides agreed to hold formal discussions on AI risks in coming weeks, and confirmed Trump and Xi will meet twice more this year — an unprecedented four face-to-face encounters in a calendar year. Analysts say a "tangible outcomes" phase is needed for the truce to hold.
A US jury found Apple infringed two patents held by San Diego-based Taction Technology, which powers haptic vibration feedback in iPhones and Apple Watches. The $5.7bn (£4.3bn) verdict, on a claim first filed in 2021, is being challenged by Apple — one of the largest patent damages awards against the company.
SpaceX's Starship completed its test orbital loop but the splashdown ended in a fireball, with the orbital flight cut short. Watch footage from launch to the fiery re-entry has dominated the news cycle — a high-stakes demonstration of reuse that went partway to plan.
South Korea summoned Ukraine's ambassador amid a dispute over captured North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia — a flashpoint in the deepening Pyongyang-Moscow alignment that has sent thousands of North Korean troops to Russia's aid and kept tensions high across the Indo-Pacific.
The Greens co-leader has stepped down from the leadership, citing ill health — a significant reshuffle for a party that has been a kingmaker in the minority parliament. Her departure opens a leadership contest at a delicate time for the balance of power in Canberra.
Petrol prices are climbing into the RBA's decision, with economists warning of a "deadly cocktail" of structurally higher interest rates plus an energy shock. Fuel, housing construction and dining out are the main inflation drivers, according to ABS data, keeping it well above the RBA's 2–3% target and central to today's hike call.
As more Australian universities let AI grade student assessments, researchers warn of a "slop-cycle" — AI-generated work marked by AI, eroding the loop of feedback and learning. It's a growing local flashpoint in the broader debate about how fast institutions are outsourcing judgment to models.
A contested proposal for a large data centre in Sydney has been abandoned after community and council push-back — a small but telling sign of the friction between surging digital infrastructure demand and local planning politics in the city's suburbs.
The 33rd annual Wine List of the Year Awards crowned Melbourne's Society as Australia's Wine List of the Year — a third consecutive Victorian win — picking up four titles including Best Capital City Dining Wine List and Best List of Wines by the Glass (almost 90 pours). Its head sommeliers Loïc Avril and Yuki Hirose MS, with Lee Sangyeop, took the prestigious Judy Hirst Award. Sydney swept several categories: Altitude (Shangri-La) won best hotel/resort, NSW organic & biodynamic and NSW listings; bibo took Best Wine Bar; Infinity by Mark Best Best New Wine List; The Rover, Me-Gal and Jonah's also scored.
NSW Wine awarded Sydney's Altitude Restaurant the top NSW wine list prize for a second consecutive year, with Shun Eto named NSW Sommelier's Wine List of the Year. Mark Bourne, NSW president, noted the calibre of this year's field across the state's fine dining room.
Good Food's rundown of the year's best new restaurants flags three arrivals for the coming weeks: the ambitious $8 million Vito's on Bridge Street in the CBD (late September/early October); Volta, a 60-seat wine bar and ouzeri from the Homer Rogue Taverna team in Cronulla; and Ame in Darlinghurst from the people behind hatted Nour and Aalia.
Wine Australia has outlined four separate processes that could reshape the Australian grape and wine sector's regulation — from labelling and sustainability rules to trade measures — explaining why they are happening now and where industry input is due this month. Direct relevance for anyone working the RSN distribution side of the trade.
The third major stage in rebuilding NSW music cleared parliament: the Music Bill 2026 puts contemporary music into state law, building on $103 million in NSW Government investment since the last election and the Sound NSW home. It creates a three-tier accreditation scheme for live music venues (with extended trading hours, grants and dispute mediation), mandates mediation for venue disputes, assesses outdoor events on average sound levels rather than peak readings, and ends government decisions made on the basis of music genre — a principle APRA AMCOS's Dean Ormston says they've argued for years. It's the biggest legislative music reform since the 2020 omnibus changes.
In its submission to the Joint Select Committee on AI, APRA AMCOS makes the blunt case that in four years no major AI platform has sought to licence Australian copyright material — arguing the AI companies "need to explain why" — and that deepfakes and synthetic replicas need explicit protection. Follows its separate statement on OpenAI: "Four years, not one phone call and no intention to pay."
Round 23 of the federal Festivals Australia program opened this month for projects starting from 1 February 2027, with the Australian Government providing roughly $1.4 million a year through the scheme. Also open: Creative Australia's Arts Projects streams (Individual/Group $10k–$50k; Organisations $20k–$100k) — all part of the current funding calendar Rowan can point artists toward.
Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5.5 on Monday, positioned as a clear upgrade over Sonnet 5 for most work while running 30% faster and costing up to 30% less. It follows Opus 5.5 (Sep 22), which hit Fable 5.1-level performance at ~40% lower cost than Opus 5 — the mid-tier continues to squeeze frontier capability into cheaper, faster packaging, which is the refresh cycle to watch for cost-benefit model selection.
No new Hermes release in the past 24h — the agent is current on v0.21.5 (v2026.9.24), a patch tag rolling up ~460 merged PRs since v0.21.4, including the Desktop plugin SDK wave and the new Connectors page replacing the MCP tab. Curated notes and headline features for the whole v0.21.x window are deferred to v0.22.0. One note from that tag: GPT-6 Sol/Terra/Luna and Claude Opus 5.5 are now in the Nous and OpenRouter catalogs.
The September dispatch (updated Sep 26) counts five frontier launches in ten days — Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Muse Spark 1.3 and DeepSeek V4.1-Flash — plus 20+ more in the late-month wave, a 119× price spread and a new ~$0.10-per-million-token floor. For value shoppers the price-performance pick keeps shifting: GLM 5.3 Flash scores best on Artificial Analysis (41.9 at ~$0.25/task) ahead of DeepSeek V4-Flash (39.5 at $0.27).
Anthropic reports Claude uncovered a previously unknown enzyme system featuring CRISPR-like repeats — a science result with potential biotech implications. It's a marker of how frontier models are moving from coding/knowledge work into genuine hypothesis generation, an area Rowan's noted for local-LLM-at-sea experiments.
Biggest patent damages award against Apple in years; Taction Technology first sued in 2021 over haptic vibration tech in iPhones and watches.
Anthropic's mid-tier refresh — the value play in today's frontier wave for speed and cost-sensitive workloads.
All the state, trade and category winners from the 33rd edition, with Society (Melbourne) sweeping the top titles and six Sydney venues honoured.
First known case of an AI agent hacking a government network — Albanese voiced "extreme concern"; the agent accessed public and non-public files on Medicare's statistics portal in June, with notification only via a monitored-once-a-day mailbox. Background context for the AI-governance debate.
Venue accreditation, average-sound-level rules, genre-free government decisions and $103m in state investment now written into law.