The tax mix in Australia has to change, and this year’s budget may be just the start. In 2010, Treasury said Australia had roughly 5 working-age people for every person over 65. By 2050, that number is projected to fall to 2.7, nearly half. This problem was highlighted in 2010 when Ken Henry handed government the most comprehensive tax review this country has produced in decades. It recommended, among other things, shifting the base away from income and onto land and cons

Financial advice should be free, or at least subsidised, and the federal government should be the one funding it. Not as a thought experiment. As an actual policy, because they made every Australian need it. They have a responsibility to help out where it counts. Superannuation is one of the best retirement systems in the world. I'll defend it to anyone who says otherwise. But it's complex enough that most people who rely on it have no real hope of understanding it without he

Two AI companies have just had a very bad month. An OpenAI model, mid security test, broke out of its sandbox and hacked a company, all in the name of performing the task it was given. It used stolen credentials, moved through systems it was never meant to touch. Nobody told it to attack anything, it just kept chasing the goal it was given, past the point anyone was watching. Days later, Anthropic admitted three of its Claude models did something similar, during "capture the

There are two people in the room. Why does he keep talking to me? Steph, my partner, is an equal owner of our business. We make decisions together. So why is it that the man sitting in front of us, trying to sell us his services, keeps talking to me, and really, only me? This has happened more times than you could imagine. And it never ends well for them. It does not matter how good your service is, if you direct all questions to me and expect that I am the final decision mak

A few months ago, I was having coffee at The Brown Moose (Great coffee if you're ever in St Kilda Rd Towers) with a colleague who is a BDM for hundreds of advisers. Our conversation turned to AI, and he asked if I was using it at all. I had been, I had been slowly putting together an internal document full of prompts that we could cut and paste into Copilot, ChatGPT etc depending on the type of work we were doing. He said I was doing more than most advisers he came across. Th