News Australia

A TELSTRA board member has accused the "big end of town" of arrogance, ignorance and naivety. "It seems to me that business generally has completely missed the major shift of political opinion in this country when it comes to environmental issues," Geoff Cousins told The Australian. "The suggestion that the government ought to ignore all [...]

US President Barack Obama has launched an initiative to develop new manufacturing jobs, in a move that will see more than 500 million dollars invested in advanced technologies. The initiative will team up government, companies and universities and aims to speed the development of a new generation of American-made high-technology products. The program will leverage [...]

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is poised to open a formal antitrust probe into whether internet search giant Google has abused its dominance on the web, The Wall Street Journal reports. The newspaper, citing ‘people familiar with the matter,’ said the FTC is preparing to serve Google with civil subpoenas ‘signalling the start of [...]

The government’s National Consumer Credit Protection Act regulations will become law as of July 1, after the Senate yesterday allowed the controversial regulations that ban exit fees in mortgages. However, the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia (MFAA), which had sought an exemption for smaller lenders from the banning of exit fees, has said while [...]

Men are leading the way when it comes to forging professional connections online, a new study has found. LinkedIn, a professional web-based networking site, studied the details of men and women across a range of industries and looked at the ratio of their online connections. Of their two million Australian users, they found that men [...]

Yesterday afternoon the Senate voted on a motion by  the Coalition and Independent Nick Xenophon to disallow the Government regulation to ban exit fees.  The strategy (backing MFAA’s campaign over the past few weeks) was to bring the Government to the table to prepare an amended regulation which would have exempted smaller lenders from the [...]

Telstra Corporation Ltd has confirmed it has reached agreement with the federal government to progressively disconnect its copper network and participate in the rollout of the national broadband network (NBN). Telstra says the agreement will deliver approximately $11 billion in replacement revenue through disconnection payments, and new revenues through payments for access to its infrastructure. [...]

JAPAN has issued a tsunami alert after a magnitude-6.7 earthquake hit the northeast of the country, the meteorological agency said. The quake rattled the areas hardest hit by the March 11 quake and tsunami disasters. Japan’s meteorological agency said the latest jolt hit about 50 kilometres off the east coast of Miyako, Iwate prefecture, at [...]

A threat by the Coalition to overturn the Gillard government’s ban on bank mortgage exit fees has prompted an angry response from consumer group Choice. The ban is due to take effect from July 1, but can still be reversed by a majority vote in federal Parliament. The Coalition would need the votes of two [...]

The central bank has again signalled that interest rates will increase "at some point" but says it will wait for more news on the state of the international economy and on Australia’s domestic demand. The minutes of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) June 7 board meeting, show the bank believes inflation is being moderated [...]