Interest rate cut has immediate impact on Geelong home prices
Geelong's property market is just a chip-shot away from making up the ground lost in home prices over the past 12 months, new data shows.
The latest PropTrack Home Price Index results reveals the median home price in Geelong ended May just .67 per cent shy of the value recorded at the same time last year.
It marks a quick turnaround as the Reserve Bank locked in the second interest-rate cut in 2025 a fortnight after the government banked a stunning federal election win.
Geelong's median house price reached $893,000 in May, according to the PropTrack figures, just shy of the figure recorded in 2024.
The value of a typical unit is up on all measures, reaching $612,000 by the end of May.
PropTrack senior economist Eleanor Creagh said Geelong was not far off returning to positive territory on annual terms.
'It's a bit of a chip shot, and it's likely that prices are going to continue lifting throughout the remainder of 2025,' Ms Creagh said.
'We're seeing that price momentum has increased and broadened with interest rates falling.
'And we know that lower interest rates have lifted borrowing capacities and boosted buyer demand, and of course, with further price increases and rate cuts expected, prospective buyers are moving off the sidelines and accelerating their purchasing decisions.
'And as a result, we're seeing that growth momentum has increased, underpinned by improving buyer sentiment and confidence.'
Ms Creagh said it appears that interest rates moving lower has buoyed buyer confidence.
'I think people are anticipating that interest rates are going to continue to move lower already and that prices are going to continue to rise.'
The fast turnaround comes regional prices outpaced the combined capitals.
Regional home prices are now 65 per cent higher than their levels five years ago.
The turnaround in buyer sentiment after an interest-rate cut comes amid continued strong population growth on the back of nation-leading internal migration figures.
More than 10 per cent of people moving to regional Australia have settled in Geelong, the Regional Australia Institute data from the Regional Movers Index revealed.
McGrath, Geelong agent David Cortous said the changing sentiment was already visible on the streets, with more people attending inspections, watching auctions and in some cases competing for properties.
'The Geelong market has been flat on price to two years now,' Mr Cortous said.
'We're starting to see that multiple buyers are back on properties now and we're selling through stock that's been sitting there. That's an indicator that the needle is moving.'
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ABC News
20 minutes ago
- ABC News
Why do societies collapse and what does it mean for us?
Does every society have a use-by date? The fact that we're not bumping into Aztecs or Byzantines around the place does suggest that they all end at some point. States can slowly decline and fade, or morph into new entities, while a few simply collapse in on themselves. "This is something which has haunted even the most powerful of empires," Luke Kemp, a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live. "It's natural to look over our shoulders at the wreckages of the past and wonder if we're going to end up the same way." Human history stretches back around 300,000 years, but we only made the move from hunter-gatherer communities to states about 5,000 years ago. Dr Kemp, whose upcoming book is Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, calls a state "a set of centralised institutions that impose rules on and extract resources from a population in a territory". They appeared in Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) before spreading around the world and becoming modern day "Goliaths" like the United States and the People's Republic of China. All states across history have eventually ended and a societal collapse is perhaps the most dramatic coda. It's "when you have multiple systems of power all go down. Not just the state but also the economy and potentially the population [as well]", Dr Kemp says. And for anyone worrying about the imminent societal collapse of Australia, there's a bit of good news. "It's actually surprisingly rare for all [of a state's] systems to go down at once," Dr Kemp says. One of the best examples in history of societal collapse is perhaps one of the least known. Around the year 1000, Native Americans created a city called Cahokia on the Mississippi River near today's St Louis. This was the first proper city in the present-day United States. With 10,000 to 15,000 people, Cahokia was bigger than many European cities of the time, including London. It was a place of kings and elites overseeing a great experiment in urbanism. But when Christopher Columbus and other Europeans started arriving in the Americas from 1492, the city had disappeared and no comparable cities replaced it. "Within about 150 years, it starts to fall apart," Dr Kemp says. Coinciding with a period of drought and flood, the city was entirely abandoned. "All the key power structures you would associate with a modern state fell apart … [and] much of the culture changed as well," Dr Kemp says. "But even more interesting is that the people there seem to intentionally forget about this experiment with urbanism … There are no oral traditions, no stories about it. "It's almost like they wanted to forget about it and leave it to rot in the swamps of the Mississippi." After centuries of European domination, Rome — or the Western Roman Empire — fell in the 5th century. Rome was sacked by Germanic Visigoths in 410, and then in 476, Germanic leader Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus. It seems to fit the brief of a societal collapse. The military fragmented. The economy plummeted. Trade broke up into local levels. The elites fell apart. But Dr Kemp says it's a much more complex case than say, Cahokia. "Some power structures did continue … The ideological basis of Rome, which by that stage was the church, actually continued to grow in power. It became the connective tissue across all of Europe after Rome fell," he says. "Many of the cultures, customs and even garbs that the Romans had were carried on by the [new] Germanic rulers." And in Dr Kemp's eyes — even with Pax Romana and all those aqueducts — the collapse of Rome wasn't necessarily a tragedy. He explains the Roman model: Conquer a territory. Use the riches and resources of the new territory to conquer more territory. Repeat. And he says meanwhile, most of the benefits of the empire were channelled back to the capital. "It was a very large-scale pyramid scheme," Dr Kemp says. "Its collapse was in many ways a good thing for a lot of people. If we look at skeletons in Latin Europe after the fall of Rome, people seemed to get taller and healthier. "So I think we've been handed down a set of stories which have emphasised collapse — and probably overemphasised how bad it is." Dr Kemp and his colleagues have crunched the numbers and found the average life span of a state throughout much of history has been 326 years. But there is a big range on either side of this number. For example, the Byzantine Empire lasted for 1,000 years, while China's Qin Dynasty lasted for just 15 years. And the largest states, or "mega-empires covering over a million square kilometres", were more fragile, with an average life span of 155 years. From Rome to Cahokia to many other examples of collapse, Dr Kemp says there's one key culprit. "We tend to get a bit too preoccupied with looking at big external shocks," he says. These can be things like plagues or enemies at the gates, which can be part of, but not the whole story. "You find that different societies handle these [external shocks] pretty well, but then they seem to become weaker … This is largely due to the fact that inequality seems to increase over time." So Dr Kemp calls inequality "the master variable behind crisis and collapse". On the flip side, after picking through the details of states from the Hittites to the Spanish Empire, Dr Kemp has a theory about what gives a state longevity. "Democracy and inclusive institutions seem to be the big things that encourage states and societies to often last longer." He cites research from Yale University that looked at how different societies coped with the Late Antique Little Ice Age of 536–660, when three different volcanic eruptions led to cooling temperatures around the Northern Hemisphere. It found that some societies were more resilient to temperature swings than others — and that a big predictor of resilience was how democratic and inclusive their institutions were. So of the world's roughly 200 countries, which is next in line for a societal collapse? "It would be very easy for me to say one of the countries in the Horn of Africa … Or Yemen for instance, which is in a state of civil war," Dr Kemp says. "But today when we do have a collapse, such as the collapse of Somalia or Afghanistan, it tends to be very short-lived. Resources are mobilised to make sure that a new state is propped up very quickly." Instead, Dr Kemp paints a picture less about individual states collapsing, but the possibility of something far bigger. He is much more concerned about the "world as a whole", given we all live in a "global, interconnected system". "If we're really thinking about a global collapse, then the things we have to start worrying about today are things like nuclear war, climatic change and dangerous new technologies," he says. "All of those, once again, are built upon large systems of inequality." And he says, while we can't put clear numbers on the likelihood of this kind of a collapse, the possibility of a "catastrophic" global event in the coming century has him worried.
Sky News AU
31 minutes ago
- Sky News AU
Two international relations experts weigh threat of China against Australia's 'confusing' ally as tensions rise in the Indo-Pacific
Two experts in the fields of defence, strategy and China have weighed the growing tensions in the Indo-Pacific and Australia's ties with a 'confusing antagonist' in the United States which could lead to 'significant harm' if a conflict with Taiwan eventuated. It came after Sky News' Sunday Agenda reported Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would not accept the US request to increase defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and would stand by Labor's existing policy. Under the government's projections, defence spending is forecast to reach 2.33 per cent of GDP by 2033–34, up from about 2.05 per cent in 2025-26. Strategy and defence expert at the Australian National University Associate Professor, Andrew Carr, told the Trump Administration was good at 'talking tough' on China, but on several economic and security issues it did not show the 'discipline or resolve' to follow through. 'China will know that US administrations pleaded with and insisted that allies do more to help Washington. Thus far, it has almost entirely fallen on deaf ears,'he said. 'The Trump Administration is right to be outraged that rich nations in Europe and Asia cheap-ride on the back of US taxpayers and soldiers. The Trump Administration is trying a very different approach to changing that dynamic, but it's not clear it will be anymore successful.' Professor Carr said China's view of Taiwan was 'purely internal' and any Australian participation or support of American defence efforts, if China invaded, would lead to 'significant harm' to the Australia-China relationship. Some experts consider 2027 as the year China's President Xi Jinping expects his military to be ready for war with Taiwan. 'That said, in such a conflict it's likely Canberra would be the one rushing to impose penalties and sanctions as a way to diplomatically and economically punish China for its attack,' Professor Carr said. The strategy and defence expert said there was a 'clear escalation of tension' in the Indo-Pacific which had been steadily rising for more than a decade as China has poured money into its military. '(China) has aggressively challenged the legal claims of most of its neighbours, has spied on and tried to corruptly buy influence around the entire region, and used economic and diplomatic means to punish any who speak out,' Professor Carr said. The ANU professor said the Trump administration had been a 'somewhat confusing antagonist' as it has been very strident in rhetoric, such as US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth's speech, while being harmful in policy, such as the high tariffs and barriers to Chinese students in the US. 'So though the surface is choppy, some of the underlying currents are potentially much smoother,' he said. 'Trump talks a big game, but there's a reason the TACO nickname (Trump Always Chickens Out) is starting to catch on. Not just economically but strategically too.' Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last week, Mr Hegseth warned the threat of China was real and potentially imminent as he pushed allies in the Indo-Pacific to spend more on their own defence needs. Mr Hegseth echoed the Trump administration's motto of maintaining 'peace through strength' and stressed the importance of restoring the 'warrior ethos'. China expert Dr Edward Chan, a postdoctoral fellow in China Studies at the Australian National University, told that while China had not 'explicitly' addressed the potential of Australia's participation in a US-led response to a cross-Strait conflict, it has expressed 'firm opposition' to broader trends in Australia's defence policy. 'Particularly in relation to its alignment with the US and its growing role in regional security arrangements,' Dr Chan said. 'For example, China has repeatedly criticised Australia's participation in the Quad and its commitment to AUKUS, arguing that such initiatives reflect a Cold War mentality and contribute to regional instability.' Dr Chan said such moves are claimed by Chinese officials to 'intensify the arms race'. The expert on China said among Chinese scholars there was a commonly used phrase that 'The United States has tied Australia to its chariot', which reflected the belief Canberra is being drawn into Washington's strategic agenda at the expense of regional stability. In terms of the next few years, and whether tensions in the Indo-Pacific would escalate, Dr Chan said a level of 'strategic unease has already become the new normal' as many governments have reassessed their security postures as they appear to prepare for contingencies, even in the hope of avoiding them. 'That said, putting on my academic hat, I would argue that a direct military conflict in the region—particularly over flashpoints like Taiwan or the South China Sea—remains highly unlikely in the near term. The risks and costs of war would be enormous for all sides involved,' Dr Chan said. 'However, we can expect persistent 'grey zone' activity to continue—what might be called the ashes of geopolitical friction. This includes freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs), increased coastguard and naval patrols, more frequent military exercises, strategic messaging, and tighter defence cooperation among like-minded countries. 'These activities are likely to become more routine.' contacted the Chinese Embassy and the Consulate on the matter, with both referring to the comments made by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Mr Hegseth's Shangri-La speech. 'Hegseth deliberately ignored the call for peace and development by countries in the region, and instead touted the Cold War mentality for bloc confrontation, vilified China with defamatory allegations, and falsely called China a 'threat',' a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said over the weekend. 'The remarks were filled with provocations and intended to sow discord. China deplores and firmly opposes them and has protested strongly to the US. 'To perpetuate its hegemony and advance the so-called 'Indo-Pacific strategy,' the US has deployed offensive weaponry in the South China Sea and kept stoking flames and creating tensions in the Asia-Pacific, which are turning the region into a powder keg and making countries in the region deeply concerned.' As for the 'Taiwan question', the Foreign Ministry said it was entirely an 'internal affair', with no other country being in a position to 'interfere'. 'The US should never imagine it could use the Taiwan question as leverage against China. The US must never play with fire on this question,' the spokesperson said. 'China urges the US to fully respect the efforts of countries in the region to maintain peace and stability, stop deliberately destroying the peaceful and stable environment cherished by the region, and stop inciting conflict and confrontation and escalating tensions in the region.'
The Australian
32 minutes ago
- The Australian
Anthony Albanese is playing a huge gamble at the G7 summit in Canada with Donald Trump
Anthony Albanese looks on during a federal cabinet meeting in Perth. You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback. You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Anthony Albanese is gambling Australia's future defence and security on two fronts and he may lose on both. First, the Prime Minister is betting he can convince US President Donald Trump and Trump's Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, to accept the government's minimalist plan for defence spending during the coming decade without doing serious damage to the US-Australia alliance. Second, Albanese is gambling that despite numerous official and external warnings, Australia will not need to fight a major war in the Indo-Pacific during the coming decade. Both bets are very risky: if Albanese loses one or both, Australia's security will be severely damaged, possibly irretrievably. Washington's pressure on Australia and other Indo-Pacific allies to increase defence spending is strong and unwavering. It has several powerful drivers. Most important is the challenge of Beijing's surging military power, its extensive preparations to fight a major war and its aggressive behaviour towards Taiwan, Japan, The Philippines and other regional democracies. Another driver is the rapid rise of Beijing's military-industrial strength with China's manufacturing output now double that of the US. Donald Trump , JD Vance and Pete Hegseth. A further US concern is the prospect of having to confront a rapidly growing Chinese nuclear force and the possibility of a Chinese-Russian nuclear coalition that could deploy more than double the number of US nuclear weapons by 2035. That risk is driving preparations for a rapid expansion and modernisation of the US nuclear arsenal. It also has spurred Trump to announce the urgent deployment of the Golden Dome system, to provide ballistic and cruise missile defence for the American homeland. This is expected to cost around $US175bn ($270bn). The Trump administration is determined to reverse the erosion of its nuclear escalation dominance. Australia and all other allies should support this endeavour because it will enhance our deterrence power and limit our vulnerability to nuclear coercion. In the face of these urgent demands, the Trump administration has set clear security priorities and determined that the US cannot do all of the heavy lifting. The allies must make much stronger contributions to their own and to collective defence. In his address to the Shangri-La Dialogue Hegseth made clear the Trump administration's priority defence policy region is Asia. In consequence, the European allies have been pressed to take much of the defence load in their region and accept the lead in underpinning the defence of Ukraine. Nearly all of the European allies have now agreed to substantially boost their defence spending. Poland expects to spend 4.7 per cent of its GDP on defence this year. Lithuania plans to spend 5.5 per cent and Estonia 5.4 per cent next year, and Germany is hiking its defence budget by 75 per cent immediately to 3.5 per cent of GDP. There are also reports that Germany is planning a further rise to 5 per cent before the end of the decade. In his speech Hegseth contrasted the efforts of some Asian allies with the substantial spending commitments already made by America's NATO partners when Europe faces a less formidable threat. This is the context for Hegseth asking Defence Minister Richard Marles to lift Australian defence spending from its current 2 per cent of GDP to 3.5 per cent 'as soon as possible'. During his plenary presentation, Hegseth appeared to be looking straight at Marles when he stated that in the case of some allies 'tough love' was needed. Albanese's response so far has been to stick with the government's plan to lift defence spending from its current 2 per cent of GDP to 2.33 per cent in eight years. 'What we'll do is we'll determine our defence policy. And we've invested across the forwards, an additional $10bn in defence,' he said. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles. If the government fails to move on its business-as-usual, minimal growth approach, the Prime Minister can expect a frosty reception from Trump if their anticipated meeting takes place on the margins of the G7 summit in Canada in 10 days. If Albanese is eventually invited to the Oval Office, a Zelensky-like dressing-down may be in store. Australia's alliance with the US is unlikely to be unscathed. The second big security gamble made by Albanese and his colleagues is that Australia will not need to fight a major war in the coming decade. Indeed, it appears the government doesn't even see a need to take additional steps to deter such a war occurring. These judgments fly in the face of numerous official and unofficial assessments that the risk of China conducting a major operation to seize democratic Taiwan is high and, if it occurs, it is likely to trigger a major war between China and the US and its allies. Hegseth reminded his audience that Xi Jinping has ordered China's military to be ready to conduct a major assault on Taiwan by 2027. 'There is no reason to sugar-coat it. The threat China poses is real and it could be imminent,' Hegseth said. Albanese appears not to have come to terms with the shift of global power and potential conflict to East Asia during recent decades. In the event of such a crisis, Australia will be close to the primary battlefields and would likely be attacked at an early stage. Recent intense discussions in Washington and other allied capitals have confirmed that if war breaks out we should expect missile strikes, attacks on key defence bases and shipping, mining of some ports, special force raids, sabotage and powerful disabling cyber attacks. The government appears unconcerned that our military and our civilian population are grossly unprepared. Russian President Vladimir Putin and foreign leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, attend a ceremony to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin wall. Regrettably, Australia's strategic situation is even worse than this. America's military and defence industrial capabilities have been allowed to run down so far that in the event of a major crisis, the US will struggle just to supply its own forces. US polling also reveals that public support for the commitment of American forces for the defence of allies and partners is weakening. Since the Vietnam War the experience is that even if a president commits forces at the outset of a crisis, the American public is unwilling to sustain major military operations abroad taking casualties for an extended period unless the US itself is directly threatened. A further serious complication is that during the past two years presidents Joe Biden and Trump have both interfered in the campaigns of self-defence being fought by Ukraine and Israel. Under both presidents the US has insisted that allies accept US directions, even if this has meant handing over national territory to an authoritarian invader or surrendering core interests to a terrorist group. The lessons for Australia are stark. In contrast to the past, prompt, powerful, sustained and fully co-operative US support for Australia in a future crisis is now much less predictable and less likely. The brutal truth is that in some circumstances we may need to fight to defend ourselves largely on our own. In years past Australian politicians routinely stated that the highest priority of the government is to protect the nation and its people. Albanese and his colleagues appear to have a different view. They have placed two very risky bets. The stakes for our future independence and freedom could scarcely be higher. Ross Babbage is chief executive of Strategic Forum in Australia and a non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
