Big Four Banks in Line of Fire: New APRA Cap Has Only One Target
APRA’s new cap on high debt to income loans looks broad on paper, but the numbers show it is effectively a speed limiter for the big four, the only banks that have ever blown past the 20% line and still write high risk loans at more than triple the rate of smaller lenders. If investor lending drives the next upswing, major banks will be the first to hit the ceiling, leaving second tier institutions with both the regulatory headroom and the incentive to chase higher risk borrowers.

Credit Card Limits Hit 17-Year Low as Aussies Chase Bigger Home Loans
Australians are putting a record $342 billion a year through their credit cards while quietly hacking back their limits to $109.7 billion, the lowest level since 2008, turning unused credit into a liability for anyone chasing a mortgage. In a market where a $10,000 credit limit can wipe roughly $45,000 off what you can borrow, cancelling long forgotten cards has become one of the bluntest and most effective tools first home buyers have to stay in the game.

NSW housing approval: a case of the haves and have nots
NSW’s housing pipeline is inching up just 4% overall, yet the map is quietly rewiring, with regional LGAs like Wingecarribee and Shellharbour more than doubling approvals while parts of Sydney like Hornsby and Wollongong go backwards. Blacktown is pulling away from the pack, now accounting for almost one in ten new house approvals in the state, a signal that growth is concentrating in a handful of high capacity postcodes rather than spreading evenly across NSW.

Brisbane Breaks $1 Million Barrier as City Outpaces All Major Capitals
Brisbane has quietly retired its “affordable alternative” badge, breaking the $1 million median and outgunning every other capital, with house prices up 82% in five years and now trading at a premium to Melbourne. At a 13% annual growth clip and apartments rising even faster, the city is shifting from safety valve to exclusion zone, reshaping who can realistically buy into South East Queensland.

3.5 Million Households to Ration Aircon Despite Record Heat Forecast
In the same week the government scrapped the $300 energy rebate and forecasts pointed to power prices rising 20% over the next decade, nearly one third of Australians said they plan to ration air conditioning this summer, equivalent to 3.5 million households cutting cooling in hotter than average conditions. That collision of policy timing, rising bills and extreme heat turns electricity pricing into a public health variable, especially for older Australians who are the most vulnerable to heat stress and the least able to escape it.

7 in 10 Aussie Travellers Want Adults-Only Cabins
Nearly seven in ten Australian travellers now back adults only cabins and more than a third would pay extra, creating a 5.2 million strong market for airlines that treat peace and quiet as a sellable upgrade rather than a soft perk. With Gen Z and Millennials roughly twice as likely as the average traveller to pay a significant premium, quiet zones start to look less like a fringe preference and more like a high yield product line for long haul carriers heading into peak family travel season.

F1 Fever: Singapore Visits Surge 52% as Aussies Smash October Travel Records
October 2025 quietly became Australia’s biggest non January month for overseas travel on record, as 1.28 million people flew back from holidays despite cost of living pressure. Singapore did the heavy lifting, with Aussie visits surging 52% when the F1 finally lined up with school holidays again, a textbook example of how event timing can move an entire destination up the leaderboard.

7 in 10 Young Australians Are Avoiding the Doctor - Here's Why
Around seven in ten young Australians say they put off seeing a doctor for non urgent issues, with men hiding behind being “too busy” and women more likely to name fear and embarrassment, so preventive care quietly drops to the bottom of the list. Layer that onto long hours, record housing costs and cost of living pressure, and you get a generation treating health like a nice to have, right up until something becomes serious enough that they can no longer ignore it.

8% of Australians Have Severe Flight Phobia
Roughly eight percent of Australians now meet the bar for severe flight phobia, which on a full A380 means around 38 passengers white knuckling their way through the journey, and closer to 60 when the cabin skews younger. Millennials are the epicentre of the anxiety spike, with severe fear rates almost triple those of Baby Boomers and higher among women, turning what was once framed as a glamorous rite of passage into a functional health issue younger travellers have to actively manage every time they fly.

Telehealth Usage Falls to 22.5% as Two-Thirds of Australians Say Quality Doesn't Measure Up
Telehealth usage is quietly slipping backwards even as Australians get more digitally connected, with take up falling to 22.5% and two thirds of people saying it simply does not match the quality of an in person GP visit. The sharpest scepticism sits with Baby Boomers and regional patients, who see convenience as no substitute for a doctor who knows their history, which turns telehealth from a universal fix into a tool that only works when it is tightly matched to the right kind of care.

When inflation quietly erases a quarter of your income
Since January 2021, inflation has quietly stripped roughly a quarter of purchasing power from households in the UK, US and Euro Area, turning the cost of living into a compounding global tax on anyone whose income and assets have not kept pace. China is the outlier at 2.8%, but for most major economies the message is blunt. if you do not own productive assets, inflation owns you.

Britain fell off its growth path and this is what that looks like
This chart is a warning light for the UK economy, showing a 16 year failure to grow living standards, with GDP per capita still below 2019 and far off both its pre financial crisis and pre Covid trajectories. If the UK cannot build a system where generational companies start, scale and list at home, it is not just getting a bit poorer, it is quietly reclassifying itself toward middle income status while the US compounds tech driven gains and Europe stalls beside it.

Now for bit of fun.

#chartcrime is our favourite X handle. We sometimes - in draft - make slight mistakes but FT? What a shocker: check out that Y axis.

At least the X axis is labelled.

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Till next time,