Afternoon Report | ASX rises, Scott Morrison cleared

0:00Welcome to the fear and greed business news afternoon report for Wednesday, the 11th of March, 2026. I'm Michael Thompson and every afternoon, we've got the five stories that happen today that you need to know about. Let's go with story number one, the S&P ASX 200 rose 0.6% today to 8,744 points with some strong gains in mining and banking stocks helping to offset growing expectations that the reserve bank could actually lift interest rates. Next week, the move comes as markets rapidly reprised the chance of a rate hike with traders now putting the odds at above 75% after some hawkish comments from RBA deputy governor Andrew Houser. We'll have a lot more on this in tomorrow morning's episode. But mining stocks led the gains today on the local boss. Fortescue jumps nearly 4%. BHP was up 1.4% champion iron climbs nearly 7% as iron ore prices pushed back above 104 US dollars.

1:01There's a cracker of a day for rare earths minor liners which surged more than 16% after extending a long term supply deal with a company called Japan Australia rare earths which does as you would expect rare earths with Japan and Australia. Gold miners also rallied as bullion moved above 5200 US dollars an ounce. One worth mentioning or a band of mining jumped more than 21% after announcing an upgrade to the gold resource at one of its sites. I mentioned the banks A&Z was up nearly 2%, NAB climbed more than 1%, but higher rate expectations did weigh on other sectors wise tech global for instance was down 3.6% while property company Goodman Group was off 1.5%. On to story number 2 now and former Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been cleared of corrupt conduct by the National Anti-Corruption Commission over his role in the Robo debt scheme. The watchdog found two senior public servants engaged in serious corrupt

2:03conduct by misleading cabinet processes and the Commonwealth Ombudsman however the NACC says there is insufficient admissible evidence to refer either case for criminal prosecution. The Robo debt scheme you might remember used an unlawful income averaging system that issued hundreds of thousands of false debt notices to welfare recipients from 2015 right through to 2019 before it was cancelled. The government later agreed to pay $475 million in compensation to victims. Story number 3 independent MP Allegra Spender has proposed a major overhaul of the tax system aimed at shifting more of the tax burden from wages to wealth. The plan proposes cutting income tax for a worker for instance on $100,000 by about $1600 a year which would be funded by reducing the capital gains tax discount, phasing out negative gearing and tightening rules on family trusts in an address to the National Press Club in Canberra this afternoon. Allegra Spender said

3:04the goal is to restore fairness between generations as younger Australians face rising housing costs and growing tax burdens. The proposal which is actually the first tax white paper from an individual MP in decades comes as Treasurer Jim Charmers considers broader tax reform ahead of the next federal budget. Story number 4 artificial intelligence company Anthropic is establishing its Australia and New Zealand operations in Sydney as part of its global expansion. Anthropic is a major rival to open AI. A lot of Australians use its Claude AI platform. Australia actually ranks fourth in the world in per capita usage of Claude. Anthropic says the new office will support partnerships with businesses, researchers and governments across the region existing customers actually already include Commonwealth Bank tech company Canberra. The company is also expanding its computing capacity here in Australia. It's thinking about using local data centers potentially investing in new infrastructure in the future. It says that Australia is a natural

4:07location for AI investment as democracies seek to play a leading role in the development of advanced artificial intelligence. And finally story number 5 the US military says it has destroyed 16 Iranian boats suspected of laying mines near the strait of Hamuz which is one of the world's most important oil shipping routes we've talked about it a lot in recent days. President Donald Trump warned around that any attempt to place mines in the strait would trigger military consequences. And I quote at a level never seen before about a fifth of the world's oil supply normally passes through the very narrow waterway and limited access is one of the reasons for the sharp spike that we saw in oil prices earlier in the week. The strikes on the vessels come as world leaders prepared to meet French President Emmanuel Macron who is the current chair of the G7 is convening an emergency meeting of the G7 nations tonight to discuss the war as well as its impact on global oil supplies. And that's it for the afternoon report. For Wednesday the 11th

5:12of March make sure you're following the podcast and head along to fearandgreed.com.au to sign up for our free daily newsletter. I'm Lawton Thompson. Enjoy your evening.