Australia's inflation target is now measured against a monthly figure that only began publishing in late 2025. But the Reserve Bank has said it will keep making its rate decisions off the older quarterly measure until the new one matures, which may take until 2027. So the number written into the target and the number actually driving decisions are not the same number, and will not be for some time.

Taken on its own terms that is a sensible choice. Steering off a brand new series before anyone can tell signal from noise would be reckless. The problem is where it was disclosed. It sits in a technical annex, while every monthly figure lands publicly as the inflation number. When the monthly figure moves and the Bank does not, the obvious conclusion for a reader is that the Bank is ignoring the data. The real explanation is correct, public, and almost entirely unread.

The new super tax was defended partly on the ground that its three million dollar line is indexed, so ordinary savers will not be quietly caught by it over the years. But the line does not rise smoothly. It moves in jumps of $150,000, which is five per cent of three million. At inflation inside the target band, five per cent takes roughly two years to accumulate.

So for most of any given stretch the line does not move at all, while balances keep compounding toward it. People sitting just below the threshold cross it through nothing more than ordinary market returns and the contributions they were always going to make. That may well be the intended outcome, and there is a respectable case for it. But it is not what most people heard when they were told the threshold was indexed.

Australian crypto platforms are sitting in a ten-month gap nobody planned for them. The regulator's formal promise not to prosecute expired at the end of June 2026. The law replacing the old rules does not commence until April 2027. In between, firms are governed by exactly the unclear regime the new law was written to fix, without the relief that made it liveable.

Aligning those two dates was available and obvious. That they were not aligned is a choice, and the cost of it lands on the smallest operators, who can least afford ten months of legal limbo and are the most likely to simply stop trading. It also leaves the regulator holding only the tool it has spent a decade being criticised for using, pointed at a population it has just told to get licensed under rules that have not started.

The reform widened what counts as a payment system, so that digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later and cash distribution all fall inside it. That part was overdue and well argued. But the same law quietly changed something else: who decides when the regulator's powers actually switch on. That decision used to belong to the Reserve Bank alone, an institution kept deliberately at arm's length from politics and tested against a public interest standard that has been argued over for twenty-five years.

Now a politician can make it too, where doing so is in the national interest. The grounds expressly include national security and crisis management. Those are not payments questions, and reasons given on those grounds often cannot be published. A decision nobody can see is a decision nobody can argue with. That is a different kind of power from the one the Bank holds, and it arrived without any of the debate the perimeter change got.