Signal watch: October 2026

More people now need two jobs to get by

More than a million Australians now work more than one job. That's about one in every 15 workers, the highest share the ABS has ever recorded.¹ Young adults and women are the most likely to do it, and most work part-time in both jobs.¹

Prices rose 4% in the year to August, while wages grew 3.2%.^2,3 When one pay packet stops covering the bills, people don't wait for a pay rise. They pick up shifts somewhere else.

Super, leave, workers' comp and tax are all designed around one job that pays the bills. For more than a million people, that's no longer true.

Type: emerging | Strength: strong | Rationale: a record ABS figure, backed by the agency's own wage and price data, with no data pointing the other way.

Private investments are worth less than their managers say

AI data centre company Firmus wanted to raise about $7 billion on the ASX, at a price that valued it at around $44 billion. On 9 October, it pulled the float. Investors balked at the price, the debt and the lack of detail. UniSuper's chief investment officer said Firmus had "a compelling story". He said the price isn't compelling.⁷

Metrics, one of Australia's biggest private lenders, is in the same position. Its auditor cut the value of the assets in its funds by up to 12%, and Metrics suspended trading in three of its listed funds.⁸ ASIC says it's now "well beyond warnings" on private credit, a market of more than $200 billion that's grown sixfold in a decade.⁹ On 14 October, ASIC also found that some super funds take outside managers' word on what their private assets are worth, and that some auditors don't test those values properly.¹⁰

These assets rarely sell, so their value is mostly the manager's estimate. Now that buyers, auditors and the regulator are testing those estimates, they're coming in lower.

Type: emerging | Strength: strong | Rationale: a failed float, an audit write-down and a regulator finding, all within a month and all pointing the same way.

AI companies are seeing the rules before we do

Before the government published its rules for big data centres in March, it showed a draft to Anthropic, an AI company it was negotiating a deal with. Freedom of information documents, many of them blacked out, show officials agreed to send it. Anthropic signed its deal about a week after the rules came out.¹⁴

Anthropic says it had no influence on the final rules. The government says it consults widely.¹⁴ The rules aren't law yet. Projects that follow them get priority for federal support and foreign investment approval.^14,15 The government is also considering a copyright change that would let AI companies train on Australian content unless creators opt out.¹⁶

AI rules are being shaped in private deals with the companies they cover, before parliament or the public gets a say. The Grattan Institute's Kate Griffiths says "no one should be surprised that these groups are knocking on doors", and wants a federal register of lobbyists.¹⁴

Type: weak | Strength: moderate | Rationale: based on one FOI-based report, and both the company and the government deny any influence.

What we're monitoring

The ABS releases its September jobs figures this week. We'll be watching whether full-time work keeps giving way to part-time. The Senate inquiry into AI and data centres reports by 30 November, and will show whether parliament wants a say in rules that are now mostly set through private deals.¹⁶ ASIC's next private credit review will focus on valuations, so expect more funds to cut what they say their assets are worth.

We're also watching data centres as targets. Ukrainian drones knocked three Yandex data centres in Russia offline this month. Viral claims that pro-Russian trolls went quiet as a result don't hold up. The drop was mostly search engine crawlers, and Russia's overall bot traffic barely changed.^20,21 The real change is that data centres are now military targets, and Australia is trying to attract more of them.