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Trump has officially lost it IMVHO. This from Sunday an example…
BREAKING NEWS
The White House is pushing to eliminate billions for coronavirus testing and tracing from a relief proposal drafted by Senate Republicans.
Saturday, July 18, 2020 6:47 PM EST
The draft suggested allocating $25 billion to states for testing and contact tracing, as well as almost $10 billion to shore up the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and $15 billion to bolster the National Institutes of Health, according to a person familiar with the tentative plans, who cautioned that the final dollar figures remained in flux.
The Trump administration has instead pushed to eliminate all of those funds and has also called for cutting billions of dollars set aside for the Pentagon and the State Department to help counter the outbreak and potentially distribute a vaccine at home and abroad.
----- He is trying to hide the fact the Pandemic is happening and people are dying! How mad is that?
At least Boris J is being marginally more sensible – suggesting they may get back to some normal by Christmas.
Thursday is a big day as we will see just what the Government is planning to keep us going till the Budget later in the year.
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Major Issues.
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https://www.afr.com/world/europe/the-humbling-of-the-anglo-american-world-20200710-p55atq
The humbling of the Anglo-American world
What separates the US and the UK from other democracies is extravagant self-belief.
Edward Luce Columnist
Jul 12, 2020 – 12.08pm
It takes effort to recapture how Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s hastened the demise of the Soviet Union. Images of that triumphal moment are as fresh as yesterday. The atmospherics smell of another era. Yet it is worth the effort.
America and Britain’s poor responses to COVID-19 can be traced partly to post-cold war self-congratulation – the belief that neither had much to learn from the rest of the world. In a few short months a microbe has exposed the underside to Anglo-American hubris. It could take far longer to undo the pandemic’s damage to their brands.
The tale is best captured graphically. With the exception of Sweden, continental Europe succeeded in May in flattening its infection curve. Its countries have been taking measured steps to keep it flat. Most of east Asia had already achieved that in April.
In America the curve was never beaten, yet half the country has given up trying. Britain eventually flattened its curve in June having reached the second-highest mortality rate in the world (America is seventh and climbing). As is often its wont, Britain deployed Churchillian rhetoric to rally the public against COVID-19. In reality, the UK is now throwing caution to the winds on the beaches, on the streets and on the landing grounds.
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China's media portrays a kangaroo-culling, shark-infested hell-hole
Reading China's state-controlled newspapers and online news sites over the past week, you'd think Australia was a potential death trap of racist attacks and vicious animals.
Michael Smith China correspondent
Jul 13, 2020 – 4.05pm
Shanghai | From shark attacks to kangaroo culls – nothing is off limits in the Chinese media's negative coverage of Australia.
If you believe everything you have read in state-controlled newspapers and online news sites the past week, it would be easy to think Australia is a potential death trap of racist attacks and vicious animals.
One report about an annual kangaroo cull in reserves around Canberra questioned why Australians would be slaughtering their national emblem. Others were critical of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's planned holiday on the outskirts of Sydney as Australia faces a second wave of coronavirus cases.
But the prize for the most sensational headline goes to the College Daily, a news micro blog that says it has 1 million followers, which blames the coronavirus pandemic on the Australian bushfires.
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Frigates added to Defence watch list of troubled projects
Andrew Tillett Political correspondent
Jul 14, 2020 – 12.00am
The navy's $45 billion future frigate project has been added to a Defence Department watch list because of emerging concerns over its design.
The frigate's inclusion as a Project of Interest comes as the principal engineer overseeing the design work quit the department, with sources attributing it to frustration.
The future Hunter class frigate project has been added to a Defence watch list.
The Australian Financial Review revealed last month the frigate was undergoing design changes because it would be longer and weigh more than the 8800 tonnes initially promised, raising concerns over its ability to hunt submarines.
UK giant BAE Systems was awarded the contract in 2018 to build nine frigates, to be known as the Hunter class, in Adelaide, based on the Type 26 design under construction for the Royal Navy.
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https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/why-hamish-douglass-is-worried-20200714-p55bvb
Why Hamish Douglass is worried
Magellan's Hamish Douglass says equities could grind higher, or the market could be heading for another COVID-19 crash. He's gone defensive in a world of uncertainty.
Jul 14, 2020 – 11.59am
Hamish Douglass is torn between two visions of the future for financial markets.
The first is a best-case scenario where the world starts to get on top of the COVID-19 pandemic, work on a vaccine progresses, economies reopen, and governments and central banks continue fiscal and monetary support.
In that world, it’s foreseeable that the tailwind of low interest rates helps equities grind 20 per cent higher.
But the Magellan chairman and chief investment officer believes a much uglier outcome is just as likely.
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Equity bulls believe everything is fine. The bond markets know better
Wall Street is being held aloft by a handful of tech giants but US debt markets are flashing red alert.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Jul 15, 2020 – 8.57am
Global bond markets refuse to ratify a V-shaped economic recovery. Futures contracts in fixed income derivatives are even more bearish, signalling nothing less than a worldwide deflationary slump as far as the eye can see.
"If markets are pricing a 'V', they're going about it in an odd way," says Andrew Sheets from Morgan Stanley.
It is simply not true that investors are ignoring the massive economic shock of the pandemic. The picture is being distorted by equities, and within that by a clutch of US tech stocks in the grip of a parabolic spike all too like the final phase of the dotcom bubble in 2000. But debt markets are three times bigger and ultimately matter far more.
Yields on 10-year US Treasuries have not rebounded as you would expect if the economy is genuinely healing. They are trading at 0.62 per cent, close to their all-time low during the panic flight to safety in late March.
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Letters reveal Kerr sacked Whitlam as a pre-emptive strike
Light has been thrown on the reasons for the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975, and on the possible courses of action that Sir John Kerr could have taken.
Andrew Clark Senior writer
Jul 15, 2020 – 12.00am
The key question about the dramatic sacking of the Whitlam Labor government by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, on November 11, 1975, has always been this: Why did Kerr sack a democratically elected prime minister without warning?
The answer has been finally revealed in Tuesday’s release by the National Archives of correspondence between Kerr and Buckingham Palace in the months leading up to Australia’s biggest constitutional crisis.
In one of these letters – dated October 2, 1975, just 40 days before the Dismissal – the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, referred to a previous conversation the governor-general had had with Prince Charles, heir to the throne.
During the months leading up to the Dismissal, Kerr had met Prince Charles and told him of his concern that Whitlam might ask the Queen to remove him – Kerr – as governor-general. Whitlam would take this action, Kerr believed, if he suspected the Queen’s representative in Australia was considering dismissing him – that is, Whitlam – as the head of an elected government.
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History is offering us a lesson - beware the goodwill of future opposition leaders
Peter Hartcher
July 15, 2020 — 12.00am
Now that the Palace Papers have clarified our past, they give us a better glimpse into our possible futures.
Some will be disappointed that the letters reveal no shocking constitutional or royal blunder − the system worked broadly as it was designed to do.
Secret letters between the former governor-general and the Queen reveal new insights into the dramatic dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975.
In fact, that's cause for concern. Because the system remains in place. The only thing holding another such crisis at bay is convention.
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Turbulent times led to nation's greatest constitutional crisis
The background to Australia's greatest constitutional crisis was replete with an air of speculative energy and suspense as the usual suspects at the top of the nation's political leadership did unusual things.
Andrew Clark Senior writer
Jul 16, 2020 – 12.01am
It was the year of living feverishly. On March 21, 1975, Malcolm Fraser was elected Liberal Party leader, and almost the first thing he said after he won the party room ballot was that the opposition he led had no intention of blocking supply in the Senate – a parliamentary procedure that would choke off the government’s supply of funds – except in “extraordinary and reprehensible” circumstances.
Seven months later, the opposition used its upper house majority to delay supply until the Gough Whitlam-led Labor government called an election. Three weeks after that, the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, sacked the Whitlam government and appointed Fraser prime minister on condition that he held an election. Whitlam was thrashed at the polls on December 13. The rest, as they say, is history.
The background to Australia’s greatest constitutional crisis, one that tested our civil society almost to breaking point, was more than two years of feverish speculation that the opposition would in fact use its majority in the Senate to poleaxe the Whitlam government and cut short its hold on the Treasury benches.
They were indeed turbulent times. Much of the West was afflicted by what was known as "stagflation" – rising inflation and high unemployment. In the US, Richard Nixon was forced out of office as president following the drawn-out Watergate scandal and the US-backed government in South Vietnam was overwhelmed by communist North Vietnam.
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Trinity nuclear test brought peace in 1945 and proliferation in decades to follow
WARREN KOZAK
· The Wall Street Journal
Seventy-five years ago today, the world’s first atomic explosion, codenamed Trinity, jolted the New Mexico desert just before dawn.
Gathered to witness the detonation was an extraordinary conglomeration of intellect. There were European emigres Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi as well as Berkeley’s Ernest Lawrence and Harvard’s James Conant. The project was led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer and US Army Major General Leslie Groves.
If only the US could establish an equally strong partnership among the military, industry and academe today.
The device, nicknamed “the Gadget”, was less than 2m in diameter and covered with cables, metal fuse boxes and masking tape, not at all like today’s immaculate weapons. It could have been a component of an elevator. The plutonium core was transported separately in the back seat of an army sedan. Oppenheimer didn’t want to risk blowing up any towns along the way.
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Britain accuses Russians of trying to steal vaccine research
Kitty Donaldson and Ryan Gallagher
Jul 16, 2020 – 11.40pm
London | The UK accused Russian state intelligence of hacking international pharmaceutical and academic research in a bid to win the race to secure a vaccine against COVID-19.
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said vaccine and therapeutic sectors in multiple countries have been targeted, declining to list the names and number of institutions affected on security grounds.
The UK named the group responsible for the hacking as APT29, saying it is "almost certainly" part of Russian state intelligence. The group also goes by the name of Cozy Bear or The Dukes and has targeted British, US and Canadian vaccine research and development organisations.
The campaign of malicious activity is ongoing, predominantly against government, diplomatic, think-tank, healthcare and energy targets to steal valuable intellectual property, according to the NCSC.
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Investors 'take a punt' on Australia's riskiest stocks
Aleks Vickovich Wealth editor
Jul 18, 2020 – 12.00am
Mum and dad investors traded an aggregate $31 billion in Australian equities during the coronavirus pandemic, with new academic research warning demand surged for high-risk companies with high levels of debt.
UNSW Business School's Carole Comerton-Forde and University of Melbourne senior lecturer Zhuo Zhong have sounded the alarm on the high-risk behaviour of retail investors between March and May.
"During this period, retail investors were aggressive purchasers of large market capitalisation stocks, high risk highly leveraged stocks, and stocks exhibiting large price declines prior to the lock-down," the finance academics wrote in an unpublished research paper seen by The Australian Financial Review.
"Retail investors have fundamentally altered their participation in the stock market during the COVID-19 lockdown period."
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This is a historic moment - just not the one those who worry about 'cancel culture' claim it is
Sean Kelly
Columnist and former adviser to Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
July 18, 2020 — 12.05am
In this year of bushfires and pandemic, nostalgia comes easy. And so I suppose, at some level, I can understand the emotional pull of a narrative fast taking hold. It states that we are nearing a historic moment, that a nadir of free speech is approaching. Debate is under threat, free exchange of ideas is ending. Things are getting worse.
The narrative is particularly strong in America right now, off the back of an open letter to Harper's magazine, and, this week, resignations of two high-profile columnists, Bari Weiss from The New York Times and Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine. It largely takes as its target the left, especially the left on Twitter. But the argument is simplistic at best, dangerous at worst. We should be cautious, in Australia, before casually adopting arguments from overseas.
The first important fact to note is that Weiss and Sullivan were not fired. They quit. Any martyrdom here is self-proclaimed, and should be approached with the same suspicion most journalists would apply to any single self-interested source. It's also simple to point to at least one major flaw in Weiss' presentation of a punitively left-wing mindset at the Times: the paper continues to publish conservative columnists. Until she quit, Weiss worked there too.
It is also naive to mention the affair without noting that self-proclaimed martyrdom at the hands of left-wing mobs has become a career path in America. If Australians are less alert to this particular grift, it's because such martyrdom, in Australia, is harder to come by, for a simple reason: nobody ever gets cancelled here.
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Pandemic of paranoia
COVID is a hoax, Bill Gates is enacting a “global microchipping” plan, Prince Charles is a vampire.... what is it with conspiracy theories lately?
By Mick Brown
· From The Weekend Australian Magazine
July 18, 2020
The coronavirus is a genetically engineered bioweapon made by the Chinese. Or possibly the Americans. It originated in a lab in Wuhan. Or possibly a US military lab. No, actually it’s a hoax. But even though it’s a hoax, it’s also caused by 5G masts broadcasting electromagnetic waves. It is part of a scheme devised by Bill Gates to introduce mass global vaccination as a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government. Dr Anthony Fauci – the mild-mannered director of America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a prominent member of the White House’s coronavirus task force before being sidelined by Donald Trump – is in on it. And so is the World Health Organisation. Believe all that, and you’ll believe anything.
But a lot of people, it seems, do. Conspiracy theories flourish in times of paranoia, uncertainty and fear – and the coronavirus pandemic presents all three. It has arrived out of the blue, driving whole nations into a state of paralysis, laying waste to the global economy, and carrying with it a panoply of dystopian threats and fears – the curtailing of civil liberties, involuntary quarantine and restrictions on movement. There is disagreement about exactly what the virus is, how it originated and how best to deal with it – affirming screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim that “nobody knows anything”. If ever there was a time when certainty was needed, it is now.
But this, it seems, is also a moment when trust in institutions, government and the media is at a dangerous low – opening the door wide for conspiracy theories and their seductive promise of an apparent map to the unmappable; a hidden “truth”, or a pacifying lie. A recent study by researchers at Oxford University into conspiracy theories shows how ideas that would otherwise have been confined to the fringes have become mainstream, reflecting a distrust in official accounts. And which may, in turn, discourage people from following official health guidelines.
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Coronavirus: Global debt soars to $388 trillion as governments borrow big
Global debt has ballooned to a record $388 trillion — or more than three times the entire world’s gross domestic product — as governments around the globe borrow heavily to shield their economies from the pandemic-induced recession.
New analysis from the Washington-based Institute of International Finance reveal that private and public borrowing reached $US258 trillion ($370 trillion) by March. The IIF estimates an additional $US12.5 trillion ($18 trillion) was added to the pile in the June quarter, “largely reflecting the global fiscal and monetary response to the pandemic”.
The increase in debt issuance through the three months to June would be more than double the average quarterly pace in 2019 of $US5.5 trillion, the IIF said.
In total, the global debt now represents about 340 per cent of annual world output.
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Research institutes warn they cannot absorb big uni job losses
Australia’s researchers have warned the sector cannot absorb thousands of job losses from the nation’s top universities, with leading medical research institutes bracing for a more than 30 per cent collapse in their own revenue.
New Group of Eight modelling showed on Friday that contracts for 4400 researchers in short-term and non-permanent positions are unlikely to be renewed as universities face a serious financial deficit with COVID-19 keeping away full-fee paying overseas students.
The peak body for the nation’s medical research groups said major philanthropic donations were drying up as a result of the economic slump, and that both arms of the nation’s research capability were now in trouble.
Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes president Jonathan Carapetis said the 56 non-university groups he represented faced financial strife as philanthropists spent money on saving their own businesses.
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Bushfire Crisis And Climate Policy
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No articles in this section
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Coronavirus And Impacts.
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World shuns total lockdowns even as coronavirus fights back
Hans van Leeuwen and Jacob Greber
Jul 13, 2020 – 12.00am
London, Washington | Countries around the world are hanging back from Victoria-style shutdowns, even as a second COVID-19 wave threatens to break over the planet's lockdown-weary populations and battered economies.
The pandemic is still raging in the Americas and is gathering pace in Africa and India, while most of Asia battles to squash small yet scary flare-ups and Europe emerges only tentatively from the lockdown gloom.
But even where infections are piling up, with record daily counts for new cases on at least four continents, governments everywhere are unwilling to countenance anything more than localised measures or pauses in lockdown easing – making Victoria's vigilance a global outlier.
While Hong Kong, some Indian states and European nations are reimposing local lockdowns to put out spot fires, others such as Japan are betting on their health system.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/victoria-s-outbreak-threatens-health-system-20200712-p55bc0
Victoria's outbreak threatens health system
Ronald Mizen and Natasha Boddy
Jul 12, 2020 – 5.22pm
Coronavirus outbreaks at Victorian hospitals could cripple the state's healthcare system as more medical staff are forced into quarantine.
Several distinct clusters of coronavirus cases have begun to emerge in Victoria, including 21 cases linked to three hospitals around Melbourne.
Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity at the Kirby Institute, said when a healthcare worker gets infected it has a major flow-on effect.
"When one healthcare worker gets infected, you find often dozens to even hundreds of others having to be quarantined, which means your whole health system can be severely crippled," Professor MacIntyre said.
"Which means if you're coming in with a heart attack or a stroke, there may not be enough staff in a really big outbreak where lots of staff have had to be quarantined. So it actually has a massive impact on the health system."
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Fauci is sidelined by Trump's White House as he steps up blunt talk on the pandemic
President Donald Trump has not talked to the scientist in more than a month, even as coronavirus infections have surged in large swathes of the country.
By Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey and Laurie McGinley
Washington: For months, Anthony Fauci has played a lead role in America's coronavirus pandemic, as a diminutive, Brooklyn-accented narrator who has assessed the risk and issued increasingly blunt warnings as the nation's response has gone badly awry.
But as the Trump administration has strayed further from the advice of many scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swathes of the country.
In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself directly in the President's crosshairs. During a Fox News interview last week with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci "is a nice man, but he's made a lot of mistakes." And in an interview last week with Greta Van Susteren, when asked about Fauci's assessment that the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly: "I disagree with him."
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Victorian government worst in the country: survey
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Jul 14, 2020 – 12.00am
The Victorian government is considered the worst-performing administration in Australia, and pessimism and anxiety in the state is high, following its mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, a new nationwide survey reveals.
The latest True Issues survey by JWS Research also finds that, nationally, concerns about the economy and health have jumped sharply since the last survey in February, while concern for the environment and climate change has abated significantly.
Voters are also significantly more concerned about defence, security and terrorism than they were in February, reflecting rising tensions with China.
The True Issues survey canvasses those policy areas that voters want the government most focused on, and it rates the way the government handles each.
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Consumer spending dives in Victoria, hurts other states
Matthew Cranston Economics correspondent
Jul 14, 2020 – 9.35am
Credit and debit card spending has dropped across most categories in Victoria as the second-wave lockdown bites, dragging down overall spending across the country.
Commonwealth Bank data shows growth in card spending across the country eased in the week to July 10 to be only 7.2 per cent higher than a year ago. This is down from 12 per cent higher in the week to July 3.
"Rising coronavirus cases in Victoria may be dampening sentiment in the rest of the country," Commonwealth Bank economist Kristina Clifton said.
Overall spending growth in Victoria went negative, falling 3 per cent. This reverses the rebound the state had experienced in the previous week when spending rose 5 per cent above the same time last year.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/is-the-virus-growing-weaker-20200713-p55bif
Is the virus growing weaker?
It's likely the coronavirus will be less virulent over time but despite speculation this process has begun, Australian experts say it is not happening yet.
Jill Margo Health editor
Jul 13, 2020 – 5.11pm
While the number of new cases of coronavirus in Australia has been increasing significantly, the number of people dying from it has hardly changed.
This same pattern is being seen in other countries, such as Singapore and Israel, and has led to speculation that the virus may be growing weaker.
The natural history of coronaviruses is that they do slowly become less virulent over time. This makes good evolutionary sense because it’s against a virus’ interest to kill its host.
If it mutates into a milder form it can remain in the host, replicate efficiently and assure its own survival.
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Believing pandemic a hoax, 30-year-old dies after attending 'COVID party'
By Bryan Pietsch
July 13, 2020 — 10.49am
New York: A 30-year-old man who believed the coronavirus was a hoax and attended a "COVID party" died after being infected with the virus, according to a Texas hospital.
The man had attended a gathering with an infected person to test whether the coronavirus was real, said Dr Jane Appleby, chief medical officer at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, where the man died.
The World Health Organization reported an increase of 230,370 global coronavirus cases, a new record.
She did not say when the party took place, how many people attended or how long after the event was the man hospitalised with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The man was not publicly identified.
The premise of such parties is to test whether the virus really exists or to intentionally expose people to the coronavirus in an attempt to gain immunity.
Appleby said the man had told his nurse that he attended a COVID party. Just before he died, she said the patient told his nurse: "I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it's not."
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America’s coronavirus disaster a lesson for Australia
The US has passed a disastrous inflection point in its battle with COVID-19, as has the world. Both developments have potentially calamitous consequences for Australia. The consequences look to be pretty bad for Donald Trump as well.
The US infection rate is now consistently more than 60,000 a day. The daily rate had been declining from late April but started to rebound in mid-June. That rebound is accelerating.
The daily death rate, which had continued to decline even as new cases picked up, has also started to rise.
Florida reported 15,000 cases in a day.
The rise in US deaths, with 140,000 fatalities already, in the midst of its semi-chaotic, nationally unco-ordinated response, contradicts the preferred narrative of those who say the virus has always been wildly exaggerated.
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'Best doctors and nurses': Australia leads world in COVID-19 ICU survival rates
By Chip Le Grand and Aisha Dow
July 14, 2020 — 11.45pm
Australians severely ill with COVID-19 have recovered at an extraordinary rate throughout the pandemic, with 85 per cent of patients admitted into intensive care units surviving the deadly virus.
The latest data provided to the federal and Victorian governments on Tuesday suggests that, so long as the second wave of infections does not overwhelm the intensive care capacity of hospitals, Australia is unlikely to face a catastrophic loss of life.
As NSW health authorities work to contain its border outbreak, Victoria is bracing for a surge in hospital admissions, with the state’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton predicting that the current caseload of more than 1000 infections would result in at least 200 more patients in COVID-19 wards by the end of the month.
Data gathered and shared by Australia’s leading intensive medicine experts shows that even the sickest of these patients – those requiring mechanical ventilation and specialist nursing in an intensive care unit – have very good survival rates compared with other countries.
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Struggling arts companies vie for rescue money
By Linda Morris
July 15, 2020 — 5.29pm
Sixty-six arts companies across the state have declared themselves to be in financial distress and in need of a share of a $50 million emergency fund established to help the sector survive the pandemic lockdowns.
The applicants are thought to represent only a small proportion of the arts sector that is vulnerable to collapse, with NSW's latest coronavirus cluster setting back hopes of a rapid return to large-scale public performances by September.
Several hundred organisations expressed initial interest in the Rescue and Restart fund, outlined by the Berejiklian government in May to resuscitate the crippled sector.
As many as 160 organisations participated in a single information session last month with 66, as of Monday, officially notifying the government's arts agency, Create NSW, of their need for immediate assistance.
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Coronavirus crisis heightens fears bank deposits could be wiped out under 'ambiguous' laws
By business reporter Nassim Khadem
16 July, 2020
Imagine you woke up one day to find your bank account had been wiped out.
Your entire life savings has evaporated overnight, but not because some anonymous fraudster had stolen it.
It happened because the very banking institution that regulators have repeatedly told you is "unquestionably strong" has faltered.
The bank has taken your deposit and converted it into shares to ensure its own survival.
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https://www.afr.com/property/commercial/house-prices-unlikely-to-rebound-until-2025-20200715-p55c6r
House prices unlikely to rebound until 2025
Ingrid Fuary-Wagner Reporter
Jul 16, 2020 – 12.00am
Australia's capital cities were on track to experience the fastest housing market recovery on record until COVID-19 stopped the strong rebound dead in its tracks this year, with median property prices not expected to return to 2017 levels before 2025 at least.
CoreLogic data shows housing values across the combined capital cities surged 10.3 per cent over 10 months from midway through last year, following a 10.2 per cent hit to the market during the 2017-19 downturn. But then the pandemic struck and Australia went into shutdown mode in March.
National property prices have fallen for two months in a row.
The fastest housing market rebound remains the period between 1983 and 1984, which followed the early 1980s recession, after which prices recovered by 10.5 per cent over 11 months.
Tim Lawless, CoreLogic's head of research, said that despite a few signs the rebound had been slowing towards the end of last year, the market had been on track for the "most rapid recovery phase that we've seen".
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https://www.afr.com/wealth/investing/vaccine-the-next-pivot-point-for-markets-20200715-p55ceh
Vaccine the next pivot point for markets
A vaccine will portend the world returning to some semblance of normality and almost certainly trigger another leg to the current risk rally. ..
Christopher Joye Columnist
Jul 17, 2020 – 9.56am
This historic year has been defined by a multiplicity of regimes.
It started in January and February with insouciance to the risk of pandemic, which was not unreasonable given the “facts” disseminated by the World Health Organisation regarding the absence of human-to-human transmission.
In March this transformed into unprecedented panic as markets suddenly realised they would have to price a one-in-100 year shock in the absence of appropriate policy support (and central bank asset purchases, or quantitative easing in particular).
This was amplified by the refusal of central banks in early March to launch QE with the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, ruling it out after he first cut interest rates by 50 basis points at the start of the month.
The third phase was the belated arrival of enormous and unrestricted QE in the second half of that month, which had the predicted effect of placating markets and providing a desperately needed liquidity, solvency and stimulus bridge to a more certain future, ideally defined by the availability of vaccines.
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https://www.health.gov.au/news/eliminating-covid-19-a-false-hope
Eliminating COVID-19 a false hope
An opinion piece by the Australian Government’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Nick Coatsworth.
Date published: 16 July 2020
Media type: Statement
Audience: General public
The current Victorian COVID-19 outbreak has seen renewed calls for Australia to pursue a coronavirus “elimination” strategy. This is surprising. It’s unrealistic – and it’s dangerous.
The inference is that if Victoria had eliminated community transmission, this second outbreak would not have occurred – something which is patently false.
As the Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, has said, this outbreak has largely stemmed from breaches in quarantine arrangements for Australian citizens returning from overseas. Such breaches would have seeded this outbreak even if community transmission had been eliminated for several weeks.
Part of the challenge in this debate is that the definition of elimination is not commonly held by people who are prosecuting the case for it in the media.
If we take the accepted public health terminology, that we reduce to zero the number of infections in Australia and target deliberate public health interventions to prevent re-establishing community transmission, that sounds very similar to what we have achieved in most parts of Australia.
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Pandemic support must be targeted, not random
This week the government paid $3.8bn in lots of $750 to five million people who don’t need it — their incomes have been unaffected by the pandemic.
That’s because they are mostly pensioners: people on the age pension, the bereavement allowance, the carer allowance, the carer payment, the commonwealth seniors health card, the disability support pension, the double orphan pension, the pensioner concession card, and those receiving Family Tax Benefit A and Family Tax Benefit B.
None of them has had a cut in income as a result of the COVID-19 recession except maybe those on the family tax benefits, although the tax benefit itself stays the same. Pensions and allowances have not changed.
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Royal Commissions And The Like.
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There are no entries in this section.
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National Budget Issues.
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Consumer confidence retreats on second wave
10.49am July 15, 2020
Consumer confidence fell back last month, reversing the previous month’s rebound as the second wave of coronavirus cases emerged, according to the latest survey from Westpac.
Today’s consumer sentiment data shows a 6.1pc drop last month to 87.9, from 93.7 in June.
Westpac chief economist Bill Evans says the timing of the survey was paramount - highlighting the weakness in sentiment was before the significant Sydney cluster was identified.
“State readings underscore the importance of virus-related developments: Victoria’s sentiment index plunged 10.4pc in July but sentiment across the rest of the nation showed much milder declines (down 4.5pc on a combined basis),” he said.
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Australia facing ‘biggest fiscal hole’ in 75 years
Australia’s budget deficit is set to blow out to more than $200bn in this financial year, making it “easily” the biggest fiscal hole the country has faced since the Second World War.
The Morrison government has committed $210bn in crisis support measures to help shield households and businesses from the worst of the COVID-19 recession. And this, alongside a collapse in revenue, will push the federal budget more than $100bn into the red in the 2019-20 financial year, and to $230bn in 2020-21, ANZ senior economist Cherelle Murphy said.
Peaking at over 10 per cent of GDP, the budget would record “easily the biggest deficits we have seen since WWII,” Ms Murphy said.
Net debt will rise to $610bn, or 31 per cent of GDP, by the middle of next year, while the amount of government debt on issue will reach $880bn.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/2-5b-boost-for-trades-reskilling-20200715-p55c4u
$2.5b boost for trades and reskilling
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Jul 15, 2020 – 10.30pm
The Morrison government will today pledge $1.5 billion to subsidise the jobs of an extra 100,000 apprentices, and, under a deal with the states to reform the vocational education sector, another $500 million to train or reskill 340,000 school leavers and unemployed.
The states will contribute another $500 million between them to the vocational education initiative, taking the total new commitment towards jobs to $2.5 billion.
The package, designed to help rebuild the economy and reduce the ranks of the unemployed, will be unveiled on Thursday by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the same day the Australia Bureau of Statistics will release the unemployment numbers for June.
Economists are predicting an increase from 7.1 per cent for May to around 7.3 per cent for June. But Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said earlier this week the effective unemployment rate, which takes into account those on JobKeeper who will hit the unemployment queue at the end of September, was around 13.3 per cent.
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Elimination will ruin economy, won't stop outbreaks: PM
Phillip Coorey and Patrick Durkin
Jul 15, 2020 – 3.02pm
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has ruled out pursuing a strategy to eliminate the coronavirus, saying it would cause the unemployment rate to double and ruin the economy.
And it wouldn't stop outbreaks like the one in Victoria because that was caused by a quarantine breach, not the suppression strategy being pursued.
His stance, which is backed by business, came as some medical experts suggested a move from a strategy of controlled suppression to eradication in response to the second wave of infections in Victoria and beyond.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who is battling small breakouts in south-west Sydney linked to the Victorian second wave, said she would not lock down the state's economy nor embrace an eradication strategy.
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Jobless rate at 22-year high, almost 1m Australians unemployed
By Shane Wright
July 16, 2020 — 11.57am
Almost 1 million Australians are out of work, with the nation's jobless rate reaching a 22-year high in June amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Thursday showed the unemployment rate rose to 7.4 per cent last month, a 0.3 percentage point increase over May.
The unemployment rate is now at its highest level since late 1998 and has climbed by 2.3 percentage points since February.
The bureau said 992,000 Australians were now formally unemployed, the highest number recorded since the introduction of monthly unemployment figures in 1978. It was a 69,300 increase on the number recorded in May.
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Weigh all options before extending mortgage 'holiday'
By John Collett
July 14, 2020 — 10.00pm
Homeowners are urged to explore other alternatives before applying for an extension to their mortgage repayment "holiday" for another four months.
Lenders' original six-month repayment deferrals start coming to an end in September and lenders are offering a further pause, stretching the repayments respite to 10 months.
The big banks have about 10 per cent of their mortgages on repayment pause as many homeowners struggle with payments because of the effects on the economy of containing the COVID-19 spread.
However, with no repayments, mortgage debt grows quickly and extra payments would need to be made at the end of the pause to pay off the loan within the original loan term.
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Australia's screen industry set for $400m federal boost
Tom McIlroy Political reporter
Jul 16, 2020 – 10.30pm
Australia is set to use its success flattening the coronavirus curve to win more major movie and television productions, backed up by $400 million in new funding from the federal government.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced plans to extend successful screen incentive measures, designed to help secure a pipeline of new film and TV work for Australian studios over seven years.
Producers can use the incentive and other elements of Australia's tax system to help fund major productions, potentially boosting jobs in film and TV production until 2026-27.
The government hopes the expanded incentive scheme rules will see as many as 8000 short and long-term jobs supported each year, coming as countries including the United States struggle to control COVID-19.
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Records - good and bad - broken by jobs report that shows huge battles ahead
By Shane Wright
July 16, 2020 — 3.15pm
Never before has Australia added 210,000 jobs in a single month.
The June jobs report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics also showed a record increase in the hours worked in one month as well as an unparalleled lift in the participation rate as people started looking for work.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced details around the new JobTrainer program that aims to upskill and reskill Australians.
For those of a glass half full nature, the report was good news. But for the pessimists, bad news was just as easy to find.
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What price for living with a virus we can't kill?
We must hope that elimination can be the by-product of a good suppression strategy. But the cost of that may be a little less privacy in future.
Jul 18, 2020 – 12.00am
This week the Crossroads Hotel, one of the first Sydney watering holes on the highway inbound from virus-hit Melbourne, transformed from local pub to national metaphor. Which way is Australia heading as it manages a global pandemic which has infected 14 million people and killed almost 600,000?
Up in Queensland, the winter holiday amusement park attractions are busy. Down in Melbourne, intensive-care beds are being prepared for the worst. Virus hotspots there range from the tower block homes of the lowest-paid to posh city law offices.
The Sydney pub is now said to be a symbol of a successful NSW strategy of suppression: containing and managing a COVID-19 spot outbreak by impressively tracking and tracing thousands of potentially infected people around Sydney, even if the virus is never totally eradicated.
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Negative gearing cost reaches $13 billion a year
By Shane Wright and Jennifer Duke
July 17, 2020 — 6.30pm
The cost to Australian taxpayers of negatively gearing rental properties had climbed to $13.1 billion ahead of the 2019 election, with new data suggesting Labor's plan to restrict the practice would have affected thousands of voters in key parts of the country.
Figures from the Australian Taxation Office for the 2017-18 financial year, released on Friday, also show total franking credits - another area Labor planned to target if it won office last year - were worth more than $10 billion.
The ALP had planned to restrict negative gearing, the process by which landlords are able to offset losses on a property against their total income, and to reverse a Howard government move to give taxpayers and superannuation funds cash refunds for excess dividend imputation, or franking, credits.
The Coalition ran heavily against both proposals, warning the negative gearing changes would hurt low and middle-income Australians and claiming the franking credit policy was a "retirement tax".
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Safe as houses no more as banks fear spike in bad loans
By Clancy Yeates
July 18, 2020 — 12.00am
As Australia's two biggest states battle a coronavirus resurgence, senior bankers are facing up to a grim reality: the unprecedented government and bank-provided lifelines will not be enough to save everyone.
This was expected but has now become more urgent as bank call centres contact hundreds of thousands of people who have put their loan payments on hold in the last few months as an emergency measure.
National Australia Bank's group executive in charge of personal banking, Rachel Slade, says the lender is checking on about 10,000 borrowers with deferred loans every week, and most want to keep their payments paused for a further three months.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/an-unemployment-train-wreck-is-slowly-emerging-20200717-p55czi
An unemployment train wreck is emerging
From airline pilots to children in poverty, much swings on what levels of support the government thinks are needed for those with very uncertain futures.
Laura Tingle Columnist
Jul 17, 2020 – 4.56pm
In the past few months, thousands of Australians have been having the unpleasant experience of suddenly becoming invisible: losing jobs that they felt defined them, and incomes that made their lives work.
If the recession of the early 1990s cut a swath through areas such manufacturing jobs, consider the sorts of jobs that might never return after the present economic slump.
There’s not a very promising outlook for A380 pilots, for example.
Unemployment is not just something that affects the low-skilled any more.
The thousands of stories of rude shocks for people who never thought they would be unemployed tend to get drowned out by the sheer incomprehensibility of the total numbers of people who have lost their jobs in the past few months.
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Hey, Josh Frydenberg, this is the season for fiscal rejoicing
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald
July 17, 2020 — 6.58pm
In another era, when Annabel Crabb and I worked together on this masthead, I routinely criticised Australian governments when they spent more than they should have and busted the budget. But what I thought my solemn responsibility Crabb found mildly amusing. She would tease me about it. She called it my "fiscal rage". She chuckled about it in her inoffensively impish way.
That was when Labor was in power. It wasn't that Labor was wrong to unleash a big blast of spending support to the economy during the global financial crisis. That was exactly right. The problem came after the crisis. Labor had fallen in love with spending. It couldn't stop.
The multi-talented Ms Crabb moved on to put her incisive wit to work on other things. While she, for instance, made gentle fun of politicians' attempts at cooking in her Kitchen Cabinet series on the ABC, I continued to criticise their attempts at cooking the national books.
I maintained my rage all the way into the Morrison era. When federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced a $7.1 billion government surplus in last year's budget and started boasting about being "back in black", I was unimpressed. It was "a surplus that remains exactly where it's always been in the last decade – almost within grasp, but not quite in the bank," I wrote. "Pardon our scepticism, Scott, but we will believe the surplus when we see it."
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Health Issues.
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Coronavirus ‘attacks a range of organs’
Seven months after the emergence of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, it’s become clear that COVID-19 is much more than a respiratory virus.
In serious cases, SARS-CoV-2 causes damage to the lung, which may be irreparable. Yet its impacts go beyond the lungs for some — blood vessels through the entire body can be affected, as well as the heart, the kidneys and the brain.
“This is a systemic virus,” said Ian Mackay, a virologist from the University of Queensland.
“It starts off in the respiratory tract but it then moves through the circulatory system and attacks a whole range of different organs — the kidneys, the heart, the cells that line our blood vessels.
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International Issues.
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Why China's wolf warrior diplomacy is a historic mistake
Alexander Downer Columnist
Jul 13, 2020 – 12.00am
When I was foreign minister I used to engage my counterparts in discussions about geopolitics – not just on the day to day matters in my briefing notes. I found it revealing to ask them about the motives for their foreign policy, the directions of their policy and their expectations for the future.
Some foreign ministers didn’t think deeply about those things. Their foreign policy was on automatic pilot driven by a few banal slogans. Not the Chinese. I remember having a private discussion away from officials over dinner with the legendary Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen and asking him those questions.
His answers were as interesting as they were frank. He emphasised China’s determination not only to succeed economically but to guarantee that the humiliations by the Europeans and the Japanese of the previous 200 years could never recur. China wanted to secure its borders and secure its strategic environment.
China also wanted to avoid internal instability. Qian explained that throughout its history China had periodically descended into civil war and chaos. The government in Beijing was determined that this wouldn’t happen again.
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Why the COVID currency shock will be made in America
The aggressive stimulus response to the pandemic will expose the domestic saving gap and cause a huge plunge in the value of the US dollar.
Stephen Roach Contributor
Jul 13, 2020 – 2.23pm
Pandemic time runs at warp speed. That’s true of the COVID-19 infection rate, as well as the unprecedented scientific efforts under way to find a vaccine. It is also true of transformational developments currently playing out in pandemic-affected economies.
Just as a lockdown-induced recession brought global economic activity to a virtual standstill in a mere two months, hopes for a V-shaped recovery are premised on an equally quick reopening of shuttered economies.
It may not be so simple. A sudden stop – long associated with capital flight out of emerging markets – often exposes deep-rooted structural problems that can impair economic recovery. It can also spark abrupt asset-price movements in response to the unmasking of long-simmering imbalances.
The COVID-19 crisis is an especially tough blow for a country that has long been operating on a razor-thin margin of subpar saving.
Such is the case for the pandemic-stricken US economy. The aggressive fiscal response to the COVID-19 shock is not without major consequences. Contrary to the widespread belief that budget deficits don’t matter because near-zero interest rates temper any increases in debt-servicing costs, in the end there is no “magic money” or free lunch.
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Rundown of China's spy agencies will make uncomfortable reading for some
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald
July 14, 2020 — 12.01am
You know about the CIA. And the FBI. The whole world knows that James Bond worked for MI6.
Everyone knows the name of the Soviet Union's notorious foreign espionage service, the KGB, the training ground for today's Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Most people have heard of the ruthlessly efficient Israeli Mossad. Most Australians have heard of the domestic spy agency ASIO. And a few will know of Australia's overseas spy agency, ASIS. But can you name one of China's intelligence services? Just one?
We've heard in recent years that Chinese spying and hacking in Australia is so rife that it's overwhelming our own intelligence agencies. The federal government in 2018 even introduced new laws to try to limit Chinese spying and interference. But we can't name the agencies doing it. Is it because they are so small and insignificant? Today, China has more people engaged in its spying effort than any other country, according to the 2019 book Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer by Americans Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil.
So how can we be so blind to such a big enterprise? A New Zealand sinologist, Anne-Marie Brady, in a new essay on China's spying, suggests a couple of reasons. One is what she calls "decades of post-Cold War complacency, of arrogance about the superiority of liberal democracies over communist systems". Another is a post-September 11 preoccupation with terrorism among Western intelligence systems including Australia's. A third is public sector cutbacks.
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US-China tech split is coming, and it will cost us dearly
The Economist
Over the past few years countless predictions have been made that the global technology industry will suffer a painful rupture because of tensions between America and China. Real damage has been surprisingly hard to spot.
Last year Apple made over $US100m of sales a day in China, while Huawei reported record revenues despite America’s campaign to cripple it. Investors have piled into tech companies’ shares, buoyed by the prospect of new technologies such as 5G and a pandemic that is forcing billions of customers to spend more time and money online.
Judged by sales, profits and shareholder returns, it has been a golden era for American and Chinese tech. The industry now has a colossal market capitalisation of $US20 trillion ($28.8 trillion) and accounts for a quarter of the world’s stockmarket value.
Yet if you examine the events of the past two weeks you can sense the split that is about to come. On July 6 Mike Pompeo, America’s secretary of state, said that the administration was considering banning TikTok, a Chinese-run app that is wildly popular in the West.
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Big banks prepare for extended recession, profits tumble
Renae Merle
Jul 15, 2020 – 4.33am
The US recession triggered by the coronavirus will be deeper and longer than initially expected, according to three big banks that reported drastic tumbles in quarterly profits.
Instead of a quick economic recovery at the end of this year, JPMorgan Chase now expects the recession to be "much more protracted", said the bank's chief financial officer, Jennifer Piepszak.
"Our view of the length and severity of the economic downturn has deteriorated considerably" from earlier this year, said Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf.
Citigroup said in a statement that it was preparing for "a higher level of stress and/or a somewhat slower economic recovery".
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Donald Trump ends preferential treatment for Hong Kong
Donald Trump has signed into law a bipartisan bill that requires sanctions on Chinese officials who crack down on the rights of Hong Kong residents to free speech and peaceful assembly, as well as the banks that do business with those officials.
Mr Trump, speaking to reporters in the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday, also said he had signed an executive order that he said would end preferential US treatment for Hong Kong.
The bill sailed through both houses of Congress by unanimous consent as China moved to impose a new national security law giving Beijing more control over Hong Kong following massive anti-government protests there. The US, UK and other Western countries have criticised the move for violating the high degree of autonomy promised to Hong Kong when Britain returned its former colony to Chinese rule in 1997.
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Coronavirus: Donald Trump battles domestic woes as China flouts freedoms
The juxtaposition is appalling — as China’s muscular President Xi Jinping flouts liberal norms by imposing unilateral security laws on Hong Kong that deny its freedom, in the US Donald Trump succumbs to domestic woes from an erupting culture war and a raging pandemic.
How goes the dinner conversation among the Chinese leaders?
Xi is pledged to China’s rejuvenation, economic success, effective governance, party control and an end to two centuries of humiliation and civil war. What he sees in the dominant superpower is a blundering leader, ineffective in government, unable to combat the coronavirus, wrestling against a so-called cultural revolution and the unresolved legacy of its civil war.
The only compensation is that it can’t be as bad as it looks. Surely. The Chinese elite knows power, having used and abused power since its 1949 revolutionary victory. It knows about the US’s hard power but it also knows how the internal fortitude on which power depends can sink into ruin.
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Caught in ideological spiral, US and China drift toward Cold War
For years, officials and historians have dismissed the idea that a new Cold War was emerging between the United States and China. Now, relations are in free fall.
Steven Lee Myers and Paul Mozur
Updated Jul 15, 2020 – 10.49am, first published at 10.48am
Washington | One by one, the United States has hit at the core tenets of Xi Jinping's vision for a rising China ready to assume the mantle of superpower.
In a matter of weeks, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions over punitive policies in Hong Kong and China's western region of Xinjiang. It took new measures to suffocate Chinese innovation by cutting it off from American technology and pushing allies to look elsewhere. On Monday, it challenged China's claims in the South China Sea, setting the stage for sharper confrontation.
And President Donald Trump on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) said he had signed into law a bill to punish Chinese officials for the new security law that curbs the rights of Hong Kong residents, along with an executive order ending preferential trade treatment for Hong Kong.
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BlackRock warns US-China tensions primed to get worse
By Lucy Battersby
July 16, 2020 — 12.00am
Australia will be forced to choose sides as tensions between the United States and China continue to escalate, global fund manager BlackRock says, noting the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the antagonism between the two powers
“It feels like there is an increasing risk of broader ideological tensions coming to fore and driving more visible tensions between these two great powers in the months and years ahead," said Ben Powell, chief investment strategist for Asia Pacific at the BlackRock Investment Institute, and in-house research division.
Mr Powell cited the United Kingdom’s decision to ban the use of Chinese tech giant Huawei’s equipment from its 5G telecom networks as an example of the US ensuring its closest allies were ‘’pulling in the same direction’’.
He added that even a change of leaders at the White House is unlikely to lead to a softening in the stance against China.
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Real economy faces its moment of truth as Wall Street parties on
Stephen Bartholomeusz
July 15, 2020 — 12.20pm
The disconnect between the future that markets are pricing into stocks and the Trump administration is touting, and what’s actually happening in the world’s biggest economy is going to either close or get bigger over the next two weeks.
As the US moves further into its quarterly reporting season, there are already signs that the view from the coalface of the economy is quite different, and more pessimistic, than the optimism about a "V-shaped" recovery that the White House says is underway and which investors have effectively priced into the sharemarket.
The first big US banks reported their results on Tuesday. Between them, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup added almost $US28 billion ($40 billion) to their provisions for potential losses on loans, swelling them to $US83 billion.
The new provisions were, in aggregate, the largest the three banks have added since the final quarter of 2008, in the worst moments of the global financial crisis.
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Fauci calls White House efforts to discredit him 'bizarre', as Trump rebukes adviser
By Doina Chiacu
July 16, 2020 — 5.52am
Washington: US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has said he did not understand the White House effort to discredit him in the battle against coronavirus and believed it was a "major mistake" that reflected poorly on them.
The White House over the weekend distributed a list of statements Fauci made early in the pandemic that turned out to be wrong as understanding of the disease developed, according to media reports. Trump said earlier this week he valued Fauci's input but did not always agree with him, but on Wednesday made efforts to distance himself from the latest attacks by a White House adviser.
"You know, it is a bit bizarre. I don't really fully understand it," Fauci said in an interview with The Atlantic.
He said he believed the people involved in releasing that list, which was misleading because it did not include the entirety of Fauci's statements or other context, are really "taken aback by what a big mistake that was."
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China avoids recession despite coronavirus, trade disputes
By Eryk Bagshaw
July 16, 2020 — 4.22pm
China's economy has returned to growth just three months after businesses and workers were plunged into a negative quarter, putting Beijing in a better position to confront multiple international disputes.
Surging pharmaceuticals and medical device exports, farm production, online shopping and advanced machinery manufacturing drove the economy up by 3.2 per cent in the June quarter, bouncing back from a 6.8 per cent decrease at the local peak of the coronavirus pandemic between January and March.
The figures, which often rely on provinces to self-report to meet official government targets, are closely watched as a guide to the Chinese Communist Party's confidence in their economy, foreshadowing their future level of investment with implications for worldwide exports including Australia.
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Coronavirus: Psychosis grips China’s lonely communists
My first and only interview with the state-owned Global Times newspaper took place in May 2010. I argued China was probably the loneliest rising power in modern history — no real allies, few true friends and widely distrusted even by those admiring its achievements.
The Global Times published an editorial a few days later entitled China’s Loneliness Could Go the Distance. To my surprise, the editorial agreed the Communist Party was indeed alone and faced hostile forces waiting in the shadows. Like a lone wolf in a strange and inhospitable environment, the party bore the glorious responsibility of returning China to pre-eminence and could not count on any other nation to help it achieve that historic mission.
Today’s pandemic seems to have triggered a strategic and political Communist Party psychosis. The Chinese lone wolf has transformed into the wolf warrior, insulting nations and threatening multiple countries with economic and/or military punishment for perceived insults. From its actions in Hong Kong to the escalation of disputes with Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asian nations, India, Canada, Britain, Europe and, of course, Australia, any good faith built up over decades is now burned.
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Trump faces rising disapproval, widespread distrust: Post-ABC poll
Scott Clement and Dan Balz
Jul 18, 2020 – 6.54am
Washington | Americans' views of President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic have deteriorated significantly as cases rise across the country and personal fears of becoming infected persist, a Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.
The Post-ABC poll shows 38 per cent of Americans approve of his handling of the outbreak, down from 46 per cent in May and 51 per cent in March. Sixty percent disapprove, up from 53 per cent in May and 45 per cent in March.
More than half of the public - 52 per cent - now disapproves "strongly" of Trump's handling of the outbreak, roughly double the percentage who say they strongly approve of his efforts and an increase from 36 per cent in strong disapproval since March.
Trump has sent mixed messages throughout the pandemic and has often been at odds with scientists and health officials in his administration. He now faces clear credibility problems with the public. More than 6 in 10 say they do not trust what he says about the outbreak, including 2 in 3 political independents and nearly 3 in 10 Republicans.
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Trump is down with about 100 days to go, but anything can happen
By Farrah Tomazin
July 18, 2020 — 1.14pm
Washington: Donald Trump is in trouble.
Not enough for electoral defeat to be a foregone conclusion - indeed, far from it - but just enough for folks on the Trump Train to start worrying about the wheels falling off.
Hit with a global pandemic, a volatile economy, and a national rethink on racial injustice, the US President has struggled in recent weeks to gain the kind of momentum he’d want less than four months before the election.
Coronavirus would challenge any political leader, but Trump in particular is at his most comfortable when he’s revving up his base and attacking his opponents at stadium-style rallies around the country.
Now, he’s hamstrung from using one of his most effective tools against rival Joe Biden, who, at the age of 77, does not appear to have the same energy and gusto as the 74-year-old President. The less frenetic style of this campaign suits the Democratic nominee who, according to most polls, is ahead in key battleground states.
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Multiple battlefronts as China takes on the world
By Eryk Bagshaw
July 18, 2020 — 11.55am
Xi Jinping stood before a Democratic Life Meeting of his cadres in May 2014. The gathering in Lankao County, a six-hour drive south of Beijing, has historically been an exercise in self-reflection in a country not usually known for debate.
Those gathered were there to privately criticise the party and each other. Xi had become President by 2952 votes to one just a year earlier and had begun re-orienting China's dour and deferential administration into one that within less than a decade would take on the world.
"It must be clearly understood that the greatest national condition of China is the leadership of the Communist Party of China," Xi said, before ticking off China's push through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, three decades of reform and economic growth. "From one victory to another victory, from one success to another success, what else can shake our beliefs?''
Six years after the Lankao meeting, Xi is President for life and his belief remains steadfast. China is now engaged in simultaneous diplomatic, military and trade disputes across Europe, Asia, America and Australia.
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How coronavirus has changed the world order
COVID-19 is not only spreading like wildfire around the world, with new energy and increased infections; it is not only killing people across continents, destroying national economies and creating a deep global recession; it is transforming geo-strategic equations.
It has intensified US-China tensions to the point where they themselves are now spreading like a wildfire, with new issues of disagreement and acrimony between the two giants arising almost every day.
For Australia, the fallout from the virus has led to serious trouble with Beijing, and on the flip side an intensification of Canberra’s strategic embrace of the US.
In terms of security architecture, perhaps the most important development for us is the intensification and expansion of the Five Eyes alliance involving Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
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I look forward to comments on all this!
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David.
3 comments:
The Epilogue of Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L Trump
3 of 3
In Donald’s mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness. Taking responsibility would open him up to blame. Being a hero—being good—is impossible for him.
The same could be said of his handling of the worst civil unrest since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. This is another crisis in which it would have been so easy for Donald to triumph, but his ignorance overwhelms his ability to turn to his advantage the third national catastrophe to occur on his watch. An effective response would have entailed a call for unity, but Donald requires division. It is the only way he knows how to survive—my grandfather ensured that decades ago when he turned his children against each other.
I can only imagine the envy with which Donald watched Derek Chauvin’s casual cruelty and monstrous indifference as he murdered George Floyd; hands in his pockets, his insouciant gaze aimed at the camera. I can only imagine that Donald wishes it had been his knee on Floyd’s neck.
Instead, Donald withdraws to his comfort zones—Twitter, Fox News—casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker. He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own. But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy.
Donald’s monstrosity is the manifestation of the very weakness within him that he’s been running from his entire life. For him, there has never been any option but to be positive, to project strength, no matter how illusory, because doing anything else carries a death sentence; my father’s short life is evidence of that. The country is now suffering from the same toxic positivity that my grandfather deployed specifically to drown out his ailing wife, torment his dying son, and damage past healing the psyche of his favorite child, Donald J. Trump.
“Everything’s great. Right, Toots?”
The Epilogue of Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L Trump
2 of 3
It would have been easy for Donald to be a hero. People who have hated and criticized him would have forgiven or overlooked his endless stream of appalling actions if he’d simply had somebody take the pandemic preparedness manual down from the shelf where it was put after the Obama administration gave it to him. If he’d alerted the appropriate agencies and state governments at the first evidence the virus was highly contagious, had extremely high mortality rates, and was not being contained. If he’d invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to begin production of PPE, ventilators, and other necessary equipment to prepare the country to deal with the worst-case scenario. If he’d allowed medical and scientific experts to give daily press conferences during which facts were presented clearly and honestly. If he’d ensured that there was a systematic, top-down approach and coordination among all of the necessary agencies. Most of those tasks would have required almost no effort on his part. All he would have had to do was make a couple of phone calls, give a speech or two, then delegate everything else. He might have been accused of being too cautious, but most of us would have been safe and many more of us would have survived. Instead, states are forced to buy vital supplies from private contractors; the federal government commandeers those supplies, and then FEMA distributes them back to private contractors, who then resell them.
While thousands of Americans die alone, Donald touts stock market gains. As my father lay dying alone, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.
Why did it take so long for Donald to act? Why didn’t he take the novel coronavirus seriously? In part because, like my grandfather, he has no imagination. The pandemic didn’t immediately have to do with him, and managing the crisis in every moment doesn’t help him promote his preferred narrative that no one has ever done a better job than he has.
As the pandemic moved into its third, then fourth month, and the death toll continued its rise into the tens of thousands, the press started to comment on Donald’s lack of empathy for those who have died and the families they leave behind. The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.
The Epilogue of Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L Trump
(1of 3
The Tenth Circle
On November 9, 2016, my despair was triggered in part by the certainty that Donald’s cruelty and incompetence would get people killed. My best guess at the time was that that would occur through a disaster of his own making, such as an avoidable war he either provoked or stumbled into. I couldn’t have anticipated how many people would willingly enable his worst instincts, which have resulted in government-sanctioned kidnapping of children, detaining of refugees at the border, and betrayal of our allies, among other atrocities. And I couldn’t have foreseen that a global pandemic would present itself, allowing him to display his grotesque indifference to the lives of other people.
Donald’s initial response to COVID-19 underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs. Fear—the equivalent of weakness in our family—is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old. When Donald is in the most trouble, superlatives are no longer enough: both the situation and his reactions to it must be unique, even if absurd or nonsensical. On his watch, no hurricane has ever been as wet as Hurricane Maria. “Nobody could have predicted” a pandemic that his own Department of Health and Human Services was running simulations for just a few months before COVID-19 struck in Washington state. Why does he do this? Fear.
Donald didn’t drag his feet in December 2019, in January, in February, in March because of his narcissism; he did it because of his fear of appearing weak or failing to project the message that everything was “great,” “beautiful,” and “perfect.” The irony is that his failure to face the truth has inevitably led to massive failure anyway. In this case, the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people will be lost and the economy of the richest country in history may well be destroyed. Donald will acknowledge none of this, moving the goalposts to hide the evidence and convincing himself in the process that he’s done a better job than anybody else could have if only a few hundred thousand die instead of 2 million.
“Get even with people who have screwed you,” Donald has said, but often the person he’s getting revenge on is somebody he screwed over first—such as the contractors he’s refused to pay or the niece and nephew he refused to protect. Even when he manages to hit his target, his aim is so bad that he causes collateral damage. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired. Donald can’t fight back by shutting Cuomo up or reversing his decisions; having abdicated his authority to lead a nationwide response, he no longer has the ability to counter decisions made at the state level. Donald can insult Cuomo and complain about him, but every day the governor’s real leadership further reveals Donald as a petty, pathetic little man—ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his own delusional spin. What Donald can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently. If New York continues not to have enough equipment, Cuomo will look bad, the rest of us be damned. Thankfully, Donald doesn’t have many supporters in New York City, but even some of those will die because of his craven need for “revenge.” What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder.
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