This blog is totally independent, unpaid and has only three major objectives.
The first is to inform readers of news and happenings in the e-Health domain, both here in Australia and world-wide.
The second is to provide commentary on e-Health in Australia and to foster improvement where I can.
The third is to encourage discussion of the matters raised in the blog so hopefully readers can get a balanced view of what is really happening and what successes are being achieved.
Quote Of The Year
Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"
or
H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
ScriptCheckSA, a real-time prescription
monitoring system, was introduced earlier this month in South Australia. The
system provides doctors and pharmacists with information about a patient’s
history and use of controlled medicines, aiding them in decision-making when it
comes to prescribing or dispensing such medicines.
WHY IT MATTERS
ScriptCheckSA can help mitigate "doctor
shopping", or visiting different doctors to get the same prescription for
a controlled medicine.
“Prescription drug dependence and misuse are
a major public health concern. Nation-wide, the supply of prescription
medicines is increasing, as is the rate of overdose and accidental death,"
said Minister for Health and Wellbeing Stephen Wade in a statement.
Minister Wade clarified that the monitoring
scheme will not limit people’s access to their medications but instead identify
those who might be abusing high-risk medications. When alerted by the system,
clinicians may ask their patients for more details about their prescription use;
discuss potential risks; and suggest alternative options or more specialised
care.
About 9 million Australians aged 14 and above were
found to have illegally used drugs in their lifetime, according to a National
Drug Strategy Household Survey published last year. Among them, 900,000 people
used a pharmaceutical drug for non-medical purposes in 2019 alone, though the
figure was down from a million recorded in 2016 after some reclassification of medications.
THE LARGER CONTEXT
The
rollout of the new prescription monitoring system in SA is part of a nationwide plan to install real-time prescription
monitoring systems across Australian states. ScriptCheckSA’s launch comes three
years after Victoria introduced a similar programme called SafeScript. The Victorian government was reported to have invested
$29.5 million to implement the system, which also included comprehensive
training for healthcare providers.
The Real Time Prescription Monitoring (RTPM) is a
nationally implemented system, designed to monitor the prescribing and
dispensing of controlled medicines with the aim of reducing their misuse in
Australia.
What is the RTPM system?
The
RTPM provides information to doctors (prescribers) and pharmacists (dispensers)
about a patient’s history and use of controlled medicines when they are
considering prescribing or dispensing these medicines.
The
Commonwealth, state and territory agencies are working together to
implement the RTPM system. However, each state or territory remains responsible
for the management of controlled medicines in its jurisdiction.
Why is the RTPM system important?
The
misuse of controlled medicines is a growing concern within Australia, with
levels of overdose and accidental deaths rising.
Controlled
medicines include pain medications such as oxycodone, morphine and fentanyl and
other high-risk medicines (determined within each State or Territory),
including all benzodiazepines such as diazepam.
Technology
developments can help reduce misuse of medicines listed as controlled
substances, while ensuring that patients who genuinely need these medicines are
able to access them.
What are the goals of the RTPM system?
The
RTPM’s goals are to:
identify patients who are at risk of
harm due to dependence or misuse of controlled medicines
identify patients who may be
diverting these medicines
limit ‘prescription shopping’
— visiting several doctors for the same prescriptions of a controlled
medicine
provide state and territory
regulators with data to detect prescribers who are not complying with regulations.
How will we meet these goals?
The
RTPM system captures information on prescribing and dispensing events related
to controlled medicines:
consistent with state and territory
legislation
from regulatory systems
from prescribing and dispensing software
from a range of external data
sources.
The
RTPM system produces real-time alerts and information for health professionals
and state and territory regulators.
Prescribers
and dispensers receive notifications and alerts when they prescribe or dispense
controlled medicines. Individual state and territory legislation sets the
criteria for controlled medicines for each jurisdiction.
The
RTPM system consists of two components:
A National Data Exchange (NDE),
which captures information from state and territory regulatory systems,
prescribing and dispensing software, and a range of external data
sources.
Regulatory systems within each state
or territory, which manage the authorities or permits for controlled
medicines in each state and territory.
The
NDE was developed and released in December 2018. Work with states and
territories is continuing to integrate the NDE into their regulatory
systems.
Protection
of personal information
The
NDE component of the RTPM system will contain personal information of a patient
relating to the prescribing and dispensing of controlled medicines to that
patient (such as the particular drug(s) prescribed, the date and amount
prescribed, and information about the dispensing of that drug). It will also
contain some information about prescribers and dispensers of controlled medicines.
The
NDE will collect and use the information, including personal information, from
prescribing and dispensing software, state and territory systems used by
regulators, and a range of other external data sources, to produce real-time
detection and alerting for regulators, prescribers and dispensers. The
Commonwealth will not have access to the personal information in the NDE.
Each
state and territory has introduced, or is working to introduce, legislation to
provide for a monitored medicines database to support the implementation of the
NDE, which will authorise the national collection, use and disclosure of
personal information for the NDE.
The
personal information in the NDE will be securely stored (using a range of
technical features) and will be accessible by prescribers, dispensers and state
and territory regulators. Personal information of a patient in the NDE may be
disclosed:
to prescribers and dispensers in the
state or territory where the patient resides
to prescribers and dispensers in another
state or territory in certain circumstances (such as where the patient
requires a controlled medicine while out of their state or territory of
residence)
to the relevant state or territory
regulator
when it is required or authorised by
law.
For
more information on the operation of the RTPM system, including how personal
information is handled and protected in a particular state or territory, please
refer to:
Health
Ministers from the Commonwealth, states and territories have agreed to national
real time prescription monitoring and are developing developing and adapting
their systems to achieve a national solution.
Work
is continuing achieve this goal with the expectation that all states and
territories will be integrated into the NDE by mid-2021.
States
and territories are responsible for developing the regulatory components that
integrate with the NDE based on their specific regulatory environments. As
such, they maintain responsibility for the regulation of controlled medicines
(Schedule 8) within their jurisdiction, and have discretion as to which
additional (Schedule 4) medicines they wish to monitor using the RTPM system.
I
find this all a bit confusing as I though Tasmania had done this first which
would make SA the third (After Vic.). It is also a little odd that SA does not
mention a link to the national system.
Can
anyone fully clarify where we really are up to? Where is the NDE up to?
In the US we saw a global climate summit and
the continuing fall-out of the George Floyd verdict as well as continuing
discussion of the Afghanistan withdrawal decision.
In the UK is seems political corruption is
raising its ugly head and not being welcomed at all!
In OZ we have seen a more normal ANZAC day as
COVID is lessening as well as concerns around the looming Budget – with many
bids for funding being lobbed! Sadly tensions with China only appear to be rising...
Sadly India is in the midst of a COVID
catastrophe and Indonesia has lost a submarine with all hands. Miserable news….
The University of Queensland has
enrolled a record number of international students in 2021, defying predictions
that closed borders and negative messaging from the Chinese government would
dampen demand.
Enrolments of overseas students
surged past 2019’s record to reach 18,000 at the beginning of 2021, up from
14,900 in 2020 and 16,600 at the same time in 2019.
UQ has also seen a 50 per cent
increase of Chinese students compared with 2020, with numbers rising from 7466
to 11,265. That is also well above 2019’s figure of 8995.
Vice-chancellor Deborah Terry said
the record figures were a combination of new students and deferrals from 2020
enrolling for the 2021 academic year.
Onerous, overly prescriptive financial advice
laws have pushed median fees up 16 per cent in a year
to $3256 and must be wound
back to stop the vast majority of the population being priced out of the
market, the peak body for Australia’s $3 trillion financial services sector
says.
Almost a decade after Labor’s landmark Future
of Financial Advice (FOFA) laws came into force, the Financial Services Council
will release a plan on Monday to water down the consumer protection regime,
which it argues is tripping up advisers in red tape. This has forced a quarter
of advisers to exit the industry in two years and pushed up barriers to entry.
The proposals include scrapping “statements
of advice”, which the lobby group says have become “unwieldy”, sometimes
running to as long as 80 pages and, at a cost of $2400 to $3000 each,
identified as the main driver of higher fees.
SOAs should be replaced with a “letter of
advice”, a new document that would be “short, concise and consumer orientated”,
the FSC said.
As Australia steps up its involvement in the space race, a Sydney start-up is building
the nation’s largest homemade spacecraft and plans to be part of a launch in
less than 12 months.
Space Machines founder and chief
executive Rajat Kulshrestha has dubbed Optimus-1 a “space taxi”, capable of
rendezvousing with rockets to ferry satellites to their final orbit.
“We want to be like FedEx. You
tell us where to go,” he said.
“We’re going to be proving the
capability to be mobile in space, move around and provide responsiveness.
“There are a couple of companies
overseas but given space is a very regulated domain, the availability of those
services to Australia and Australian interests is very limited at the moment.”
Money can’t reverse the destruction, but
better resources for groups looking after traditional owners’ rights will go a
long way to ensuring this doesn’t happen again.
There’s a saying around Canberra that every
parliamentary inquiry casts a villain, a victim and a hero.
Auditions for the role of the villain were
not required when a federal autopsy into Rio Tinto’s blasting of Indigenous heritage at Juukan Gorge began last year.
But by the time the inquiry had delivered its
findings, there was a clear message that room for improvement existed among the
biggest victims of the disaster.
The cottage industry that manages the legal
and financial affairs of Australia’s native title custodians was found to be
struggling to meet “basic legal and administrative obligations, let alone
heritage protection”.
The advisory work of Yamatji Marlpa
Aboriginal Corporation was openly questioned by the inquiry, after the Puutu
Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) members said they did not understand the 2011
land-use agreement that Yamatji negotiated with Rio on the PKKP’s behalf.
Cleaning up the financial advice
industry has made it unaffordable
Regulations
have helped clean up the shocking conflicts of interest that used to be rife in
the financial advice industry but most Australians aren’t willing to pay thousands
of dollars for financial advice. How to get the balance right?
Making it possible for ordinary
Australians to get affordable, accessible and decent financial advice sounds
like a sensible public policy goal. It’s proving very difficult to achieve in
practice.
The Financial Services Council is the latest to point out some
unintended consequences. Financial advisers are fleeing the industry because
their business models can no longer offer the new standards and protections for
consumers without charging their clients much more in fees. Most Australians
can’t or don’t want to pay thousands of dollars in upfront fees, meaning they
are missing out on getting any financial advice.
One obvious result is the number of financial advisers in Australia fell by nearly 3000
last year to just over 20,000. More significantly, that decline is expected to
accelerate over the next few years, with only around 13,000 still likely to be
in business by the end of 2023.
Paul Keating has welcomed
speculation the Morrison government will not meddle with the superannuation guarantee, saying such a decision would not
only be commendable from a retiree’s perspective, but would also help the
nation reduce its current account deficit.
Mr Keating said if the pre-budget
reports were true and compulsory super contributions were allowed to reach 12
per cent by 2025, as is already legislated, “then the government deserves
commendation for a mature decision”.
He said it was now time the
legislation was left alone for good so that people could plan their retirements
safe in the knowledge the rules would not be changed on them, while super funds
could also make longer-term decisions.
“Such a decision would amount to a
consensus between the parties on the
superannuation aggregates, underwriting a generational opportunity for superior
income adequacy in retirement,” he told The Australian Financial Review.
“Such an outcome would allow
people to plan for retirement knowing they are able to rely on a much larger
accumulation, while allowing funds to create longer-term instruments.
This week The Sydney
Morning Herald and The Age restart publishing political research, with
the launch of the Resolve Political Monitor (RPM).
You’ll notice a few differences
from the way we used to conduct and report polling. Firstly, we do collect
voting intention – emulating as closely as possible the real ballot paper
ranking without an “undecided” option - but no longer report two-party
preferred results.
Our readers told us in the past
they did not appreciate the “horse race” nature of the way we reported the
results of TPP questions and they wanted something deeper.
It wasn’t just that all the major
polls, including the one published by the Herald and The Age, predicted a TPP win for Labor at the last
election, although that was clearly a factor in our new approach. Years of
leadership contenders using polling as a justification for knifing incumbent
prime ministers led, understandably, to the perception the polling was
distorting politics, not just examining it.
UpdatedApril 19, 2021 —
6.33pmfirst published at 1.23pm
London: Australian and British MPs who
pressured Boris Johnson’s government to ban Huawei from the UK’s 5G network say
they have been fully vindicated following reports the Chinese vendor was able
to eavesdrop on conversations taking place on a Dutch telephone network.
Huawei staff were able to
eavesdrop on all mobile numbers on the KPN network, according to a 2010
internal company record obtained by Dutch newspaperde Volkskrant, including
then prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende and Chinese dissidents living in the
Netherlands.
Australia’s governments have long
banned Huawei from both the broadband and 5G networks over spying and security
concerns.
But Prime Minister Boris Johnson
resisted pressure from his own MPs and the Trump administration to block the
company, causing tension amongst the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing club,
comprising Australia, United States, Britain, New Zealand and Canada.
Britain’s announcement that it has
established a taskforce to explore the potential of a central bank-issued
digital currency underscores the extent to which China’s piloting of a digital
yuan and the explosion of interest in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is
accelerating the efforts of the major central banks to consider whether they
need to issue their own digital money.
On Monday the UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak,
announced that the UK Treasury and Bank of England would evaluate the creation of a digital
currency – a “Britcoin” – to
protect sterling against cryptocurrencies and improve the UK payments system.
The Bank of England said no decision had yet
been made on whether to issue a CBDC (central bank digital coin).
Previous discussion papers issued by the BoE
have indicated, however, that if it were to issue a CBDC, it would be within a
two-tier system, sitting alongside cash and bank deposits rather than
displacing them.
It would not be a cryptocurrency nor would it
necessarily use the distributed leger technology that underpins existing
cryptocurrencies.
The Morrison government will ask
Treasury to review the quality and affordability of financial advice and
associated problem of “under-insurance”, merging and expanding the scope of two
Hayne royal commission recommendations.
Financial services minister Jane
Hume has announced the government will commission a review of the financial
advice sector in 2022, as recommended by royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne to
assess whether ethics and standards in the troubled industry had improved three
years after his scathing final report.
However, the government will
depart from Hayne’s edict by expanding the scope of the inquiry to include a
commercial focus on accessibility of financial advice services and handing the
task to Treasury, rather than the corporate regulator.
“The Quality of Advice Review will
be conducted under the one roof by Treasury, who can appropriately consider the
full breadth of issues impacting on both quality and affordability of all forms
of financial advice,” Senator Hume told the Financial Services Council Life
Insurance Summit on Wednesday.
“Cancel
culture” has become so prevalent and damaging to free speech one of Australia’s
top philosophers has set up an academic journal in which contributors can
publish under a fake name.
Peter
Singer, a professor of philosophy at the elite Princeton University in the US,
together with two other academics, will launch the Journal of Controversial
Ideas later this month, to allow researchers to publish articles without
risking their careers or suffering intimidation on social media.
“Clearly
there has been an increase in various forms of behaviour that can intimidate
people from writing on controversial topics,” Professor Singer told The Australian.
“We
have noticed it in many fields, including in philosophical writing, and this
isn’t a good thing. We’ve all had personal experiences with harassment,” he
added, referring to his two co-founders Jeff McMahan and Francesa Minerva at
the universities of Oxford and Ghent, respectively.
The
journal, which will include renowned thinkers such as Lawrence Summers,
Jonathan Haidt and Philip Tetlock on its editorial board, comes amid growing
concern that universities — including in Australia — are increasingly dominated
by and beholden to extreme and aggressive elements, typically from the left,
who demand conformity.
COVID-19 transformed federal
budget policy miraculously. Canberra had been rigorously on-course to satisfy
the long-standing bipartisan objective of budget surplus. However, as soon as
the enormity of the virus was apparent, a deficit of nearly 10 per cent of GDP
– one of the highest in the world – was implemented, with universal approval.
Miraculous though this is, the
next stage requires even greater policy dexterity: getting the budget back to
normal. But the COVID-19 experience has upended what normality might be.
While there are still true
believers in the intrinsic virtue of budget surpluses, the pandemic experience
has changed many perceptions. It has shown just how successful fiscal expansion
can be, with earlier gloomy forecasts quickly upgraded, thanks to this bold
stimulus.
Fears that fiscal expenditure was
intrinsically slow to respond have been falsified. Concerns that government
debt would reach an unstable tipping point have lost credibility. Credit rating
agencies are less intimidating after their pathetic performance in the 2008
crisis. Moralising about burdening future generations with debt seems over-egged,
given the substantial public assets they will inherit.
Geostrategic rivalry and tensions between
Beijing and Washington are increasingly playing out in the Indo-Pacific, and
this country is on the front line.
Xi Jinping may be willing to join Joe Biden’s virtual climate summit this week and talk up the need for global
co-operation and economic integration. But any potential agreement on greater
emissions reductions won’t translate into a broader reset of China’s tense
relationship with the US and determination to assert its authority regionally.
That ensures Australia will continue to be on
the front line, given China’s willingness to use economic coercion and trade
retaliation to express its displeasure with the Morrison government. Yet
Canberra is feeling far less isolated due to the Biden administration’s renewed
attention on the region as well as growing unease about China’s ambitions among
ASEAN nations.
In an address to the Asia Society on
Wednesday, Frances Adamson, secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade, said what would matter most in coming years is the ability of the region
to find “the right balance” between competing powers in the face of unsettling
trends.
The key difference with the advent of the
Biden administration, she says, is its demonstration of “genuine focus on
allies and partners” and its willingness to engage and consult with them.
UpdatedApril 22, 2021 —
1.08amfirst published April 21, 2021 — 7.55pm
The Australian government has torn
up Victoria’s controversial Belt and Road agreement with China, saying it falls
foul of the country’s national interest, in a move that will further inflame
tensions between Canberra and Beijing.
China’s foreign mission reacted
swiftly on Wednesday night, warning the decision would put any recovery in the
relationship between Australia and its largest trading partner in jeopardy.
“This is another unreasonable and
provocative move taken by the Australian side against China,” said a
spokesperson for the Chinese embassy.
“It further shows that the
Australian government has no sincerity in improving China-Australia relations.
It is bound to bring further damage to bilateral relations, and will only end
up hurting itself.”
Victoria’s Belt and Road deal
ripped up, threats of retaliation from China
A
decision to rip up Victoria’s Belt and Road deal has been met with threats of
retaliation. But Defence Minister Peter Dutton has issued a warning.
Jade
Gailberger
NCA NewsWire
April 23, 20218:36am
Australia
will not “surrender” to threats of retaliation from China after Victoria’s Belt
and Road deal was ripped up.
Defence Minister Peter Dutton
issued the warning on Friday before pointing the finger at Premier Daniel Andrews
for entering into an agreement that flew in the face of national interest.
“Dan Andrews did the wrong thing,”
Mr Dutton told Today.
There will be those who dismiss
the scrapping of Victoria’s Belt and Road agreement as merely the end of a memorandum
of understanding – a deal that commits no funds and no projects while offering
nothing but trouble for its two major players.
But nothing could be further from
the truth. For China, the BRI represents its greatest global project. It’s a
multi-trillion dollar investment vehicle through which Beijing projects its
influence and prestige throughout the world.
“The East is rising and the West
is declining,” China’s President Xi Jinping said in March. The BRI, which
sweeps across Asia, the Pacific and into Europe, connecting trade, transport,
digital networks and infrastructure, is the embodiment of that ethos.
Australia has already infuriated
China by banning Huawei and implementing world-leading foreign interference
legislation. On Wednesday it set a global precedent by tearing up an agreement
similar to one that China has signed with dozens of other countries.
Australian officials were blindsided when New
Zealand’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta criticised efforts to pressure China
through the 70-year-old spy alliance known as the “Five Eyes”.
“We would much rather prefer to look for
multilateral opportunities to express our interests on a number of issues,”
Mahuta said on Monday.
The language is carefully couched but it has
real consequences. Our nearest neighbour did not inform Australia of its
position before Mahuta this week voiced her government’s discomfort about the
“expanding remit” of Five Eyes. While Wellington’s conspicuous absence from a
few joint statements had caused unease in Canberra over the past year,
Australian officials did not know about New Zealand’s official opposition to
using the spy network to exert diplomatic pressure on Beijing.
While there have been other incidents over
the past year demonstrating how strained trans-Tasman relations have
become, this development is
likely to cause diplomatic friction in the coming weeks.
Creditors
have voted to wind up Greensill’s Australian business after it attracted no
buyers that would carry on Lex Greensill’s Bundaberg-headquartered empire,
which collapsed into insolvency last month.
Creditors
voted 23-0, with three abstentions, to liquidate Greensill at a meeting on
Thursday morning.
Liquidation
was the only option after no buyers came forward to take on the company, which
has debts estimated at $4.9bn.
The latest
report from administrators Grant Thornton, released overnight on Thursday,
says Greensill Capital’s Australian staff should get the $2.2m in entitlements
they are owed, but other creditors – including Japan’s SoftBank, owed $1.5bn –
will have to wait for the UK administrators until untangle Greensill’s
labyrinth financial affairs before they know whether they will receive any cash
at all.
Grant
Thornton said in the report, issued last week ahead of Thursday‘s meeting, that
Greensill Capital has just $4 million in the bank and its four remaining staff
are working out of temporary offices as administrators try to sell its sole
remaining asset, fintech company Omni, valued at about $26m on Greensill’s
books.
After a late-night visit from security
officials, the race was on to get AFR Correspondent Michael Smith safely out of
China. In a new book, he reveals the diplomatic manoeuvering that took place.
It was well after midnight when China’s secret police knocked on my door. Their arrival on that muggy Shanghai night
in September 2020 woke me from an uneasy sleep.
The previous day had started with a phone
call from the Australian ambassador telling me to get out of the country “as
soon as possible”. My bags were packed and I was booked on a China Eastern
flight out of Shanghai to Sydney the next evening.
The heavy pounding on the front door, one
flight down from my bedroom, reverberated through the wooden hallways and
stairwells of the traditional laneway house which had been home to the The
Australian Financial Review’s China correspondents for 16 years. Then someone
found the doorbell, adding it to the wake-up chorus.
Accompanied by the pounding on the door,
which was now being repeated every two seconds, it was clear my late-night
visitor had urgent business. I padded downstairs barefoot in boxer shorts and a
T-shirt, pausing only to grab my glasses from the bedside table. The fog of
sleep meant I had not yet had time to process what was happening.
Australian National University has
posted the second-largest deficit in the country’s higher education history,
suffering a $162 million shortfall last year as it was battered by the pandemic
and its own policies to downsize international student enrolments.
However, the deficit is $57
million better than predicted thanks to a huge insurance payout after the
campus was badly damaged by flood in 2018 and a massive hail storm in January
2020.
ANU’s lower-than-expected deficit
stemmed from higher research income and tuition fees from domestic students.
Professor Brian Schmidt, ANU’s
vice-chancellor said no more redundancies were planned beyond the 460 announced
last year.
Only Melbourne University has ever
posted a higher deficit after it reported a $210 million loss in 2010 after its
investment portfolio declined sharply in the global financial crisis.
Politicians who wrap themselves in the flag
of a generation of fallen have separated Anzac from the realities of modern
Australia and the context of why these wars were fought.
Difficult though it may be to conceive of a
time when Anzac did not dominate rituals of Australian nationhood, not long ago
Anzac Day itself was on virtual life support.
Its dwindling observance in the 1960s and
’70s, largely on account of the unpopular Vietnam War, but also because of the
dubious overtones of empire and Britishness, brought forth widespread
predictions of the day’s likely demise.
Anzac’s extraordinary revival in the 1980s
and ’90s, stretching to the recent World War I centenaries, is due largely to
its shedding of anything to do with why Australians fought in those wars. “For
king and country” became paeans to “mateship”.
Popular culture drove the resurgence. Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli had almost nothing to do with why the Anzacs
were actually there – to kill Turks – fashioning instead a saga of British
duplicity, of young Australians sacrificed on the altar of imperial – indeed
Churchillian – folly. Britain became the foe.
The Morrison government is not looking for
policy positions to win seats in the other states, just to hold onto the ones
it has got. The Coalition can’t afford to lose seats in Queensland or Western
Australia.
What is it about the federal government and
targets that seems to so often get it into trouble?
For the past couple of weeks, as the vaccine rollout has flailed around amid conflicting messages, supply problems, lack of
transparency on availability and eroding confidence, the government has been
defending its decision to dump its original vaccination targets.
Not only would we not “meet and beat” the
rollout targets, we were being told we didn’t need the targets in the first
place and people should just get over it.
When it comes to climate change the whole
target (meeting and beating) story is a bit more complicated.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and members of
his cabinet such as Energy Minister Angus Taylor say people are too hung up on targets
and that the important thing to focus on is what is being done to cut
emissions.
Hedging against China’s threats is not the
same as prodding it for no obvious gain on moribund Belt and Road agreements
Apr 23, 2021 – 6.31pm
Australia has few illusions about China under
President Xi Jinping. Since 2013 he has steadily restored one-man authoritarian
rule to the country with a new high-tech twist, and become practised at using
China’s vast markets as a geopolitical club for those who displease.
In The Last Correspondent, Michael Smith’s book, launched this week, on his forced exit
last year as The Australian Financial Review’s Shanghai-based reporter, he
describes what it’s like to encounter China’s police state at first hand.
Australian exporters have been counting the cost of Beijing’s political
weaponising of trade for a year now.
This month’s bullish prediction by the
International Monetary Fund of the highest growth on record for 2021 confirmed
what sharemarkets are already banking on – the global economy is firing up.
Encouraging COVID-19 vaccine trials late last
year opened the door to a supercharged recovery, as massive fiscal spending
continues this year with America’s $US1.9 trillion ($2.4 trillion) aid package.
The host of the 40-nation climate summit, US
President Joe Biden, opened the event by urging all the leaders to pledge to
“overcome the existential crisis of our time”. It was “a moment of peril, but
also a moment of extraordinary opportunities”, he said on Thursday night
Australian time.
The next speaker was the secretary-general of
the UN, Antonio Guterres. “We are on the verge of the abyss.”
After America’s four years of climate
absenteeism under Donald Trump, several leaders expressed relief at Biden’s
activism in leading the planet back from the edge. With the world on a
trajectory to warm by 3 degrees, the collective effort has to bend it to hold
warming to a maximum of 1.5.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the
task ahead as “Herculean”.
Scott Morrison was excluded from the list of
almost 80 leaders invited to speak at a climate summit hosted by Britain’s
Boris Johnson in December last year. Organisers made clear that Australia
lacked the climate action to earn a place.
There are three possible explanations for
Scott Morrison’s calculated attack this week on hard working Australians who
live in the inner city. One, he thinks that the next election will be a re-run
of the last, with the nation irreconcilably divided between the regions and the
capital cities. Two, he is uncomfortable with the diversity of his hometown
Sydney and its cosmopolitan rival Melbourne, and couldn’t hide his feelings on
the night. Or both of the above.
Either way, the statement read like something
that the ABC’s comedian and broadcaster Sammy J would have scripted for the PM;
the leader as an old school footy coach who sees democracy as a tribal sport.
“We’re not going to achieve net zero [greenhouse gas emissions] in the cafes,
dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities,” Morrison told the Business
Council of Australia annual dinner in Sydney on Monday.
It was a charmless, counterproductive thing
for a prime minister to say. Surely some of the “pioneering entrepreneur[s],
farmers and scientists” Morrison wants to drive Australia’s clean energy future
have a soft spot for the inner city, having studied at sandstone universities.
Still, you had to respect his partisan
honesty. We are 13 months into a global pandemic and Morrison is no longer
pretending to look for common ground with people who will never vote for him.
By pitting the inner city against the regions, Morrison hopes to reprise the
miracle of 2019, when he secured re-election for the government with super
majorities in Queensland and Western Australia, which offset shortfalls in every
other state and territory. It is a double-or-nothing bet on the fault lines
that have defined federal elections since 2010.
Only a politician with a surplus of snark
would turn up to dinner with the nation’s business elite and tell them, over
the best food and wine at a city hotel, that he had no time for people at
inner-city wine bars.
But that is what Scott Morrison did this week
when he tried to take both sides of the climate change debate in a two-step
routine. First, promise to do something. Second, take a casual swipe at voters
who want him to do something.
“We’re not going to achieve net zero in the
cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities,” he said. He wanted to
sip the chardonnay, if you like, but pose for the cameras in the act of
spitting it out.
It was good chardonnay, too, according to
those at the Business Council of Australia dinner at the Fullerton Hotel in
Sydney’s old post office on Martin Place. The wine list included Peter Lehmann
Riesling and Shiraz, Burton McMahon Chardonnay and Giant Steps Pinot Noir. The
menu had cured ocean trout, grain-fed beef and roasted snapper. The chicken was
organic.
“We stand for democracy” announced a double-page ad in The New York Times last week, undersigned
by the some of the United States’ best-known corporations and chief executives.
The statement was a protest against reforms
to voter registration that passed in the US state of Georgia at the end of
March and raises the question: in the age of corporate activism, does democracy
as we celebrate it still have a chance?
The Georgia law reform, SB202 as it is known to its friends, was championed by Republican senators as a
way of guarding against voter fraud. The legislation aims to ensure the
integrity of the US electoral system by requiring a form of ID from voters.
Democrats object to the legislation on the
grounds that it could lead to voter suppression – discouraging or making it
impossible for disadvantaged and minority communities to vote by introducing
hurdles to participation. In its original form, the bill included changes such
as a ban on voting on Sunday – this would have put an end to the “souls to the
polls” voting drive that black churches use to turn out their communities to
cast a ballot, reducing participation among a key Democratic voting bloc. The
ban was opposed in the Senate process and removed from the final bill. After a
month of debate and modification in the chamber, the legislation was passed in
the regular way that laws are made.
The corporations “standing for democracy” in
the Times are objecting to a bill produced by elected officials through the
established political process, and advocating for overriding the outcome using
the power of corporate voices.
After another tumultuous week in the
Australia-China relationship, four conclusions are becoming increasingly clear.
First, we are going to be on this rollercoaster ride for years. National
positions are hardening. Neither Beijing nor Canberra will back down and the
prospects for negotiation are zero given China’s “wolf warrior” mania.
Second, Scott Morrison and his senior
ministers look increasingly confident in their stance to seek “a balance in
favour of freedom”. The language used about relations with China is careful but
is becoming clearer and more definitive. There is something to be said for
knowing when your back is hard up against a strategic wall.
Third, the Chinese Communist Party’s rhetoric
suggests a hint of panic is seeping in. Statements from the Chinese embassy in
Canberra and from the foreign ministry in Beijing are as shrill as they are
counter-productive, implicitly threatening those who engage in “the despicable
tactic of smearing China on the Australian side”.
Beijing’s usual Australian support base has
largely gone to ground and public opinion has swung significantly against the
People’s Republic.
Watching the collective hysteria because of
delays in the national vaccine rollout reminds me that Australia really is the
lucky country. So lucky, we will find anything to complain about. Which is not
to undersell the problems attached to the rollout or the mistakes ministers
have made over-promising and underdelivering.
Donald Horne asserted in his 1964 book The
Lucky Country that “Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate
people who share its luck”. But let’s get some perspective.
While Australian politicians seek to find
better ways to deliver the vaccines in coming months, using better co-operation
between the commonwealth and the states, other nations the world over are
battling second, third and fourth waves of the virus.
These are nations that really are led by
second-rate politicians, if judged against the job they have done managing
COVID-19. While Australia opens a travel bubble with New Zealand — mutually
enjoying our largely COVID-free lifestyles — countries such as India daily
battle new cases in the hundreds of thousands and surging ever higher. More
than three million people across the world have died from the virus and many
more will die before it’s brought under control.
It may be time to redeploy the
novelty giraffe. Healthy Harold – an Australian life education
icon – used to be engaged to visit schools to talk to children about respectful
relationships, bullying, drugs and alcohol.
Harold combined a long neck with a
pleasant demeanour, and his popularity was such that no one (at least not at my
school) ever thought to ask why a giraffe, exactly, was talking to us about
such grave matters.
The basis of Harold’s expertise
was unclear but his enthusiasm was evident, and that was enough.
A cursory internet search shows
Harold’s popularity seems to have tailed off since his heyday in the 80s and
90s – back when “stranger danger” was a thing and few people thought to educate
children and young people about the far greater danger of men they know.
The federal government’s
“milkshake” ad – which purported to teach young people about sexual consent
through the metaphor of a milkshake – made Harold look good. The ad was
released last week to such great derision that it was quickly removed from
the government website where it premiered. It was notable for not using the
word consent, let alone sex or assault.
Exclusive:
Australian Defence Forces will return to “core business” in defending
Australia’s interests with uncertain times creating new home front threats,
Defence Minister Peter Dutton has declared.
Speaking
on the eve of Australia’s most revered day, Anzac Day, Mr Dutton thanked the more
than 39,000 troops who served in the Middle East but said now the focus was on
home.
He
said the skill sets learned in the conflict zone over the past 20 years would
serve the nation well as Australia faced multiple threats including the
militarisation of bases and islands on our doorstep, notably by China, the
level of foreign interference and cyber threats, and the “heavy influence” into
our neighbour.
Mr Dutton was in Brisbane yesterday and had planned to speak with
soldiers of the 3rd Battalion at Lavarack Barracks to commemorate the Battle of
Kapyong during the Korean War, when Australian troops slowed Chinese forces
advancing on Seoul.
The Australian Securities & Investments Commission is often
referred to as the country’s chief investment watchdog for good reason.
In its primary role of overseeing many aspects of Australia’s
corporate and financial landscape, ASIC is known to bite if it believes
investors are being put at risk.
That’s why, just before Easter, the regulator made separate
announcements on two heavily marketed, high-risk investment products —
contracts for difference (CFDs) and binary options.
CFDs and binary options are different types of investment
products, but they both allow investors to speculate on future price movements.
According to ASIC, the other main thing these products have in
common is that a large percentage of the retail investors who have used them in
the past have ended up losing their money.
Surging global cases of COVID-19 threaten Australia’s vaccine exit
strategy
By Mike Toole and Brendan Crabb
April 19, 2021 —
5.00am
Two
seemingly incompatible statistics were released on Friday. The number of
COVID-19 vaccine doses administered worldwide reached 878 million and more than
832,000 new infections were reported.
That
is more than double the number reported just two months ago and the
second highest on record. In this third global surge, no
region has been spared. Most European countries are experiencing massive third
waves, far worse than previous waves. In Canada and the American midwest, cases
are surging and Latin America is once again the global epicentre of the
pandemic. Brazil is reporting an average of 71,000 cases and more than 3000
deaths a day. Even in Chile, where the vaccination rate is third highest in the
world, new cases have doubled since late February.
In
the Asia-Pacific region, India is spiralling out of control, reporting more
than 250,000 cases daily. Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Cambodia and
Thailand also have second or third waves. Closer to home, Papua
New Guinea and Timor-Leste are experiencing major surges.
So
what’s going on? Firstly, it’s important to be clear that the portfolio of
eight vaccines available to the world is excellent at preventing severe disease
and – going by trends in Israel and Britain – infection. The problem is that
the global rollout of vaccines is not equitable, nor is it keeping pace with
accelerating rates of transmission drive by viral variants of concern, young
people’s increased vulnerability, and complacency around suppression measures.
$20 billion and counting: the economic hit from vaccination delays is a
very big deal
By Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden
April 20, 2021 —
5.28am
The
coronavirus vaccines are a modern miracle. Right now, in countries that have
been ravaged by the virus, like Israel, Britain and the US, the vaccines are
enabling a swift return to normal life. Social distancing can end. Travel can
resume. The cloud of uncertainty can lift.
While
our earlier performance led the world, the tables have turned rather quickly.
Others are gaining protection from the virus even without social distancing,
but our delayed rollout leaves us exposed. The government appears to have
finally realised this – proposing a target of a million vaccinations a week in
the last three months of the year. While many have claimed delays are no big
deal, make no mistake: the costs are very real and very large.
There
is the ever-present threat of an outbreak, and the renewed lockdowns and border
closures that would inevitably bring. That threat continues to cast a pall over
consumer and business confidence. If you think our recovery has been strong so
far, imagine how much stronger it would be were we all immune to the virus.
But
the key source of ongoing damage is our international border. Our first line of
defence, the border has been pivotal to saving tens of thousands of lives and
preventing even greater economic destruction. And the simple fact remains that
our border cannot reopen safely until our population is largely vaccinated.
A
year ago it appeared the global economy was about to fall into a
pandemic-carved abyss. Now, according
to the International Monetary Fund, it is experiencing its strongest
growth on record.
That
global growth – the IMF has forecast six per cent this year and 4.4 per cent in
2022 – means an economic catastrophe has been averted, or at least largely
blunted hasn’t, however, come without a cost.
The
IMF’s estimate of the fiscal responses of government to the pandemic is $US16
trillion ($20.7 trillion), a number that is still rising and which may even now
be conservative. It has said the peak for global fiscal deficits last year was
about 14 per cent of world GDP – a 10 percentage point increase on 2019.
The
four major central banks – the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank,
the Bank of Japan and the Peoples’ Bank of China – have so far expanded their
balance sheets by about $US10 trillion over the course of the pandemic.
‘Long hauler’ study shows COVID-19 can kill months after infection
Jason Gale
Apr 23, 2021 – 7.04am
One
of the largest studies of COVID-19 “long haulers” has proved what many doctors
suspected: Not only are many patients suffering a raft of health problems six
months after infection, they’re also at significantly greater risk of dying.
Survivors
had a 59 per cent increased risk of dying within six months after contracting
the SARS-CoV-2 virus, researchers reported on Thursday (Friday AEST) in the
journal Nature.
“We’re starting to see a little bit beneath that iceberg, and it’s
really alarming.”
— Ziyad Al-Aly
The
excess mortality translates into about 8 extra deaths per 1000 patients --
worsening the pandemic’s hidden toll amid growing recognition that many
patients require readmission, and some die, weeks after the viral infection
abates.
“When
we are looking at the acute phase, we’re only pretty much looking at the tip of
the iceberg,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of the research and development service
at the St Louis VA Medical Centre in Missouri, who led the study. “We’re
starting to see a little bit beneath that iceberg, and it’s really alarming.”
Al-Aly
and his colleagues documented the cascade of debilitating effects that plague
survivors months after diagnosis, from blood clots, stroke, diabetes and
breathing difficulties to heart, liver and kidney damage, depression, anxiety
and memory loss. They also found the risk of complications was far higher than
with the flu.
The NSW
government will impose a three-day lockdown on anyone arriving from Perth
following a COVID-19 outbreak, with top infection control experts and doctors
calling for an end to the hotel quarantine era.
A Melbourne
man is suspected of acquiring coronavirus during his quarantine period while
staying at Perth’s Mercure hotel, which had already been earmarked for closure
as a quarantine facility because of its poor ventilation.
Western
Australian Premier Mark McGowan said the Melbourne man, aged in his 50s, spent
five days in Perth following his quarantine and health authorities were
assuming he was infectious while there sparking a three-day lockdown of the
city.
New Zealand
has paused quarantine-free travel with Western Australia, with a flight due to
leave Perth on Friday night cancelled.
West
Australian premier Mark McGowan has threatened to permanently halve the number
of international arrivals into Perth unless the federal government opens up dedicated
quarantine facilities and has called for an immediate ban on anyone from
Australia travelling to India.
Perth
and the Peel region are in the first day of a snap
three-day lockdown after a returned traveller caught COVID-19 while in hotel
quarantine and triggered the first cases of community transmission of the virus
in more than 12 months.
There
was one new case of community transmission on Saturday and the city remains on
edge about the potential for more infections after it emerged a man who
acquired the virus while in hotel quarantine had been moving freely around
Perth for five days before boarding a flight with 257 passengers to return home
to Melbourne.
A
woman who the man in his 50s stayed with while in Perth tested positive on
Friday. She lives in the Perth suburb of Kardinya and works at a dental clinic
in Applecross.
Speaking to
the Business Council of Australia dinner in Sydney on Monday night ahead of
participating in this week’s greenhouse summit being hosted by US President Joe
Biden, Mr Morrison outlined the types of technological advances to enable net
zero to be reached.
“We need to
change our energy mix over the next 30 years on the road to net zero
emissions,” he said.
“We will not
achieve net zero in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner
cities.
“It will not
be achieved by taxing our industries that provide livelihoods for millions of
Australians off the planet, as our political opponents sort to do, when they
were given the chance.
Farming
and manufacturing have been named as key sectors in the federal government’s
push to achieve net zero carbon emissions, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison
promises action on climate change ahead of a global summit that is likely to
demand a 2050 deadline for the plan.
Mr
Morrison said the “road to net zero” was already under way and would include
energy and industry as well as agriculture and manufacturing.
But
he put no timeframe on the ambition in a speech on Monday night to the Business
Council of Australia, which supports the Paris agreement on climate change and
achieving net zero by 2050.
Mr
Morrison is expected to come under pressure from other leaders to commit to net
zero by 2050 at a series of global meetings this year, starting with a
gathering hosted by United States President Joe Biden this week, followed by a
meeting of G7 nations in Cornwall in June and culminating in the United Nations
climate summit in Glasgow in November.
Scott
Morrison may be right that Australia will not achieve net zero emissions “in
the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities”. But why did he
bother to pick that particular fight?
It’s another
example of the Prime Minister letting his political style get in the way of the
substance he wants to get across. Sometimes that style works well in ignoring
the loudest political noise to appeal to his “quiet Australians” in marginal
electorates. More recently, his tone has often seemed off-key for a range of
audiences well beyond inner-city cafes.
It’s true
Australia’s substantive record on reducing its emissions is much more
impressive than many other countries despite it being such a resource-dependent
economy, and that the Coalition gets little credit for this.
But politics
is always about managing popular sentiment as well. Easy rhetorical lines that
supposedly target inner-city greenies or Labor just provide the government’s
many critics further ammunition to suggest it really doesn’t care about climate
change. That charge is even more sensitive in the same week as the virtual
summit of 40 world leaders called by US President Joe Biden to try to get greater
commitments on emissions reduction by 2030.
Scott
Morrison and Anthony Albanese are targeting the blue collar and other workers
who need to be assured that tackling climate change will be good for them as
well as the planet.
In the space
of 24 hours, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese both delivered speeches on
climate change which, while differing in style, were aimed at precisely the
same audience: the blue-collar and other workers, predominantly in the regions,
who need to be assured tackling climate change will not only be good for the
planet, but also for them personally as well.
Albanese got
the ball rolling in October 2019, when he used his
first so-called headland speech to broaden Labor’s pitch on climate change
beyond the environment.
His heralding
of the potential for renewable energy to create a new “manufacturing boom” was
a direct pitch to those voters, including the coal communities in the Hunter
and Queensland, who
had spurned Labor in May that year.
They are the
same voters Joel Fitzgibbon argues are the difference between Labor being in
government – and therefore being able to effect change – or remaining in
opposition.
Albanese gave
examples at the time, including how the metallurgical coal industry would
benefit from a low-carbon future because it is needed to produce steel for wind
turbines.
Scott
Morrison says Australia is already doing the “heavy lifting” to
lower domestic emissions and will beat its 2015 Paris commitments at a canter –
and its track record is better than the the United States, the host of this
week’s climate summit.
Whether Joe
Biden, his special climate envoy John Kerry, and the rest of the world’s newly-emboldened
“climate club” of leaders pushing for greater action accept those
assurances is another matter.
US Secretary
of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday revealed he has ordered America’s diplomats
to challenge nations “whose action – or inaction – is setting the world back”.
“When
countries continue to rely on coal for a significant amount of their energy, or
invest in new coal factories, or allow for massive deforestation, they will
hear from the United States and our partners about how harmful these actions
are,” Mr Blinken said.
The banking
regulator says lenders may need to limit their exposure to customers at most
risk from climate change, or even consider dumping some of these clients, as it
pushes the industry to sharpen its focus on climate risks.
The
Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) on Thursday for the first
time released prudential guidance on climate change risks in a move to give
banks, insurers and super funds more clarity on a fast-moving issue.
The document
did not set hard rules on lending or investment, but said institutions were
expected to assess their portfolios for economic sectors, or regions, with
higher climate risks. This could include the physical risks of wild weather;
damage to asset values caused by moves to slash emissions; or the threat of
lawsuits against companies that failed to respond to climate risks.
APRA said it
expected banks would generally work with clients most exposed to climate risks
to improve the risk-profile of these customers.
Major reform
of Australia’s aged care system must start now. The final report from the Royal
Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety has landed, declaring that
fundamental change is needed to uphold the rights of older Australians.
Community
expectations are high after two years of horrific stories exposing systemic
failings that have persisted for decades. The Royal Commission called out
successive governments for lack of leadership and inadequate funding. It
highlighted perverse service and funding models, with weak accountability and
an over-stretched, under-trained, and underpaid workforce. These conditions
combine to create a system where thousands of older Australians miss out on
care and one in three receive substandard care. This is unacceptable and cannot
go on.
But
unfortunately, the Royal Commission did not provide a clear roadmap to a better
system. The final report was littered with disagreements between the two
Commissioners.
The
Government’s response to the Royal Commission report has not been promising so
far. The Government must lift its ambition, and seize this opportunity to
introduce landmark social policy reform fit to stand next to Medicare and the
National Disability Insurance Scheme. Aged care reform is more than a political
challenge, it’s a moral imperative.
Prime
Minister Scott Morrison has announced a royal commission on veteran suicides
after a long-running campaign by former soldiers and pressure from his own MPs
who voted in the Senate to establish it.
The
announcement comes just days after Mr Morrison revealed Australia would remove
its final 80 Defence personnel from Afghanistan in September, ending the
nation’s longest war after 20 years in the country.
“Every
single day the service of our veterans is something that is pressed on my
mind,” Mr Morrison said on Monday. “There is a far greater cost that is borne
beyond those deployments, and that is the mental toll taken on the veterans
after they return. That cost is most significant when we see it in the death by
suicide of our veterans.”
Mr
Morrison will release draft terms of reference for the royal commission later
on Monday. He said it will need the support of state and territory governments,
and he will address that at national cabinet on Monday afternoon.
The May 11 federal budget will reveal a $50bn improvement in the
budget bottom line for this financial year, economists predict, as the Reserve
Bank says the powerful post-COVID-19 rebound has already returned national GDP
to its pre-pandemic level.
The extended boom in the iron ore price, which at above $US180 a
tonne is well over triple the $US55 used in Treasury assumptions, and a labour
market recovery that has defied all expectations will drive a dramatically
smaller deficit than expected in the mid-year update only five months ago.
Commonwealth Bank head of Australian economics Gareth Aird said:
“The fact that government finances are going to look a lot better than they
thought does provide more wriggle room on the policy front.”
The Department of Finance has released numbers to February showing
actual budget outcomes were $23bn better over the first eight months of the
financial year, and analysts believe the eventual number will come in tens of
billions better still.
As
Josh Frydenberg prepares next month’s federal budget, one of the world’s most
important economic institutions has offered some striking advice on what his
priority should be: fairness.
The
International Monetary Fund, which oversees the stability of the global
economy, has warned the COVID-19 crisis is “intensifying the vicious circle of
inequality”.
In
its latest guidance
to governments on budget policy, titled A Fair Shot, the fund warns the pandemic has widened
the gap between rich and poor in most nations and “could morph into a social
and political seismic crack”.
That’s
not the sort of language we’re used to hearing from the economic hard heads at
the IMF.
I’m
old enough to remember when the fund was denounced by protesters for imposing
harsh budget austerity on nations in return for a financial lifeline. Activists
accused the IMF of being part of an “unholy trinity” – alongside the World Bank
and the World Trade Organisation – that promoted a brand of neoliberal
capitalism that destroyed local communities and hurt the poor.
As
Josh Frydenberg prepares next month’s federal budget, one of the world’s most
important economic institutions has offered some striking advice on what his
priority should be: fairness.
The
International Monetary Fund, which oversees the stability of the global
economy, has warned the COVID-19 crisis is “intensifying the vicious circle of
inequality”.
In
its latest guidance
to governments on budget policy, titled A Fair Shot, the fund warns the pandemic has widened
the gap between rich and poor in most nations and “could morph into a social
and political seismic crack”.
That’s
not the sort of language we’re used to hearing from the economic hard heads at
the IMF.
I’m
old enough to remember when the fund was denounced by protesters for imposing
harsh budget austerity on nations in return for a financial lifeline. Activists
accused the IMF of being part of an “unholy trinity” – alongside the World Bank
and the World Trade Organisation – that promoted a brand of neoliberal
capitalism that destroyed local communities and hurt the poor.
The
highest consumer confidence in 11 years has helped drive a 1.4 per cent jump in
seasonally adjusted retail sales, more than twice what some big bank economists
forecast.
Preliminary
data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed consumers spent $30.7
billion in March with big rises in Victoria, up 4 per cent, and Western
Australia, up 5.5 per cent, as both states rebounded from COVID-19 lockdown
restrictions in February.
Annual
retail sales rose 2.3 per cent in March compared to March 2020 when COVID-19
restrictions were introduced, leading to a spike in sales in
food retailing that month.
We think consumer confidence and record household savings will
fuel demand, with increased spend on out-of-home experiences.
Trade tensions with China have cost Australian exporters $5.5bn in
lost sales over the six months to January, despite early evidence that barley,
rock lobster, coal and cotton producers had found alternative markets for $500m
worth of their wares.
Research by Commonwealth Bank shows the imposition of bans and
extra taxes on Australian goods into China have triggered $5.5bn in lost
exports over the six months to January.
The fall in coal exports to China was equivalent to more than $5bn
alone over that period, a drop of nearly 80 per cent.
The
federal government will unveil billions of dollars in new measures to ensure
women’s economic security and personal safety in the May budget, after a
devastating two months in which it has taken significant political damage for
its handling issues related to women.
The
Sun-Herald and The
Sunday Age understand the budget will contain new policies to
bolster superannuation savings, tackle domestic violence and make childcare
more affordable.
Since
then, former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins has gone public with allegations
she was raped in March 2019 in Parliament House, other instances of
misbehaviour and bullying have been aired and the government has ordered a
review of parliamentary culture.
ASX
listed health insurer Medibank Private confirmed the appointment of David
Koczkar as its new chief executive officer effective from May 17.
Medibank
chairman Mike Wilkins confirmed that its chief customer officer will be
elevated to the top job, as first
reported on Friday in The
Australian Financial Review.
Mr
Wilkins said that the board was pleased to be able to appoint an executive of
Mr Koczkar’s calibre and experience.
“As
our chief customer officer David has been a champion for our customers and has
played an instrumental role in the growth and re-positioning of Medibank,” he
said.
Pfizer
and Moderna-style vaccines could soon be made in Melbourne, as the Victorian
government has committed $50 million towards establishing a facility to
manufacture mRNA coronavirus vaccines domestically.
The
mRNA coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have continually yielded
strong results in clinical trials with growing evidence suggesting they will be
much easier to reconfigure to cover new viral variants than more conventional
inoculations such as AstraZeneca’s, which is being made in Australia by CSL.
Vaccination
super sites to start priority immunisations in Victoria.
It’s
been a 30-plus year journey for small plasma fractionation biotech Aegros, but
the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting global plasma shortage have provided
the catalysts it needed to gain commercial traction for its product.
The
company, which raised $5 million in a round led by Barclay Pearce late last
year, specialises in splitting plasma into proteins such as immunoglobulin and
albumin, which are used to create therapies to treat a range of conditions
including immune deficiencies.
The
origins of the start-up date back to the 1980s when Dr Joel Margolis, a
renowned haematology researcher, created a separation, or purification, process
called tangential flow electrophoresis.
The
foundations for Aegros were laid in the late 1990s when Dr Hari Nair joined Dr
Margolis’ company, Gradipore, and applied this technique to plasma protein
purification.
Prime
Minister Scott Morrison says Australia will move to start making mRNA vaccines
locally as the Victorian government announced it was investing $50 million
towards building a manufacturing facility.
But that
manufacturing capability will not alter the nation’s vaccine supplies this
year, the Prime Minister warned, as the country’s leaders prepare to reset the
vaccination program in a national cabinet meeting on Thursday.
mRNA vaccines
had not been used clinically until the pandemic. But the technology has shown
huge promise with both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines proving highly effective
and evidence so far suggests those vaccines are easier to alter to cover new
variants than some other types of vaccines.
Mr Morrison
said it was crucial for Australia to have the ability to make those types of
vaccines, but not just for COVID-19. mRNA vaccines use genetic code from part
of a virus to teach the body to recognise invasive organisms and fight them,
whereas adenovirus vaccines use a genetically modified animal virus to do the
same thing.
“We will move
to do that,” he said. “mRNA vaccines will be important for vaccine development
into the future, and Australia is going to be part of that, and my government’s
going to be part of that. State governments will be part of that.”
Is any sane reader under any illusion about the People’s Republic
of China? Assuming not, I shall not labour the point that the Chinese Communist
Party is the greatest threat the free world faces in the century ahead.
You know that. You know the CCP is treating China’s Uighur
minority with hideous inhumanity, brutalising Hong Kong and breaking its word
to Britain, and trying to seize control of the South China Sea; that at home
China is becoming a surveillance state of Orwellian proportions, and abroad
stealing our intellectual property and tilting the playing field against our
exports; that the CCP tries to infiltrate our universities and intimidates great
Western commercial institutions such as HSBC into ashamed compliance.
You know, in short, that the CCP’s vision is of a rising China and
a free world dwindling by degrees into impotent dependency. Thanks to so many
passionately warning voices like those of former Hong Kong governor Chris
Patten, experts in the field like the Royal United Services Institute’s Charles
Parton, or brave television documentary-makers like Robin Barnwell, these
truths should not be in doubt.
But what are we to do? The risk is not of ignorance but despair: a
terrible danger we slip from “too soon” into “too late” without an intervening
moment of deliberation. That moment should be now, before it is too late.
Stagflation is a growing threat to the global economy
The problem
is not just the rush of cheap money, it is the structural bottlenecks in global
supply that are emerging in ageing populations and deglobalisation.
There is a
growing debate about whether the inflation that will arise over the next few
months will be temporary, reflecting the sharp bounceback from the COVID-19
recession, or persistent, reflecting both demand-pull and cost-push factors.
Several
arguments point to a persistent secular increase in inflation, which has
remained below most central banks’ annual 2 per cent target for more than a
decade.
The first
holds that the United States has enacted excessive fiscal stimulus for an
economy that already appears to be recovering faster than expected.
It took
nearly three months for the new US President to hold his first summit with
another nation’s leader in person. But when he finally found time and overcame
the COVID constraints, which leader did he choose to host in the White House? Japan’s
Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga, who visited Washington at the weekend, Australian
time. Why Japan? Because Japan is on the front line of the US confrontation
with China, America’s greatest struggle of the 21st century.
Driving home
the point, the relationship with Tokyo is “our most important alliance” in the
words of a background briefing that a White House official gave the American
press corps before the summit. Other capitals will have their noses out of
joint, but the truth is that Biden cannot succeed in meeting China’s challenge
without solid Japanese support.
Did he get it?
The declaration issued by Biden and Suga on the weekend “could be the decisive
act on Japan’s part to change from the path of improvement-oriented relations
with China to competition-focused or even confrontation, depending on how China
reacts”, says a leading Japanese analyst, Yoichi Kato. Because Biden
asked Japan to step up its commitment to help defend Taiwan, the self-governing
territory that China considers a “red line” priority, against any Chinese
aggression. And Japan did.
The world is
on alert over China’s moves against Taiwan. Beijing relentlessly has been
increasing its military pressure on Taiwan’s airspace and maritime zones in
recent months. Just last week Beijing flew 25 warplanes into Taiwan’s air
defence identification zone, the biggest number since Taiwan started disclosing
such reports last September. Taiwan scrambled its own air force to deter them.
Charles in charge: Prince is now the Queen’s closest counsellor
For the first
time in 70 years, the Queen does not have the Duke of Edinburgh to rely on for
counsel. The responsibility now falls to Prince Charles, who despite a
sometimes difficult relationship with his father, is ready for the job.
Simon Heffer
Apr 18, 2021
– 1.03pm
The
simplicity, magnificence and grandeur of the funeral
of the Duke of Edinburgh commanded a moment of British national unity and
reflection possible only in an old country, with a long and serene history of
monarchy.
Her Majesty,
like so many of her subjects bereaved in this time of pandemic, had to stand
alone, with only a few of her family around her.
With the Duke
of Edinburgh’s obsequies over, the responsibility for supporting Her Majesty
within what he called “The Firm” has passed to his eldest son, the Prince of
Wales. The heir to the throne is now the Queen’s closest counsellor; he will be
the first person she turns to when seeking a second opinion on matters of
state.
Unprecedentedly
in the 70th year of her reign, what Her Majesty does not know or understand
about statecraft is not worth knowing. But she is thoughtful by nature and her
reliance upon her late husband was based upon a sense of caution. Now, her son
and heir must bear the responsibility of being her sounding board.
New Zealand
has told Australia and its other Five Eyes partners the US, Canada and the UK
that it is “uncomfortable” about expanding the role of the grouping beyond
intelligence sharing, as Wellington tries to avoid a breakdown in its relationship
with China.
In an
acknowledgment of New Zealand’s difficult strategic environment, Foreign
Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the Ardern government was becoming “more alert to
the values that differentiate” Wellington from Beijing, citing concerns on Hong
Kong, the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang and cyber attacks.
“It’s not
getting any easier to be a small country,” she said.
The address
was delivered on Monday as Foreign Minister Marise Payne and International
Development and the Pacific Minister Zed Seselja prepare to visit New Zealand
for three days of talks starting on Wednesday.
Less than
three months ago, New Zealand Trade Minister Damien O’Connor set off a Trans-Tasman storm — widely reported in China’s
state-controlled media — after he said Australia “should follow us and show
respect” to improve its relationship with President Xi Jinping’s
administration.
President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US military forces from
Afghanistan by September 11 is his first big blunder in office. This could
cost the US dearly in future years and should give America’s friends and allies
pause to ask if Biden has the grit for the tough road ahead.
The President’s announcement, laughably titled On the Way Forward
in Afghanistan, was nothing more than an unseemly bolt for the exit, based,
Biden tells us, on a conviction he formed in 2008 “that American military force
could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government”.
In fact, that is precisely what American, Australian and other
forces delivered to Afghanistan: a flawed but functioning democracy, keeping
the Taliban at bay and preventing groups such as al-Qa’ida from using
Afghanistan as a training base from which to attack the West.
Here Biden and Donald Trump are on a unity ticket, locked on to a
bizarre sabotage mission, negotiating and now honouring a “diplomatic agreement”
with the Taliban while deserting the Afghans who have fought with our forces
during the past two decades.
Former Minneapolis policeman Chauvin convicted of murder in Floyd case
Jonathan
Allen
Apr 21, 2021
– 7.34am
Minneapolis |
Former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin was convicted on Tuesday (Wednesday
AEST) of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter in the
deadly arrest of George Floyd, a milestone in the fraught racial history of the
United States and a rebuke of law enforcement’s treatment of black Americans.
The 12-member
jury found Chauvin, 45, criminally liable in Floyd’s death last year after
considering three weeks of testimony from 45 witnesses, including bystanders,
police officials and medical experts. Jurors began their deliberations on
Monday.
Judge Peter
Cahill read a guilty verdict on all three counts, including third-degree
murder, as reached by the jury in the trial of former Minneapolis police
officer Derek Chauvin in the kneeling death of George Floyd last year.
In a
confrontation captured on video, Chauvin, who is white, pushed his knee into
the neck of Floyd, a 46-year-old black man in handcuffs, for more than nine
minutes on May 25, 2020, as he and three fellow officers arrested Floyd, who
was accused of using a fake $US20 bill to buy cigarettes at a grocery store.
The Fed is on the hot seat as the Great Inflation looms
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
April 21, 2021 —
8.29am
We
know what caused the Great Inflation of the Johnson-Nixon years: the US stoked
a fiscal boom to pay for both the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty at the
same time.
America
continued to ramp up “guns and butter” spending after the output gap had been
closed and the economy was hitting capacity constraints. Rather than raising
taxes to pay for welfare expansion, it relied on loose money from the Federal
Reserve. The Fed obliged.
Needless
to say, it was less clear at the time that the price structure was becoming
unhinged. Inflation was very low and apparently stable through the early and
mid-1960s, even when unemployment dropped to 4 per cent and the labour market
was as tight as a drum. Fed doves could not resist the temptation of running
the economy hotter.
They
kept playing down signs that inflationary pressures were building in the supply
pipeline. They thought they could safely squeeze yet more job gains out of the
ageing cycle. The Democrats then in charge of the White House and Congress
lavished Fed doves with praise.
Ukraine last
week protested the Russian move to close broad areas of the Black Sea near
Crimea to foreign navy ships and state vessels until November.
The US also
aired its concern on Monday, with State Department spokesman Ned Price saying
“this represents yet another unprovoked escalation in Moscow’s ongoing campaign
to undermine and destabilise
Ukraine.”
Price noted
that the move “is particularly troubling amid credible reports of Russian troop
buildup in occupied Crimea and around Ukraine’s borders.”
The European
Union also voiced concern about the troop buildup and the navigation restrictions.
Russian
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov charged that the restrictions on foreign
naval ships were in line with international agreements, arguing that it’s
common practice to limit areas where military drills are held. He emphasised in
remarks carried by Russian news agencies that the restrictions wouldn’t
interfere with commercial shipping.
‘An eye for an eye’: Missile strikes near Israeli nuclear reactor,
prompting retaliation
By Josef Federman
April 22, 2021 —
12.32pm
Jerusalem:
A missile launched from Syria was fired into southern Israel early on Thursday,
setting off air raid sirens near the country’s top-secret nuclear reactor, the
Israeli military said. In response, it said it attacked the missile launcher
and air-defence systems in neighbouring Syria.
The
Israeli army said it had deployed a missile-defence system but could not
confirm if the incoming missile was intercepted, though it said there had been
no damage. The air raid sirens were sounded in Abu Krinat, a village just a few
kilometres from Dimona, the Negev desert town where Israel’s nuclear reactor is
located.
With the
pandemic still
raging across Europe there’s been a revival of interest and discussion
about a concept borne out of the 2008 global financial crisis. Analysts,
commentators and bank regulators are again talking about the dreaded “'doom
loop'”.
The
expression emerged out of the sovereign debt crisis that nearly engulfed
southern Europe, most notably Greece, a decade ago when Greece came perilously
close to defaulting on its sovereign debt and had
to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central
Bank, other Eurozone economies and, via a haircut on their loans, private
investors. Its major banks had to be recapitalised by the state.
The eurozone
debt crisis of 2010-11 was borne out of the excessive debt burdens of the southern
European governments and the nexus between that indebtedness and their
also-fragile banking systems, which were overloaded with bad debts and badly
undercapitalised after the 2008 crisis.
Updated April
22, 2021 — 11.58amfirst published at 9.43am
National
security experts and federal Labor have welcomed the Morrison government’s
decision to tear up Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’s Belt and Road agreement
with the Chinese government, but some have warned it now needs to manage the
fallout including economic retaliation from Beijing.
Foreign
Minister Marise Payne announced on Wednesday night the Belt and Road Initiative
deal – which tied the state to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature
initiative to bankroll infrastructure projects around the world – has
been cancelled under the Commonwealth’s new foreign veto laws.
The two deals
Victoria struck with the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping’s
signature foreign policy have been ruled invalid under the nation’s new foreign
veto laws on the basis that it contradicts Australia’s foreign policy of
countering the infrastructure spending blitz around the world.
London:
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been savaged for sucking up to
China and turning her
back on the Five Eyes alliance during a historic debate in which British MPs unanimously
declared that China is carrying out genocide and crimes against humanity.
The
vote on the motion addressing Beijing’s repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang
province was carried unanimously, making it the first time in the Commons’
history that MPs have passed a genocide motion without dissent.
During
the debate, Australia was
praised for its actions in standing up to China, despite the massive cost
to the trading relationship, estimated to be worth $20 billion, as Beijing has
blocked lobster, wine, barley and some coal imports since Canberra asked for an
inquiry into the origins of coronavirus.
Russia orders end to huge military drills near Ukraine
AFP
·April 23, 2021
Russia's
defence minister on Friday ordered an end to military drills near Ukraine
involving tens of thousands of troops and dozens of warships that had
exacerbated tensions with the West.
The West has
repeatedly called on Putin to pull back troops, and on Thursday the United
States said it would wait for Moscow to follow up on its announcement of an end
to the military drills near Ukraine.
Mission accomplished. The now-nullified Belt and Road Initiative
memorandum of agreement had achieved its core goal merely by being signed by
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews in 2018.
Its termination by the federal government adds icing to that cake.
Beijing is using it vigorously to adduce further evidence for its argument
that Canberra is being irrationally mean to the People’s Republic of China. It
makes ample use of such events to double down on its rhetorical attacks and
commercial coercion.
It will persist with this strategy despite failing to shift either
Australian government policies or popular concerns about the PRC.
The search for a missing Indonesian navy submarine has become a
desperate race against time with the sub’s oxygen supply due to run out by 3am
on Saturday.
The 44-year-old German-built KRI Nanggala-402 vessel is feared to
have sunk to the bottom of a deep sea trench off Bali early on Wednesday with
53 people on board.
Indonesian navy spokesman Julius Widjojono said the Nangalla, a
1395 tonnes diesel-electric attack submarine, may have suffered an electrical
failure and lost control as it submerged around 3.46am on Wednesday (5.46am
AEST) during a torpedo drill 37km north of Bali.
While the vessel had 72 hours’ worth of oxygen on board — enough
to sustain the 49 crew members, commander and three gunners until early on
Saturday — there are fears it has sunk too deep to be rescued and is now at a
depth beyond its capacity. If so it will be the first ever major submarine
disaster in the Southeast Asian archipelago.
Reading the Xi leaves: what’s next for the Chinese President
If Xi Jinping
had followed the rules, he would be stepping down next year. The longer he
stays in office without an anointed successor, the greater the risk of a power
struggle.
Such
is Xi
Jinping’s political dominance in China – one dissident called
his rule a kind of “exquisite totalitarianism” – that any notion he might one
day step down barely registers these days.
Xi
appears to have an iron grip on the ruling Chinese Communist Party, the
military and the security services. State and private business empires have
learnt the hard way not to oppose his edicts. His diplomats style
themselves as “wolf warriors”, aggressively prosecuting foreign
policy.
However,
Xi’s drive for power has far-reaching consequences, not just for China, but
given the country’s economic and geopolitical weight and reach, the world too.
In
early 2018, without public notice, Xi abruptly removed de facto term limits on
the most senior position of power, the head of the Communist Party, and thus
far has refused to nominate his successor.
Anger, denial and grief: rich Americans and Biden’s tax plans
Devon
Pendleton, Max Abelson and Suzanne Woolley
Apr 24, 2021 – 5.18am
Charles
Myers was sitting in a first-class seat on a flight from New York to Dallas
when his phone started blowing up on Thursday. News had just broken that the wealthiest
Americans could soon face a tax rate as high as 43.4 per cent on gains from
their investments.
The
chairman of Signum Global Advisors wasn’t thrilled.
“Raising
capital gains taxes hurts the capital markets,” he said in a text message.
“Better to raise the personal top marginal rate and estate tax. Leave capital
gains and dividends alone.”
Myers
has raised funds for Joe Biden, and wasn’t shocked by the White House’s plan
because it was part of the president’s campaign. But the donor doesn’t think that
43.4 per cent rate will make it into final legislation.
As
the plane descended, he added: “Over-taxing success is un-American.”
US and China are pricing in very different futures
By Tom Stevenson
April 23, 2021 —
6.32am
High
rates of Chinese growth have raised eyebrows in the past, but the problem with
last week’s first quarter GDP numbers was simple arithmetic. When your starting
point is the biggest drop in economic output since records began, the
comparison a year later is almost bound to look spectacular.
Boosting
China’s economy by
a record-breaking 18.3 per cent in the three months to March was
an impressive performance – evidence of the country being first in and first
out of the pandemic. But the number is a one-off curiosity for data nerds,
rather than an indication of what lies ahead for the rest of the year. As we
heard at the recent national congress, China’s ambition is to grow at a high
but sustainable level of 6 per cent.
As
ever, the forward-looking stock market reaction is the best guide to what’s
really going on. On Friday, it was a shrug. The CSI 300 index of leading shares
in Shanghai and Shenzhen barely moved on the news. When you consider that this
benchmark has fallen by 15 per cent since February, the lacklustre response
showed that no one is getting over-excited by China’s growth prospects.
Investors
look through the headlines to what is coming down the track – and in China’s
case, expectations are considerably less feverish than they are on either side
of the Atlantic. Here, we are still luxuriating in the belief that successful
vaccine rollouts, reopening economies and a torrent of fiscal and monetary
stimulus will sweep us towards the sunlit uplands.
India’s giant second wave is a disaster for it and the world
·By The Economist
·4:58PM April 23, 2021
April 14th was a big day in India. Hindus and Sikhs gathered to
mark the new year. Many Muslims celebrated the first day of Ramadan at
late-night feasts with friends and family. In Haridwar, a temple town that this
year hosts the Kumbh Mela, an intermittent Hindu festival that is the world’s
biggest religious gathering, between 1m and 3m people shoved and jostled to
take a ritual dip in the Ganges. And across the country, the number of people
testing positive for COVID-19 for the first time surpassed 200,000 in a single
day. It has continued to surge since, reaching 315,000 just one week later—the
highest daily figure in any country at any point during the pandemic. Deaths,
too, are beginning to soar, and suspicions abound that the grisly official toll
is itself a massive underestimate. Makeshift pyres are being constructed on
pavements outside crematoriums to deal with the influx of bodies.
This horrifying second wave is a catastrophe not only for India
but for the world. Allowing the virus to circulate unchecked increases the risk
that dangerous new strains will emerge. One worrying variant first detected in
India, called the “double mutant”, has already been found in several other
countries, including America and Britain. Even as scientists labour to
understand how big a threat it poses, more variants are appearing.
A more immediate consequence of India’s second wave for the rest
of the world is a disruption to vaccine supplies. India had hoped to be the
world’s pharmacy. But with case numbers exploding the government has restricted
exports of vaccines. In the first half of April India shipped just 1.2m doses
abroad, compared with 64m in the three prior months. The Serum Institute of
India, a private company that manufactures the AstraZeneca vaccine, has
defaulted on commitments to Britain, the European Union and covax, a scheme to
supply more shots worldwide. African countries that had been counting on India
to provide them with vaccines are looking on in dismay.
Singapore/Jakarta
| The Indonesian Navy believes the submarine that has been silent since Wednesday morning
is severely damaged after debris was found in the search area in waters north
of Bali.
The Navy had
earlier estimated the KRI Nanggala would have run out of oxygen by 3am this
morning local time (6am AEST). The status of the submarine has changed from
missing to sunk.
The debris
found included a cooling pipe, a torn prayer mat and a bottle of lubricant used
on the submarine’s periscope, said Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Yudo Margono who
showed the objects at a press conference live-streamed from Bali on Saturday
afternoon.
Admiral Yudo
said the condition of the 53 men on board the 44-year-old submarine is unknown.
However, sonar suggests the vessel has sunk 850 metres, a depth much greater
than the submarine could withstand for an extended time.
