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.
Thursday, May 20, 2021
The Macro View – Health, Economics, and Politics and the Big Picture. What I Am Watching Here And Abroad.
In India there are just the barest signs of
improvement while SE Asia and Nepal are really failing.
Was\r has broken out between Israel and Hamas
and it is getting out of control in terms of lives lost.
In the US seems to be unable to help in the
Middle East while at home things continue to stabilise.
In the UK fears are building regarding the
risks of a new COVID variant from India that may cause big problems.
In Australia we have had the Federal Budget
and are in a major spendathon. Who knows when we will see any level of balance
returning but it is clear it is a decade out at least!
Having beaten the ‘drums of war’
first, Labor now falls silent
Pushback
against China long ago ditched prudence for paranoia. But after starting the
gung-ho rhetoric, Labor is now saying nothing substantial about Australia’s
greatest geostrategic challenge.
In recent weeks Australian
ministers, senior public servants and military commanders have again worked
themselves into a lather over China’s intentions towards Taiwan.
The public hears not only the beating “drums of war” but the march of its special
forces into the “valley of hell”. In Canberra, tongues once more uncoil.
Thought swirls in the very same cauldron as barely concealed racial anxiety.
The region watches on as Australia jumps up and down in a time-honoured
tradition of trying to put steel in America’s backbone. Asian capitals must
either be aghast, amused or simply uninterested by such antics.
These latest remarks join
exultation in some quarters that dissent on Australian China policy is steadily
being driven into a ditch. Universities and business have been largely
silenced.
Talking up war over Taiwan goes
against Australia’s national interest
Making clear a willingness to fight for
democratic Taiwan in its hour of need might advance our status as a good
international citizen, but it would also prejudice our own security and
prosperity.
Gareth Evans
May
9, 2021 – 9.49am
It is never wise, in foreign
affairs and defence policymaking, for emotion to trump reason, for politics to
trump objectivity, or for sensitive judgment calls on major national interest
issues to be made before they have to be.
Talking up, as so many now are,
the prospect of war with China – with Taiwan as the likely trigger point – runs the risk of offending all
three prescriptions.
Before pounding more rhetorical drums, and producing ever more strident
legislative, executive, diplomatic and military responses, the Morrison
government, and those in the commentariat who sail with it, need a reality
check. They need to address the key factors in play here – focusing on the
world as it is, not as they would ideally like it to be, or irrationally fear
that it might be – as summarised in the following checklist.
First, China’s new assertiveness
under President Xi Jinping is a given. China makes no secret of its ambition to
match the United States as a global player, to carve out its own strategic
space in the western Pacific, and to become a regional hegemon to which all its
neighbours pay deference.
Business smarts is why the
insolvency ‘cliff’ has disappeared
There
are few ‘zombies’ after the end of JobKeeper because firms have horded cash and
restructured debt. The challenge now is seizing opportunities on the other side
of hibernation.
Scott Langdon
May
9, 2021 – 3.16pm
Dire predictions about a COVID-19
insolvency “cliff” have failed to come true. Thousands of businesses decimated
by the pandemic would never reopen, the doomsayers warned.
Zombie companies would
disintegrate when JobKeeper and other federal government stimulus ceased. There
would not be enough insolvency practitioners to deal with the avalanche of
failed businesses.
Guess what? It didn’t happen. There is no cliff. There will be no deluge of
insolvencies. Yes, there will be an increase from 2020 – which was abnormally
low due to government intervention and external administrations were down 54
per cent from 2019 – but it will not be in mass proportions.
Australian investment in China
fell by 25 per cent last year. That is unprecedented, and ominous.
Once a year the Australian Bureau
of Statistics (ABS) publishes supplemental statistics on Australia’s
international investment position.
These provide a comprehensive
assessment by country, which is not available in the quarterly balance of
payments. We get to see where Australia has invested abroad, and which
countries have invested in Australia.
The ABS began this report in 2001,
when Australia’s external assets were $542 billion. The stock has increased in
every year since.
This has been largely driven by
compulsory inflows to our superannuation funds, and by their pursuit of
international diversification. At the end of 2020, as disclosed by the ABS on
Wednesday, Australia had $3.044 trillion invested abroad.
The
federal government has sensibly decided not to extend the threat of jail for
Australians returning from India. This, though, should not be the end of the
matter. The ban imposed by federal Health Minister Greg Hunt reveals deep
problems with how laws are made during the pandemic. Australians are right to
ask how a minister, at the stroke of a pen late one Friday evening, could
subject citizens to imprisonment for returning home, without even the prospect
of this being disallowed by parliament.
Parliament
is meant to be the nation’s ultimate lawmaker. It has the legitimacy to make
laws for the whole community because it is a representative body elected by the
people. It also conducts its proceedings and debates in public, meaning that is
always subject to scrutiny. The Constitution recognises this by vesting the
legislative power of the commonwealth in our federal parliament.
Despite
this, exceptions have arisen that permit laws to be made other than by
parliament. Most importantly, parliament can delegate its lawmaking power to
ministers in the executive government. This reflects the fact that parliament
does not have the time to debate the detailed regulations often required to
accompany its laws. Sometimes laws must also be made by ministers with urgency
and decisiveness, especially at times of war and national crisis.
Josh Frydenberg’s big-spending budget and a
booming domestic economy obscure the risks and reality of the fractured
relationship with Australia’s biggest trading partner.
Updated May 10, 2021 – 5.47pm, first
published at 5.36pm
The good news in this big-spending budget
will totally overwhelm any pockets of bad news. But China, even if largely
unacknowledged, remains central to both.
Record iron ore prices are certainly not the
only reason Josh Frydenberg can spend tens of billions of dollars more
yet still boast of an
improving bottom line. But with recent prices nearly four times the conservative $US55 a tonne predicted in the last budget, China’s demand
for iron ore provides a generous buffer for Canberra’s own largesse.
That open spigot of money from Beijing may
not be a permanent feature but the sunny outlook for Australia’s key export and
Australia’s budget revenue is unlikely to change in the short term.
Despite its best efforts, China still has no alternative supply yet available either from potential new mines in Africa or
from a decimated and distracted Brazil.
Australian warships have already
conducted four transits of the South China Sea this year, intensifying the
tempo of operations in the heavily contested waterway amid growing tensions with China.
The navy last week publicised that
three of the navy’s Anzac class frigates, Anzac, Ballarat and Parramatta, along
with replenishment vessel HMAS Sirius, had sailed through the southern reaches of the South
China Sea.
The pace of this year’s transits –
four in the first five months – compares with six across all of 2020, Defence
officials confirmed.
“[The ships] are currently
conducting two separate regional presence deployments aimed at strengthening
practical co-operation with regional partners and enhancing interoperability,”
the Defence Department said in a statement.
Education is the only remaining Australian
export market to China worth more than $10 billion that Beijing could target
without inflicting significant harm on its own economy, a new report says.
Given the potential vulnerabilities of the
education market, Australia must adopt a more concerted and co-ordinated
approach to diversifying countries from which students are sourced, a report
from the National Security College at Australian National University says.
“If there was a significant drop in students
from China, the revenue and research loss would be impossible to fully replace
through other international markets because China is the largest source of
globally mobile students. It would also be costly for the government to step in
and fully fund the gap,” the report says.
Industrial policy is back in
fashion as geopolitical tensions increase
The new cold war is driving the fashion for
state intervention. But claims industrial policy will also produce
better-paying jobs and a more productive economy deserve deep scepticism.
Updated May 11, 2021 – 9.20am, first
published at 9.13am
Old ideas are like old clothes – wait long
enough and they will come back into fashion.
Thirty years ago, “industrial policy” was
about as fashionable as a bowler hat. But now governments all over the world,
from Washington to Beijing and New Delhi to London, are rediscovering the joy
of subsidies and singing the praises of economic self-reliance and “strategic”
investment.
The significance of this development goes
well beyond economics. The international embrace of free markets and
globalisation in the 1990s went hand in hand with declining geopolitical
tension. The Cold War was over and governments were competing to attract
investment rather than to dominate territory.
The Morrison government has thrown its
support behind an Iluka Resources plan to develop the first fully integrated
rare earths supply chain on Australian soil and in doing so create a processing
hub for third-party miners.
A letter signed by Trade Minister Dan Tehan
and Resources Minister Keith Pitt reveals they met the Iluka board to discuss
the rare earths plans in March and formed the view it was a project worthy of
backing.
Iluka has yet to put a price tag on the
project but Goldman Sachs has estimated it will cost the company about $1.2
billion for a cracking and leaching plant, a refinery producing 20,000 tonnes
of rare earths oxides a year and to develop the Wimmera mine in Victoria.
The processing plant would be built at
Iluka’s existing minerals sands operations at Eneabba in WA.
That’s why the top 5 per cent of
taxpayers pay a third of all personal tax.
So the government promised tax
cuts that paid back bracket creep and simplified the rate scale. And, to
improve the politics, low to middle income earners got their cuts six years
before higher income earners were scheduled to get theirs.
Entrenched budget deficits and
debt exceeding $1 trillion will force tax rises, big spending cuts or
cancelling income tax cuts for higher earners a few years from now, economists
said.
The budget
projects annual deficits for another decade, equal to about 1.5 per cent of GDP
by 2031-32, or about $30 billion in today’s dollars.
About one-third of the extra
spending was temporary, for income tax refunds for low and middle earners and
business tax breaks.
Canberra-based Outlook Economics
director and former Treasury official Peter Downes said he was surprised by the
lack of medium-term fiscal consolidation in the budget and that the
affordability of the stage three personal income tax cuts was “very doubtful”.
Consumers do not understand the very real
limitations of “general” financial advice and sections of the financial advice
industry are calling for it to be renamed “information,” so as to better
protect client interests.
General advice, unlike “personal” advice, is
not required to take into account the client’s individual financial situation
or needs. And more importantly, it does not have to be of any benefit to the
consumer.
General advice can sometimes be nothing more
than explaining the features of a financial product. That’s no problem if that
is all it is. The risk comes when the person providing the information is
trying to sell a financial product.
The problem has been underlined in a survey of consumers commissioned by the Australian Securities
and Investments Commission (ASIC) that found no measurable difference in
consumers’ understanding of general advice – regardless of what it was called.
The most depressing item of expenditure in
the federal budget was not even specifically mentioned. But it was there in the
weeds, the money carefully tucked away. We are going to spend $2.5bn on buying
75 main battle tanks and some associated kit from the US. And that is just part
of more billions of dollars we’re spending on other, hugely heavy (and
therefore largely unusable) tracked, manned combat vehicles for the army as
part of the Land 400 program.
We know about this purchase partly because,
in the vaguest, most generic terms, it was in the defence force structure plan.
We know about it more specifically because, as my colleague Ben Packham revealed, the US Defence Security Co-operation Agency
announced its approval for the sale. The US has laws which oblige its agencies
to announce when such foreign sales have been approved, even if they haven’t
been finalised.
Why do I find the tank purchase so utterly
depressing? It’s not that they are instruments of war. All civilised human
beings hate war. But if you value peace, prepare for war.
It’s not the martial aspect of tanks that is
depressing. It is instead the sheer idiocy and the anachronistic frivolity of
Australia acquiring tanks and similar heavy, tracked vehicles which can never
be of the slightest military use to us. And our doing this at a time of acute
strategic challenge in our own region, when our maritime assets are woefully
inadequate to the need, reflects the kind of high-minded strategic blindness,
the paradigm paralysis and inertia of the defence organisation. Australia has
not used a tank in anger since the Vietnam War. Our combat troops were mainly
gone by late 1971, so that’s 50 years in which we have had no use for tanks.
But we’ve had them all that time.
Washington: Foreign Minister Marise Payne
says the United States’ vocal support for Australia should embolden other
countries to stand up to Beijing when the Chinese government threatens their
national values and interests.
Payne held her first in-person meetings with
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington on Friday (AEST) as well as
meetings with other top Biden administration officials.
Payne said the Morrison government is pushing
for a more thorough investigation into the origins of the coronavirus while
maintaining its belief the virus probably emerged from wildlife rather than a
Chinese laboratory leak.
At a joint press conference at the State
Department, Blinken backed recent remarks by Indo-Pacific Co-ordinator
Kurt Campbell that China’s
economic coercion of Australia is a roadblock to a normalisation of relations
between the rival superpowers.
Bond
vigilantes may stop believing the US central bank’s assurances that inflation
is under control and take matters into their own hands, writes Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
May
14, 2021 – 10.16am
The US is engaged in an
astonishing monetary experiment. The Federal Reserve is still conducting
quantitative easing even as the rate of headline inflation hit 4.2 per
cent.
Core inflation has risen to a
25-year high of 3 per cent, recording the biggest jump in a single month since
1981. Factory gate inflation has been running at a 7.1 per cent annual growth
rate over the last six months even before full reopening.
The Biden administration is
running a budget deficit of 13 per cent of GDP this year even though the output
gap closed in April and large parts of the economy are overheating. Small firms
cannot find workers. Unfilled job openings have reached a record high.
Yet interest rates are zero and
the Fed is still buying $US120 billion of bonds each month, directly financing
part of Washington’s “war economy” debt issuance. It is persisting even though
the broad M3 money supply has grown at 24 per cent over the last year. It is
downplaying all evidence of pent-up inflation as “temporary”.
A hidden $1.1 billion saving has
sparked fears of cuts to services for Australians out of work despite a federal
pledge to drive the unemployment rate to record lows by helping people find new
jobs.
The efficiency drive will shift
1.2 million job seekers to an online service in a bid to replace face-to-face
advice from employment service providers paid by the government to help the
unemployed.
The savings were included in a
series of measures listed in the federal budget on Tuesday night outlining
sweeping changes to the JobActive system used for two decades to place people
in work.
Community and employer groups are
concerned the plan flouts a 2018 report to the government that said all the
savings from the online model should be invested in better services for the
long-term unemployed.
What this week’s budget proves is that fiscal (budgetary) stimulus
really works, something many economists had come to doubt over the four decades
in which monetary policy – the manipulation of interest rates – was the main
instrument used to manage the economy’s path through the business cycle.
That potency’s the main reason the economy
has rebounded from last year’s government-ordered deep recession far earlier and more strongly than any
economist (or I) had expected.
It’s now clear that, by the March quarter of this year, the economy’s production of goods and
services – real gross domestic product – had returned to its level at the end
of 2019. The level of employment was a fraction higher than before the virus
struck, and the rate of unemployment had gone most of the way back to its
pre-virus 5.1 per cent.
And it was Scott Morrison’s massive boost to
government spending – JobKeeper, the temporary JobSeeker supplement and all the
rest – “wot done it”.
London: Cristina Williams came to Australia
as a UN war refugee from El Salvador aged 10.
But she says the country that welcomed her
with open arms is unrecognisable to her now as a result of harsh border bans
that have trapped citizens inside the country, locked tens of thousands out and
culminated in the threat to jail and fine any Australian who
tries to flee coronavirus-ravaged India. Some have
dubbed it Fortress Australia.
While much of the focus of Australia’s border
closure has been on the difficulties citizens have returning home, lesser-known
are the stories of the growing number of Australians looking to leave
permanently.
“I was a UN war refugee. Australia was a
place that rescued my family when we were in need but that Australia is dead,”
41-year-old Williams says.
“Australia has now taken other families that
are suffering and instead of finding a way to get them here they’ve turned
their back. They’re actively shutting people out,” she says, fighting back
tears.
Grieving for freedom: Why many of
us feel trapped inside fortress Australia
By Dr Nancy
Jiang
I
learnt recently that one in four Australians is born overseas. I am one of
them. My mother was granted political asylum by the Hawke government after the
Tiananmen Square massacre and I have called Australia home since I was 10 years
old.
I arrived with no preconception of
what Australia was like and not a single word of English. As I learnt the
language and the ways of society, I became proud to call myself an Australian.
I went to school with people from incredibly diverse backgrounds. I became a
medical doctor, and then an intensive care specialist. I have always been
extraordinarily grateful for the life-changing move that my parents made and
the opportunities I have had growing up in the freedom of the West.
However, that has changed. For the
first time in the last three decades, I feel a growing sense of unease as the COVID-19
pandemic unfolds.
My father usually visits his
elderly mother in China every year, he and his sisters having a roster to care
for her. The roster, like many other things in COVID, has been thrown out the
window. He hasn’t seen her for 18 months and his anxiety is growing. He is
scared of not being able to return to Australia, that the borders could slam
shut any time and that he would not have access to medical care for his own
health conditions. He feels imprisoned in the country that he calls home
because my grandmother is frail but not imminently dying. Apparently only being
almost-dead or actually dead generates the amount of grief required for the
government to let us out of prison.
If
Victoria’s story is a book, then there is a whole chapter which is the
Indigenous experience – the full story of which has never been told.
But the recent launch of
Victoria’s truth-telling commission – the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission
– offers the chance to tell it, to ensure that we fill in the gaps of the story
of Victoria.
The commission will bring the
good, the bad and the ugly; imperatives that will help us identify who we are
and importantly, where we are going.
My hopes? That truth-telling will
move to restore Indigenous culture and identity and empower Indigenous people
to take control of their future; financially, economically and socially.
Victorian
Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has told healthcare workers in a private
seminar that the country will reach a critical juncture where it must abandon
its fortress Australia approach to COVID-19 and “make a call on letting it run”
once vaccinations have been widely offered.
In recordings from two recent
events leaked by government insiders, Professor Sutton also revealed he had
been “shocked” at the Victorian government’s “steadfast” refusal to adapt and
acknowledge mistakes during the coronavirus pandemic.
Professor Sutton told the audience
at an event in late April that vaccinations were not progressing as fast as he
would like and Australians were lacking urgency because of the country’s
success against coronavirus.
The Chief Health Officer indicated
a time would come when the Commonwealth would have to reopen international
borders and accept there would be cases of COVID-19, although the impact of
those cases would be stifled by vaccinations.
Defence spending needs to match
the risk of conflict now
If
Beijing wanted to slow down the growth of Australian-US defence co-operation in
the Top End, surely a very clever way to do it would be to take control of the
area’s most viable port ...
In
an expansionary budget, one area that felt a bit underdone was Defence. Here, the
government delivered what it promised 12 months ago: $44.6bn, an increase over
last year’s budget of 4.1 per cent in real terms.
At
any time in the last 25 years a Defence budget growing at that level would have
been welcome. But now Australia and the wider region faces the direst strategic
outlook perhaps since the end of World War II.
It’s
clear that Scott Morrison and his ministers understand that the region is
facing a crisis brought on by an increasingly bellicose Chinese Communist
Party. Taiwan is the immediate flashpoint, with the level of risk peaking in
perhaps four to five years’ time. In that period, according to the US Defence
Department, the People’s Liberation Army will gain a strong military edge over
the Straits of Taiwan in air power, missiles and ships.
Would
Xi Jinping risk his own future, as well as that of the Chinese Communist Party,
to stage an attack on Taiwan? Xi has learned to turn risky situations to his
advantage. In the illegal annexation of the South China Sea, in cyber spying
and intellectual property theft, the imposition of Communist authority in Hong
Kong and in the economic coercion of Australia, Xi took significant risks to
strengthen his rule and largely got away with them.
The crisis in India’s hospitals is likely to
run well into July, even if the second wave of COVID-19 infections peaks this
month – or at least that is the best guess forecasters can glean from limited
data.
For national and international policymakers
trying to chart a path through India’s pandemic disaster, the reported figures
are an indication of direction, rather than a true measure of the disaster
engulfing the country, observers say.
India reported a record 412,262 new
infections and 3980 deaths on Thursday. Some predict the nation will report
500,000 new cases in a single day before infections start to diminish. The true
figures are likely to be much higher – as much as 20 times, according to a
prominent mathematical modeller, Professor Gautam Menon.
In an interview with Indian news site The
Wire, Professor Menon said while reported cases would peak at between 500,000
and 600,000, the number of undetected daily cases would be between 8 million
and 10 million a day.
Global solutions require help for
two-thirds of the world
Like curbing global warming, containing the
global pandemic requires tackling the vast inequalities between rich and poor
countries that have been exacerbated by COVID-19.
What is remarkable about the increase in
nationalist sentiment across the developed world in recent years is that it is
occurring at a time when many of today’s most pressing challenges, including
climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, are fundamentally global problems
demanding global solutions.
And the anger brewing among citizens of
vaccine-poor countries – basically, the two-thirds of humanity living outside
the advanced economies and China – could come back to haunt the rich world all
too soon.
US President Joe Biden’s ambitious plans
to address inequality in America are to be welcomed, provided the
administration succeeds in covering the long-run costs through higher taxes or
stronger growth, admittedly two big ifs.
So, too, is the smaller but still significant
Next Generation EU scheme to help European Union members such as Italy and
Spain that have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
Coronavirus: Sweden’s lockdown
delay ‘cost 2000 lives’, study reveals
·By Oliver Moody
·The Times
·11:26AM May 12, 2021
Sweden
could have prevented nearly 40 per cent of the coronavirus deaths in its first
wave had it imposed a timely lockdown, a study suggests.
While
neighbouring governments closed shops, bars, schools and restaurants, and in
some cases ordered citizens to stay in their homes, Sweden mainly relied in the
early stages of the pandemic on recommendations and a ban on gatherings of more
than 50 people.
Over
the first six months nearly 6000 Swedes died of COVID-19, one of the highest
per capita death rates in Europe at that time and substantially worse than
other Nordic states.
Three
economists in Germany have now estimated that at least 2,000 of those lives
might have been saved with a prompt lockdown.
The
coronavirus pandemic has wiped out almost two decades of improvement in US life
expectancy, according to new research that finds the chance of dying over the
last 12 months was the same as it was in 2001.
Before
COVID-19 emerged an 80-year-old man in the US had a chance of dying in the next
12 months of 5.82 per cent, according to JPMorgan analysis of official
statistics, compared to 4.28 per cent for a similarly aged woman.
“Due
to the COVID-19 pandemic, these probabilities rose to around 6.76 per cent and
4.83 per cent respectively, increases of 16 per cent, and 13 per cent,” said
David Mackie, a JPMorgan analyst.
“This
further widened the gap between mortality risk for males and females, because
at all ages males have been more likely to die of COVID-19 than females,” he
added.
Viewed
another way, the increase in mortality risk for men aged between 75 and 84 of
1.15 percentage points was 64 per cent greater than the increase for women
(0.71 percentage points).
London | The Morrison government has
snapped up 25 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, in a surprise boost to the
nation’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout.
The deal will deliver 10 million
doses of Moderna’s standard vaccine this year and 15 million of its booster
vaccine candidate next year, the US-based pharmaceutical giant said late on
Wednesday (AEST).
The company said it would
“shortly” submit an application to the Therapeutic Goods Administration for its
two-dose messenger RNA vaccine, which uses the same technique as the
Pfizer/BioNTech jab.
The news came after the government
announced in the budget that it planned to spend an unspecified
amount bankrolling the creation of immediate, large-scale manufacturing
capability for mRNA drugs in Australia.
Step out of the COVID bunker: Long
border closure is questioned by experts
By David Crowe
May 12, 2021 — 7.17pm
Australians should embrace a different
approach to risk from the coronavirus as millions of people sign up for
vaccines, leading scientists said in the wake of a contentious budget
assumption that could keep international borders closed until the middle of
next year.
The warning will fuel a political debate over
the vaccine rollout and border controls as Prime Minister Scott Morrison
defends the big-spending federal budget against Labor accusations that he is
not doing enough to speed up vaccinations and expand the capacity of the
quarantine regime.
While the budget did not include new spending
on quarantine facilities, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg signalled on Wednesday the
government was open to a proposal from Victoria, and potentially other state
governments, to build more facilities like the Howard Springs quarantine centre
near Darwin.
NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet challenged
the federal timeframe on borders by calling for a clear roadmap to opening
Australia to the world, as business leaders also warned about the damage from
turning away travellers and banning citizens from leaving the country.
The pandemic has upturned many orthodoxies
and expectations. But in this era of wild uncertainty, one thing is sure. There
will be another pandemic.
That is why Australia’s enlightened
self-interest demands a greater financial and intellectual contribution to
global health efforts. Especially the reconstruction of the World Health
Organisation.
The budget did little new for those who
expect Australia to play its part in global humanitarian and health efforts.
While the commitment to sharing vaccines from our own stockpile with poorer
nations was laudable, there was no enduring increase to the overseas
development aid budget. In fact, the permanent aid spend is projected to drift
lower in the years to come and we are now ranked one of the least generous aid
donors in the OECD, committing just 0.19 per cent GNI to foreign aid.
However, we do balance against this is the
government’s habit of funding specific out-of-budget commitments. These include
the half-billion-dollar commitment to Pacific and south east Asia vaccination,
a four-year $485 million package of support for south east Asia, and an $80
million COVAX Advanced Market Commitment – the global vaccine co-ordination
effort.
Official
figures say there have been 55,000 COVID-19 deaths in South Africa since March
27 last year. That puts the country’s death rate at 92.7 per 100,000 people,
the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. It is also a significant underestimate — as,
it seems safe to infer, are all the other African data on the disease.
Over
the year to May 8 the country recorded 158,499 excess deaths — that is, deaths
above the number that would be expected on past trends, given demographic
changes. Public-health officials feel confident that 85-95 per cent of those
deaths were caused by SARS-COV-2, the COVID-19 virus, almost three times the
official number.
The
discrepancy is the result of the fact that, for a death to be registered as
caused by COVID-19, the deceased needs to have had a test and been recorded as
having died from the disease. Although South Africa does a lot of testing
compared with neighbouring countries, its overall rate is still low. And the
cause of death is unevenly recorded for those who die at home.
To power to our emissions target,
we must double our energy research
By Luke Heeney and Daniel D’Hotman
May 12, 2021 — 1.14pm
Australia is increasingly isolated on climate
action. If we don’t increase our ambition soon, we will feel the heat diplomatically,
economically, and physically.
Our policy of “technology not taxes” is
unlikely to get us to net-zero by 2050. And if we don’t put our money where our
mouth is, we probably won’t get close. Decarbonisation will not be free.
“Technology not taxes″
simply means taxpayers will wear the cost of developing and commercialising
low-emissions technologies.
We could develop these technologies more
cheaply. An economy-wide carbon price would help to ‘pull’ technologies through
and amplify the effectiveness of research and development spending. By refusing
to price carbon, we make our task more difficult and more costly. So, we will
need to spend even more on energy R&D to subsidise clean technologies until
they reach cost parity with dirty alternatives.
So
you’ve started to think about aged care. It might be for you, one of the
fast-growing cohort of older Australians. It might be for a loved one, who
could do with some help to stay living in the family home or has reached the
stage where residential care might be a safer option.
Or
it simply might be that as a taxpayer, you wonder how much of the almost $18bn
in extra funding committed to the aged-care sector in Tuesday’s federal budget
will be spent on care for the elderly and how much might end up lining the
pockets of the more unscrupulous aged-care providers.
The
Morrison government used the budget to respond to the final report of the
aged-care royal commission, which mapped out a five-year path to reform for
many aspects of the sector. The response cleared up many questions about how
aged care will be delivered in coming years, but left many hanging. We take a
look at some of those questions.
I
need support to stay in my own home, but there’s a big waiting list for
home-care packages. Does this budget help me?
A
qualified yes. The budget is spending up big on care in the home, committing
$6.5bn to fund 80,000 additional home-care packages over the next two years. It
is the largest ever investment in home care.
Will the budget be a requiem for
economic responsibility?
If
Josh Frydenberg eschews more pump-priming and makes tough fiscal choices to
help drive investment and productivity, Tuesday night could be the Treasurer’s
finest hour.
The federal budget on Tuesday night will be a
requiem to the one-time robustness of Australia’s medium-term macroeconomic
frameworks, both fiscal and monetary.
It is sobering to think that just
18 months ago Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was on the brink of delivering a budget
surplus. Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe had ruled out using
unorthodox monetary policy. C’est la vie.
Both the Treasurer and RBA
governor can be congratulated for helping the national economy ward off much of
the adversity associated with the coronavirus tragedy. It also seems their
policy mix has created a mini-boom on the other side. But there is a long-term
price to be paid for all the necessary remedial action.
Policy is continuing to fuel the
30-year, tax concession-fuelled boom in east coast residential real estate.
This has combined with the unprecedented global monetary expansion of the US
and other majors (ex-China) to support stockmarket reflation and resurgence.
Fadden’s ‘horror’ 1951 budget is a
lesson in sacrifice
The
past is a foreign country. But the chief lesson of the 1951 budget is that
prioritising short-term economic and political imperatives can ultimately
require drastic corrective action.
May
9, 2021 – 5.53pm
The past is a foreign country, and
Australia is a very different place compared to 70 years ago. But the story of
the “horror” 1951 federal budget is relevant to the macroeconomic policy
challenges Australia faces after the Great Pandemic. The chief lesson is that
prioritising short-term economic and political imperatives can, bit by bit, get
out of control and ultimately require drastic corrective action.
Elected in 1949 on a free
enterprise, anti-central-planning platform, the Menzies government lifted the
wartime controls on the economy that the Chifley Labor government had
maintained long after hostilities ceased, amid fears of a repeat boom-bust
cycle catapulting the country into another depression.
The Menzian ambition to end
austerity and govern amid prosperity led it to depreciate and undervalue the
currency to fire up commodity exports in a country that then rode on the
sheep’s back rather than on truckloads of iron ore. But when this collided with
the Korean War wool boom, Sir Arthur Fadden moved to pull back the runaway
economy and dampen inflationary pressures.
As editor-in-chief Michael
Stutchbury’s account on the features pages sets out, Treasurer Fadden’s
punitive one-third hiking of the tax burden on households and businesses
attracted the editorial ire of the fledgling Financial Review. Less than
two months into its existence, Australia’s first national newspaper put a stake
in the ground for private enterprise, which it feared was set to be supplanted
as the engine of growth by tax-funded public sector “development”.
Why the budget won’t deal with
universities’ existential threats
Andrew NortonProfessor in the
practice of higher education policy
May
10, 2021 – 12.02am
Decisions about opening
Australia’s borders to international students matter more for higher education
than anything likely to be in Tuesday’s budget.
But the 2021-22 budget is still
important for students, research and the survival of some higher education
providers.
In one early announcement,
Education Minister Alan Tudge promised help for private higher education
providers hit by falling international student numbers.
Regulatory charges will be paused
again and 5000 additional domestic student places funded for undergraduate
certificate and graduate certificate courses.
In Tuesday night’s budget, it will be
important to note its assumptions about when our international borders will be
back to functioning normally. Not because they’re sure to be right, but because
our borders will have a big impact on Scott Morrison’s new strategy of getting
unemployment down to get wages – and thus living standards – up.
As the Commonwealth Bank’s Gareth Aird has reminded us, fancy calculations about how low unemployment has to fall
before labour shortages force employers to bid up wages, rest on the (usually
reasonable) assumption that our borders will be working the way they always
have.
If our borders are temporarily closed to immigration and overseas students,
however, the point where skill shortages emerge may arrive a lot earlier than
the fancy calculations suggest. What’s more, it’s become clearer that the day
where our border conditions return to normal may be a lot further into the
future than we’d first hoped.
It will be interesting to search the budget
papers for signs that these complications don’t come as news to the economic
managers, but have been built into the new strategy’s design.
This big-spending budget exposes a revolution
in macroeconomic policy management that turns the old fiscal rules upside down
and rewrites the play book in a near-zero interest rate world.
The justifications for a more activist fiscal
policy are economic and political, a convenient confluence for a government
facing an election in the next 12 months.
In a changing of the guard, economic power
has decisively shifted from the RBA’s Martin Place headquarters in Sydney to
the Treasury and Parliament in Canberra.
With official interest rates anchored at 0.1
per cent and monetary policy virtually exhausted, a Liberal Treasurer has acted
on the advice of Treasury and the RBA that the budget must continue doing the
heavy lifting – even after the major COVID-19 economic shock has passed.
Australia has gone straight back to its
recurring bad habit: the permanent spending of any temporary budgetary gain. It
just assumes everything will keep going the government’s way.
May 11, 2021 – 9.10pm
Australia under the Morrison government and
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has pulled off an astonishing recovery from the
pandemic.
Last year’s emergency spending put a $311
billion backstop under the economy, and the Reserve Bank slashed interest rates
to practically zero.
The reward has been the sharpest of V-shaped
rebounds. GDP growth is now forecast to be 4.2 per cent in 2021-22, up from the
December estimate of 3.5 per cent. The ASX is at record highs. So is the NAB business confidence forecast. And so is the gusher of an iron ore price
which is touching $US230 a tonne – against a price assumption in the budget of
$US55 by March 2022.
Some of the budget deficit pressure has been
relieved too. Forecast tax receipts over the next four years are up by $84.5
billion on the revenue expected in December, driven by rising iron ore prices
and rapidly recovering employment.
The October budget, just seven months ago,
forecast deficits of $480 billion over the four-year forward estimates, now
down to $342 billion, with the forecast $213 billion deficit for this 2020-2021
year cut to a slightly less eye-watering $162 billion.
Unlike the US and the UK, the government is
not raising tax rates to try to cover the damage. The 23.9 per cent tax take to
GDP ceiling is still in place.
This is the lick-and-a-promise
budget. The budget that proves it is possible to be half pregnant. Which makes it the
couldabeen budget. Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg had the makings of a
champion of budgets, but their courage failed them.
It’s not a bad budget. Most of the
things it does are good things to do. Its goal of driving unemployment much
lower is exactly right. Its approach of increasing rather than cutting
government spending is correct, as is its strategy of fixing the economy to fix
the budget.
But having fixed on the right
strategy Morrison, reluctant to be seen as Labor lite, has failed in its
execution. Economists call this “product differentiation”; others just call it
marketing.
Some are calling this a
big-spending budget. It isn’t. Frydenberg has kept his promise that it would be
no “spendathon”. As a pre-election vote-buying budget it hardly rates. Its “new
and additional tax cut” for middle-income earners of up to
$1080 a year turns out to be not a tax cut but the absence of a tax increase.
Biotech heavyweights Cochlear and
CSL are celebrating a long-fought win for concessions that would see income
from Australian patents for biotechnology products taxed at a lower rate.
It’s a measure the biotechnology
sector has lobbied for over the past decade, with chief executives including
Cochlear’s Dig Howitt long arguing that introducing a patent incentives scheme
would stop intellectual property developed in
Australia
from moving offshore to more countries with more attractive tax settings.
Mr Howitt welcomed news of the
scheme, saying the flow-on effects of keeping home-grown IP onshore were
significant.
Australia faces “generations” of deficits
following the 2021-22 federal budget, with economists warning that without
far-reaching policy reform the country could be left mired in debt that will
weigh on taxpayers forever.
Macroeconomics chief economist Stephen
Anthony said the budget would never recover from the spending splurge unleashed
by the coronavirus pandemic, with the government unwilling to engage in real
reforms that would not only cover ongoing deficits but also help boost wages to
ordinary workers.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has forecast a deficit of $106.6 billion in 2021-22 after a record
shortfall of $161 billion this financial year. By 2024-25, the deficit is still
expected to be around $57 billion.
But longer-term forecasts in the budget show
the deficit ongoing well into the next decade. By 2031-32, the deficit is
forecast to be 1.3 per cent of GDP, or about $42 billion.
The federal budget’s historic return to big government presents both a major opportunity
and challenge for bureaucratic leaders to demonstrate the importance and value
of the public sector in modern Australia.
After years of concern about the
public sector crowding out business investment and the building up of long-term
public liabilities, the need to support the response and recovery to COVID-19
has seen the federal government open the purse strings to nearly $600 billion
of spending in the coming financial year.
For context, that’s nearly double
in nominal dollars what the then Rudd government committed in its response to
the 2008 financial crisis and around 30 per cent of projected GDP.
Crudely, government is being
called on to carry nearly one-third of the economic load over the next 12
months, an enormous responsibility to get right.
Labor has promised a $10 billion fund to cut
housing costs for workers in a response to the federal budget that seeks to
galvanise voter concerns about soaring house prices and rising rents.
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese also
pledged more incentives for employers to hire 10,000 apprentices in fields like
renewable energy, accusing the federal government of doing too little to help
younger Australians.
Opposition leader Anthony Albanese is
delivering Labor's response to the 2021 federal budget in Parliament.
He also challenged Prime Minister Scott
Morrison to do more to protect women from sexual harassment, saying a Labor
government would pass laws to place a “positive duty” on employers to eliminate
sex discrimination, harassment and victimisation.
For the best part of the past quarter
century, the fortunes of Australian treasurers have flourished or died by the iron ore price.
As this week’s budget demonstrated for anyone
who had forgotten: revenue from China for the steel-making dirt and the rivers
of federal taxes it generates is still the great wildcard of Australia’s
political economy.
It giveth and taketh away irrespective of the
brilliance, or otherwise, of the individuals who manage the budget.
But it also creates traps. It can give
treasurers false confidence or excessive pessimism. The country suffers
under both delusions.
A leading credit rating agency has warned
Labor’s plans to inject up to $45 billion into special investment funds for
housing, the energy grid and manufacturing could weigh on Australia’s AAA
rating.
While the so-called “off-budget” spending has
the political advantage of appearing to be fiscally responsible by not
increasing the deficit, the investments would still be counted as debt by
credit agency S&P Global Ratings.
Labor is exploring using more off-budget
measures to pay for its policies, while Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese also
flagged policies to help people buy their own homes as he seeks to make soaring
house prices a key campaign theme.
The centrepiece of Mr Albanese’s budget reply
speech on Thursday night was the creation of a $10 billion fund to help build 30,000 low-cost houses, including those for front-line workers
locked out of inner-city suburbs near where they work, and for emergency
accommodation for partners and children fleeing domestic violence.
Josh Frydenberg’s third budget
speech had barely been delivered in the House of Representatives on Tuesday
night when the focus of the budget coverage
seemed to become overwhelmed by the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and what it meant
for when borders would open and the economic outlook.
Given that the budget represented
one of the most spectacular, and opportunistic, volte-faces in political ideology in at least the past 30 years, the government may have been
quietly grateful for this.
The debt-and-deficit parsimony
that has driven the Coalition’s often ideological cuts to government spending,
and which drove the Coalition’s relentless political attack on Labor, has been
put into the cupboard.
It has been stashed away in
deference to a new-found homage to, dare one say, “jobs and growth”, even as
the spending still flowing through the economy from last year’s emergency
measures is set to deliver a better jobs outcome than existed in the
pre-pandemic, and debt and deficit, era.
An economist who once worked for
the federal Treasury, Stephen Anthony, describes the Morrison government’s
federal budget this week as “a requiem”. But whose funeral is it?
Responsible government financial
management, for starters. The Liberals who contemptuously dismiss this budget
as “Whitlamesque” do Gough a grave injustice. As a proportion of the economy,
the debt and deficit in this Josh Frydenberg budget is vastly bigger than
anything Whitlam committed.
The new term of abuse for fiscal
wantonness could be “Frydenbergian”. Or “Morrisonian”, depending on who wants
to take responsibility.
Whitlam’s biggest deficit was
equivalent to 1.8 per cent of Australia’s economy, or GDP. This year’s will be
equal to 5 per cent of GDP, according to the budget papers. More than double.
Peter Costello has warned Treasurer Josh
Frydenberg that record federal government spending cannot continue and there
needs to be structural reform to both grow the economy and repair the budget.
The former treasurer’s advice at the
traditional post-budget Higgins 200 breakfast in Melbourne on Friday follows
the forecasting of a $106.6 billion deficit in 2021-22 after a record $161 billion shortfall this
financial year.
The 2021-22 budget outcome is in stark
contrast to the federal government’s pre-coronavirus view that deficits were
unsustainable and the budget would be “back in the black” by now. It has
instead unveiled a $74.6 billion spending plan aimed at getting the nation’s economy
surging post-pandemic, on top of the huge outlays it made during the crisis to
save jobs. By 2024-25, the deficit is expected to be about $57 billion.
Scientific research has backed up
the effectiveness of nurse-to-patient ratios introduced by the Queensland
government, showing they demonstrably prevented re-admissions, shortened
hospital stays, and reduced costs.
The state government introduced
the measure in 2016, ensuring a minimum number of nurses-to-patients was to be
maintained across Queensland hospitals.
The government asked experts from
the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a real-time assessment of the scheme
to make sure it was having a favourable effect.
The University of Pennsylvania
collaborated with researchers from Queensland University of Technology’s School
of Nursing for the study, and they have now officially published the results of
the review.
‘Desperately disappointing’
setback for ovarian cancer screening hopes
By Kate Aubusson
May 13, 2021 — 8.30am
Long-awaited results of a major
ovarian cancer study three decades in the making found screening women detected
the disease before they developed symptoms but didn’t save lives.
The findings are a devastating
blow for ovarian cancer researchers, patients and their supporters who had
hoped the trial involving more than 200,000 women would lead to early diagnosis
and ultimately national screening programs that would prevent thousands of
ovarian cancer deaths every year.
But they were adamant that new
highly effective early detection tests would be discovered, and significant
advances in treatments since the trial ended had improved the lives - and
potentially the outcomes - for women with the insidious disease.
“It’s desperately disappointing,”
said Professor Ian Jacobs, vice chancellor at UNSW and gynaecological
oncologist who spearheaded the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer
Screening (UKCTOCS) since its preliminary days more than 30 years ago.
US declares state of emergency to
keep fuel flowing after cyber attack
Myles McCormick, Derek Brower, Lauren Fedor and Hannah Murphy
May
10, 2021 – 1.26pm
New York/Washington/San Francisco | The US government declared a
state of emergency on Sunday (Monday AEST) in a bid to keep fuel supply lines
open as fears of shortages rose following the shutdown of an essential
pipeline.
The move lifted various limits on
the transport of fuels by road to ease the fallout from the continuing closure
of the Colonial pipeline, which carries almost half the fuel consumed on the US
east coast, following a ransomware cyber attack on Friday.
“This Declaration addresses the
emergency conditions creating a need for immediate transportation of gasoline,
diesel, jet fuel and other refined petroleum products and provides necessary
relief,” the Department of Transportation said.
The order came as the government
scrambled to deal with the repercussions from the closure of Colonial, the
biggest refined products pipeline in the US, which transports 2.5million
barrels of fuel a day from refineries on the Gulf Coast to markets such as
Atlanta, Washington and New York.
Updated
May 9, 2021 – 2.17pm, first published at 1.50pm
The editor of a Chinese newspaper
says Beijing should consider launching long-range strikes on Australian
military facilities if Canberra were to join a US-backed conflict in the Taiwan
Strait.
While the comments published at
the weekend do not reflect the Chinese government’s official position, they are
the latest sign of the intensifying hostilities between Canberra and Beijing
that have alarmed diplomats and investors.
Hu Xijin, the notoriously hawkish
editor of the Global
Times tabloid, published an editorial on Saturday calling on China to establish a
plan for “retaliatory punishment” against Australia if it provided military
support to Taiwan.
“The plan should include
long-range strikes on the military facilities and relevant key facilities on
Australian soil if it really sends its troops to China’s offshore areas and
combats against the PLA [People’s Liberation Army],” Mr Hu wrote.
That week took the total value of
Australia’s fine art auctions so far this year to 37 per cent more than for the
same period in the last pre-COVID year, 2019. “The market has been
exceptionally strong around the world in all categories for eight months now,”
the director of one of the auction houses, Merryn Schriever of Bonhams
Australia, told The
Financial Review.
And we know that Australia’s real
estate market is ridiculously overheated, but it’s not alone. Last year, while
the world economy shrank by 3 per cent, house prices increased by an average 5
per cent across the 16 developed countries measured by the Federal Reserve Bank
of Dallas. In the midst of a pandemic.
In New Zealand, house prices
soared by 21 per cent in the year to the end of February, prompting Prime
Minister Jacinda Ardern to call it a “dangerous housing bubble”. Her government announced the
end of tax deductibility for mortgage interest by investors and told the
Reserve Bank of NZ it had to start worrying about real estate prices in setting
interest rates.
Putin sounds a warning to the West
at victory day parade
·By Marc Bennetts
·The Times
·6:31PM May 10, 2021
President
Putin pledged that Russia would defend its national interests “firmly” as he
oversaw a military parade on Red Square yesterday to commemorate the 76th
anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.
The
parade came amid rising tensions with the United States and other NATO member
states over a host of issues including alleged Kremlin cyberhacking and
Russia’s military build-up on Ukraine’s borders.
The
two sides have engaged in tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions in recent weeks.
Yars
intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, tanks, armoured personnel
carriers and other military hardware rolled past the Kremlin’s walls during a
parade involving 12,000 Russian troops, with Putin, 68, watching from a stand
that also seated Soviet war veterans.
Above
Red Square, Su-35 fighter jets accompanied a TU-160 strategic nuclear bomber in
a dramatic flyover. At the end of the parade, Su-25s soared high above the
city, trailing exhaust fumes in the white, blue and red colours of the Russian
flag.
Netanyahu says Palestinian
militants to pay ‘very heavy’ price for rocket attacks
By Nidal
al-Mughrabi and Jeffrey Heller
UpdatedMay 12, 2021 —
12.42pmfirst published at 4.11am
Gaza/Jerusalem: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu warned that Palestinian militants would pay a “very heavy” price
after three Israelis died from rocket attacks on Tel Aviv, in the latest round
of violence to roil the region.
Israel carried out multiple air
strikes in the Palestinian territory of Gaza raising the death toll of
Palestinians to 32.
The rockets fired from Gaza
reached the outskirts of Jerusalem on Monday during a holiday in Israel
commemorating its capture of East Jerusalem in a 1967 war.
“We are at the height of a weighty
campaign,” Netanyahu said in televised remarks alongside
his defence minister and military chief.
“Hamas and Islamic Jihad paid ...
and will pay a very heavy price for their belligerence ... their blood is
forfeit.”
China’s population growth rate the
slowest in decades
·AFP
·6:09PM May 11, 2021
China’s
population has grown at its slowest pace in decades, reaching 1.41 billion,
census results showed on Tuesday.
The
growth of 5.4 per cent since the last census in 2010 reflects fears of a
looming demographic crisis amid an ageing society and slowing birthrates, with
a sharp drop in the number of working-age citizens in the world’s
second-biggest economy.
The
growth rate was the slowest since the 1960s. Beijing changed family planning
rules in 2016 to allow families to have two children amid fears grew about
China’s fast-ageing population and shrinking workforce — but it is yet to
produce the expected baby boom to help offset the country’s ageing population.
“The
adjustment of China’s fertility policy has achieved positive results,” said
Ning Jizhe, an official from the National Bureau of Statistics.
But
he added that the “ageing of the population imposed continued pressure on the
long-term balanced development of the population in the coming period”.
The
number of people aged between 15 and 59 dropped nearly 7 per cent, while those
aged over 60 was up more than 5 per cent.
China’s census highlights its
looming population problem
·By Liyan Qi
·Dow Jones
·10:00PM May 11, 2021
China
said its population hit 1.41 billion in 2020, eking out a tiny rise from the
previous year, underlining how the world’s most populous nation is going to
have to face its demographic challenges sooner than expected.
The
number — up from the 1.40 billion official data showed for 2019 — indicated
that China’s population has only gone up by 72 million since the last census,
in 2010.
In
a news conference after the release, Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of
Statistics, said there were 12 million births last year, which would represent
an 18% drop from the 14.65 million the year before, a trend that is likely to
increase pressure on Beijing to ease remaining birth restrictions. It was the
fourth straight year of declining births after a rise in 2016, the first year
after China ended the three-decade-old one-child policy.
Mr.
Ning said China’s fertility rate — the average number of babies a woman will
have over her lifetime — dropped to 1.3 last year, which he acknowledged as a
low level. By comparison, the U.S. — also in a fertility slump — last week reported
a total fertility rate of 1.64 last year.
Washington | US consumer prices climbed in
April by the most since 2009, topping forecasts and intensifying the
already-heated debate about how long inflationary pressures will last.
The consumer price index increased
0.8 per cent from the prior month, reflecting gains in nearly every major
category and a sign burgeoning demand is giving companies latitude to pass on
higher costs.
Excluding the volatile food and
energy components, the so-called core CPI rose 0.9 per cent from March, the
most since 1982, according to Labor Department data on Wednesday (Thursday
AEST).
The gain in the overall CPI was
twice as much as the highest projection in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
Similar to last week’s monthly jobs report, forecasters are struggling to get a
handle on the rapidly reopening economy.
‘Is this the big one?’: The next
intifada could be fuelled over TikTok
By Thomas L. Friedman
May 12, 2021 — 4.47pm
New York: Let’s see, what happens when TikTok
meets Palestinian grievances about right-wing Israeli land grabs in Arab
neighbourhoods in Jerusalem? And then you add the holiest Muslim night of
prayer in Jerusalem into the mix? Then toss in the most emotional Israeli
holiday in Jerusalem? And a power play by Hamas to assume leadership of the Palestinian
cause? And, finally, a political vacuum in which the Palestinian Authority is
incapable of holding new elections and Israel is so divided it can’t stop
having elections?
What happens is the explosion of violence
around Jerusalem on Monday that quickly spread to the Gaza front, and has
people asking: Is this the big one? Is this the start of the next Palestinian
uprising?
The Israeli government, the surrounding Arab
nations and the Palestinian Authority all desperately want the answer to be
“no” – Israel because it would find little support from a left-leaning White
House, let alone the rest of the world, for a big crackdown on Palestinians;
the Arab governments because most of them want to do business with Israeli
tech-makers, not get mired defending Palestinian rock-throwers; and the
Palestinian leadership because it would expose just how little it controls the
Palestinian street anymore.
But unlike the intifadas that began in 1987
and 2000, when Israel had someone to call to try to turn it off, there is no
Palestinian on the other end of the phone – or, if there is, he’s a 15-year-old
on his smartphone, swiping inspiration from TikTok, the video app often used by
young Palestinians to challenge and encourage one another to confront Israelis.
Republican Party ‘cancels’ Liz
Cheney in sacrifice for Trump’s approval
By Matthew
Knott
May 13, 2021 — 6.05am
Washington: The Republican Party has now made
it official. You can still hold a leadership position in the party if you
believe that Donald Trump fomented the January 6 Capitol insurrection with his
lies about election fraud. You just have to keep quiet about it.
By removing Liz Cheney from her
position
as the third most senior Republican in the House of Representatives, a party
that loves to rail against left-wing “cancel culture” has now cancelled one of
its own.
The decision had nothing to do
with ideology or policy. The daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney has
impeccable conservative credentials: Heritage Action, a leading right-wing
think tank outreach group, has awarded Cheney a lifetime rating of 80 per cent.
She’s a low tax-supporting foreign policy hawk with traditional views on issues
like abortion and same-sex marriage.
She’s also got an independent
streak and is unafraid to speak her mind.
‘The genie’s out of the bottle’:
Inflation is here. What now?
By Neil Irwin
May 14, 2021 — 10.04am
The central fact of the US economy in
mid-2021 is that demand for all sorts of goods and services has surged. But
supplies are coming back slowly, with the economy acting like a creaky machine
that was turned off for a year and has some rusty parts.
The result, as underlined in new government
data this week, is shortages and price inflation across many parts of the economy. That is
putting the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve in a jam that is only
partly of their own making.
Higher prices and the other problems that
result from an economy that reboots itself are frustrating but should be
temporary. Still, the longer that the surges in prices continue and the more
parts of the economy that they encompass, the greater the chances that Americans’
psychology about prices and inflation could shift in ways that become
self-sustaining.
For the past few decades, companies have
resisted raising prices or paying higher wages because they felt that doing so
would cost them too much business. That put a damper on inflation across the
economy. The question is whether current circumstances are evolving in a way
that could change that.
Never mind who started it, it’s
clear who benefits from the violence in Gaza and Israel right now
By Gwynne Dyer
May 13, 2021 — 4.05pm
“Objective allies” generally don’t even talk
to each other. They don’t have common values, their ultimate goals may be
completely incompatible, they often hate each other. But they share some
intermediate goal, and are clever enough to realise they can both get what they
want by acting together in certain ways.
Sometimes those ways may even involve
shooting at each other, but if acting that way brings a result that serves
their various purposes, they are still objective allies. So Benjamin Netanyahu,
still prime minister of Israel despite his parlous political position, and
Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian organisation that controls the Gaza Strip, are
objective allies.
Updated May 13, 2021 — 11.25amfirst published
at 7.12am
London: Progressive politics is facing
extinction, former British prime minister Tony Blair has warned in a stinging
critique of the far-left and its “voter-repellent” approach to culture, gender,
race and identity.
Blair, one of just three Labour leaders to
ever win general elections in the United Kingdom, also said his crisis-plagued
party needed “total deconstruction and reconstruction” - remarks which sparked
fresh speculation that the 68-year-old might be mulling a comeback.
In an essay for the left-leaning magazine New
Statesman, Blair said there were only flickers of a progressive agenda with
deep majority support around the globe and predicted the problem would worsen
without an urgent change of strategy.
“Political parties have no divine right to
exist and progressive parties of the centre and centre-left are facing
marginalisation, even extinction, across the Western world,” he said.
Updated May 13, 2021 — 11.49amfirst published
at 6.05am
Washington: The Republican Party has now made
it official. You can still hold a leadership position in the party if you
believe that Donald Trump fomented the January 6 Capitol insurrection with his
lies about election fraud. You just have to keep quiet about it.
By removing Liz Cheney from her position as the third most senior Republican in the
House of Representatives, a party that loves to rail against left-wing “cancel
culture” has now cancelled one of its own.
The decision had nothing to do with ideology
or policy. The daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney has impeccable
conservative credentials: Heritage Action, a leading right-wing think tank
outreach group, has awarded Cheney a lifetime rating of 80 per cent. She’s a
low tax-supporting foreign policy hawk with traditional views on issues like
abortion and same-sex marriage.
She’s also got an independent streak and is unafraid
to speak her mind.
The
US is spending more than it did on World War II and risks turning itself into a
failed welfare state like France.
Bret Stephens
May
14, 2021 – 10.49am
Years ago, Alexis Tsipras, the
party leader of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left, surprised me with a
question. “Here in the United States,” the soon-to-be prime minister asked me
over breakfast in New York, “why do you not have this phenomenon of passing
money under the table?”
The subject was health care.
Greece has a public health care system that, in theory, guarantees its citizens
access to necessary medical care.
Practice, however, is another
matter. Patients in Greek public hospitals, Tsipras explained, would first have
to slip a doctor “an envelope with a certain amount of money” before they could
expect to get treatment. The government, he added, underpaid its doctors and
then looked the other way as they topped up their income with bribes.
Take a close look at any country
or locality in which the government offers allegedly free or highly subsidised
goods and you’ll usually discover that there’s a catch.
Australia is urging other like-minded
countries to stand up to China’s bullying and economic coercion, as Foreign
Minister Marise Payne applauded the Biden administration for supporting allies
facing the heat.
Standing in Washington alongside Secretary of
State Anthony Blinken, who declared for the first time in public on Friday
(AEST) that the US would “not leave Australia alone”, Senator Payne said it was
vital that allies did all they could to back one another.
“I hope that the support Australia has
received from the United States gives confidence to others,” she said. “It
doesn’t matter where the challenges to your sovereignty come from.”
The remarks by Senator Payne, who has held several
top-level meetings with Biden officials for the first time since the new
President was inaugurated in January, came as Australia joined the US, Japanese
and French navies for war games in the East China Sea.
House
Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from their leadership on Wednesday night, but the
GOP’s Donald Trump problem continues. They cannot win without his voters, but
they also will struggle to win if the former president dominates the party and
insists on re-fighting the 2020 election for the next four years.
Cheney
was purged on a voice vote that was so overwhelming that no one even asked for
a recorded tally. Her offence was challenging — too vocally for GOP comfort —
Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that the attempt to
overturn the Electoral College vote on January was constitutional and
warranted.
Many
Republicans privately agree with Cheney on both points, but they don’t want to
get into a public fight with Trump.
They
want House of Representative leaders to focus on resisting the Biden agenda,
and they think Cheney’s insistence on publicly rebutting Trump’s falsehoods was
a distraction. She can now say what she wants as a backbencher.
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