September 30, 2021 Edition
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Globally the pressure to do more on addressing Climate Change is building led by the US and catching Australia in the need to do more – which seems even to be agreed by the Coalition Govt.
It has been a international news focussed week with our PM all over the global stage with The Quad and AUKUS while we still have a very grumpy France to deal with, to say nothing of actually getting some submarines from someone in the next 20 years.
Otherwise we
have seen all sorts of pestilence from Earthquakes in Victoria to erupting
volcanoes in Spain! I suspect the Gods are a bit annoyed right now. Victoria has also startled the umpire by having sudden rise to 1500 Covid cases / day today!
Lastly we have to keep an eye on China and the failure of property developer Evergrande with $A400B of debt. Could go badly for China and the world economy.
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Major Issues.
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Chinese students defy predictions of collapse
Julie Hare Education editor
Sep 19, 2021 – 6.45pm
A complex picture of international student enrolment patterns is emerging, particularly among the Chinese, as numbers in some universities collapse but are increasing among the country’s most elite universities.
Despite dire predictions of international students abandoning Australia in preference for Northern Hemisphere institutions, total Chinese university enrolments as of July, which takes in second semester, were 140,786, just 2 per cent lower than 2020.
Commencing students, almost all of which will be studying online from their homes, were up 0.3 per cent on 2020, at 40,224, according to federal government data.
However, a more nuanced picture emerges if the Group of Eight universities are factored into the equation. It reveals that Chinese enrolments are up by 6.4 per cent to 99,091 compared to July 2020 with new enrolments up by 17 per cent to 29,015 compared to the same time last year.
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A future-focused review must question Reserve Bank’s inflation target
Rather than criticise past central bank decisions, the focus should be on whether targeting nominal income might be the best monetary policy framework in a world dominated by supply side shocks.
Warwick McKibbin Contributor
Sep 19, 2021 – 3.25pm
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development statement in the latest assessment of the Australian economy that there should be a review of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is welcome news.
The OECD rarely publishes documents that haven’t already been through a review process with the Australian Treasury, and the Australian Labor Party has been calling for a review for some time, suggesting it is inevitable.
There have been several reviews of central banks in different countries in the last few years, including the Bank of Canada, the US Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank. These reviews have helped refocus these institutions’ roles and adjust the monetary framework better to suit these economies’ current and future economic conditions. I was recently involved in an expert panel that evaluated the ECB review.
What should be the focus of a review of the RBA? Most of the review should be forward-looking rather than criticising past decisions. To the extent that a historical assessment will be helpful, it is to learn lessons for future institutional and policy design.
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Subs deal will quicken decline in Chinese students: Rudd
Julie Hare Education editor
Sep 17, 2021 – 5.01pm
Australian universities will face an accelerated decline in student enrolments from China as the AUKUS submarine deal cements geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Australia, says former prime minister Kevin Rudd.
To compensate for the loss of revenue from Chinese students, universities will have no option but to broaden their horizons and seek to establish enduring markets in other Indo-Pacific and Middle Eastern countries.
Mr Rudd said the combination of closed borders and geopolitical tensions was causing a decline in Chinese student enrolments, a trend that would continue following Thursday’s AUKUS announcement.
“I cannot see any immediate relaxation in terms of international pandemic travel at scale, nor can I see any significant relief in terms of geopolitical tensions between Australia and China,” Mr Rudd told a seminar held by the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne on Friday.
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Left’s identity politics crisis a progressive problem
Contributor
September 20, 2021 — 5.00am
In what must be a massive frustration for federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese, another ALP factional fight has broken into civil war on the Left, distracting attention away from the clear failures of the Morrison government.
That the deputy leader of the ALP in the Senate and former NSW premier, Kristina Keneally has been “parachuted” into the safe seat of Fowler – in a move that has displaced and disappointed an obviously outstanding local candidate, Tu Le, a human rights lawyer and the daughter of Vietnamese refugees – should not surprise many. Professional politics has always ridden roughshod over local communities.
But this nasty bout of intra-Left fighting carries significant implications for the future of Labor, and its ability to maintain a sufficient voter base to support the alternative party of government in our Westminster system.
Last week, I found myself caught up in this fight, after posting what I thought was a fairly obvious rhetorical question on Twitter: Could anyone imagine that a man of Keneally’s seniority within the party would be scrapping for pre-selection six months out from a federal election? I anticipated (and received) the usual denial from men that gender had anything to do with it, despite the obvious double standard: Bob Carr stitched up the top spot on the Senate ticket on his entry to Federal Parliament, and no one would have successfully challenged the position of my old boss, and Keneally’s predecessor, as deputy Senate leader, Stephen Conroy.
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How Australia can inject speed into its submarine plan
The peak threats from China are likely to come sooner rather than later. But there are also ways of giving the submarine project a head start.
Ross Babbage Contributor
Sep 20, 2021 – 3.51pm
Peter Dutton, the Minister for Defence, revealed over the weekend that he had discussed the possibility of leasing some nuclear-powered submarines from the Americans to provide an interim capability prior to the Australian-built boats being launched.
This is very welcome because Australia needs to boost its deterrence and defensive capacity sooner rather than later. This is because our most serious security threat will probably confront us in the coming decade and not in the late 2030s or 2040s. We need to get the new submarines quickly.
When the submarines enter service they will not only deliver greater speed, endurance, firepower and stealth but they will exploit the underwater weakness of the Peoples Liberation Army Navy. While Chinese submarines and their crews are improving, they are still well behind the underwater capabilities of the advanced Western powers and this lead is likely to be maintained.
This means that if Australia can get its new boats into service quickly, they will give this country an extraordinary capability to halt the maritime operations of even a large maritime power. They will not offer the capability of France’s Force de Frappe nuclear deterrent to “tear an arm off” an enemy, but they will provide us with the capability to cripple an enemy by slicing off their maritime feet.
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The strategic reverberations of the AUKUS deal will be big and lasting
The Economist
6:39PM September 20, 2021
Just occasionally, you can see the tectonic plates of geopolitics shifting in front of your eyes. Suez in 1956, Nixon going to China in 1972 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 are among the examples in living memory. The unveiling last week of a trilateral defence pact between Australia, the UK and the US (introducing the awkward acronym of AUKUS) is providing another of those rare occasions.
AUKUS envisages a wide range of diplomatic and technological collaboration, from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence, but at its core is an agreement to start consultations to help Australia acquire a fleet of nuclear-propelled (though not nuclear-armed) submarines. One consequence of this is Australia cancelling a contract, worth tens of billions of dollars, signed in 2016 with France for diesel-electric submarines.
In announcing AUKUS on September 15 with the prime ministers of Australia and Britain, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden stressed that it was about “investing in our greatest source of strength — our alliances”.
However, America’s oldest ally, France, has reacted with understandable fury. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called it a “stab in the back”. On September 17 President Emmanuel Macron withdrew France’s ambassadors from Washington and Canberra (though not London).
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What happens when Beijing’s housing bubble bursts?
Evergrande’s financial woes are raising fears China’s huge house price boom could soon bust, which will deal a hefty blow to economic growth.
Karen Maley Columnist
Sep 21, 2021 – 5.02am
You just have to look at the stunning collapse in the iron ore price to realise how nervous investors have become about the outlook for China.
Of course, the ostensible reason for the steep slide in the iron ore price is Beijing’s move to impose production cuts on the country’s steel industry due to environmental concerns.
But Beijing is simultaneously trying to take some heat out of the torrid property market by forcing debt-addicted property developers to deleverage. This, of course, will translate into a slowdown in the country’s property construction industry, and lower demand for steel.
Evergrande – which owes more than $US300 billion ($415 billion) – is the poster child of Beijing’s crackdown on debt-addicted property developers.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/why-aukus-is-welcome-in-the-indo-pacific-20210921-p58tdu
Why AUKUS is welcome in the Indo-Pacific
The attempt to contain Chinese power will also heighten tensions with Beijing. But the alternative would be to accept uncomplainingly China’s efforts to dominate the Indo-Pacific.
Gideon Rachman Columnist
Sep 21, 2021 – 9.13am
The Australia-UK-US security pact — AUKUS— has been greeted with rage in China and France. But more significant than the flamboyant anger in Beijing and Paris are the countries that are quietly applauding the agreement.
The many Indo-Pacific nations that are worried by China’s increasing belligerence look to America, not France, to balance Chinese power. Japan and India, the two largest economies in the region outside China, have welcomed AUKUS. Later this week, the White House will host a summit meeting of the leaders of the Quad — the US, India, Japan and Australia.
Week by week, the US is visibly strengthening its network of security relationships across the Indo-Pacific.
The positive reaction in the region will matter much more in Washington than anger in Paris — unwelcome though that is. Containing China’s power and ambitions is now the major strategic priority of the US, a commitment that spans the Biden and Trump administrations.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/snubbing-china-on-trade-is-a-strategic-mistake-20210919-p58sy0
Snubbing China on trade is a strategic mistake
Comments on Friday by Trade Minister Dan Tehan regarding China’s accession to the Indi-Pacific region trade group were a serious fumble.
Grant Wilson Contributor
Sep 20, 2021 – 7.36pm
In a momentous week, the Morrison government made a glaring mistake on the most important trade deal in the world.
It is trade and investment, rather than nuclear-powered submarines, that will keep Australia safe and well in our region in the decades ahead.
This makes the comments on Friday concerning China from Dan Tehan, the Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment, all the more unfortunate.
There was a glaring opportunity for Australia to re-engage with our largest trade partner, to strategically rebalance ahead of the Prime Minister’s trip to the US and to get ahead of the game on Taiwan.
Instead, Mr Tehan fumbled the moment and broke with government policy in the process.
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As the world reorders itself to resist China, it’s a pity the latest move was so boofheaded
Political and international editor
September 21, 2021 — 5.30am
When Xi Jinping took leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he promised the cadres that he was “laying the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position” in the world.
And he has been succeeding mightily for almost a decade. But an unexpected snag has emerged. The world was supposed to accept China’s dominance and submit. Instead, it has started to resist.
Nations are moving to combine their weight to balance against China’s. Two new alignments have taken place this year alone – the Quad, embracing Australia, India, Japan and the US – and now AUKUS, the Australia-UK-US security partnership.
It’s an old pattern in world power politics – threatened by a rising hegemon, groups of countries come together to protect their own interests.
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Australia’s foreign policy is getting clumsy and arrogant
September 18, 2021 — 4.41pm
“They’re just having a sook.”
It’s a sentence that has been heard a few times over the past 48 hours, as Coalition MPs rubbish any suggestion that Australia has seriously harmed itself in infuriating France over dumping the $90 billion submarine deal.
It’s a thuggish mentality, devoid of humility, that encapsulates everything that is wrong about Australian foreign policy at the moment. The idea that we couldn’t have done this any other way is laughable for a number of reasons.
First, the Morrison government should not have given France the impression that the submarine deal was back on track over the past six months.
As recently as June this year, French President Emmanuel Macron backed Australia in its worsening tussle with China, standing alongside Prime Minister Scott Morrison in the Elysee Palace courtyard in Paris. What Macron didn’t know was that four days earlier, Morrison had used a meeting with US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to discuss the secret plan to ditch the French submarines and build a nuclear-powered fleet with the United States and Britain.
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Successful deterrence: Why AUKUS is good news for Taiwan
By Natasha Kassam and Darren Lim
September 19, 2021 — 7.30pm
Amid the flurry of defence announcements over the past week, Australia’s shift in language about Taiwan has gone under the radar.
In the joint statement from Australian and US defence and foreign ministers, Taiwan is described – for the first time – as “a leading democracy and a critical partner for both countries”. This follows the Prime Minister’s commitment to co-ordinate action with other liberal democracies in the region.
The commitment to strengthen ties with Taiwan tells a story about Australia’s larger regional project. In that context, Taiwan may also end up one of the clearest beneficiaries from the decision by Australia to join the AUKUS trilateral initiative that includes building nuclear-powered submarines with the US and UK.
Long-range submarines represent a means to increasing defence capabilities, not just in territorial waters but to defend Australia’s interests in the wider region. Critically, those wider interests revolve around deterrence – demonstrating a willingness to respond to aggression and defend against military expansion.
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AUKUS is our plan B for China, but let’s not barrack for Cold War 2.0
Australia still needs to invest in a credible self-defence policy because in foreign and strategic policy there are no “forever” friends or allies.
Peter Varghese Contributor
Sep 21, 2021 – 12.27pm
There has been much breathless commentary on AUKUS both here and abroad. Its significance is real. It is, however, more a leap in technology than it is a fundamental strategic departure.
AUKUS makes sense as part of Australia’s plan B for China. That is, the plan we need if we find ourselves in a full-blown Cold War 2.0.
Some would say that is precisely where we are. I hope they understand what a new cold war means. It means a radical reordering of the global economy to decouple it from China, which is the largest trading partner of most countries in the world. It means a strategic fault line down the middle of the Indo-Pacific, with south-east Asia – our strategic hinterland – uncomfortably trying to straddle the strategic fence.
This is not a pretty picture for Australia and our starting point should be that Cold War 2.0 is neither inevitable nor desirable. It serves neither our security nor our economic interests.
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Countering China’s trade coercion should be alliance agenda
The major constraint on making collective pushback against Beijing’s economic statecraft a part of the US-Australia alliance is Washington’s “America first” insularity.
Stephen Kirchner Contributor
Sep 21, 2021 – 12.49pm
The joint statement from this year’s Australia-US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) noted “the coercive use of trade and economic measures that undermine rules-based trade”, calling out China’s campaign of economic intimidation against Australia in all but name.
Even more remarkable, however, is that the communique employed almost identical language to that coming out of a string of bilateral ministerial meetings in the lead-up to AUSMIN between Australia and India, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand and France.
The Australian government has been rallying allies and regional partners to internationalise the issue of economic coercion. Apart from demonstrating that Australia is not diplomatically isolated on the issue, the solidarity offered by these statements implicitly raises the threat of a collective response to China’s actions should they escalate.
Whether the implied threat of a collective response disciplines China’s future behaviour towards Australia remains to be seen. It is far from clear what form such collective action might take, but a counter-coercion framework is under active consideration by policymakers, not just in Canberra and Washington, but also in the European Union and elsewhere.
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Why AUKUS is big strategic deal for Joe Biden
The submarine agreement turns the ‘Pacific pivot’ that former president Barack Obama advertised into more than an empty slogan.
Max Boot
Sep 21, 2021 – 2.06pm
No pain, no gain. That’s as true in diplomacy as in the gym. The United States has gained much with its agreement to share nuclear-powered submarine technology with Australia as part of a new Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) accord.
But this achievement comes at a cost: France, complaining of a “knife in the back”, recalled its ambassadors from Canberra and Washington (but not London) in its fury over losing a $66 billion agreement to sell diesel submarines to Australia.
Was it worth it? Yes. Could it have been better handled? Also yes. This is a bit like a football team scoring a touchdown and then getting penalised 15 yards for unsportsmanlike conduct.
AUKUS is the kind of “tremendously big deal” that former president Donald Trump always bragged about but seldom delivered. It turns the “Pacific pivot” that former president Barack Obama advertised into more than an empty slogan.
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Melbourne reaps fallout of an unhappy record-holder
Construction industry workers are angry at union leadership and tough COVID-19 restrictions, but John Setka’s excuses about protests being hijacked by anti-vaxxers ring hollow.
Jennifer Hewett
Sep 21, 2021 – 5.03pm
Victoria’s Treasurer Tim Pallas acknowledges the shutdown of the state’s construction industry for two weeks will mean “economic trauma” for all those businesses and workers doing the right thing.
But he insists there’s no choice given the public health risks due to “broad-scale non-compliance” across the industry increasing the spread of the virus. Add to that days of angry Melbourne street protests, sometimes violent, by a mix of construction workers and assorted anti-vaxxer opportunists.
As the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry points out, it’s remarkable when Victoria’s disreputable firebrand unionist, John Setka, seems more like the voice of reason by comparison.
But then Setka wouldn’t be accustomed to dodging bottles and other objects thrown at him by rioters on Monday before retreating into his besieged building union headquarters and having to rely on police for greater protection.
The showdown in the streets of Melbourne is a vicious escalation of the simmering fury unleashed by the Victorian government after it announced vaccinations would become mandatory on construction sites.
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Morrison is making an enemy of China - and Labor is helping him
Former prime minister of Australia
September 22, 2021 — 5.30am
The Liberals, having no faith in the capacity of Australians and all we have created here, could not resist falling back, yet again, to do the bidding of another great power, the United States of America.
Menzies, even after World War II, did Britain’s bidding against the international community in attempting to wrest the Suez Canal from Egypt just as he deceptively committed Australian troops to Vietnam to appease the United States.
Howard, another US appeaser extraordinaire, committed us to an illegal war in Iraq with tragic consequences.
And now, Morrison, a younger throwback to the Liberals’ Anglosphere, shops Australia’s sovereignty by locking the country and its military forces into the force structure of the United States by acquiring US submarines.
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The other big risk markets are underestimating
For months, markets shrugged off signs that giant Chinese property developer Evergrande was in distress. But some believe they’re ignoring another danger.
Karen Maley Columnist
Sep 22, 2021 – 5.00am
For the past few months, some of the country’s most astute investors have been privately warning that financial markets were failing to appreciate the risk associated with the giant, debt-laden Chinese property developer Evergrande.
Even though Evergrande’s bonds were trading at a hefty discount to their face value – an indication the property giant’s creditors were becoming anxious they would not be repaid in full – most investors clung to the reassuring notion that Evergrande was simply too big to fail.
That meant that, in the end, Beijing would have no choice but to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rescuing the embattled property giant.
Of course, Beijing’s reluctance to intervene has forced investors to reassess their previous optimism, and growing concerns over Evergrande’s fate have sparked a global rush out of stocks and commodities.
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https://www.smh.com.au/national/how-to-lose-friends-and-infuriate-people-20210922-p58toz.html
How to lose friends and infuriate people
Award-winning political commentator and author
September 23, 2021 — 5.30am
Scott Morrison’s momentous national security announcement last week should have been a turning point for him and the government. Instead, because he delayed making one tough call, leaving himself open to accusations of backstabbing and deception from a great friend and ally, he robbed himself of a much-needed reset.
A few days later he again squibbed what should have been a straightforward decision involving a senior colleague, on a matter which goes to the heart of transparency and probity.
Both were about trust. Both provided insights into the most troubling aspects of Morrison’s character and management style. Both have left a very bad smell.
The first was the big-bang unveiling of the new Anglospheric alliance – upending decades of diplomatic endeavours in Asia – which included the planned acquisition of nuclear submarines from the US or the UK.
By waiting until the night before the announcement to advise President Emmanuel Macron (Morrison’s office refuses to answer when asked if they actually spoke) he was torpedoing the $90-billion contract with France for conventional submarines, he guaranteed they went nuclear.
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The rich could have saved the world. Instead, they hesitated
By Lewis Jackson
September 23, 2021 — 4.30am
Shutdown:
How Covid Shook the World’s Economy
Adam Tooze
Allen Lane, $35
Shutdown is best grasped from the back. The index lists 111 countries and regions, from Australia (nine mentions) to Zambia (two). Economist John Maynard Keynes (seven) rubs shoulders with Saddam Hussein (two) and philosopher Thomas Hobbes (one). Even Elon Musk rates a mention. Central banks feature 62 times, 17 more than President Donald Trump. At a time when most Australians venture only as far as the supermarket, Adam Tooze’s COVID-19, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, is a welcome, if vertiginous, dose of perspective.
Tooze is an economic historian by trade. His previous book, Crashed, presented the financial crisis of 2007/08 as a global saga stretching from the 1970s up to Donald Trump. Shutdown is a similarly ambitious romp across borders and through history.
He traces the pandemic from Wuhan—“the size of a large European country” — to the world. Those early days are painful to relive. South Korea had approved two tests by February 14, eight days before Lombardy was first locked down. At the time President Trump boasted “we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people”. Boris Johnson warned against overreacting. Tanzania’s president simply promised divine assistance.
Tooze confronts us with the inequalities COVID-19 exposed. While many in the West migrated their working lives to the comfort of Zoom, for the less well-off it was a starkly different story. Two thirds of young children worldwide were without access to internet connections. In the US, only 11 per cent of those on less than $US25,000 ($35,000) could work from home, whereas for 75 per cent of those earning over $US200,000 working from home became the norm and then a right.
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French fury can’t be left to unwind joint Indo-Pacific work
5:28PM September 22, 2021
France has recalled its ambassadors to the US and Australia (but not the UK). It’s angry over the nuclear submarine deal between the US, Australia and Britain. It’s happened before. France withdrew its ambassador here in 1995 after Australia barred a French company from competing for a major defence contract to protest France’s decision to resume nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
Apart from the economic benefits, Paris understood the submarines were all about a long-term strategic partnership. It would appear that not a lot of effort went into softening the blow for Paris after we changed our mind on the French boats.
France is a key Indo-Pacific player with growing strategic partnerships with Australia, India, Singapore and Japan. It has 7000 defence personnel stationed throughout the Indo-Pacific: 4100 in the Indian Ocean and 2900 in the Pacific.
These forces protect their French territories and offshore zones, as well as broader roles in disaster response and counter-terrorism. France participates in many multilateral and bilateral military exercises through the region. It trains Indo-Pacific armed forces for peacekeeping.
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Australia is again snuggling up to powerful friends
The new AUKUS pact symbolises a nuclear-powered move away from being a country with the self-respect of true independence.
John McCarthy Contributor
Sep 23, 2021 – 12.39pm
Former British prime minister Harold Wilson was quoted – possibly apocryphal – as saying that a week is a long time in politics. This has been a very long week.
On most hard issues, policy is a viscous, not a clear-cut, commodity. So the advocates and opponents of AUKUS won’t have a walkover on what is the best boat for Australia.
Australians lacking a phobia about things nuclear will see the merits of more powerful boats and a stronger navy (let us leave it to the experts as to which boats can move more stealthily though our northern approaches). For the old-fashioned anti-nuclear crowd, time has moved on.
If we are to change to nuclear-power ships, why did we not go all the way five years ago? Where was the problem then? The Americans had size and clout. The British boats worked. So did those of the French.
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How we dodged a bullet by sinking the French submarines deal
Economist
September 23, 2021 — 12.31pm
While the public discussion about Australia’s AUKUS pivot has been dominated by the geostrategic and technological angles, it’s mostly overlooked what I see as its biggest coup: good economics. Taking a French nuclear submarine and replacing the nuclear reactor with a diesel engine to avoid a domestic political dust-up over nuclear energy – while holding out the possibility of converting back to nuclear later – was a uniquely Australian solution to a simple problem.
Just like its Collins-class predecessor, the French-designed Shortfin Barracuda was compromised by the need to reconcile our geographic isolation with our rejection of a domestic nuclear capability.
That an Australian government has finally refused to throw likely hundreds of billions in good money after bad should be a great relief to us all. The opposition’s instinct was to call out the $2 billion or so “wasted” under the pivot. To the contrary, the decision is a triumph over what might otherwise have been the most expensive instance of “sunk-cost fallacy” in Australian history. This basic economic error – the tendency to follow through on something we’ve already invested in regardless of the costs and benefits of doing so – explains too many of our big public policy blunders.
That doesn’t mean the succession of governments that got us into this mess should escape blame. Both sides of politics had a hand in it: the Rudd-Gillard governments in dragging their feet, perhaps spooked by Labor’s Collins-class legacy; and the Abbott-Turnbull governments in overseeing the farcical “competitive evaluation process” that has now left two of our major allies in Japan and France bruised.
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Australia must hold US to ‘no quid pro quo’ guarantee with AUKUS
Australia will need world-class diplomacy to deal with the ongoing risks and opportunities created by the new partnership with the US and Britain on nuclear submarines
Gareth Evans
Sep 23, 2021 – 11.00pm
Some world-class hyperbole has been generated by Australia’s new AUKUS technology-sharing agreement with the United States and the United Kingdom. Our proposed acquisition, in particular, of at least eight nuclear-powered submarines, voiding in the process a massive deal with France to build 12 conventionally propelled diesel submarines, has fuelled an uproar at home and abroad.
For some in the anti-nuclear movement, the AUKUS agreement poses the biggest threat to nuclear non-proliferation since North Korea’s breakout. For Australia’s Greens, “floating Chernobyls” are about to blow up our port cities. For anti-China hawks, it’s champagne time: AUKUS represents a “vital bulwark against an angry and authoritarian communist China”.
For China’s Foreign Ministry, it “seriously damages regional peace and stability, intensifies the arms race, and undermines the Non-Proliferation Treaty”, and, for China’s media wolf warriors, it makes Australia “a potential nuclear war target”.
For France, which withdrew its ambassadors from the US and Australia, it’s another brutal “stab in the back” from perfidious Albion and the Anglosphere. And for Australia – in the words of two former prime ministers, no less, which should certainly concentrate our minds – it may mean a “further dramatic loss of sovereignty” to the US and “a slippery slope” that ends in “a pre-commitment to becoming an active belligerent against China in a future war”.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/why-we-badly-need-nuclear-submarines-20210922-p58tqm
Why we badly need nuclear submarines
Australia needs nuclear-powered submarines to provide long-range operations, but the AUKUS agreement will provide benefits long before the submarines are deployed.
Andrew S Erickson
Sep 24, 2021 – 12.00am
It’s rare that a submarine deal – or any military partnership –creates quite as many waves as the Australia-United Kingdom-United States agreement has. The nuclear-powered submarine club has long been limited to just six nations: the US, Britain, France, Russia, China, and India. Becoming the seventh member is a big deal for Australia, especially since Washington has only ever shared such technology before with the United Kingdom. It also offers Australia a critical technological edge in any future tension or conflict with China – already in the nuclear-powered submarine club and working hard to upgrade its membership with Russian aid.
Despite understandable shock at Australia abruptly terminating its existing and growing contract with France’s Naval Group for 12 Shortfin Barracuda-based Attack-class diesel-electric submarines, there were ample indications that cost overruns, significant delays, and reduced Australian industry involvement were aggravating Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government. With these cost overruns, the French Naval Group pushed the price tag of conventional submarines up into the range normally associated with nuclear-powered submarines.
All that was needed was for the US and Britain to clear the significant bureaucratic hurdle of allowing Australia access to naval nuclear propulsion technology. Meanwhile, Beijing’s economic bullying, threatening language, and attempts to subvert Australian politics have caused a sea change in Australian public opinion since 2017, while some of Canberra’s elite must have been monitoring unprecedented Russian assistance to China’s own naval nuclear propulsion programs with mounting concern.
The politics are messy, but the reasons why countries want to be in the nuclear-powered submarine club are crystal clear. Power and endurance, both for propulsion and the need to supply electrical power for onboard systems, are critical to any navy – and nuclear power is simply the best option. Even the French deal was done on the premise that the submarines could eventually be converted to nuclear propulsion.
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A professor’s resignation highlights pressures within academia to conform
One man has long been a critic of post-modern ideology
Sep 25th 2021
PETER BOGHOSSIAN, an untenured assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University (PSU), was one of the most vocal critics of post-modern ideology in the academy, until he resigned from his university on September 8th. In 2018 he and two authors tried to publish 20 fake papers, in order to expose what they saw as a willingness to publish anything that used the right jargon. Seven were published, including one on “queer performativity” in urban dog parks, and one calling astronomy imperialist and suggesting physics departments study interpretative dance.
This is a loss to satire, but is it also representative of anything larger? In his resignation letter, Mr Boghossian wrote that the university had been changed from “a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division”. Students at PSU are “being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” he wrote. A spokeswoman for the college retorted that, “Portland State has always been and will continue to be a welcoming home for free speech and academic freedom.”
Other scholars have found themselves in similar situations. Those conservatives who remain in the academy may be used to this. But increasingly it is affecting liberals. A report published in August by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a campaign group, has found that since 2015 the number of scholars targeted with demands for investigation, demotion, censorship, or termination reached 113 in 2020, or a total of 426 cases in five years. Some of these cases may stretch the casual observer’s sympathies. The majority, though, are “academics on the left being attacked from further left”, says Sean Stevens, one of the authors.
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Momentous questions get outsourced to Dad in Washington
The power balances of the region will be decided in the next two decades – when we will not have the capability or the autonomy to deal with them ourselves.
Laura Tingle Columnist
Sep 24, 2021 – 4.27pm
The federal Coalition have always been keen advocates of contracting things out.
It started in the Howard years, when the delivery of services was contracted out and, over the years, spread to contracting out policy advice – from the public service to richly-rewarded consultants who sometimes produce little more than vacuous PowerPoint presentations.
The pandemic has shown the current government willing to contract out responsibility for things such as quarantine, vaccines and vaccine-mandating rules to the states.
But who would ever have thought it would contract out our national security and defence strategy?
For, in a nutshell, that’s what has happened in the past week with the decision to embrace a new alliance with our old allies and “forever” friends, based on the decision to buy an (unspecified) nuclear-powered submarine that won’t go into service until 2040.
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Caution: submarines. Approach with great care
Associate editor and special writer
September 24, 2021 — 11.00pm
The diplomatic fallout from an old ally in Europe following Australia’s abrupt switch from French diesel-electric to American nuclear propulsion serves to remind us that submarines have long had the capacity to cause unintended consequences if not approached with care.
More than a century ago, a brief signal from one of Australia’s first submarines accidentally consigned ANZAC troops to eight months of misery and death instead of them being withdrawn after a hellish first day on Gallipoli.
And then, not so long ago, the bungled development of an expensive new fleet of subs veered into high farce when the navy was reduced to ferreting around an inland country town for a spare part lest the nation find itself without a working submarine at all.
On April 25, 1915, a little Australian submarine called the AE2, having dived beneath minefields and Turkish warships that tried to ram it, the crew almost asphyxiating, managed to sail beyond the Dardanelles and into the Sea of Marmara, north-east of the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Its daring captain, the Irish-born Henry Hugh Gordon Dacre Stoker, sent a hurried wireless message, announcing the AE2’s astonishing feat.
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Between East and West, Australia is no longer the misfit. That would be China
Political and international editor
September 25, 2021 — 5.00am
Australia, according to a Chinese writer, was like the bat in an Aesops fable. When the bird kingdom was about to go war with the kingdom of the beasts, both sides turned to bat for support. The bat refuses to join the beasts, pointing out that it has wings like a bird. But it also refuses to join the birds, arguing that it has fur like a beast.
When war is averted, the bat is despised by both kingdoms . The rueful bat delivers the moral of the tale: “Ah, I see now. He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends.”
Like the bat, Australia could never truly be part of the East or the West, doomed to be alone in a permanent identity crisis forevermore, according to the academic Tang Guanghui, writing in World Affairs, a journal of China’s Foreign Ministry, in 1996. “It seems that Australia is suffering from the same confusion and embarrassment” as the bat, he wrote.
Tang wasn’t the only one. Australia was a “torn country”, according to the US academic Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, published in the same year. Huntington saw a country “divided over whether their society belongs to one civilisation or another”, riven between the West and Asia. It could never reconcile its European origins with its Asian geography.
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Stones point way to Indigenous Silk Road
A recently discovered ancient arrangement of stones on Mithaka lands, north of Birdsville. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen
10:02PM September 24, 2021
Hidden among the gibber plains and dry river beds of the Channel Country in outback Queensland are clues to understanding the seemingly sophisticated civilisation that operated in Australia before Europeans arrived.
Researchers working with the Mithaka people have, for the first time, uncovered a vast network of quarries spread over an area about the size of Belgium. They believe the quarries produced grindstones sold into transcontinental trade linking the commercial and ceremonial activities of pre-contact Aboriginal people.
Dating suggests the sites were occupied a few hundred to a few thousand years ago, making it possible to join early ethnographic accounts with archaeological evidence and modern techniques like remote sensing, genetics and isotope chemistry.
The researchers believe the Mithaka lived in seasonal villages of gunyahs (huts) usually situated near the water, where they harvested waterfowl, fish and mussels. They believe the Mithaka economy revolved around bartering grindstones for pituri (a weak narcotic), ochre, fibre and resin, often accompanied by exchanges of songs and dances. The network has been likened to a First Australian version of China’s modern Silk Road.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/quad-must-be-a-seagoing-deterrent-20210923-p58u6e
Quad must be a seagoing deterrent
It will be decades before Australia deploys its nuclear submarines. All the Quad members have an interest in filling that maritime gap.
Tom Corben and Ashley Townshend
Sep 24, 2021 – 1.47pm
Unlike last week’s AUKUS surprise, the Quad Leaders’ Summit in Washington, DC, is set to focus on geoeconomics, critical technology, health security and climate change. These are pressing regional issues over which Australia, India, Japan and the United States must work to increase their capacity for collective action.
But the four leaders must also find time to discuss the rapidly deteriorating strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific – and return this issue to the top of their agenda.
Time is not on our side. Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines will play a significant role in upholding a favourable balance of power towards the end of the 2030s. That’s a very long time to wait.
In the intervening decades, it’s critical that Australia gets its security partnerships and high-end defence networks such as the Quad working better to meet the military challenges China is posing today.
This requires the Quad to sharpen its focus on the maritime domain.
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Coronavirus And Impacts.
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Deaths will top 2200 as Victoria reopens: modelling
Tom Burton Government editor
Sep 19, 2021 – 7.15pm
Victoria faces a Christmas surge in COVID-19 hospitalisations and deaths after it reopens in November, with a leading scientific forecaster predicting that 2200 people will die this spring and summer – three times the number of fatalities during the state’s winter outbreak last year.
The Burnet Institute’s modelling of the epidemiological impact of lifting Victoria’s lockdown shows an initial peak of 1960 cases around October 25, along with 1666 hospitalisations and 964 deaths.
Admissions to intensive care during the peak period would rise to about 360 people. Burnet’s modelling for NSW suggests that state is facing a first peak of around 173 in hospital intensive care.
But NSW is yet to release modelling for the impact of lifting lockdown restrictions, which will have a significant effect on health outcomes.
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More stick than carrot in the vaccine economy
Supply side disruptions to the economy do not end on Freedom Day. In fact, they could easily worsen into 2022.
Vimal Gor
Sep 19, 2021 – 10.16am
Despite the wishes of my parents, I am neither a doctor nor a lawyer. So, it is with some hesitancy I delve into the area of vaccines and opening up after lockdown. Also let me be clear I was fully vaccinated early on so believe in their use and effectiveness.
However, for someone who chose a career of trying to pick where the economy is heading it is extremely important to understand the issues around vaccines and opening up.
Freedom Day in NSW looms in mid-October, once 70 per cent of the adult population is vaccinated. Given we have exceeded 80 per cent first doses we can be confident on that timing.
I will leave trained medical professionals to opine on 70 per cent being the right number. You would assume more cautious people will continue a self-imposed version of lockdown as cases will still be high if not higher.
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We must re-open as Big Australia, not Fortress Australia
Australia needs to get back to its confident and intrepid old self, and leave small-mindedness behind with the closed borders.
Michael Fullilove Contributor
Sep 20, 2021 – 4.41pm
In the beginning, Australia handled COVID-19 very well.
Being an island was an advantage. We were able to pull up the drawbridge.
But our success was not all down to good fortune. Canberra was quick to act, introducing a mandatory two-week quarantine for all travellers and closing the borders to nearly all non-residents and non-citizens. Generous Commonwealth expenditures cushioned the blow to the economy.
Politicians and officials were conscientious and our universal healthcare system was critical. The Australian people were calm, engaged and pragmatic.
The results, measured in the ultimate metric of lives saved, were excellent.
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COVID-19 will remain a ‘fire’ fought on multiple fronts, Doherty Institute says
By Rachel Clun
September 21, 2021 — 5.00am
Mask-wearing will remain indefinitely in some settings as experts predict strict lockdowns will not protect COVID-free parts of the country from the pandemic forever.
But new data shows the rate of deaths from coronavirus so far this year is similar to a bad influenza season and significantly better than last year as vaccinations gain traction around the country.
For states sticking to border closures and tougher measures against COVID-19, a Doherty Institute sensitivity analysis that was presented at national cabinet on Friday found those measures would not be able to keep the virus out long term and community fatigue was a real risk.
“In reality, the national COVID-19 epidemic has been and will continue to be a ‘fire’ fought on multiple fronts,” the report said.
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‘Vast majority’ of kids have suffered mental health decline during pandemic
An hour ago September 24, 2021
The mental health of Australian children has deteriorated significantly over the past year due to Covid-19, according to new research from the ANU.
Co-author Professor Nicholas Biddle said the mental health of adolescents and young adults was of “particular concern”.
“We found 71 per cent of parents and carers of Australians aged 15 to 18 reported worsening mental health conditions for their children,” he said. “A lot of this is due to the ongoing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic – and, in particular, extended lockdowns.”
Parents and carers of Australians aged five to 18 say their children’s mental health and wellbeing is significantly worse off than a little over 12 months ago.
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In vaccinated Britain, all my friends are getting COVID-19
Having your population double-vaxxed to the max doesn’t stop the virus from being rife, it just stops people worrying about it.
Hans van Leeuwen Europe correspondent
Sep 24, 2021 – 10.48am
London | As Australia presses towards the coveted 80 per cent vaccination threshold, what’s it like to live in a country that has already got there? Probably not quite what you’d expect.
Take the week I’ve just had. On the sidelines of my son’s soccer game last weekend, one of the other parents tells me that she’d just got back from an extended family reunion in Wales, and nine out of 16 people came away with COVID-19. They were all double-vaccinated.
The next day, we ring some of my wife’s relatives to ask how their trip to Spain was. They both have COVID-19. The husband described it to me as “like the shittiest flu I’ve ever had”. They were both double-vaccinated.
you here – only one person has called in to say they couldn’t come because they had COVID.”
My wife decides to skip her university reunion. Afterwards, though, a message goes around saying someone tested positive for COVID-19 following the event, so everyone should probably take a lateral flow test.
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Singapore tightens COVID-19 rules despite 80 per cent vaccination rate
By Philip J. Heijmans
Singapore: Singapore made work-from-home the default and tightened rules to allow a maximum of two people to meet in restaurants or other social settings, as it seeks to rein in mostly mild cases that could otherwise quadruple in two weeks and overburden hospitals.
Primary school students will have to shift to learning from home, while booster shots get extended beyond seniors to a younger age group, the government said on Friday.
The moves, which take effect from September 27 for about a month, appear to shift away from the country’s stated transition toward living with the virus. About 80 per cent of the Singapore’s population is fully vaccinated.
With health officials expecting daily cases to jump to around 6000 from about 1500 currently, the government wants to curb that increase and avoid a hard lockdown. This resolve may soon get severely tested even though four in five people are already vaccinated in Singapore.
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Joe Hockey was right about our age of entitlement. Just look at the Melbourne protests
Columnist and senior journalist
September 26, 2021 — 5.00am
What exactly were the violent protests we saw in Melbourne last week? An expression of personal liberty? A predictable reaction to a draconian, over-long lockdown and an industry shutdown? The consequence of rational fear of vaccination, or irrational fear of vaccination? A bunch of union thugs doing what union thugs do? Or a neo-Nazi recruitment drive, with vaccination used as a convenient proxy issue? Perhaps all of the above.
The violence and the semi-ironic posing of some of the protesters made it all feel like a nasty social media thread, brought to life like Frankenstein’s monster, limbs twitching as it was charged with electricity. (People often forget that in Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, the monster became enraged and violent when he was denied the love and familial comforts he saw humans enjoy. His rage came from a place of profound hurt.)
Former treasurer Joe Hockey was right – we do live in an age of entitlement. If you add the word freedom to something, you have a right to it.
Former opposition leader Bill Shorten also nailed it when he called the protesters “man-babies”: they are the political equivalent of a tantruming child, and as narcissistic. Everything (most importantly their anger) is the fault of someone or something outside them, and despite the bleats of personal freedom, there is suspiciously little talk of personal responsibility.
I wouldn’t be the first person to notice the generous dollop of toxic masculinity that fuelled the protests. They also reflected the Trumpian language that has crept into our political vocabulary. “Personal liberty” is a selection from the human rights menu which leaves off the concept of civic rights and the responsibility that goes with holding one’s place in society.
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Climate Change.
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Climate change to deliver suburban house price pain: RBA
By Shane Wright and Mike Foley
September 20, 2021 — 5.43pm
Climate change could cut property prices across a swath of Sydney’s northern suburbs from Lane Cove to Ku-ring-gai, with Reserve Bank analysis showing many homeowners face declining equity in their houses and rising insurance costs.
As separate work by the RBA warned coal and LNG exports to key Asian markets were likely to fall as nations such as China and South Korea reduced their carbon emissions, the bank’s research on the Australian property market suggested climate change was a growing risk to the financial sector.
Economists Kellie Bellrose, David Norman and Michelle Royters found by 2050, about 400,000 more loans (or 2.5 per cent of all loans) would have a loan-to-value ratio of more than 80 per cent – half of those with an LVR of more than 90 per cent – as property values fell due to climate change.
They suggested there would be 254 “climate-sensitive suburbs” at increased risk of a drop in value by that time, rising to 1438 suburbs by 2100.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/adopt-net-zero-or-pay-a-price-frydenberg-20210923-p58u1n
Adopt net zero or pay a price, says Frydenberg
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Sep 24, 2021 – 12.01am
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has thrown his weight behind the adoption of net zero emissions by 2050, warning that unless Australia moves, sanctions by capital markets will increase borrowing costs, affecting everything from home and business loans to major infrastructure investments.
He is also urging banks, insurers and super funds to show they are serious about achieving net zero emissions by continuing to support traditional industries such as agriculture and mining to help them adapt to what he says is a “structural and systemic shift in our financial system, which will only gain pace over time”.
His remarks come as EnergyAustralia said it would bring forward the closure of its Mt Piper coal power plant in NSW as part of new commitments to end coal power generation by 2040.
It still expects to run the plant past 2030, the date by which the world’s top climate scientists say coal power production should cease.
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Decarbonising starts with unglamorous tiny steps
Brooke Masters
Sep 23, 2021 – 1.41pm
With the COP26 global climate talks in Glasgow fast approaching, companies are falling over themselves to trumpet their green credentials. In the past week, Rusal unveiled “ultra-low” carbon Budweiser cans, Royal Dutch Shell sold a big chunk of its US shale holdings and Nespresso promised to make its coffee carbon neutral.
But a lot of this is smoke and mirrors: Rusal is supplying 5 million green cans total to AB InBev’s British arm, which brews 20 million cans and bottles a week; Nespresso is funding forestry projects to buy time while it tries to increase the use of recycled materials. ConocoPhillips, the new owner of Shell’s Permian Basin assets, plans to increase production next year. Stunts and pious pledges won’t save the planet.
Manufacturers and retailers must rethink their entire design, manufacturing and sales processes. Those that have are discovering that change is either very expensive or an unglamorous, iterative process that involves thousands of tiny improvements. Neither makes for good press releases.
Consider this: BMW calculated that the shift from petrol to electric cars would increase the carbon footprint of its supply chain from 10 tonnes a vehicle in 2019 to 14 by 2030 if no countermeasures were taken. So it is working with its 70,000 first- and second-tier suppliers to increase the use of recycled materials from 30 to 50 per cent and cut CO₂ emissions in other ways to bring that average down to 8 tonnes instead. That means rethinking everything from design specifications to the tools on the shop floor – and shifting customer expectations.
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Financial markets are preparing for climate change and so must we
By Josh Frydenberg
September 24, 2021 — 12.00am
From the industrial revolution to the digital age, financial markets have been affected by significant structural change. Each time it drives a reassessment of risk and value and, in turn, asset allocation.
Climate change is no different.
Markets are moving as governments, regulators, central banks and investors are preparing for a lower-emissions future. It’s a long-term shift, not a short-term shock.
The world signalled its ambition when more than 190 parties committed in Paris to keep the rise in average global temperatures to below two degrees.
This has been followed by 129 countries committing to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
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Royal Commissions And The Like.
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No entries in this category.
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National Budget Issues.
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Yay! OECD boffins find a new and better reason to increase the GST
Economics Editor
September 24, 2021 — 11.47am
Ask almost any bunch of economists what big reforms to the economy we need and their list will start with tax reform and probably not get much further. Ask a bunch of big-business people what we need and their list will linger lovingly on tax reform.
You can see this in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s latest report card on our economy, the first since 2018. To be fair, the rich-nations’ club’s list of important reforms included much more than tax. But tax was front and centre of news reports in the financial press.
In particular, it seized on the outfit’s recommendation that we either increase the rate of the goods and services tax, or broaden the range of goods and services to which it applies, and use the proceeds to cut the rates of income tax. Good one! Yay! Let’s do it!
But hang on. Haven’t we heard this tune before? Yes, we’ve been hearing it for years. And haven’t both sides of politics made it clear it’s not on their list of promised reforms?
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Hot housing market increases risk of crash, says IMF
10:38PM September 24, 2021
Runaway residential property prices could threaten the stability of Australia’s financial system and need to be reined in, the International Monetary Fund says.
That warning, delivered in the IMF’s first financial health check of the economy since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, follows rising local concerns about the threat that high household debt and surging house prices pose.
The IMF, in a report released on Friday, said regulators should consider tighter lending controls on overstretched homebuyers – a move the country’s major banks fiercely resist.
MF Australia mission chief Harald Finger said a “comprehensive policy response” was needed to deal with our booming property market, which was exposing vulnerabilities in the financial system and making it harder for people to buy a home.
-----Health Issues.
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Early intervention halts autism, study finds
11:00PM September 20, 2021
A landmark study into autism has found that a therapy in which parents learn to read the “secret code” of their baby’s communication cuts the chances of babies at risk going on to be diagnosed with autism by two-thirds.
Previously doctors waited until a child was three to diagnose and begin therapy for autism, but researchers now say babies’ brains can be moulded from an early age, reducing the eventual chance of a diagnosis.
The research conducted by the Telethon Kids Institute found a clinical diagnosis of autism was only one-third as likely in children who received the pre-emptive therapy known as iBASIS-VIPP.
“This is a landmark finding for autism research,” said Andrew Whitehouse, professor of autism research at the Telethon Kids’ Institute and the University of Western Australia. “One of the things that we were was taught in clinical training many years ago is that children are born with autism. And we are just waiting until they’re around three years of age, when we can diagnose autism.
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Breakthrough in the fight against obesity, type 2 diabetes
Jill Margo Health editor
Sep 21, 2021 – 1.00am
A new mechanism to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity has been identified in a landmark Australian study.
Published today in the prestigious journal Nature Metabolism, the findings have the potential to change the way these conditions are understood, treated and possibly even reversed.
Natalie Trevaskis: “We believe this therapy has potential to provide a new and more effective way to treat type 2 diabetes and visceral obesity.”
Led by the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, together with the universities of Melbourne, South Australia and Auckland, the study took eight years to complete.
“We believed we were onto something significant, something that could completely change the field, so rather than publishing this work in stages, we waited until we had all the pieces in place,” says Associate Professor Natalie Trevaskis, who led the Monash study with Professor Chris Porter and Dr Enyuan Cao.
While it is known excess fat around the waist predisposes people to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, the study shows how this happens, why this happens and what can be done to stop it.
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The new screening test that spots 51 cancers
By Peta Bee
The Times
4:21PM September 21, 2021
THE earlier cancer is detected the more likely treatment is to be successful, hence the importance of the blood test at the centre of a new National Health Service trial - the world’s largest - which it is hoped will prove a giant leap towards prompt diagnosis.
Part of a global “liquid biopsy market” that is expected to be worth nearly £5 billion ($9.4 billion) by 2028, the Galleri test is being hailed as a tool that will revolutionise cancer screening. With just a single 10ml blood sample - the equivalent of two teaspoons - the test’s diagnostics search for signs of dozens of cancers before they can be found by touch or symptoms. It could reveal cancer before the need for needles and scalpels and may become as routine as a cholesterol test. This is what you need to know about it:
Who can take part in the NHS trial?
Letters are being sent to NHS patients aged 50 to 77 in eight areas of England - Cheshire and Merseyside, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, the North East, west Midlands, east Midlands, east of England, Kent and Medway and southeast London - inviting them to take part in a randomised control trial called the NHS-Galleri study led by Professor Peter Sasieni, the director of the Cancer Research UK and King’s College London Cancer Prevention Trials Unit. Stipulations are that the 140,000 participants must not have had cancer in the past three years and will need to provide a blood sample at a local mobile clinic.
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Private health insurance tax and fee hikes hurting the latecomers
September 24, 2021
A rising number of Australians are being penalised for failing to take out private health insurance, and it’s costing them more than half a billion dollars each year.
Many don’t realise they are paying penalties, prompting a warning for consumers to check what their lack of insurance is costing them.
Government data shows almost 900,000 people pay Lifetime Health Cover loadings on their private health insurance because they failed to sign up before age 31, while 330,000 higher-income earners pay a Medicare Levy Surcharge of $415 million – a 73 per cent jump in numbers in just four years.
Australian Taxation Office figures show the surcharge – up to 1.5 per cent extra tax on people earning above $90,000 – averages $1264 a year, similar to some private health premiums.
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Doctors too keen to operate, say experts
12:00AM September 25, 2021
Doctors are routinely overdiagnosing and overtreating conditions that do not require medical intervention, sometimes carrying out unnecessary surgery exposing patients to risk and ongoing pain, according to two internationally renowned researchers.
Professor Rachelle Buchbinder, a Melbourne rheumatologist and professor at Monash University, and Professor Ian Harris, a Sydney orthopaedic surgeon and clinical researchers at the University of NSW, say about one-third of medical care is of “no value”, while 10 per cent is actually harmful.
“Modern medical care is designed to maximise the number of encounters with the system, constantly prescribing, operating, testing and scanning, and prioritising business over science,” the authors say in a new book, extracted in The Weekend Australian Magazine.
“It’s a system rife with perverse incentives and unintended consequences, producing healthcare without necessarily improving the health of the recipients of that care.
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International Issues.
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Putin’s party wins election but loses some ground
By Maria Tsvetkova and Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber
September 20, 2021 — 8.45am
Moscow: President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party is expected to maintain its grip over the State Duma, or lower house, exit polls in the country’s parliamentary elections show, amid complaints by opposition parties and independent observers of widespread fraud.
Early results released after polls closed in the three-day vote also put United Russia ahead of the Communist Party and other rivals. The polling agency Insomar predicted United Russia would win with 45 percent of the vote.
With nearly 13 per cent of ballots counted, the Central Election Commission also said United Russia had won just more than 40 per cent of the vote.
Opposition parties and observers reported ballot stuffing and other tampering during the three days.
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China weaponises the law and takes legal fight to the world
The Economist
7:35PM September 19, 2021
In early January the Communist Party published a five-year plan for the development of “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics”.
Most of the document is domestically focused, but one section is devoted to foreign matters. It calls on China to help shape international law, to turn itself into the first choice of jurisdiction when resolving cross-border disputes and to encourage the use of Chinese law abroad.
The party’s goal, the plan says, is to promote “fair and reasonable” international rules. But in the past year it has become increasingly clear that the party means to take a legal fight to the world. President Xi Jinping wants China’s legal apparatuses to grow bolder when dealing with international matters, and to reshape international legal and regulatory norms.
In areas such as patents, maritime rights, cybersecurity, sanctions and extradition battles, the Communist Party is using its legal system to safeguard and advance China’s interests in ways it has not previously done.
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Will Evergrande be China’s Lehman Brothers moment?
Will the demise of Evergrande cause more damage than policymakers can handle? Macro experts don’t think so.
Jonathan Shapiro Senior reporter
Sep 20, 2021 – 3.04pm
Over the weekend, the topic du jour among the macro community was whether the looming default of Chinese construction giant Evergrande marks a Lehman Brothers moment for the world’s second largest economy.
The growing fear is that its demise, and the losses the banks and bondholders that provided the $US350 billion of debt will have to swallow, could trigger a contagion event similar to what the US experienced in September 2008, which led to the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank.
Evergrande, which went public in 2009, is one of China’s most important companies. The construction giant’s model is to borrow money to buy up state land, and then build homes en masse.
The linkages into the economy run deep. Housing construction has been an engine of economic growth and individual wealth creation. But Evergrande's enormous debt pile left it vulnerable to a weaker property market.
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French rage triggered by exclusion from Indo-Pacific deal
Emmanuel Macron has spent years trying to promote France as an Indo-Pacific power. The jewel of these efforts was the submarine contract negotiated as part of a Franco-Australian strategic partnership.
Anna Gross, Victor Mallet and James Politi
Updated Sep 20, 2021 – 11.03am, first published at 11.01am
Paris/Washington | When Antony Blinken came to Paris on June 25, French leaders told the US Secretary of State that France attached the “utmost importance” to its strategic submarine deal with Australia – a deal now sunk by the new AUKUS pact, according to senior French officials.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s foreign minister, also stressed that he viewed the agreement with Australia as a “French-US partnership” because of the significant role played by American defence company Lockheed Martin in the French contract, one French diplomat said. President Emmanuel Macron repeated the messages, according to the French side.
This was just one of several overtures made by the French to US and Australian officials in the months before the AUKUS deal was secretly finalised between the US, Australia and the UK, and the $50 billion submarine contract between France and Australia was undone.
Macron was so insulted by being left out of the AUKUS Indo-Pacific pact, which is designed to confront growing Chinese power in the region, and by the lack of warning from his allies, that he recalled his ambassadors from Washington and Canberra on Friday night.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/how-evergrande-could-become-another-lehman-brothers-20210921-p58teu
How Evergrande could become another Lehman Brothers
If the property developing giant goes bankrupt, it could trigger another GFC as the financial tsunami hits markets beyond China.
Wang Jing, Chen Bo, Yu Ning, Zhu Liangtao, Wang Juanjuan, Zhou Wenmin and Denise Jia
Sep 21, 2021 – 1.24pm
For the past two months, hundreds of people have been gathering at the 43-floor Zhuoyue Houhai Centre in Shenzhen, where China Evergrande Group’s headquarters occupy 20 floors. They held banners demanding repayment of overdue loans and financial products. Police with riot shields had to be on site to keep things under control.
The demonstrators are construction workers at the property developer’s housing projects, suppliers providing construction materials and investors in the company’s wealth management products (WMPs). From paint suppliers to decoration and construction companies, Evergrande owes more than 800 billion yuan ($170 billion) due within one year, while it has only a 10th of that amount of cash on hand.
As of the end of June, Evergrande had nearly 2 trillion yuan of debts on its books, plus an unknown amount of off-books debt. The property giant is on the verge of a dramatic debt restructuring or even bankruptcy, many institutions believe.
A bankruptcy would amount to a financial tsunami, or as some analysts put it, “China’s Lehman Brothers”. The venerable American investment bank’s 2008 collapse helped trigger a global financial crisis.
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Beijing is having fun with Washington on Pacific trade pact
China has applied to join a deal that Obama created and Trump tore up. What does that say about US policy?
Thomas Friedman Contributor
Sep 22, 2021 – 2.45pm
Anyone who says that China’s President Xi Jinping does not have a sense of humour is definitely not following the news from the Pacific these days.
China last week applied for membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership – the trade deal that was originally negotiated by President Barack Obama precisely to counter China’s economic power in the Pacific. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump promptly tore it up rather than learn what it was about and get Congress to ratify it, and the Democrats have since then made no move to revive the deal, known as the TPP.
Beijing applying to join the TPP is the diplomatic equivalent of the US asking to be a member of China’s “Belt and Road” trade and investment initiative in Asia, or Russia applying to be a member of the new NAFTA because it controls part of the Arctic north of Canada. In other words, a deliciously mischievous ploy.
But it’s a ploy that exposes a real weakness in US foreign policy toward China, which has become the biggest challenger to American pre-eminence in setting the rules of today’s international system in trade and diplomacy.
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Biden’s French snub is a warning to Europe
The US was willing to bruise France to sign AUKUS for the same reason it was willing to upset much of Europe to leave Afghanistan. The priority is China.
Janan Ganesh Contributor
Sep 22, 2021 – 1.15pm
The French approach to foreign affairs can be cold, one-eyed, chauvinist – and right. De Gaulle’s blackballing of Britain from the European project turned out to be prescient. Opposition to the Iraq war has aged even better in far less time.
Before the fall of Kabul, few nations were as quick as France to read the sad runes, and to warn its people there accordingly.
In the shape of the US defence deal with Australia and Britain, France is enduring as cruel a snub as one democracy has dealt another for some time. If nothing else, though, its unsentimental view of the US – as Europe’s friend, not its eternal benefactor – stands enhanced.
It has been a good summer for the cause of “strategic autonomy” from America.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/china-s-economic-rethink-is-simply-about-inequality-20210920-p58t5w
China’s economic rethink is simply about inequality
A prominent organising policy idea now is “common prosperity”, the concept of which is not new in Chinese politics.
Cai Fang Contributor
Sep 22, 2021 – 3.50pm
Two hands run the Chinese economy: the market and the government. Market forces overwhelmingly allocate resources, getting prices and incentives right. The government regulates competition, corrects market failures and safeguards fairness of distribution.
China’s political leadership proposes and frames principal policy concepts to signal new policy directions to the people and direct various levels of government on policy priorities.
A prominent organising policy idea now is the concept of “common prosperity”, the concept of which is not new in Chinese politics.
It appeared when former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reform in the late 1970s, and at the 1992 14th National Congress of the Communist Party of China that declared its aim was to build a socialist market economy.
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Evergrande’s near collapse marks the end of China’s economic miracle
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
September 23, 2021 — 10.30am
The Chinese Communist Party can at any time stop the collapse of the Evergrande Real Estate Group mushrooming into a systemic financial crisis: it controls the banking system and has hegemonic sway over the transaction counterparties.
It is hard to imagine a Lehman denouement in such circumstances. Beijing would not flirt lightly with such a risk before next year’s 20th Party Congress, intended to be the coronation of Xi Jinping for life.
It has been a staple of party propaganda for the last 13 years that the US banking collapse in 2008 discredited the Western economic model (it didn’t), and that such a disaster could never happen in China’s version of Leninist state-capitalism. This raises the political bar.
But this episode is nevertheless fundamentally different from previous spasms of stress over the last 20 years, and it will test nerves. Xi Jinping is deliberately deflating the property bubble, deemed an economic cancer that is leading to dangerous inequality and is robbing resources away from China’s hi-tech ambitions. He has taken direct control over the purge from economic plenipotentiary Liu He, lately subjected to Maoist “rectification”, but without Liu He’s financial sensitivity.
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Xi weighs future of Evergrande as he targets third term
A collapse of the heavily indebted developer would have grave consequences for hundreds of thousands of property buyers and retail investors, as well as financial stability in the world’s second-largest economy.
Tom Mitchell, Edward White and Sun Yu
Sep 23, 2021 – 11.50am
Singapore/Beijing | Just a year away from an unprecedented third term in power, Xi Jinping is taking one of the biggest economic gambles of his presidency by letting Evergrande teeter on the edge of bankruptcy.
A collapse of the heavily indebted Chinese developer would have grave consequences for hundreds of thousands of property buyers and retail investors, as well as financial stability and economic growth in the world’s second-largest economy.
Yet Xi’s administration has yet to offer any reassurances that it will intervene to stabilise the situation, as it recently did with two other large conglomerates that almost collapsed under the weight of their significant debts.
“Senior officials are very concerned about Evergrande,” said one government adviser, who noted that China’s debt-to-gross domestic product ratio had surged from 250 to 290 per cent in under two years.
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Evergrande crashes as China dumps ‘build, build, build’ playbook
Beijing is changing the nation’s growth model and the heavily indebted Evergrande has become the first casualty.
James Kynge and Sun Yu
Sep 23, 2021 – 4.52pm
A dramatic video filmed in the southwestern city of Kunming in August hints at the scale of China’s property bubble. Onlookers can be heard screaming in awe as 15 high-rise apartment blocks are demolished by 85,000 controlled explosions in less than a minute. The unfinished buildings, which formed a complex called Sunshine City II, had stood empty since 2013 after one developer ran out of money and another found defects in the construction work.
“This urban scar that stood for nearly 10 years has at last taken a key step toward restoration,” said an article in the official Kunming Daily after the demolition. Such “urban scars” are common all over China, where Evergrande – the world’s most heavily indebted property company – is suffering a liquidity crunch that could prove terminal.
The crisis at the company, which as recently as two years ago ranked as the world’s most valuable property stock, highlights both the speed at which corporate fortunes can unravel and the deep flaws in China’s growth model. Evergrande, for all of the high drama of its meltdown, is merely the symptom of a much bigger problem. China’s vast real estate sector, which contributes 29 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, is so overbuilt that it threatens to relinquish its longstanding role as a prime driver of Chinese economic growth and, instead, become a drag on it.
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Myanmar facing a vortex of collapse: UN human rights chief
5:17PM September 24, 2021
Myanmar faces a “vortex of repression, violence and economic collapse” without urgent intervention, as fighting intensifies between the military and a growing resistance movement, and millions of people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance, UN Human Rights chief Michelle Bachelet has warned.
A new UN report into the rapid deterioration of Myanmar — a Southeast Asian country that just a decade ago was a magnet for foreign investment as it took tentative steps towards democracy — is an indictment of the military junta that toppled the Aung San Suu Kyi civilian government on February 1.
Ms Bachelet urged the international community to do more to prevent the state’s collapse late on Thursday, warning it would soon be “too late” to avert a nationwide civil war as the military’s grip on power faced widespread resistance from large segments of society.
Hundreds of armed people’s defence force units have sprung up to challenge the junta in response to an appeal by the shadow national unity government — comprising former MPs and activists — for a nationwide armed uprising against the military (known as the Tatmadaw).
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China’s central bank rules all crypto transactions are illegal in country
By AFP
2:40AM September 25, 2021
China’s central bank says all financial transactions involving cryptocurrencies are illegal, sounding the death knell for the digital trade in China after a crackdown on the volatile currencies.
The global values of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin have massively fluctuated over the past year partly due to Chinese regulations, which have sought to prevent speculation and money laundering.
“Virtual currency-related business activities are illegal financial activities,” the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) said in an online statement Friday, adding that offenders would be “investigated for criminal liability in accordance with the law”.
The notice bans all related financial activities involving cryptocurrencies, such as trading crypto, selling tokens, transactions involving virtual currency derivatives and “illegal fundraising”.
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Canadians released from Chinese jail after Huawei CFO freed over US fraud charges
By Eric Tucker, Jim Mustian and Robert Gillies
Updated September 25, 2021 — 11.24amfirst published at 3.03am
New York: Two Canadians detained in China on spying charges have been released from prison and flown out of the country, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Friday, hours after a top executive of Chinese communications giant Huawei Technologies resolved criminal charges against her in a deal with the US Justice Department.
Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were arrested in China in December 2018, shortly after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of the company’s founder, on a US extradition request. Many countries labeled China’s action “hostage politics”.
The deal with Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of the company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, calls for the Justice Department to dismiss fraud charges late next year in exchange for Meng accepting responsibility for misrepresenting her company’s business dealings in Iran.
The arrangement, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, resolves a years-long legal and geopolitical tussle that involved not only the US and China but also Canada, where Meng has remained since she was arrested at Vancouver’s airport in December 2018.
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I look forward to comments on all this!
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David.
