September 2, 2021 Edition
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The news of the week was the attack by ISIS-K on the airport supporting the evacuation from the Taliban in Kabul. Afghanistan seems to have descended into chaos again sadly. Surely the right approach for the next 100 years or so is to just leave them alone other than supressing nascent terrorist groups.
In the US we see sadness and frustration with the way the Afghan was has been brought to an end. Hurricane Ida was a really ferocious storm and lives were lost. As in the UK we are seeing COVID-19 number and cases rising with death rates rather controlled so far.
In OZ we have finished our evacuation efforts from Kabul, in the nick of time, having got 4100 or so out and the focus now returns to the domestic COVID19 problem which is not going wonderfully.
The major news with COVID19 in OZ is the switch to just hoping we can live with the virus without having the hospital system collapse as we vaccinate like crazy. Not sure this is a great plan!
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Major Issues.
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https://www.afr.com/markets/equity-markets/china-is-pulling-the-plug-20210822-p58kva
China is pulling the plug on iron ore
There is not much that Scott Morrison and Mark McGowan will agree on in the months ahead. But neither will want to see China pull the plug on iron ore.
Grant Wilson Contributor
Updated Aug 22, 2021 – 2.04pm, first published at 12.33pm
We flagged a few weeks ago that cycle highs were in place for iron ore. The rout has intensified since, with benchmark contracts down as much as 40 per cent.
Other base metals, such as copper and nickel, along with the oil complex, have also taken a hit, in line with a delta-led deterioration in global growth expectations.
Still, iron ore has taken the brunt, and may still have a lot further to fall.
For Australia, the timing could hardly be worse.
Iron ore exports added about 2.5 per cent to nominal GDP over the past year. It also aided fiscal repair, and provided a kicker to shareholders of the big miners, including the bumper dividends that were recently announced.
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As super funds head offshore, China fast becoming a growth play
Age reporter
August 17, 2021 — 10.30pm
Investors are back on the hunt for long-term growth opportunities and China is emerging as an attractive place to park retirement savings.
Mercer’s chief investment officer Kylie Willment says superannuation funds are increasingly seeking greater exposure to offshore assets, and Chinese companies are becoming a dedicated equities class that will soon become mainstream.
“We have seen significant developments in that space over the past two years,” she says.
Australian super funds have been increasing their allocations to international shares. In 2016, $312 billion was invested across all funds. This year, the allocation has increased to $551 billion.
China has historically been under-represented in global share allocations, either squeezed into emerging markets funds or passively invested through global indices.
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History tells us what will decide whether we work from home in the future
Economics Editor
August 24, 2021 — 3.30pm
By now it seems cut and dried. The pandemic has taught us to love the benefits of working from home and stopped bosses fearing it, so we’ll keep doing it once the virus has receded and the kids are back at school. Well, maybe, maybe not. Any lasting change in the way we work is likely to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Productivity Commission boss Michael Brennan and his troops have been giving the matter much thought and, as he revealed in a speech last week, such a radical change in the way we work would be produced by the interaction of various conflicting but powerful forces.
After all, it would be a return to the way we worked 300 years ago before the Industrial Revolution. Then, most people worked from home as farmers, weavers and blacksmiths and other skilled artisans. And, don’t forget, by today’s standards we were extremely poor.
What’s made us so much more prosperous? Advances in technology. But technology is the product of human invention. That invention could have pushed our lives in other directions.
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My message to parents: Don’t panic, remote learning is OK for most kids
Education researcher
August 25, 2021 — 5.30am
It was disappointing to read a report last week about a small number of parents taking out their frustrations with remote learning on their children’s teachers. Ongoing lockdowns have been trying for us all. Teachers are not only filming lessons, zooming lessons, preparing lessons and send-home packs, calling students and families, and worrying about those they haven’t been able to reach. They’ve also been at school caring for the kids of essential workers while also juggling the needs of their own kids. And they carry the same worries and anxieties as the rest of us.
I’d like to believe the criticism of teachers, however unfair, comes from a place of concern about what’s happening to children’s education as remote learning goes on. My message to parents is this: there’s no need to panic. Our research shows that learning continues regardless.
Parents are concerned about the impact homeschooling will have on learning, but the research is reassuring.
This chimes with the latest NAPLAN results, which found the pandemic had no significant impact on students’ literacy and numeracy achievement at the national or state level.
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Good policy process a casualty of the war on COVID-19
The regulatory failures of Australia’s pandemic management have spanned shifting goalposts, secret health advice, little democratic discussion and no cost-benefit analysis.
Gary Banks Contributor
Aug 24, 2021 – 1.04pm
Last week, the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum held its 14th international conference on good regulatory practice, hosted (virtually) by New Zealand. I was invited to give an opening address reflecting on the state of regulation-making during the COVID-19 crisis.
If good process and effective regulatory governance are pre-conditions for achieving the right regulatory outcomes – which APEC ministers endorse – the record for most member economies leaves a bit to be desired.
While I refrained from saying so in international company, Australia’s experience is far from exemplary. Our COVID-19 numbers have been comparatively good, but as an island continent with controllable borders, we are again a Lucky Country in this respect.
When it comes to good regulatory practice, however, our performance has fallen short, even accounting for the exigencies of the pandemic.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/how-qe-became-an-addiction-we-must-learn-to-break-20210824-p58ljh
How QE became an addiction we must learn to break
Central bankers must underline that printing money was an emergency fix, not a routine solution to economic problems.
Stephen Grenville Contributor
Aug 25, 2021 – 4.45pm
Britain’s House of Lords has just published its evaluation of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing program. The title summarises their unflattering assessment: Quantitative Easing – a dangerous addiction?
This concern has special resonance as one author was Mervyn King who, as governor, initiated the Bank’s QE program in 2008.
Just about every OECD central bank, including the Reserve Bank of Australia, has undertaken QE. Why are concerns being raised now? Some history helps explain.
The Fed’s QE1 in 2008 was a response to the meltdown of financial markets, providing liquidity to restart paralysed mortgage markets. This was indisputably beneficial.
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Australian troops safe after Kabul bombing: Dutton
Andrew Tillett Political correspondent
Aug 27, 2021 – 8.57am
All Australian personnel have been removed from Afghanistan, Defence Minister Peter Dutton has confirmed following Thursday’s terrorist attack outside Kabul’s airport where tens of thousands of people had been evacuated from to flee the Taliban.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he was deeply saddened by the deaths of US service personnel and Afghan civilians.
“Australia condemns these heinous and barbaric attacks,” the PM tweeted.
Mr Dutton told Channel 9 the attack was a “horrible day” and if Australian troops continued to stay on the ground in Kabul, they would have suffered casualties too.
Suicide bombers from Islamic State’s Afghan offshoot, known as ISIS-K or IS-KP, killed at least 13 US soldiers and dozens of Afghan citizens outside the airport’s Abbey Gate.
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Is now the time to dial up the risk in your super portfolio?
Unlike younger Australians, those heading into retirement should be cautious about increasing their exposure to equities.
Michael Read Reporter
Aug 28, 2021 – 5.00am
There may be no stronger force in investing than the fear of missing out.
Over the past 12 months, Australians have watched stock prices soar, fuelled by cheap money and record amounts of government stimulus. Indeed, the S&P/ASX 200 Index is more than 22 per cent higher than it was a year ago.
Buoyed by the prospect of achieving record returns, an increasing number of investors are asking financial advisers: should I shift more of my superannuation into shares?
Financial Framework director Dan Hewitt says he understands why people are considering dialling up the risk in their portfolios.
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‘Sledgehammer’: Plan to force university staff to reveal foreign political history
August 28, 2021 — 5.00am
A confidential plan to force tens of thousands of university staff to reveal a decade of foreign political and financial interests has met with such fierce backlash that the federal government is now reviewing the proposal.
New draft foreign interference guidelines for universities are proposing to demand academics disclose their membership of overseas political parties and any financial support they have received from foreign entities for their research over the past 10 years.
Multiple university sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there was widespread concern about the requirements, with one university executive describing it as “a sledgehammer, blanket approach” to the issue.
The proposed guidelines, which have been drafted by the University Foreign Interference Taskforce (UFIT), represent a major ramping up of scrutiny of academics’ backgrounds in response to concerns within the federal government about research theft by the Chinese Communist Party and other foreign actors.
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PM’s surprise investment in a better class of economic debate pays off
Economics Editor
August 27, 2021 — 11.45am
When he was appointed chair of the Productivity Commission, Michael Brennan looked to be just another political appointment by a government that disrespected the public service and was busily installing its own men – and I do mean men – to plum jobs and key positions.
Three years later it’s clear that, whatever Scott Morrison’s motives in insisting he be appointed, Brennan is his own man, with his own inquiring and “well-furnished” mind. His disposition is conservative and he’s an expert in the neo-classical orthodoxy of economics.
He’s what Treasury-types used to call an “economic rationalist”. But Brennan is no narrow-minded dogmatist who, having discovered the truth, sees no need to look further. He’s learnt from behavioural economics and is interested even in “evolutionary economics”.
Brennan’s appointment to head the Productivity Commission coincided with the early departure of John Fraser as secretary to the Treasury and then-treasurer Morrison’s decision to replace Fraser with the chief of staff in his own office, Philip Gaetjens.
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On the brink of a superannuation revolution
6:45PM August 27, 2021
It’s taken some 11 years but the long overdue reformation of the $3 trillion Australian superannuation industry starts next week. And in coming months it will gather pace to the great long-term benefit all those with substantial money invested in industry and retail superannuation funds.
In 2010 the Cooper report set out what was required to establish a modern Australian superannuation savings system, where members could discover what was happening to their money.
The report lobbed on the desk of the then ALP government which implemented some parts, but the disclosure recommendations were never implemented by either party until this year when Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and superannuation minister Jane Hume managed to get support from sufficient cross benchers.
Already online there are now interactive YourSuper comparison tools to help people choose between the funds on offer in a way that enables people to compare funds with similar investment components.
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An image of leadership that is slowly unravelling at the edges
Using soldiers, doctors, and experts as props cannot hide the reality of struggling hospitals or slow vaccination rates forever.
Laura Tingle Columnist
Aug 27, 2021 – 4.40pm
The compassion our political leaders have expressed for the desperate people trying to flee Kabul in the past couple of weeks has been noticeably greater (if, shall we say, still rather constrained) than was shown to asylum seekers from the same country 20 years ago, or subsequently.
Still not great enough compassion for anyone to escalate the rate of rescue missions until it was too late. And not great enough to stop many people – possibly Australian citizens as well as ordinary Afghans who are now in fear of their lives – being stranded there, even before the horrendous bombing at Kabul’s airport.
But there has been enough compassion to compel the Prime Minister to adjust the weight of his language slightly over recent weeks, to put less emphasis on “there won’t be any queue jumpers” and more on expressing horror at what was unfolding, and advertising how many people had been flown out of the ravaged country in our name.
What prompted this change? The answer is almost certainly images.
Remember how successfully asylum seekers were kept faceless and nameless at the height of asylum seeker politics? It is much easier to maintain a sanctimonious tone when you aren’t looking at pictures of little kids in distress.
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Coronavirus And Impacts.
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Without a change in mindset, we’ll never escape COVID
The nation needs to change its mindset and focus only on the hospital cases and the fatalities.
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Aug 22, 2021 – 4.17pm
It was only a few weeks ago the Prime Minister was warning that if NSW waved the white flag on trying to suppress its outbreak, it could jeopardise the national plan to reopen.
At the time, NSW’s number of new cases daily was in the mid-300s and Gladys Berejiklian had effectively acknowledged COVID-zero was an impossibility and vaccination was the fastest road out.
The Prime Minister says the national plan can still proceed with large case numbers.
Scott Morrison cautioned that lockdowns must still be pursued.
“Minimising those cases is going to ensure that we go into the next phase a lot stronger,” he said.
“Australians have made great sacrifices to be able to get us into the position we have been in. We are not going to squander that. It’s important we stay home. It is important we make this lockdown work. It’s important that we don’t give up on it.”
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Berejiklian’s risky vaccination trick is working
Aaron Patrick Senior correspondent
Aug 22, 2021 – 11.09am
For the past two-and-a-half weeks, even as NSW’s fight against COVID-19 became more desperate by the day, Premier Gladys Berejiklian promised to reward residents of the state for turning up at doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies and converted Bunnings warehouses to get needles stuck into their arms.
In coming days NSW will blow through the 6 million freedom-triggering vaccinations target Berejiklian set at the beginning of the month, demonstrating the Premier has got at least one thing right responding to the out-of-control outbreak.
Over the weekend, ABC data journalist Casey Briggs produced a chart that compared NSW’s vaccine rollout with the US and Britain, two countries that put a huge effort into vaccinations because they, unlike Australia, were suffering mass COVID-19 deaths.
NSW’s daily number of vaccinations, adjusted for population, is about one- third more than the numbers achieved by Britain’s vaunted National Health Service, and about 20 per cent higher than the best the US could do.
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What’s next if Victoria’s lockdown can’t eliminate delta?
If an eradication strategy doesn’t dramatically decrease cases by September 2, it might be worth trying a soft lockdown while waiting for vaccination coverage to increase.
Tony Blakely Epidemiologist and public health medicine specialist.
Aug 23, 2021 – 5.00am
Lockdown No.5 in Victoria was textbook. An outbreak occurred, contact tracing swung into action, cases were found, and over time the number of daily cases infectious in the community diminished to zero for three days, and we came out of lockdown.
Lockdown No.6 is not going well. Victoria cannot seem to tip the balance despite even stricter restrictions. In fact, the majority of cases found have been infectious out in the community, and the numbers are going up rather than down.
Even worse – and the reason for this bad trend – is the constant stream of mystery cases. When there are mystery cases, there will by definition be future cases in the community.
I strongly support the Victorian government’s decision to go “really hard” by Australian standards, with curfews, and by closing playgrounds and childcare, and further reducing essential workplaces.
It would be so much better to re-eliminate the virus, and wish for a near-normal life until the end of the year.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/victoria-s-soft-lockdown-option-20210822-p58kwx
Victoria’s ‘soft lockdown’ option
Andrew Tillett and Aaron Patrick
Aug 23, 2021 – 5.00am
A top epidemiologist says Victoria may need to go into a “soft lockdown” because of the rising mental health and economic costs of prolonged strict measures, even if that pushes daily infections into the hundreds.
Melbourne University epidemiologist Tony Blakely, writing in The Australian Financial Review today, proposes easing some restrictions to manage Victoria’s delta outbreak while vaccination rates rise.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison sounded the death knell for so-called “COVID-zero” over the weekend, warning the premiers higher caseloads were not an excuse to delay reopening Australia once vaccination rates hit 70 per cent.
Mr Morrison’s top mandarin, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Phil Gaetjens, has advised state premiers that independent modelling showed the surge in delta cases – NSW reported 830 cases on Sunday – made little difference to eventual infections and hospitalisations once vaccination coverage increased.
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Delta forces retreat from elimination and lockdowns
The impossibility of zero cases, amid the rising costs of lockdowns, is forcing a shift of strategy from lockdowns to vaccination.
Aug 22, 2021 – 6.41pm
Leading epidemiologist Tony Blakely suggests in today’s The Australian Financial Review that rising economic and social costs of 200-plus days of lockdown in Melbourne mean the Andrews government may need to consider retreating from its insistence on seeking to eliminate the highly-infectious delta strain.
A “soft lockdown” may be the least costly option, even if it allows daily infections to rise to 300. Contrary to last year, the health advice is starting to lean this way as delta becomes, in practice, impossible to sustainably eliminate, as rising vaccination rates mean COVID itself is less deadly, and as the rising health and economic costs of lockdowns outweigh the benefits.
Until very recently, Jacinda Ardern suggested that New Zealand could pursue a zero-COVID strategy indefinitely: just as Premier Mark McGowan still does for Western Australia.
Amid the inevitable outbreak, New Zealand’s COVID-response minister yesterday said the higher infectiousness of delta raised “some pretty big questions” about the country’s strategy. New Zealand couldn’t keep going into hard lockdown to run down every outbreak.
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Premier, abandon your plans to open up when we hit 6 million jabs
Immunologist and emeritus professor of medicine
August 23, 2021 — 4.25am
There have been many mistakes, in many countries, that have hindered efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic. None has been more counterproductive than the premature easing of public health containment initiatives. Time and time again, premature easing of restrictions has breathed new life into infections by the SARS-Cov-2 virus. This is especially so when dealing with the Delta variant.
By this week, NSW will have delivered six million jabs into arms, to have 31 per cent of the adult population fully vaccinated and 56 per cent partially vaccinated against COVID-19.
Premier, there is no modelling anywhere that suggests this achievement should trigger an easing of any restrictions. Please abandon your plans to do so, especially given new cases of community spread are increasing. Only 55 per cent of people over 70 in NSW have been fully vaccinated. Tens of thousands of people over 70 remain highly vulnerable.
In Britain, where the percentage of vaccinated adults is twice as high as here, that achievement triggered the removal of all public health restrictions as the country embraced the freedom associated with the decision to go forward “living with COVID-19”. The result? Hospitals in crisis, with about 800 admissions each day for COVID-19 and an average of 90 deaths a day.
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Clash looms over Prime Minister’s lockdown exit target
By David Crowe
August 23, 2021 — 5.00am
Liberal MPs are urging Prime Minister Scott Morrison to take a hard line against states that veto plans to ease lockdowns when vaccination rates hit 70 per cent, escalating a political clash over calls to abandon the target when coronavirus case numbers have surged to record levels.
Federal government MPs are demanding a clear path toward easing rules to give Australians a “reward” for signing up for vaccinations, with some calling for states to be able to go it alone rather than being held to the national target.
With national daily case numbers climbing to 917 on Sunday, the highest since the pandemic began, state and territory leaders questioned Mr Morrison’s claim that the medical advice to national cabinet endorsed the plan even at high infection rates.
The advice, from Doherty Institute professor of epidemiology Jodie McVernon and her colleagues, assumed only 30 cases in one scenario but is being clarified with a new assessment likely to go to states and territories this week.
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Australia won’t reach 80pc without mandatory jabs
Lockdowns are strictly enforced, while vaccination is voluntary. Reopening will be pushed back without a concerted effort by political and business leaders to get us across the threshold.
Chris Richardson and Natalie James
Updated Aug 23, 2021 – 2.45pm, first published at 2.41pm
Australia has two big weapons to fight off COVID-19 – vaccines and lockdowns. But we’re taking a different approach to them. Lockdowns are mandatory. Vaccines are not. Lockdowns have specific exemptions. Vaccines are voluntary.
Those relative priorities don’t make sense, given that vaccine hesitancy will make it tough to reach enough vaccine coverage to get out of this crisis.
Many people under 40 have been waiting for Pfizer, so vaccination rates may well remain excellent during September and October.
Yet that could well hide a developing problem: NSW may start to run out of willing arms sometime next month, with Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland starting to hit the hesitancy speed bump during October.
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Doherty Institute target ‘risks Covid-19 death of 25,000 people’
10:00PM August 23, 2021
Australia faces more than 25,000 Covid-19 deaths and hundreds of thousands of long coronavirus cases if Scott Morrison sticks with his plan to open the nation with an 80 per cent vaccination rate, a cross-university group of academics claims.
In a study for the Australian National University, a group of economists and medical researchers say the Doherty Institute’s thresholds for reopening Australia are too low and the nation should not loosen restrictions until 90 per cent of Australia’s entire population – including children – has had two shots.
Even then, the academics – from ANU, the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Australia – say Australians will need a third booster shot, especially if they received Vaxzevria (previously AstraZeneca), and 95 per cent of vulnerable groups and people over 60 are fully vaccinated.
The academics’ call comes as the Prime Minister stands by the plan to open up with vaccination thresholds based solely on the adult population and warns premiers not to abandon the plan.
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Children are at risk from Delta
12:00AM August 24, 2021
Parental anxiety is rising in tandem with COVID case numbers in children. Children account for 43 per cent cases in Victoria and at least 25 per cent of new cases in NSW. We had been reassured by high-profile paediatricians that children largely bypassed the worst of Covid, that hospitalisations were low and deaths the exception. Indeed, UK data until February showed that child deaths from Covid were two per million while more than 360 children have died in the US from a child population of 74 million. In 20 to 40 per cent of children, Covid is mild or without symptoms. A US study in August 2020 reported a hospitalisation rate of eight per 100,000, but once hospitalised, like adults, one in three ended up in intensive care. Virtually all our knowledge is based on data pre-Delta.
Questions of global equity were invoked to stall vaccinating kids even though this argument never influenced ours or anyone else’s vaccine procurement decisions. We know that the social, emotional and physical wellbeing of children is linked to in-school learning yet we are told that layered measures should be instituted, with vaccination conspicuously absent. Kids were poor transmitters, until a Canadian study performed pre-Delta showed otherwise, with very young kids 0-3 years more likely to transmit to household members than adolescents.
The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation was in lockstep with the UK in limiting vaccination to vulnerable kids on August 2, intending to rule on the rest in the “coming months”. Research on children has been biased by lower testing rates, often due to milder symptoms in them, cyclical lockdowns that have shielded them from infection and scientific judgment set like cement predating the emergence of Delta.
The deprioritisation of children meant that under-17s were excluded from the Doherty Institute modelling and the government’s four-phase roadmap out of Covid released on July 30. This is despite many high-income countries cracking on, vaccinating 12 to 17-year-olds, including the US, Canada, Israel, Singapore, Germany, France, Japan, Ireland plus Mexico and Indonesia.
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Voters back national vaccination targets to ease restrictions
By David Crowe
August 25, 2021 — 5.00am
A majority of Australians want political leaders to stick to a national cabinet deal to ease restrictions when the vaccination rate hits key targets, with 62 per cent backing the plan and only 24 per cent saying states and territories should go their own way.
Voters are increasing their support for vaccinations at the same time many of them decide the country will not return to zero coronavirus cases, with 54 per cent saying it is not possible to achieve “complete suppression” again.
The exclusive findings lend weight to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s call to the country to “get out of the cave” after weeks of dispute over whether to relax rules when the vaccine rate reaches 70 per cent and then 80 per cent of people aged 16 and over.
The Resolve Political Monitor, conducted for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age by research company Resolve Strategic, finds majority support for the national plan within states including 64 per cent in NSW and 61 per cent in Victoria.
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https://www.ausdoc.com.au/opinion/covid-diaries-we-cant-forget-children-any-more
The COVID Diaries: We can’t forget the children any more
Dr Newcombe is an infectious diseases physician and clinical microbiologist at Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney and Douglass Hanly Moir Pathology.
25th August 2021
One of the few bright spots of COVID-19 last year was the relative sparing of children. Unfortunately, the Delta variant has changed all of that.
In adults, the variant is at least twice as transmissible and twice as virulent as the ancestral 2020 one.
And it is increasingly apparent that children face similar increases, at least in transmissibility and possibly in virulence as well.
As of 23 August in Victoria, 23% of the state’s active cases were in children less than 10 years of age and 20% were in children aged between 10 and 19 years.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/return-learning-to-the-classroom-20210824-p58ljd
Return learning to the classroom
The pandemic has upended the natural order by protecting older people at the expense of children. Reopening NSW schools for term four would restore normal priorities.
Aug 25, 2021 – 6.17pm
The encouraging surprise of the 2021 NAPLAN results provides further hope that Australia can exit the pandemic in better shape than most other comparable countries. The national numeracy and literacy tests held in May showed no discernible change in average scores for year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students compared with the last round of testing in 2019.
That offers some reassurance that the past 18 months of school closures may not have been as disruptive as feared for the progress of the nation’s most precious human capital. It also shows the importance of NAPLAN, which some teacher unions and education academics want scrapped.
Without standardised testing, Australia’s school system would now be flying blind through the forced experiment of home schooling and remote learning. Yet it’s still not the full picture. More detail on the effect of lockdowns on students from disadvantaged families waits on the release of school-level NAPLAN results later this year. Also not captured is the cost to the social wellbeing of cooped-up kids, and a growing mental health toll.
So the NAPLAN results are no cause for complacency about getting students back in the classroom.
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We’re rival MPs but both paediatricians, so united on how to protect school students from COVID
By Katie Allen and Mike Freelander
August 26, 2021 — 5.00am
Fighting COVID-19 has been a marathon event – here in Australia and around the world. With every vaccination, COVID-19 becomes a less deadly disease – for us all. But we can’t forget the shadow impacts of the COVID pandemic, including the mental health impacts, particularly on our children.
This week the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute released a report outlining the enormous impact COVID is having on the mental health and wellbeing of our young, particularly the most disadvantaged. It says prolonged school closures and lockdowns can exacerbate these impacts.
We are MPs from opposite sides in the Federal Parliament, but we are both paediatricians and we are united in our support for the MCRI report, especially its call to prioritise the vaccination of teachers, early educators and school staff to ensure we can get children back to school sooner.
Students across Australia have been missing out. Victorian students already missed almost 150 days of face-to- face learning – one of the highest rates in the world – and they are facing a second year of lockdowns, more than any other state in the country. In NSW it looks to be some time before students can return to school.
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Two-thirds want lockdowns to end and ‘zero Covid’ policies abandoned, YouGov survey finds
12:01AM August 26, 2021
More than two-thirds of Australians want lockdowns to end as soon as possible, don’t believe returning to zero Covid-19 cases is possible, and think lockdowns should be lifted after 80 per cent of the population is vaccinated, a new YouGov survey reveals.
The NSW lockdown has sparked a marked shift in public attitudes towards Covid-19 restrictions, vaccination and government control, according to the poll taken for the Centre for Independent Studies think tank.
A YouGov survey found a total of 71 per cent believed Covid- 19 restrictions and lockdowns should be raised either as soon as possible or after the national cabinet’s agreed vaccine thresholds were reached.
Less than a quarter wanted some restrictions to continue until complete elimination of Covid-19 (13 per cent) or even to continue after the pandemic (13 per cent).
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Still OK to reopen with high numbers, national cabinet to be told
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Aug 27, 2021 – 5.00am
The states will be urged to stick with the national plan to reopen the economy after modelling of three new scenarios by the Doherty institute forecast only “slight” increases in eventual cases and deaths if the reopening process began with high numbers of infections in the community.
The new modelling contains scenarios with the number of community cases at the starting point low, medium and very high. A source said the very high number was much higher than the cases NSW had produced.
In all three cases, it was still deemed appropriate to proceed with the plan as the forecast number of deaths, hospitalisations and illnesses were only slightly higher than the original modelling forecast that Australia would have to live with.
The national cabinet, which meets on Friday, will also be presented with federal health department data showing while the delta variant of coronavirus is causing a higher rate of hospitalisation than the first strain, because of vaccinations there are far fewer deaths and severe illnesses.
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Stretched hospitals are the PM’s next big test
Chief political correspondent
August 27, 2021 — 5.00am
If not now, when? That is the catch-cry for a powerful argument that defined federal politics this week, will echo around the country for months and could easily decide the next election. It is the distilled version of a message from Scott Morrison that comes down to trust. The Prime Minister tells Australians the time has come to emerge from lockdown. And he assures them it will be safe.
This is not Morrison’s promise alone. The premiers and chief ministers have also signed up to the national agreement to ease the restrictions in stages after the country reaches a vaccination rate of 70 per cent and then 80 per cent. They will decide the health orders that control the outcome.
Yet the promise from Morrison is a pivotal point in the pandemic. He senses the frustration among Australians who believe life in lockdown cannot go on, which means voters are receptive to his message. The bigger question, however, is whether voters have full disclosure on the consequences.
The assurances made in Canberra do not sound so convincing to those who are a long way from Parliament. In the Victorian town of Shepparton, for instance, locals warn of a crisis. In the hospitals of western Sydney, meanwhile, health workers struggle to cope with the load.
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Safe to open with hundreds of community cases: Doherty
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Aug 27, 2021 – 5.14pm
Easing restrictions once 70 per cent of the adult population is vaccinated, even with “hundreds” of cases of coronavirus already in the community, will result in an earlier spike in infections than previously forecast but no increase in total cases overall, updated modelling by the Doherty Institute says.
However, moderate restrictions will remain necessary until at least the vaccination rate hits 80 per cent and the third phase of reopening begins.
The new modelling was presented to state and territory leaders at Friday’s national cabinet meeting as Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to maintain solidarity for the national plan to reopen the economy in phases, based on vaccination rates.
There was no firm commitment either way and the states failed to agree on what precise freedoms, such as being able to travel or attend sporting events, will be available to the vaccinated once the 70 per cent threshold was reached.
There was agreement, however, to start vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds from September 13 in parallel with the adult population after the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation gave the green light to give them Pfizer.
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Even Berejiklian is fed up with the PM, who she privately regards as an ‘evil bully’
Political and international editor
August 28, 2021 — 5.00am
Thursday was the day Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk finally had had enough of Scott Morrison. She announced she was not waiting any longer for the Prime Minister to work with Queensland. In January, Palaszczuk decided that Queensland needed to dump the failed system of hotel quarantine and build its own cabin-style facility. But when she pitched this to Morrison, he was unsupportive.
Now her government had decided to go ahead and build the cabin-based quarantine facility in Queensland without any Commonwealth co-operation.
It had been an exasperating seven months for her. So much for a pandemic emergency: “I’ve been calling for this since January, it could have been built now,” she told a press conference. She’d been trying to work with Morrison because quarantine is, after all, a Commonwealth responsibility under Section 51 (ix) of the constitution.
Hotel quarantine has proved to be the leakiest part of Australia’s defence against COVID. The system has been responsible for 27 outbreaks of the disease, on Labor’s count, including the current one gripping NSW.
Several premiers and the federal opposition for months called on Morrison to fix the system. But for some reason, he couldn’t see a need. The Prime Minister decided that what was good enough for the first phase of the emergency was good enough for the duration.
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US intelligence unsure if Coronavirus emerged from lab leak or animals
Updated August 28, 2021 — 10.46am first published at 6.29am
Washington: The US intelligence community is unsure whether the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan laboratory or emerged naturally through animals, but most agencies believe it was probably not engineered in a lab.
The findings were contained in a much-awaited unclassified version of an intelligence report commissioned by US President Joe Biden to probe the origins of the virus.
A classified version of the report, prepared by the office of the Director of National Intelligence, was delivered to the White House earlier this week.
The inconclusive nature of the report will likely only heighten, rather than end, the increasingly heated and partisan debate in the US about the origins of the coronavirus.
Prominent Republican politicians have been adamant the virus originated from a lab leak and have sought to tie infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci to funding for so-called “gain-of-function” research (which alters biological organisms to enhance their property) into coronaviruses.
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Climate Change.
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Rain falls for first time on top of Greenland ice cap
By Ben Webster
The Times
9:55PM August 21, 2021
Rain has fallen on the top of Greenland’s ice cap two miles above sea level for the first time since records began.
The temperature at the peak is normally well below freezing but rose above it for nine hours on Saturday last week and there were several hours of rain instead of snow.
There have been unusually high temperatures across Greenland at up to 18C higher than average in some places. This caused the heaviest rain on the ice sheet as a whole since 1950, when records began, with an estimated seven billion tonnes of water falling over three days.
The temperatures caused rapid melting, with seven times more ice lost from the ice sheet on Sunday than the daily average for this time of year.
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The greening of super can’t come at fund members’ expense
Investing in green causes will appeal to many super savers. But it’s also full of hidden risks they should not be asked to bear.
David Gallagher and Graham Harman
Aug 25, 2021 – 3.54pm
When the Keating government legislated the modern system of superannuation in 1992, its intention was clear and simple: compulsory savings and investment would become part and parcel of every working Australian’s life to ensure they had a pathway towards sufficient income funding in their retirement.
If not, the age pension was guaranteed by the government as a safety net.
At the outset, funds were set up, mostly by corporations, to manage the collective regular funding contributions made on behalf of employees.
Fast forward to today, and the traditional company superannuation fund has largely disappeared. These funds have been replaced by a handful of leviathan industry funds and the age-based asset allocation baskets offered under the MySuper regime.
The growth in the pool of superannuation investments has spawned a corresponding increase in the breadth of interpretation as to what the fundamental role of superannuation is and within what framework it should be carried out.
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Australia will lose the battle for international students, IDP warns
Julie Hare Education editor
Updated Aug 25, 2021 – 6.13pm, first published at 4.39pm
IDP Education chief Andrew Barkla has warned that Australia will lose the race to win back international students to countries such as the UK and Canada that have loosened their borders, after hard border closures here bit hard into the company’s profits.
IDP, which matchmakes international students with universities, on Wednesday reported that its net profit after tax had slumped 42 per cent to $39.5 million in the year to June 30, on 10 per cent lower revenues of $529 million. No final dividend was declared.
Mr Barkla said there was “no great assurance at the moment” that the reopening road map based on vaccination rates and modelling by Melbourne’s Doherty Institute would get Australia back on track in time to head off the international competition for students.
“The longer Australian borders remain closed, the greater the challenge in re-engaging students who want to study here. It’s a competitive marketplace so we’re forgoing the return of skilled and capable workers [by keeping out international students].”
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Subsidised coal part of market overhaul: Energy Security Board
12:00AM August 26, 2021
Special payments will be needed to keep ageing coal-fired and gas power stations in business to avoid future spikes in electricity prices, under a national plan to shore up the energy grid.
A new capacity mechanism recommended by the Energy Security Board will put incentives in place to stop the early closure of power plants and create long-term signals for investment in dispatchable generation.
The ESB’s post-2025 market design recommends four reforms of the electricity network to replace and secure baseload power, avoid price hikes and ensure long-term grid reliability.
Signalling the end of the nation’s coal-fired power fleet, the country’s energy ministers have also backed a revamp of the electricity market that transitions from traditional coal and gas assets to pumped-hydro, battery, wind and gas generation.
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Uncharted waters leave little room for nuclear option
11:59PM August 25, 2021
The Energy Security Board has pulled no punches detailing the highwire act being performed as Australia makes the rapid transition to renewable energy.
As a nation, we have been ahead of the global curve both in the speed of investment in wind and solar generation and in experiencing the pitfalls that can come with it.
Blackouts that were first experienced in South Australia have now been repeated in other parts of the world, notably Texas and California.
After a spate of blackouts over the northern summer, California is racing to install a suite of gas turbines to make sure the lights stay on in future.
The ESB suggestion for a capacity market to pay otherwise uneconomical fossil fuel generators to stay in the market to back up renewables is not new. One was established in Britain almost a decade ago.
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Royal Commissions And The Like.
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ASIC dumps ‘why not litigate?’ as Frydenberg resets path
Ronald Mizen Economics correspondent
Aug 26, 2021 – 8.44am
The corporate watchdog’s controversial “why not litigate?” mantra has been dumped after Treasurer Josh Frydenberg made clear his expectation of a more supportive regulator focused on economic recovery.
The change is part of a major overhaul of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which also included the appointment of a new leadership team following the high-profile departure of former chairman James Shipton and his deputy Daniel Crennan.
Mr Shipton and Mr Crennan exited after an expense scandal late last year, and though both were ultimately cleared of wrongdoing, Mr Frydenberg used the turmoil as an opportunity to shakeout the regulator.
The appointment of a new guard was the first phase of that process. In April, former Herbert Smith Freehills lawyer Joseph Longo was made chairman, and ACCC commissioner Sarah Court was appointed his deputy.
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National Budget Issues.
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Future Fund assets hit $196.8b, after record 10pc quarterly gain
Jonathan Shapiro Senior reporter
Updated Aug 26, 2021 – 10.04am, first published at 10.01am
The Future Fund has delivered a 22 per cent annual return for the financial year ending June 30, 2021 as its assets swelled to $196.8 billion.
The 12-month performance is the strongest in the history of the sovereign wealth fund since it was set up in 2006 to offset public sector pension liabilities, as it gained $35.7 billion of value during the period.
In the third quarter alone, the Future Fund’s assets gained $18.2 billion or more than 10 per cent. That too is a quarterly record, bettering the 8.6 per cent gain in the final quarter of 2013 when the fund was half the size.
The Future Fund’s mandate is to deliver returns of 4 to 5 per cent above the inflation rate, and it is currently tracking well ahead of that target, delivering an annualised rate of 10.1 percent over 10 years, relative to the 6.1 per cent target.
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Health Issues.
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See COVID19 Section
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International Issues.
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‘Like a deer in the headlights’: the price of Biden’s Afghan strategy
The chaotic scenes in Kabul are unlikely to derail US President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, but they have worried allies and emboldened foes.
Edward Luce Columnist
Aug 22, 2021 – 1.16pm
Not since Major General William Elphinstone’s retreating British army was picked off in 1842 has a foreign occupier left Afghanistan under such a cloud.
It took three years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 for its Kabul ally to submit to mujahideen forces. It was two years after the US military’s exit from Vietnam before Saigon fell to the communists in 1975.
Last Monday, Kabul folded to the Taliban almost three weeks before the official day of America’s departure.
“We look like a deer caught in the headlights,” says Mathew Burrows, a former senior CIA officer now at the Atlantic Council. “It is one more chink gone in the American empire.”
The scenes of chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport will supply anti-American propagandists with years of footage.
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The west has paid the price for neglecting the Afghan economy
Building a nation is the work of those who belong to it. Building a functioning state and economy, however, is something the west not only could have done but had a duty to do.
Martin Sandbu
Aug 23, 2021 – 9.45am
After the fall of Kabul, there is a strong temptation to see the failure of the west’s 20-year intervention in Afghanistan as preordained. “There is no military solution” to the country’s challenges, goes one version of this analysis. True enough: you will not definitively win a war where you are unable to win the peace.
But there is a similar fatalism about the possibility that peace could ever have been won in Afghanistan. It is too tribal and traditional a society ever to become a functioning democracy, say some. “Nation-building” by outsiders is always doomed to failure, say others.
Building a nation is no doubt the work of those who belong to it. Building a functioning state and economy, however, is something the west not only could have done but had a duty to do after ousting the Taliban in 2001.
The sad truth is that we never really tried.
While Afghanistan’s per capita income is higher today than in the 1990s, it flatlined around $US600 in the last decade, according to the World Bank. As the economist Jeffrey Sachs points out, US spending on economic development in the country has been dwarfed by military spending — and even what was notionally devoted to reconstruction mostly went on security.
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Taper tantrum fears: Fed chair has to be careful not to unleash market chaos
Senior business columnist
August 23, 2021 — 11.59am
Last week’s jitters in financial markets after the release of the US Federal Reserve Board minutes of its July meeting provide a volatile backdrop to this week’s annual Jackson Hole conference of the world’s central bankers.
Sharemarkets around the world wobbled, bond yields slid, the US dollar strengthened and commodity prices slumped after the release of the minutes, which showed that a majority of the members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee were prepared to start “tapering” or reducing, the Fed’s $US120 billion ($168 billion) a month of bond and mortgage purchases later this year.
Fed chairman Jerome Powell is scheduled to speak on Friday at the conference that starts Thursday and ends Saturday – a conference that thanks to COVID-19 will be virtual – with a lot of expectation but little certainty that he will talk about the timing and rate of a phasing out of the quantitative easing the US central bank in response to the initial outbreak of the pandemic last year.
If he doesn’t address the elephant in the virtual room on Friday, the next opportunity to detail the Fed’s plans to evolve US monetary policy will come at the Fed’s next meeting towards the end of September, which would leave the markets in a continuing state of uncertainty for at least another month.
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Biden’s Afghanistan botch-up will invite Beijing to try its luck
Political and international editor
August 24, 2021 — 5.08am
Many leaders were shocked at America’s disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan. One who was not? China’s President Xi Jinping.
He has long been convinced of the inevitability of US decline and Chinese ascendancy: “The East is rising,” he likes to say, “and the West is declining.” He is setting China up to be the world’s leading power and he’s well on the way.
And that is exactly why US President Joe Biden says he is walking away from Afghanistan. Biden says he’s withdrawing from the Middle East to concentrate American energy on China.
In announcing the withdrawal, Biden said: “The US cannot afford to remain tethered to policies creating a response to a world as it was 20 years ago. We need to meet the threats where they are today.”
Chief among them is China, and Biden was explicit: “We also need to focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations that is really going to determine our future.” America was engaged with China “in a competition for the 21st century”, Biden has said repeatedly.
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Biden’s America is confused — and so is the world
Most of America’s friends strongly prefer Democrats to Trumpism. But they are still unsure what that means for America’s role in the world.
Edward Luce Columnist
Aug 25, 2021 – 9.08am
No, the Western alliance is not about to break up. And America is not about to drift off into some isolationist reverie. Afghanistan is too peripheral to trigger such a dramatic shift.
But the chaotic nature of America’s withdrawal, and the slight felt by most of its allies, have put an abrupt end to President Joe Biden’s international honeymoon. It has also left the world — and much of Washington — in confusion.
What does Biden mean by “America is back”? To which America is he referring?
The answer is not obvious. Biden’s Afghan pullout fulfilled one promise, to get out of “forever wars”, and broke another, to restore the primacy of America’s alliances. The second promise was what sharply differentiated Biden from Donald Trump.
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America’s comeback from Afghan defeat is what matters
How the US recovers from its failure in Afghanistan and shapes up to the China challenge is what will ultimately matter, long after the images of the fall of Kabul become Facebook memories.
Aug 23, 2021 – 6.07pm
Amid the tragic debacle of the US retreat from Kabul, there is now a danger of reading too much into what the withdrawal from Afghanistan says about America’s role in the world.
The final US defeat in Vietnam was symbolised by the images of the last helicopter leaving the American embassy in Saigon in 1975. Paralleling this, the humiliating operational debacle of the pullout from Afghanistan has been crystallised by the pictures of desperate Afghans hanging onto a C-17 transport plane.
Vietnam was the first so-called television war. In the digital age, when every smartphone is a camera, the sharing on social media of images of the Taliban takeover and the humbling blow to the prestige of the world’s only superpower is intensifying feelings about what all this supposedly means for America’s global leadership.
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Here’s a reality check on Afghanistan’s mineral wealth
All the gold in the world is worth nothing if stuck under a land run by feuding warlords.
The Lex Column
Aug 25, 2021 – 10.47am
The graveyard of empires is a rich cradle of resources. Positioned on the Tethyan belt, Afghanistan is well-endowed with gold, copper, gems and lithium, prompting suggestions regime change will improve access.
Some experts have seen the war-torn country as literally sitting on a gold mine, with total mineral deposits of $US1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) — a 2010 figure dismissed by geologists and other less buccaneering types as hopelessly optimistic.
In truth, any number is a shot in the dark. Much of the data hark back to the 1980s, based on exploration carried out under the Russians. Still, rich seams of industrial and other metals exist.
Various rounds of licence tenders attracted plucky miners from Asia and the West, including sometime JPMorgan investment banker Ian Hannam. Many such projects fell apart or simply withered away amid political strife, corruption and warfare.
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Afghanistan's Hazara, a long-persecuted minority living in fear of Taliban
AFP
August 25, 2021
Schools and rallies bombed, hospitals targeted and commuters ambushed: for years, the Hazara community has suffered some of Afghanistan's most violent assaults.
Now, with the Taliban back in control, the majority Shiite Muslim group fears the Sunni hardliners may again turn on them -- just as they did during their last regime in the 1990s.
Here is a brief history of the community:
Hailing from the country's rugged central highlands, the Hazaras are believed to trace their lineage from Genghis Khan's Mongol invaders who ransacked Afghanistan in the 13th century.
By some estimates, nearly half of the Hazara population was wiped out in the late 19th century, with many later enslaved during the conquest of their traditional homeland by Pashtuns, the country's biggest ethnic group.
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Wind tunnel gives Beijing advantage in hypersonic weapons
By Didi Tang
The Times
5:21PM August 24, 2021
China has developed the world’s most advanced wind tunnel, capable of simulating 30 times the speed of sound, as Beijing steals a march in the race for hypersonic weapons.
The JF-22 facility in Beijing could replicate speeds of up to 37,000km/h – more than three times that of NASA’s most advanced wind tunnel, the Lens II in Buffalo, New York – and is due for completion this year. Han Guilai, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, estimated that it would put China 20 to 30 years ahead of the West.
The US and Russia are developing hypersonic missiles that can be launched into space carrying nuclear payloads but first they must build wind tunnels to simulate the conditions such weapons would experience in flight.
The new wind tunnel uses chemical explosions, rather than mechanical compressors, to generate high-speed air flow. This creates shockwaves, temperatures and pressures similar to those experienced by high-velocity aircraft. There are wind tunnels using similar technology in development in Japan and Germany.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/a-realistic-decision-to-quit-kabul-20210824-p58ljf
A realistic decision to quit Kabul
America’s attempt to remake Afghanistan was a liberal illusion. Washington needs to look to its core great power interests instead.
Tom Switzer Contributor
Aug 25, 2021 – 2.12pm
The American effort to remake Afghanistan as a viable democratic state has ended in failure. It’s tragic for those in this war-torn country who long for peace and stability. For the US, the tragedy involves a certain amount of humiliation.
However, much of the coverage of the sloppy withdrawal seems hysterical. Far from representing an avoidable debacle that means US security guarantees can’t be taken seriously, this is a tragic end to a long blunder that has cost America dearly in blood and treasure.
As the prominent US Cold War diplomat George Kennan said in the context of Vietnam: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of the world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound policies than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”
Remember, the US spent $US2.26 trillion, fought for 20 years, supported a corrupt and despised local government, lost almost 2500 soldiers, not to mention all those who were wounded. And nobody could offer a viable alternative to the chaos other than try to postpone the day of reckoning. Was the US supposed to stay forever?
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https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/why-powell-should-be-bold-at-jackson-hole-20210826-p58m4q
Why Powell should be bold at Jackson Hole
The longer the Fed chairman waits to detail his thinking, the bigger the risk the central bank will be forced into a disorderly slamming of the policy brakes.
Mohamed El-Erian Contributor
Aug 26, 2021 – 12.04pm
Federal Reserve chairs usually approach the annual confab of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in one of two ways. Either fly under the radar screens of markets, or some eye-grabbing policy announcement.
It would not surprise me if Jay Powell, in his keynote speech this week, opts for the former at this year’s virtual event. Some might even see this as a more risk-averse option. That would be unfortunate. The wellbeing of the economy, the Fed and financial markets call for Powell to take the latter route. It is also the less risky option.
Vacillation by Fed chairs on how to handle their Jackson Hole pronouncements is natural. Choosing a lower key approach fits with the symposium’s stated intention of bringing “together economists, financial market participants, academics, US government representatives and news media to discuss long-term policy issues of mutual concern”.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/chaos-after-explosion-rocks-kabul-airport-20210827-p58mch
Dozens killed as explosions rock Kabul airport
Aug 27, 2021 – 12.47am
Suicide bombers struck the crowded gates of Kabul airport with at least two explosions on Thursday, causing a bloodbath among civilians and US troops, and bringing a catastrophic halt to the airlift of tens of thousands of Afghans desperate to flee.
Two US officials put the US death toll at 12 service members killed, making it one of the deadliest incidents for American troops of the entire 20-year war.
There was no complete toll of Afghan civilians but video images uploaded by Afghan journalists showed dozens of bodies of people killed in packed crowds outside the airport.
A watery ditch by the airport fence was filled with bloodsoaked corpses, some being fished out and laid -in heaps on the canal side while wailing civilians searched for loved ones.
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What is ISIS-K? The terror group believed to be behind Kabul airport explosions
By Tom Vanden Brook
August 27, 2021 — 6.15am
Washington: Explosions outside the Kabul airport that have caused multiple casualties come as Biden administration officials have been alarmed in recent days by threats at Hamid Karzai International Airport by IS-K or ISIS-K, a terrorist group that is a sworn enemy of the Taliban.
A senior US intelligence official said while no formal attribution has been made, all signs — and recently gathered intelligence — point to IS-K, an offshoot of Islamic State, as the culprits.
US officials, including President Joe Biden, had been warning of the threat of Islamic State terror attacks at the Kabul airport, which is being guarded by the Taliban as Americans and Afghan allies seek to leave the country.
Douglas London, the CIA’s former top counterterrorism chief for the region, including Afghanistan, said the threat posed by IS-K is now higher because of the vacuum created after the Taliban toppled the Afghan government within a matter of days.
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Deadliest day in a decade a nightmare for Joe Biden and America
August 27, 2021 — 10.44am
Washington: Despite the scenes of pandemonium that marred the beginning of the US-led evacuation effort from Afghanistan, Joe Biden could take comfort in one fact.
No Americans - either civilian or military - had died during the withdrawal effort, which was ramping up impressively in recent days.
An article in Politico this week summed up the increasingly buoyant mood inside the Biden administration.
“In the span of a week, the White House went from struggling to explain a rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan to beating its chest,” the report stated.
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Powell says taper could start in 2021, no rush on rate hike
Matthew Boesler
Aug 28, 2021 – 12.48am
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank could begin reducing its monthly bond purchases this year, though it won’t be in a hurry to begin raising interest rates thereafter.
The economy has now met the test of “substantial further progress” toward the Fed’s inflation objective that Powell and his colleagues said would be a precondition for tapering the bond purchases, while the labour market has also made “clear progress,” the Fed chief said Friday in the prepared text of a virtual speech at the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium.
At the Fed’s most recent policy meeting in late July, “I was of the view, as were most participants, that if the economy evolved broadly as anticipated, it could be appropriate to start reducing the pace of asset purchases this year,” Powell said.
“The intervening month has brought more progress in the form of a strong employment report for July, but also the further spread of the delta variant,” he said. “We will be carefully assessing incoming data and the evolving risks.”
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September 11 was a warning of what was to come
The terrorist attacks on America were the first sign that the 21st century would not bring boundless peace and prosperity.
George Packer
Aug 27, 2021 – 5.00am
September 11 is buried so deep under layers of subsequent history and interpretation that it’s hard to sort out the true feelings of that day. But I remember one image with indelible clarity. It’s the face of a young woman in a colour photograph on a flyer that appeared at the entrance to my subway stop in Brooklyn, around my neighbourhood, and then all over the city. WE NEED YOUR HELP, the flyer said.
Giovanna ‘Gennie’ Gambale
27 years old 5′6″
Brown hair, brown eyes Last seen on 102nd fl of World Trade Centre …
Call with any information.
The sign was posted right after the attacks and stayed up long after it stopped being an urgent request to locate a missing person who might be wandering through the ashes of Lower Manhattan, and became a tribute to a lost daughter. The early hours and days were like that. The facts were incomprehensible. How many people died, how many survived, did any survive? When would the next attack come? Who had done it, and why?
Through most of September 12 and 13, I waited to give blood with other New Yorkers in a long footpath line. “I volunteered so I could be a part of something,” an unemployed video producer named Matthew Timms told me. “I’ve been at no point in my life when I could say something I’ve done has affected mankind. Like, when the news was on, I was thinking, What if there was a draft? Would I go? I think I would.” A teenager named Amalia della Paolera was passing out cookies. “This is the time when we need to be, like, pulling together and doing as much as we can for each other,” she said, not “sitting at home watching it on TV and saying, like, ‘Oh, there’s another bomb.’ ”
Only on the second day did we begin to understand that there would not be any need for our blood, and even then no one left the line until we were told to go home.
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I look forward to comments on all this!
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David.
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