April 28 2022 Edition
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Sadly the
Russian war against Ukraine continues and seems to get worse by the week. Putin is now saying he will attack any one who helps Ukraine. This can still end very badly!
In the US they are working to help Ukraine as hard as they can while politically things seem as bad as ever internally.
We are seeing the UK PM in India on trade and defence matters mainly.
We are now in Week 3 of the six week General Election. The level of debate has been pretty pathetic so far IMVHO and COVID has upended the Labor efforts recently. I continue to worry that we are not taking our COVID rates and deaths seriously - the death rate is way too high for relaxation of all controls IMVHO!
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Major Issues.
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6:00am, Apr 18, 2022 Updated: 6:32pm, Apr 17
Michael Pascoe: The federal election campaign is silent on the issues that count
It seems the most extraordinary story: Seven Coalition MPs on the record “have hit back at criticism of Scott Morrison’s broken promise to deliver a federal ICAC, declaring voters aren’t raising the corruption commission”.
It also seems like a story successfully promoted by “Coalition sources”.
To paraphrase, “the punters don’t care about integrity in government, so we don’t need to”.
As far as excuses go for not delivering the integrity commission promised four years ago, it is pathetically, miserably, depressingly weak, albeit still better than Scott Morrison’s actual excuse: “It’s Labor’s fault.”
But the “Don’t Care 7” find some support in the Streem media monitor count of top campaign issues in the first week of the official circus. “Integrity” or “ICAC” didn’t make the top 10 mentions.
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Senate race is one of the most interesting in recent memory
Tom McIlroy Political reporter
Apr 16, 2022 – 12.00am
This year’s Senate race is one of the most interesting in recent memory given its diverse field of candidates and the major parties contesting more seats than usual after the 2016 double dissolution.
The results will deliver a fascinating six years in the upper house.
There are 76 seats in the Senate, made up of 12 senators for each of the six states and two senators for each of the two territories. But at each election only half of the Senate seats are up for grabs because each member serves a six-year term.
In the current Senate, the Coalition holds 36 seats, Labor has 26 and the Greens have nine. Crossbenchers hold another five: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has two (Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts), Centre Alliance has one (Stirling Griff), the Jacqui Lambie Network has one (Jacqui Lambie) and Rex Patrick stands as an independent.
The Senate holds a lot of power and its composition can affect how successful a government is at getting new legislation across the line. As it stands the Coalition is three seats short of a majority and has therefore had to depend on the crossbench senators.
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Albanese pays a price for bad week as voters swing back to government
By David Crowe
April 17, 2022 — 6.00pm
Labor leader Anthony Albanese has paid the price for a damaging opening week in the election campaign after voters cut their support for the opposition from 38 to 34 per cent while swinging back to Scott Morrison as preferred prime minister.
Primary support for the Coalition rose from 34 to 35 per cent, and Morrison made gains on his personal approval and performance on key issues including economic management and national security.
The first major survey of the campaign revealed a reversal of fortune for the two leaders, with Morrison leading Albanese as preferred prime minister by 38 to 30 per cent after the Labor leader held the advantage two weeks ago with a lead of 37 to 36 per cent.
But the survey, conducted by Resolve Strategic for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, also showed that 27 per cent of people eligible to vote at the May 21 election describe themselves as uncommitted, up from 21 per cent two weeks ago.
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Baseless claims: Electoral commission sees rise in fake news in lead-up to federal poll
April 17, 2022 — 7.15pm
Talking points
· Many of the baseless claims being peddled on social media were in line with what was being disseminated throughout the 2020 US election.
· False claims are being circulated online that Australians need a COVID-19 vaccine to vote.
· The electoral commission has created a disinformation register that outlines the most prominent baseless claims.
The Australian Electoral Commission has reported an increase in the number of misleading posts on social media in the lead-up to this year’s federal election compared to 2019, with some candidates making baseless claims about election fraud and COVID-19.
The commission has been working closely with social media giants this year to combat misinformation and disinformation, as liberal democracies around the world continue to grapple with the surge of fake news turbocharged during the 2020 United States presidential election.
The commission said many of the baseless claims being peddled on social media were in line with what was being disseminated throughout the 2020 US election.
It has referred 22 posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok containing potential misinformation to social media companies since September, leading to the removal of three pages and 11 posts, and the suspension of two accounts. Two of the referrals are still pending, and five instances in which the platform did not find that its terms of service had been breached.
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Defence in ‘urgent need of new weapons’, says key Australian exporter
April 18, 2022
One of Australia’s biggest defence exporters says the next federal government needs to overhaul Defence’s $270bn procurement system to prioritise urgently needed weapons and equipment over “exquisite” capabilities that take decades to arrive.
EOS Defence global chief executive Grant Sanderson said Defence’s 40-year-old acquisition model was less focused on addressing immediate strategic threats than on “deploying something that is imperfect”.
EOS is a leader in space systems, remote weapons systems, and battlefield communications, earning 95 per cent of its revenue from exports.
Mr Sanderson said as a Canberra-based company, EOS was committed to the Australian market, but “inertia” in Defence’s procurement system made it “one of the most expensive and energy-sapping places in the world to do business”.
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https://www.afr.com/wealth/personal-finance/why-funds-management-needs-a-shake-up-20220414-p5adix
Why funds management needs a shake-up
With endless research on why managers fail to achieve high returns, an appropriate checklist that encourages challenging views may help.
Giselle Roux Contributor
Apr 18, 2022 – 12.08pm
Industries learn the hard lesson of accountability when things go astray. There is an illuminating set of podcasts by Financial Times columnist Tim Harford, Cautionary Tales, where time and again tales of missed links caused calamities.
A recent episode on the collapse of a raised walkway summarised the problem. Builders, architects, structural engineers, suppliers, project managers are all involved. Mostly they work well together, yet occasionally, there is a glaring slip-up where a flaw has no true owner.
The concept has been a standard lesson in hospital emergencies brought to life by Atul Gawande in his book, The Checklist Manifesto. The title hints at the solution. Many industries benefit from a set of written edicts that aim to prevent errors in complex and disparate systems.
Fund management could do with a dose of rules and a prescriptive process of who cross-checks the views of another.
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100,000 quit financial advice as fees jump another 8pc
Aleks Vickovich Wealth editor
Apr 18, 2022 – 2.21pm
The median cost of financial advice services rose by $270 last year to $3529, pushing the number of professionally advised Australians below 2 million and many consumers into the hands of unlicensed social media influencers, according to a landmark annual study.
The Adviser Ratings 2022 Financial Advice Landscape Report has found the median fees charged to consumers increased from $3256 to $3529 a year, representing an 8 per cent spike, or 40 per cent over the three years to December 2021. The estimate includes both scaled-limited and comprehensive-ongoing forms of advice and would be closer to $5000 a year if restricted to the latter.
The highest fee detected by the research house was $12,000 and the lowest was $800. The $273 annual price rise was attributed to increases in the cost of providing advice due to regulation and diminishing supply as another 4000 advisers, or 16 per cent of the workforce, left the industry last year.
Rapidly rising costs and diminishing supply have resulted in more than 100,000 clients over the past year dropping out of their advice services, taking the total cohort of advised Australians to just 10.1 per cent of the adult population, down from 13.9 per cent in 2018.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/coalition-labor-spend-big-under-the-radar-20220418-p5ae6v
Coalition, Labor spend big under the radar
Andrew Tillett Political correspondent
Apr 18, 2022 – 7.40pm
The major parties have made almost $400 million in funding promises and allocations for dozens of local projects in a guerilla grassroots campaign in just the first week on the hustings.
Despite heavy criticism of Prime Minister Scott Morrison over pork barrelling, tracking by The Australian Financial Review of candidate promises made on social media channels, but not accompanied by official press releases, shows the Coalition and Labor have been unbowed with a series of under-the-radar commitments across 25 seats.
Since the election was called on April 10, the government has announced at least $110 million in subterranean promises. Labor has made $130 million in similar commitments but this number swells to $276 million when quickly matched commitments for government announcements are included.
These pledges range from as little as $45,000 to repair a local cenotaph in the Tasmanian seat of Lyons – announced by the PM himself – through to $107.5 million from the opposition matching a government commitment to bolster Cairns’ water supply.
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Transgender people are pawns in a political gamble
Labor believes the Deves issue goes beyond faith-based communities to conservatives and everyday suburban voters as well.
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Apr 18, 2022 – 5.54pm
When NSW Liberal Treasurer Matt Kean demanded over Easter that Scott Morrison dump Katherine Deves as the Liberal candidate for the northern Sydney seat of Warringah, there was anger but little surprise among federal Liberals.
For some months now, there has been a strong suspicion inside the federal government that the NSW government wants it to lose the May 21 election, so voters will be more charitable come the NSW state election in March next year.
Whether it has been the frequent public clashes over energy policy, or the more recent and, at times, confected outrage over flood relief funding, Kean has been at the centre of taking on Morrison and his ministers.
However, to do so in the midst of an election campaign, when Morrison was riding high thanks to a poor start by Labor, takes it to another level. Hence, the anger.
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Australia’s lifeline to the US’: The stakes in Solomon Islands are exceptionally high
Political and international editor
April 19, 2022 — 5.00am
What’s the big fuss about Solomon Islands? Why is the most senior Indo-Pacific official in the entire US government making an urgent 14,000-kilometre trip this week to visit a fly-speck country with half the population of Adelaide and one tenth its economy?
We know that the Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare intends to sign a new security agreement with China. A draft of the secret deal leaked three weeks ago. It specifies that China would be allowed to send security forces to Solomons at the request of the Solomons government.
This was a matter of “grave concern” said New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the time. Scott Morrison said that it was indeed “an issue of concern for the region”.
But, on Sunday, Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Marise Payne, seemed to suggest that the problem had been solved. The ABC’s David Speers asked her: “Prime Minister Sogavare says he is still planning to go ahead with it, he says it won’t involve a military base. Do you believe him?”
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The truth about how much politicians can ‘manage’ the economy
Senior economics writer
April 19, 2022 — 5.00am
It’s common during elections for pollsters to inquire of voters which political party they believe is best placed to “manage the economy”.
Or, alternatively, which party or leader they believe would best perform the task of “economic management”.
Invariably, voters place higher weight on the Coalition’s “economic management” abilities.
But it’s not clear to me voters entirely understand what question they are being asked here, and – more problematically – the question itself seems to inherently overstate the powers politicians actually possess to “manage” economies at all.
Politicians, of course, do little to educate voters about the true extent of their ability to manage economies. They are only too keen to claim responsibility for any positive economic phenomena, such as a low jobless rate, while simultaneously disclaiming responsibility for any adverse phenomena, such as tepid wages growth.
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Learning the war lessons of quad bikes and drones
12:00AM April 19, 2022
Ukraine’s most effective weapons in the conflict against Russia have been drones, quad bikes, anti-aircraft, anti-ship and antitank missiles, and sniper rifles.
Ukraine has been deploying drones for surveillance and attack purposes; these range from multipurpose Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones with a wingspan of 12m to small, repurposed hobby store drones. Ukrainian drones using thermal imaging have been effective in locating and targeting Russian tanks and other armoured vehicles as well as forward command centres, artillery positions and troop deployments.
At least six Russian generals have been killed so far, although it’s not clear whether they’ve been killed by drones, snipers or something else. Ukraine says Russian forces have been jamming Ukrainian drone links, but the Russians have had to turn off their jammers to operate their own drones. This has given Ukrainian forces the opportunity to pinpoint and destroy Russian jammer vehicles before they can resume jamming.
Quad bikes cost about $10,000, but they’ve given Ukrainian forces the capability to conduct hit-and-run operations over boggy terrain against Russian armoured columns. Small, highly mobile squads with night-vision goggles have operated off-road at night using small surveillance drones, antitank missiles and sniper rifles to target Russian lines of communication. Priority targets have been tanks and fuel vehicles.
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RBA minutes eye earlier rate hike due to inflation and wage pressures
April 19, 2022
The Reserve Bank says an expected jump in underlying inflation and looming wage pressures have brought forward the likely timing of the first increase in interest rates.
In the minutes of the RBA’s April 5 board meeting, published on Tuesday, the central bank said that, “for some time, the Board had been communicating that it wanted to see evidence that inflation is sustainably within the 2 to 3 per cent target range before increasing interest rates”.
“It had also been communicating that this was likely to require a faster rate of wages growth than had been experienced over previous years,” the RBA minutes said.
“Inflation had picked up and a further increase was expected, with measures of underlying inflation in the March quarter expected to be above 3 per cent.
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KKR lobs $88-a-share bid for Ramsay, diligence under way
Sarah Thompson and Anthony Macdonald
Apr 19, 2022 – 7.53pm
KKR is in talks to acquire Australia’s biggest private hospital operator, Ramsay Health Care, in a deal valuing it at more than $20 billion,
Street Talk can reveal Ramsay is providing KKR with due diligence after the buyout giant made an indicative and non-binding offer of $88 per share to acquire the company.
Barrenjoey Capital Partners and Credit Suisse are advising KKR while UBS is in Ramsay’s corner.
Sources said the offer was all cash with an option for some shareholders to potentially roll their stakes into the deal. Ramsay shares last traded at $64.39.
Ramsay Health Care’s biggest shareholder, late founder Paul Ramsay’s Ramsay Foundation, is believed to be supportive of the takeover talks. The Foundation owns a 20 per cent stake.
A KKR spokesman declined to comment. KKR is understood to be working as part of a consortium.
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I’ve got the money, but how do I actually start investing it?
Lucy Dean Wealth reporter
Apr 20, 2022 – 7.00am
These days, it’s nearly impossible to walk two blocks through the CBD without seeing an advertisement for a new investment platform, a product push from an updated stockbroker, or hear the benefits of copy trading.
Investing has become ubiquitous.
Almost 300,000 Australian investors made their first trade in the 12 months to November 2021, according to analysis by research firm Investment Trends.
Share trading platform Superhero estimates more than one in three Australians aged 18-24 began investing in the six months to February 2022, with a similar proportion of overall investors planning to invest more than $20,000 in 2022.
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Leaders should hang their heads in shame over Solomons-China deal
Political and international editor
April 21, 2022 — 5.00am
In a few days, Australia’s leaders will stand solemnly, heads bowed, to honour the nation’s war dead on Anzac Day. They should hang their heads in shame.
Australians fought and died to prevent a hostile power from establishing a base in Solomon Islands in World War II.
Now we discover that a hostile power has established a political foundation for military patrolling and a potential base in Solomon Islands.
China has stolen a march on Australia, a 4000-kilometre advance from its nearest existing military base, without firing a shot. Merely by signing an agreement with Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
“The fact that China was first to announce the agreement confirms this is indeed a historic day in the neocolonisation of the Pacific,” says the head of the ANU National Security College, Rory Medcalf.
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Albanese is learning mistakes can prove fatal, whatever Morrison does
Award-winning political commentator and author
April 21, 2022 — 5.00am
Overlooked in all the excitement over Anthony Albanese’s shocking start to the election campaign was how awful it has been for Scott Morrison. Albanese’s mistakes were spontaneous, damaging and inexcusable. Morrison’s performance was typically Morrison – disciplined, rehearsed and also damaging.
Morrison was kept alive, just, thanks to Albanese’s bloopers, a well-targeted budget, an ability to keep talking confidently while everything crumbles around him and a few media rat packers determined to even up the contest. Even though they reeked of workshopping and gotcha, the journalists’ questions to Albanese were legitimate.
Unable to spit out the answers, his confidence shattered, he slid into a spiral of mistakes on costings and border protection triggering saturation coverage. Whatever Albanese imagined would happen in that first week was obliterated by the demoralising reality. He had succeeded in taking Morrison to the brink of destruction only to then inflict harm on himself.
Nothing went as expected, leading those close to him to recall boxer Mike Tyson’s famous quote that: “Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth.” They trusted the hits would bring out Albanese’s inner street fighter. They felt better about the way he began the second week. Helped along by days in Queensland with his Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers beside him, Albanese came out swinging, drawing Morrison into a bare-knuckle slugfest.
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Options narrow as China gains ground in Pacific
Australia has been unable to stop the Solomon Islands signing a security pact with China. The US is just as alarmed, but also with little impact. What comes now?
Jennifer Hewett Columnist
Apr 20, 2022 – 4.32pm
Political outrage – confected, exaggerated and occasionally sincere – about the other side’s failures is a standard campaign ploy. These days, traditionally bipartisan topics involving sensitive issues of national security are no longer exempt.
But Labor’s condemnation of the failure of the Morrison government to prevent the Solomon Islands signing a security agreement with China would sound more persuasive if any other outcome had been likely or realistic.
It certainly would have been a clearer demonstration of Australia’s Pacific “step-up” if a near invisible Foreign Minister Marise Payne had herself stepped up to visit Honiara rather than leaving it to a last-minute trip by her junior minister. But that’s very different from suggesting a visit from any Australian politician – including Scott Morrison – would have prevented Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare from signing a lucrative deal with the Chinese.
Australian officials can’t say so publicly, but this is believed to include China’s payments to individual politicians as well as promises of investments and other financial inducements. Short of attempting to match a malignant model of corruption and interference in another country’s domestic politics, Australia’s options are much more constrained.
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Teal independents pick up where the Democrats left off
The Climate 200 candidates running in affluent Liberal seats are a new force. But in terms of appeal, they are a reheated version of the now defunct Australian Democrats.
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Apr 21, 2022 – 10.30pm
It was not so long ago that Labor fancied its chances of wresting from the Liberal Party the odd affluent, inner-city electorate.
At the 2007 election, the last time it won government from opposition, Labor had a red-hot go at both Wentworth, then held by Malcolm Turnbull, and North Sydney, then held by Joe Hockey, by running high-profile candidates in both.
It failed to seize either, and since then Labor’s hold on its own such electorates has waned.
In 2010, it lost the once-safe seat of Melbourne to the Greens’ Adam Bandt, and the equally once-safe Hobart seat of Denison, now known as Clark, to independent Andrew Wilkie. Neither seat is set to return in a hurry.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/chinese-investment-in-australia-plunges-70-per-cent-20220421-p5af59
Chinese investment in Australia plunges 70 per cent
Michael Smith North Asia correspondent
Apr 22, 2022 – 12.01am
Tokyo | Chinese investment in Australia fell 70 per cent last year to lows not seen since the global financial crisis, as the COVID-19 pandemic and diplomatic tensions quashed Beijing’s appetite for deals apart from selected acquisitions in the mining sector.
Chinese firms invested US$600 million ($808 million) in Australia during the 2021 calendar year, compared with US$1.9 billion in 2020, an annual study by KPMG and the University of Sydney Business School found.
Last year was the latest of five in row of declining Chinese investment in Australia since 2017, when political hostilities first emerged between Beijing and the then-government of Malcolm Turnbull and the end of a global spending spree by Chinese companies.
While Australia still punches above its weight in the level of Chinese investment it attracts, it is fast losing ground to competitors in Europe and South America.
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PM’s ‘Deve-ious’ tactics produce another failed character test
Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
April 22, 2022 — 10.19am
For months there has been a great deal of debate about Scott Morrison’s “character”.
Now, in the controversy over Katherine Deves, the Liberal candidate for Warringah who Morrison refused to dump despite a string of offensive social media posts, we have seen the prime minister fail a significant character test.
Ignoring the public and private calls by Liberals – not all of them moderates – for Deves to be disendorsed, Morrison said on Thursday, the day nominations closed, “I’ve been in contact with Katherine again today, encouraging her”.
Morrison not only refused to budge, but tried to turn the argument back on his critics. He condemned “those who are seeking to cancel Katherine, simply because she has a different view on the issue of women and girls in sport”, and attacked the “pile on”.
In a revealing comment he also said, “I think Australians are getting pretty fed up with having to walk on eggshells every day because they may or may not say something one day that’s going to upset someone”.
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Election 2022: Urgent calls for next government to tackle medicine affordability
12:01AM April 22, 2022
A coalition of peak medical bodies is calling on the next-elected government to address medicine affordability, saying the rate of co-payments could reach $50 a script within the next five years.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Australian Patients Association, Chronic Pain Australia and Musculoskeletal Australia have banded together to urge the commonwealth to address the affordability of prescription medicine, after polling found 30 per cent of voters said they were struggling to afford medicine under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Polling by the Pharmacy Guild found concern for medicine affordability has jumped six points since January this year.
The number of voters skipping medicine entirely has spiked by 17 per cent, with soaring prices and cost-of-living pressures the key reasons. This is a three-point jump since January.
The polling was conducted in 15 marginal electorates, including Flynn, Bowman, Dobell, Robertson, Reid, Gilmore, Kooyong, Bass, Corangamite, Braddon, Lindsay, Macquarie, Boothby, Cowan and Swan, sparking concern the issue could be a seat-swinging issue.
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Australia faces massive existential threat from China
With China militarising the Solomon Islands, we need decisive leadership to protect our way of life.
Christopher Joye Columnist
Apr 22, 2022 – 11.03am
The spectre of Chinese nuclear submarines, destroyers, fighters and bombers based in the Solomon Islands, merely 1752 kilometres from Australia’s mainland (and closer than New Zealand), brings the looming prospect of global conflict right to our doorstep.
Many readers may not remember that Japan, which today is a key Australian ally, pursued an almost identical strategy in World War II when it was an adversary. Japan invaded Malaysia, Singapore, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, including the main island of Guadalcanal, where it built an airstrip, called Henderson Field. This is now Honiara International Airport, which remains the island’s key runway.
Australia needs to ramp up full-scale production of the MQ-28A “ghost bat” combat drones, expand our F-35 fleet, and seek to acquire B-21 stealth bombers.
The Battle of Guadalcanal (ie Solomon Islands) between August 1942 and February 1943 was the first major land offensive undertaken by the Allied forces, including Australia and the US, against Japan, resulting in more than 26,000 deaths and the loss of 57 warships and almost 1300 aircraft. The largest-ever Australian warship sunk in battle, HMAS Canberra, was torpedoed multiple times, claiming 84 souls.
This was superseded by conflicts between Japan and the Allies in what we now call Papua New Guinea, which was mostly an Australian territory at the time, in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands and throughout other Pacific nations and atolls.
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https://www.afr.com/wealth/personal-finance/brace-yourself-for-interest-rate-hikes-20220420-p5aeuu
How to prepare for interest rate rises
With the RBA tipped to start increasing the cash rate from June, this is what homeowners and credit cardholders need to do now to get ahead.
Lucy Dean Wealth reporter
Updated Apr 22, 2022 – 10.22pm, first published at 5.00am
Borrowers with $2 million home loans could face mortgage repayment increases of more than $2000 a month if the Reserve Bank of Australia raises cash rates to 2 per cent by June next year.
While the RBA is tipped to start raising rates this June, economists expect more increases after that – reaching at least 1 per cent by the end of the year.
The COVID-19 pandemic consolidated an era of ultra-low interest rates, but a cascading series of events including global supply chain crises and now the Russia-Ukraine war has sent inflation around the world skyrocketing.
The US Federal Reserve in March raised its benchmark rate for the first time since 2018, pushing it from 0.25 per cent to 0.50 per cent. Locally, the RBA recently gave its strongest hint it will soon move rates.
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Political tribes are busily destroying political parties
Both sides of politics want to capture a nondescript centre, but those voters are not interested in the totemic things that drive parties these days.
Laura Tingle Columnist
Apr 22, 2022 – 4.57pm
French President Emmanuel Macron debated the contender for his job, Marine Le Pen, on French television this week. For three hours.
There were many matters of substance to discuss: significantly at an international level, the future role of France within the European Union at the very time when the EU’s potential role as a major security bloc – as opposed to an economic one – has been revived and is being debated following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There were questions too about the links to Russia, and specifically Vladimir Putin, of the far-right-wing Le Pen (who has significantly softened her public positions to become a more acceptable candidate for the nation’s top job).
There was a lot more domestic discussion that Australians would recognise: cost of living pressures, healthcare, pensions, COVID-19, taxes, immigration and climate change.
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Horror budget on the cards for whoever forms next government
Columnist
April 23, 2022 — 5.00am
Every voter with a passing interest in this election campaign should be able to recite the unemployment rate by now. It is 4 per cent, and falling. They should also be aware that the Reserve Bank will soon be increasing interest rates, and that the first increase will come either before polling day, or immediately after it. These two pieces to the puzzle of the Australian economy are moving in opposite directions because the snap back from the pandemic recession continues to exceed expectations. So why is the federal budget keeping consumers, and business, on life support for another two years?
It is a question that should have occurred to Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, even if they have a shared political interest in avoiding the implications before polling day on May 21. Whoever forms the next government will be confronted with a structural deficit that cannot be willed away with incantations about Australia’s world-beating recovery. A horror budget is on the cards at some point in the next parliament, most likely next year after the winner has honoured their election commitments.
But before we even get to that debate, there is the riddle of the never-ending stimulus to consider. Remember when Josh Frydenberg delivered his first pandemic budget in October 2020, with its jaw-dropping deficits? The treasurer adopted a two-stage fiscal strategy to spend whatever it took to drive down unemployment, then step back to let the market take over once the jobless rate was “comfortably back under 6 per cent”.
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We must – and can – do more for Ukraine
12:00AM April 23, 2022
The war in Ukraine has entered a new phase where Russia’s aim over the next few weeks is to deliver a paper victory for Vladimir Putin to justify a parade on May 9 in Moscow marking Victory Day, the anniversary of the Nazi surrender in 1945.
There are reports that a Russian military parade is planned to march through the rubble of Ukraine’s port city of Mariupol on May 9, where the remaining Ukrainian forces are fighting to the end, surrounded in the wreckage of the Azovstal Metallurgical Combine, and pounded by Russian artillery and airstrikes.
Russia is consolidating its forces in Ukraine’s east. To the extent that they have a coherent war plan after being defeated in their attempt to take Kyiv, it is to consolidate their control of the Donbas, the area controlled by Russian proxy forces since 2014, and establish a land corridor south east to the annexed Crimea.
There is a second war aim: if Ukraine won’t surrender, then Russia is intent on crushing its Slavic brothers, applying a scorched-earth policy, demolishing infrastructure and poisoning whatever support Moscow might once have had in Europe.
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China menace now on our doorstep, and we are singularly ill-prepared
In this season of wake-up calls, the Solomons agreement is the loudest. The Chinese military is coming to the South Pacific — and we may be witnessing a revolution in our strategic outlook.
23 April, 2022
The Chinese military is coming to the South Pacific, and Australia is completely unprepared to deal with this sobering reality. Unprepared militarily. Unprepared diplomatically. We may be witnessing a revolution in our strategic outlook.
No one yet knows precisely what the security agreement signed between the Chinese government and Manasseh Sogavare’s Solomon Islands government will lead to, but it is a devastating blow to Australia’s national interests. No matter how the Morrison government tries to spin this, the Beijing-Honiara agreement represents a historic failure for Australian diplomacy and statecraft.
The text of the agreement is secret. The fact of its being signed was announced by the Chinese foreign ministry in Beijing. Sogavare says he will not publish the text without Beijing’s permission. He has promised Scott Morrison and other leaders in the Pacific, such as Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape, there will not be a Chinese military base in his country.
For years Australian intelligence and assessment agencies have held the judgment that China seriously wants a military base in the South Pacific. Once, Beijing’s chief South Pacific ambition was to convince the remaining South Pacific nations that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan to switch to China. It succeeded in this with Solomon Islands in 2019.
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Strategic position as dire as 1930s': Dutton
23 April, 2022
Defence Minister Peter Dutton has warned the nation to be “prepared for the inconceivable”, saying he believed China was seeking to turn Australia and Indo-Pacific nations into tributary states.
In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Dutton said Australia's strategic position was as “dire” as it was in the lead up to the Second World War.
“We want a normalised peaceful relationship with every country, including China. But China has changed,” Mr Dutton said.
“And it’s going to take money to respond to that both in terms of additional personnel as well as investment in technologies and equipment.
“It’s conceivable that there could be a chemical warfare attack on a capital city of one of our allies and so could you be drawn back into a conflict in the Middle East.”
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Election 2022: Brendan O’Connor will ‘step on toes’ to bolster defence
5:53PM April 22, 2022
Opposition defence spokesman Brendan O’Connor says he can’t guarantee he will hold on to the portfolio if Labor wins government, but if he gets the job he won’t be afraid to “step on toes” to fast-track the delivery of much-needed weapons.
Mr O’Connor told The Weekend Australian an Albanese government would overhaul Defence’s notoriously slow procurement system to get more firepower into service quickly, warning capability gaps had left the nation exposed.
He said Labor would fast-track the purchase of new armed drones, not currently on Defence’s order list, and urgently boost the nation’s missile stocks.
Mr O’Connor said a promised Labor audit of defence capabilities would focus on delivering extra firepower “within the next three to five years”. It would also examine longer-term capability gaps, leaving open the potential for an interim submarine between the retirement of the Collins-class boats and the arrival of the AUKUS nuclear-powered subs.
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COVID 19 Information
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‘Unique on a global scale’: NSW nears elimination of HIV as cases fall to record lows
By Lucy Carroll and Mary Ward
April 20, 2022 — 5.00am
NSW reported its lowest number of new HIV infections on record last year with the goal of elimination of the virus in the state now “well within reach by 2025”.
The achievement would make NSW one of the first places in the world to eliminate HIV before the global target of 2030, public health experts say.
Broad uptake of preventive treatments and less casual sex during the pandemic were viewed as reasons for the fall in infections in 2021.
Data released by NSW Health shows the state recorded a total of 178 new HIV infections last year, a 36 per cent drop compared to the average over the past five years.
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Climate Change.
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No entries in this category.
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Royal Commissions And The Like.
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Election 2022: Due more funding than defence, we need trust in NDIS
9:05PM April 19, 2022
If Labor takes office next month and Bill Shorten continues in the NDIS portfolio, as is his professed wish, he will have his hands on the tiller of one of the government’s largest spending programs.
Shorten will have two significant groups of constituents to serve – the 500,000 NDIS participants, their loved ones, and the workers who care for them, but also, and crucially, the taxpayer.
By the back end of an Albanese government’s first term in office, Treasury projects the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme to be outstripping defence spending. Last month’s budget put the projected 2024-25 NDIS spending at $42.8bn, and just over $46bn the following year.
This is seriously big coin, and taxpayers are entitled to be sure it is doing what it is designed to – providing the support people with permanent and significant disability need.
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Pandemic costs pushing nursing homes to the brink of closure
7:08PM April 21, 2022
Dozens of aged-care homes are on the verge of shutting their doors as the ongoing cost of protecting residents and staff from the Omicron wave proves unsustainable, Catholic Health Australia says.
CHA, representing the largest grouping of aged-care homes in Australia, says financially strapped facilities can no longer bear the extra costs of trying to prevent the Omicron strain from entering facilities, and without emergency government support, the number of Covid-related deaths will rise.
“Around half the aged-care homes in Australia are only barely able to make ends meet and now the extra costs associated with this new wave of Covid are going to push them over the edge,” CHA director of strategy and mission Brigid Meney said.
Shadow Minister for Aged Care Services Clare O'Neil says Labor is committed to “crucial reform” to fix the workforce… shortage crisis in the aged care industry. Ms O’Neil said she hopes the Coalition will provide clarification on policies concerning nursing homes. “Labor wants to put nurses back in More
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National Budget Issues.
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Coalition’s home loan guarantee scheme a market distorting mechanism designed to win votes
April 18, 2022
The Coalition’s home loan guarantee scheme is a classic case of the superficial winning out over prudent policy development. Good politics trumping good economics. Just watch as the individuals who have signed up to this scheme begin to suffer with rising interest rates and falling property prices in the years ahead.
The bottom line is that it is a market distorting mechanism designed to win votes, nothing more. The political equivalent of a popularity contest driving policy development. With property prices on the rise nationally in recent years, the Coalition decided to guarantee home loans for new entrants into the housing market who weren’t able to secure large enough deposits without government help.
In some cases participants only need a two per cent deposit to buy a home under the scheme. Putting to one side the fact that the scheme logically flies in the face of the banking royal commission recommendations to lift lending standards, in the inflationary climate we’re now in it is doubly bad policy.
The Coalition likes to crow about 60,000 Australians having signed up to the scheme, and it hopes that number will rise with today’s announcement that it is increasing the size of loans those using the scheme can access. For example, the cap in Canberra was $500,000 but it is rising to $750,000. In Sydney and major regional centres it rises from $800,000 to $900,000, taking effect on 1 July this year.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/deves-revolting-policies-have-no-place-steggall-20220418-p5ae35
Fatter home loan scheme will only push up prices
Updated Apr 18, 2022 – 11.32am, first published at 8.03am
The enlarged first home buyer guarantee scheme that will be announced by Scott Morrison today will only push up prices for homes, Saul Eslake says.
“What schemes like this do is push up the price of housing essentially by the amount of additional assistance,” economist Saul Eslake says on ABC TV.
“We have now in Australia almost 60 years of history that says overwhelmingly convincingly that anything that allows people to pay more for housing than they otherwise would ... would result in more expensive housing rather than more people owning houses.”
Morrison is due to announce the increase in the scheme that helps first-home buyers make a purchase with just a 5 per cent deposit and without having to pay lenders mortgage insurance, Phillip Coorey reports today.
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Government funding costs shredded by bond sell-off
Cecile Lefort Markets reporter
Apr 18, 2022 – 4.07pm
The prospect of a higher cash rate as the world's central banks try to tame inflation has shredded the government’s funding cost assumptions on Australia's sovereign debt, which is poised to balloon to a record high of $1.2 trillion by 2026.
Last week, the government’s financing arm swiftly raised $15 billion of 11-year bonds yielding 3.14 per cent, receiving overwhelming demand for the offer. This is nearly twice the rate of what a similar 11-year bond issue paid last year, and triple the rate when the pandemic struck.
Government debt has nearly doubled to stand at $820 billion since the coronavirus emerged. The sharp increase in funding costs in just a couple of years is the result of a global trend in the Western world subjected to a sudden rise in living costs inflamed by the war in Ukraine and its grip on energy prices.
Central banks in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and the UK have started to increase their cash rates to rein-in excessive inflation, and Australia is expected to follow soon.
Economists and financial markets anticipate the Reserve Bank will lift its record low 0.1 per cent in June, and raise it to around 2 per cent by the end of the year. The cash rate has not been increased since 2011, when it stood at 4.75 per cent.
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Are Australia’s retirees just too good at saving?
There are concerns the budget extension of lower pension draw-down rates will encourage better-off retirees to leave their wealth to their family rather than spend it.
Lucy Dean Wealth reporter
Apr 20, 2022 – 5.00am
No one wants to spend their retirement worrying about money. It’s the motivation that drives the fundamental purpose of superannuation – to provide income in retirement.
Australians are pretty good at saving their superannuation, industry members and the Treasury says. The challenge is encouraging the more wealthy to spend it.
The question of whether retirees are spending enough in retirement resurfaced when the government extended the temporary reduction to minimum superannuation draw-down rates in its federal budget.
The draw-down rate is the minimum amount that retirees must take out of their superannuation every year, and ranges from 4 per cent to 14 per cent depending on the retiree’s age.
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Confront financially out-of-control NDIS or pay higher taxes
No one questions the need to support those with disabilities, but the present gigantic welfare scheme has expanded far beyond the original bipartisan intent.
John Kehoe Economics editor
Apr 20, 2022 – 12.17pm
Whoever wins the federal election must confront the financially out-of-control National Disability Insurance Scheme, and an honest and empathetic conversation with the public and disability sector is required.
Providing a proper safety net for people with serious disabilities – and relieving their under-pressure family carers – should be one of the primary roles of government.
The NDIS is doing important work assisting people with disability who are often in very difficult circumstances through no fault of their own. But the NDIS has become a gigantic welfare scheme and has expanded far beyond the original bipartisan intent.
The NDIS is now the desired social security program for participants, more than 18,000 service providers and consultants.
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National debt repayments could rise by billions as rates rise: Treasury
By Shane Wright and Rachel Clun
April 20, 2022 — 1.39pm
Higher global interest rates have pushed up the cost of federal government debt by billions of dollars in the fortnight since the budget was handed down, while the Treasury Department revealed the budget also contains $54 billion in unlegislated spending.
In the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook (PEFO), which is compiled by Treasury and the Finance Department without input from the government, both departments confirmed the figures released by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on March 29.
This year’s budget deficit is on track to be $79.8 billion, the third-largest in history, followed by a $77.9 billion deficit in 2022-23. Long term, without changes in policies, the budget remains in deficit for the rest of the decade and beyond.
Gross debt is forecast to reach a record $906 billion by the end of this financial year, grow to $977 billion in 2022-23 and top $1 trillion the following year. The departments forecast that by 2025-26, gross debt as a share of the economy will start to fall even though in nominal terms the debt will continue to grow.
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https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/the-grim-imf-news-for-australia-20220420-p5aepz
The grim IMF news for Australia
Australians are benefiting from the latest surge in property prices, but policymakers should take note of the International Monetary Fund’s China warning.
Karen Maley Columnist
Apr 21, 2022 – 5.00am
Australian policy-makers could well be tempted to feel a certain sense of smugness at the International Monetary Fund’s decision to upgrade the country’s growth outlook for the year to 4.2 per cent.
Instead, they should be deeply concerned about the IMF’s deepening anxiety about China – Australia’s largest trading partner – as Beijing’s drastic measures to contain COVID-19 are exacerbating the downward spiral in the country’s property market.
Analysts were pleasantly surprised this week by figures which showed that the world’s second largest economy grew by 4.8 per cent in the first three months of the year, compared with a year earlier.
But they warned that much of this growth occurred in January and February, and that the figure obscured the economic slowdown that took place last month as the country has witnessed the harshest lockdowns since the earliest days of the pandemic in 2020.
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PEFO farce hides debt interest danger
7:40PM April 21, 2022
It’s not only home loan borrowers who are going to be singed – the more recent ones, well and truly burned – by higher interest rates, it’s also going to be the Federal and indeed all state governments bar got-iron ore lucky WA.
That is to say, you – all 26m of you; because all government debt is really your debt.
Right now, every one of you – man, woman, child and even new-born baby – owes around $35k of federal debt, and it’s going to be going up relentlessly every year, pretty much forever.
Then add on the state debt, with the 6.6m Victorians top of the pops thanks to Chairman Dan’s infrastructure and CO2-emitting concrete megalomania.
Every Victorian owes another $24k or so, with an ‘update’ coming in two weeks.
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Health Issues.
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How magic mushrooms are helping traumatised veterans
A recently retired Green Beret had tried antidepressants, therapy and a support dog to fight depression but none worked as well as psychedelic drugs.
Lindsay Whitehurst
Apr 17, 2022 – 1.35pm
Salt Lake City | Matthew Butler spent 27 years in the US Army, but it took a day in jail to convince him his post-traumatic stress disorder was out of control.
The recently retired Green Beret had already tried antidepressants, therapy and a support dog. But his arrest for punching a hole in his father’s wall after his family tried to stage an intervention in Utah made it clear none of it was working.
“I had a nice house, I had a great job, whatever, but I was unable to sleep, had frequent nightmares, crippling anxiety, avoiding crowds,” he said. “My life was a wreck.”
He eventually found psychedelic drugs, and he says they changed his life. “I was able to finally step way back and go, ‘Oh, I see what’s going on here. I get it now,’” said Butler, now 52. Today his run-ins with police have ended, he’s happily married and reconciled with his parents.
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‘Crisis looming’: GP calls for help as small band of doctors do heavy lifting on opioid treatment
By Chloe Booker
April 16, 2022 — 7.29pm
Talking points
· GP warns a crisis looms as young doctors don’t want to take on patients needing opioid replacement drugs, such as methadone.
· There has been a 5 per cent jump in the number of people receiving pharmacotherapy from 2019 to 2021.
· Just 6 per cent of the 1043 prescribers, mostly private GPs, see the bulk of the almost 15000 patients.
· Patients, especially in rural and regional areas, are often forced to wait weeks or travel hours for treatment.
· 22 GPs who prescribe in large numbers have either retired or had to dramatically reduce their patient load in the previous 18 months.
A GP recognised for his work with people who abuse drugs is calling for more doctors to step up as demand for opioid treatment surges in the pandemic.
Dr Anthony Michaelson, who is being honoured with an Order of Australia for his service to the community for his pioneering drug abuse treatment programs, is one of a dwindling number of GPs who prescribes medication to treat opioid addiction in high numbers in Victoria.
“Almost all [opioid replacement treatment] prescribing has been done by ageing GPs such as myself,” he said. “Young doctors want nothing to do with addiction medicine. There is a crisis looming.”
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Healthcare promises that just can’t be kept
Neither the Coalition nor Labor can go on pretending that health spending is sustainable in its present form.
Terry Barnes Contributor
Apr 19, 2022 – 3.13pm
It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that Australian government healthcare funding is at record levels. Scott Morrison and the Coalition boast about it. Anthony Albanese and Labor promise still more.
But, of course, it is. As the Australian population continues to grow, and a higher proportion of our population reaches the high-use stage of their lives, the healthcare system must keep pace.
Furthermore, almost all government attention for the past two years has been on the COVID-19 pandemic, wider healthcare reform and innovation being largely shunted aside for the duration. Healthcare reform may have been suspended, but the politics of health has not.
Predictably, health and Medicare are major election issues.
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In sickness and in wealth: why healthcare is the new black for investors
Business columnist
April 20, 2022 — 3.19pm
It is no coincidence that the two biggest buyout deals in Australian history — the takeover of Sydney Airport and now the proposal to buy the country’s largest private hospital group Ramsay Health — were developed during the fog of COVID.
The $20 billion proposed offer for Ramsay from private equity giant KKR which was confirmed on Wednesday was the culmination of a courting ritual between the parties spanning more than a year.
Sydney Airport was similarly stalked, in that case by a consortium of superannuation investors that had been working behind the scenes for a couple of years.
Healthcare and airports rank high among the sectors negatively affected by two-plus years of COVID measures that limited their profitability. But after the lull comes the bounceback, in which frustrated demand can lead to a surge in revenue when facilities are reopened.
The COVID disruptions are clearly still affecting Ramsay Health’s earnings, and additional costs around staffing and procurement will roll into the second half of the year.
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https://www.afr.com/street-talk/csl-s-new-us4-billion-debt-raise-breaks-records-20220421-p5af0i
CSL’s new $US4b debt raise breaks records
Yolanda Redrup, Sarah Thompson, Kanika Sood and Anthony Macdonald
Apr 21, 2022 – 9.57am
Blood products giant CSL has issued the longest-dated senior bond ever by an Australian or New Zealand corporate, financial or government borrower, as part of its $US4 billion debt raise to help fund its $16.4 billion acquisition of Vifor Pharma.
The company announced the pricing of the raise on Thursday morning, split into six $US500 million and $US1 billion chunks.
The $US4 billion is the largest single-currency debt capital markets transaction from an Australian or New Zealand corporation, according to a note from Citi.
CSL’s first debt tranche comes with a five-year fixed coupon of 3.85 per cent, but if you’re willing to wait decades to be paid back, the sixth $US500 million tranche comes with a 40-year coupon of 4.95 per cent.
By 2062, CSL will be a very different company and neither CEO Paul Perreault, nor its respected chairman Dr Brian McNamee will be gracing the biotech’s halls.
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Ramsay may grow rather than shrink under KKR
1:53PM April 22, 2022
Ramsay Health Care has one thing that separates it from smaller rivals that have found themselves taken over by private equity: stability.
It is not a broken business and the group’s stable management is its most-prized asset and why under potential KKR ownership it may grow rather than shrink.
Ramsay chairman Michael Siddle joined the company in 1968 and became a founding director in 1975.
Meanwhile Carmel Monaghan, its Australian hospitals chief executive, has held various roles at the group since 1998.
This steady hand has seen Ramsay grow to become Australia’s biggest private operator, with extensive operations in the UK, Europe and Asia and created what is known as the “Ramsay platform”, which is attractive to KKR.
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International Issues.
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The West’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ is stretched at crucial moment
Massive arms supplies to Ukraine are depleting Western armories just as governments fear they may need weapons for their own defence.
Hal Brands
Apr 17, 2022 – 8.51am
America is following an “arsenal of democracy” strategy in Ukraine: It has avoided direct intervention against the Russian invaders, while working with allies and partners to provide the Kyiv government with money and guns.
That strategy, reminiscent of US support for Britain in 1940-41, has worked wonders. Yet as the war reaches a critical stage, with the Russians preparing to consolidate their grip on eastern Ukraine, the arsenal of democracy is being depleted.
That could cause a fatal shortfall for Ukrainian forces in this conflict, and it is revealing American weaknesses that could be laid bare in the next great-power fight.
Of all the support the US and its friends have provided Ukraine, arms have mattered the most. Deliveries of drones, antitank and anti-aircraft weapons, ammunition and other capabilities have helped Ukraine wreak havoc on Russian forces even as Moscow has pummeled the country’s industrial base.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that the West has delivered 60,000 antitank weapons and 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons to Kyiv. The Pentagon is now laying plans to rush additional artillery, coastal defence drones and other materiel to Ukraine. The White House on Wednesday announced a new $800 million package including helicopters and armoured personnel carriers.
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He envisioned a nightmarish, dystopian Russia. Now it’s reality
Alexandra Alter
Apr 17, 2022 – 12.54pm
Over the past 40 years, Vladimir Sorokin’s work has punctured nearly every imaginable political and social taboo in Russia.
His novel Blue Lard, which features a graphic sex scene between clones of Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, drew a criminal investigation over charges that he was selling pornography. Pro-Kremlin activists accused him of promoting cannibalism and tried to ban his novella Nastya, a grisly allegory about a girl who is cooked and eaten by her family. Protesters placed a giant sculpture of a toilet in front of the Bolshoi Theatre and threw his books in it, a fecal metaphor that Sorokin said reminded him of “one of my own stories”.
With every attack, Sorokin has only grown bolder, and more popular.
“A Russian writer has two options: Either you are afraid, or you write,” he said in an interview last month. “I write.”
Sorokin is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most inventive writers, an iconoclast who has chronicled the country’s slide toward authoritarianism, with subversive fables that satirise bleak chapters of Soviet history, and futuristic tales that capture the creeping repression of 21st-century Russia. But despite his reputation as both a gifted postmodern stylist and an unrepentant troublemaker, he remains relatively unknown in the West. Until recently, just a handful of his works had been published in English, in part because his writing can be so challenging to translate, and so hard to stomach. Now, four decades into his scandal-scorched career, publishers are preparing to release eight new English-language translations of his books.
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A bitter fight is likely to follow Russia’s looming default
Alan Rappeport
Apr 17, 2022 – 3.46pm
Russia is ambling toward a major default on its foreign debt, a grim milestone that it has not seen since the Bolshevik Revolution more than a century ago and one that raises the prospect of years of legal wrangling and a global hunt by bondholders for Russian assets.
The looming default is the result of sanctions that have immobilised about half of Russia’s $US640 billion of foreign currency reserves, straining the country’s ability to make bond repayments in the currency in which the debt was issued: US dollars. Girding for a default, Russia has already preemptively dismissed it as an “artificial” result of sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies, and it has threatened to contest such an outcome in court.
The coming fight, which would probably pit Russia against big investors from around the world, raises murky questions over who gets to decide if a nation has actually defaulted in the rare case where sanctions have curbed a country’s ability to pay its debts.
Russia does not appear likely to take the declaration of a default lightly. If that should occur, it would raise Russia’s cost of borrowing for years to come and effectively lock it out of international capital markets, weighing on an economy that is already expected to contract sharply this year. It would also be a stain on the economic stewardship of President Vladimir Putin that would underscore the costs Russia is incurring from its invasion of Ukraine.
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https://www.afr.com/markets/currencies/why-the-us-dollar-dominates-20220417-p5ae1h
Why the US dollar dominates
Is the US dollar about to lose its special dominant role in the world financial system? People have been asking that question for my entire professional career.
Paul Krugman Contributor
Apr 17, 2022 – 4.04pm
Is the US dollar about to lose its special dominant role in the world financial system? People have been asking that question for my entire professional career. Seriously: I published my first paper on the subject in 1980.
A lot has changed in the world since I wrote that paper — notably, the creation of the euro and the rise of China. Yet the answer remains the same: probably not. For different reasons — political fragmentation in Europe, autocratic caprice in China — neither the euro nor the yuan is a plausible alternative to the dollar.
Also, even if the greenback’s dominance erodes, it won’t matter very much.
What do we mean when we talk about dollar dominance? Economists traditionally assign three roles to money. It’s a medium of exchange: I don’t give economics lectures in payment for groceries; I get paid in dollars to lecture and use those dollars to buy food. It’s a store of value: I keep dollars in my wallet and my bank account. And it’s a “unit of account”: Salaries are set in dollars; prices are listed in dollars; mortgage payments are specified in dollars.
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Russia orders Mariupol defenders to surrender or die as port bombarded
By Pavel Polityuk
Updated April 17, 2022 — 6.01pmfirst published at 4.40am
Talking points
· Russia’s defence ministry has ordered the last Ukrainian fighters left in Mariupol to lay down their arms from 6am, Kyiv time.
· Conquering Mariupol would be Russia’s most significant victory of the invasion. The last Ukrainian fighters are now surrounded at the Azovstal steelworks.
· Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says there will be no further peace talks if Ukrainians are “eliminated”.
· Oligarch Roman Abramovich has arrived in Kyiv to continue peace talks on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
· Russia has escalated attacks on Kyiv, Kharkiv and even the western city of Lviv, in the wake of the sinking of the warship Moskva.
Lviv: Russia’s defence ministry has ordered the last Ukrainian defenders left in Mariupol to surrender in order to save their lives.
The Ukrainians defending the city’s Azovstal steel works were told they had to lay down their weapons after 6am on Sunday, Kyiv time, and surrender and become prisoners of war - or be eliminated in a last stand among the ruins.
Airstrikes and preparations for a naval landing by Russian forces in Mariupol appear to be under way, according to the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
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https://www.afr.com/world/europe/putin-ukraine-and-the-revival-of-the-west-20220418-p5ae67
Putin, Ukraine and the revival of the West
Vladimir Putin says the Western liberal model is a proven failure. Xi Jinping’s mantra has been that the West is in decline. Both may have spoken too soon.
Gideon Rachman Columnist
Apr 18, 2022 – 1.58pm
Paris | Two photos taken during the Ukraine crisis seem to sum up the relative positions of Russia and the Western alliance.
The first is of Vladimir Putin at his now famous long table – his physical distance from visiting leaders symbolising Russia’s isolation. The second image is of Joe Biden in the middle of a group of NATO leaders – with the US president surrounded by friends and allies.
Amid all the horror of the war in Ukraine, some in the US and Europe have spotted a silver lining in the revival of the Western alliance. Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO, captured the new mood in a recent co-authored article, with James Lindsay, headlined: Why Putin underestimated the West.
The speed, strength and unity of the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine surprised the Kremlin, as Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, has admitted. It may even have surprised Western leaders.
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War and stagflation threaten global economy as pandemic recovery slows
Chris Giles
Apr 18, 2022 – 1.22pm
London | The twin perils of slowing growth and high inflation, or stagflation, will hit the global economy this year as Russia’s war against Ukraine exacerbates a slowdown in the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, according to Financial Times research.
Mounting price pressures, slipping output expansion and sagging confidence will all pose a drag for most countries, according to the latest Brookings-FT tracking index.
As a result, policymakers will be left with “grim quandaries”, said Eswar Prasad, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The IMF is this week expected to downgrade its forecasts for most countries as finance ministers and central bankers convene at the spring meetings of the fund and the World Bank to discuss how to respond to the darkening economic outlook.
Policymakers must work out how to address rapidly rising prices and the dangers of raising interest rates when debt levels are already high.
Kristalina Georgieva, IMF managing director, on Thursday (Friday AEST) called the war in Ukraine a “massive setback” for the global economy.
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https://www.afr.com/world/europe/russians-begin-eastern-ukraine-offensive-zelensky-20220419-p5aeay
Russians begin eastern Ukraine offensive: Zelensky
Apr 19, 2022 – 6.34am
Key Points
· Lviv hit, at least seven civilians killed
· Mariupol siege constrains Russia troop deployment
· German bosses, union oppose boycott of Russian gas
Lviv, Ukraine | Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says the Russians have begun their offensive to take control of eastern Ukraine.
“Now we can already state that the Russian troops have begun the battle for the Donbas, for which they have been preparing for a long time,” he announced on Monday (Tuesday AEST) in a video address.
He said a “significant part of the entire Russian army is now concentrated on this offensive”.
He vowed: “No matter how many Russian troops are driven there, we will fight. We will defend ourselves. We will do it every day.”
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War in Ukraine: Talking to Vladimir Putin ‘useless, waste of time’, says Italian PM Mario Draghi
By Philip Willan
The Times
5:33PM April 18, 2022
The Italian Prime Minister has justified sending arms to Ukraine and acknowledged that efforts by Western leaders to talk to Vladimir Putin have proved useless.
Mario Draghi said Italy’s decision to send weapons had received almost unanimous support in parliament.
“The terms of the question are clear: on one side is a people who have been attacked; on the other, an aggressor army,” he said in an interview published by the newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Mr Draghi said sanctions were essential but were not sufficient to halt Russia’s troops in the short term.
“We have to help the Ukrainians directly and that is what we are doing,” he said, in his first interview with an Italian newspaper since taking office 14 months ago.
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In the event of Armageddon, desperately seek kelp
By Tom Whipple
The Times
April 19, 2022
First the bad news: a nuclear conflict has occurred, killing hundreds of millions and throwing enough soot into the air to block out the sun for a decade.
Now the good news: there is a chance we can get through the resulting years of endless winter without the survivors starving. But it’s going to involve a lot of seaweed, the mass relocation of crops and extracting sugar from paper.
An international academic collaboration has produced a road map for surviving an “abrupt sunlight reduction scenario”. After an asteroid impact, a huge volcanic eruption or an exchange of nuclear weapons, most of the deaths could well come not from the catastrophe itself, but as a result of the mass starvation that follows crop failures.
Even a relatively minor eruption, such as that of Krakatoa, put enough soot in the air to cause 1883 to be called the “year without a summer”. What if there were two, three or five years without a summer? Is starvation inevitable?
Not, a new paper contends, if we prepare well enough. With sufficient global co-operation it is possible, the authors argue, to keep the flame of civilisation burning.
“We’re trying to promote preparedness – a culture of having institutions, government and companies prepared for a kind of global catastrophe that has been quite neglected,” said Juan Garcia Martinez, from the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, which works with scientists around the world.
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Beijing claims a role as shaper of the postwar Pacific order
The history of World War II has become the latest front line between Washington and Beijing, as China asserts its role as a victor and traditional hegemon in the Pacific.
James Curran
Apr 18, 2022 – 12.28pm
As strategic competition between the United States and China intensifies, a new dimension of conflicting views is opening up among scholars, historians and strategic analysts in Washington and Beijing.
This is the opposing views of China and America on World War II and the meaning for each. A crescendo of interpretation in new books, articles and various arms of propaganda will recount these differences all the way to the centenary in 2039 of the beginning of the European war and the preceding years when China remembers its lonely struggle against Japan.
Much more is at stake here than rhetoric or the culture of commemoration. It is about claims to leadership in the new world order.
For the United States, its role in liberating Europe and defeating Japan in the Pacific has long provided the moral foundation for its creation of the postwar international system.
According to Elizabeth D Samet, professor of English at West Point and author of Looking for the Good War (2021), memories of the experience now burden American thinking about how it goes to war.
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https://www.afr.com/world/europe/why-china-and-russia-are-both-now-struggling-20220419-p5aeez
Why China and Russia are both now struggling
Moscow overreached on Ukraine and Beijing on COVID-19, and now they’re paying for their hubris.
Thomas Friedman Contributor
Apr 19, 2022 – 1.24pm
The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones.
Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable.
The West lost self-confidence – and both Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed it in, putting out the word that these chaotic democratic systems were a spent force. And then a totally unexpected thing happened: Russia and China each overreached.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his surprise, invited an indirect war with NATO and the West. China insisted that it was smart enough to have its own local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese under-protected or unprotected and, in effect, inviting a war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses – the omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It has now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities, 370 million people.
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America’s debt truck is heading for a stagflationary crash
The US has escaped recurring crises by ratcheting up its debts. Inflating its way out of trouble is not really an option.
Adrian Blundell-Wignall Economist
Apr 19, 2022 – 5.33pm
Stagflation or a cycle of boom and bust are both plausible outcomes for the US economy, depending on what the Federal Reserve does in future. What is entirely implausible is the recently released Biden adminstration’s budget outlook: where very low interest rates continue, inflation falls quickly and unemployment remains low.
Markets will have a lot to swallow if they are to end their habitual complacency.
The main elements of the Biden budget scenario are shown in the chart. The primary deficit (that before paying interest) moves back from its COVID-19 2021 level to 4.4 per cent of GDP this year, to the 3 per cent in 2023 and towards 2 per cent thereafter. The Fed might be behind the curve, but the current budget interest rate outlook is well behind even that of the Fed: the three-month Treasury bill this year is 20 basis points, 90 in 2023, and eventually reaching 2.25 per cent.
The Fed’s “dot plot” outlook is higher in the near term (see chart), even before Fed vice chairman Lael Brainard’s more hawkish comments earlier this month. Despite very easy monetary policy, inflation (the GDP deflator) declines to 3.3 per cent this year, 2.1 per cent in 2023 and 2 per cent thereafter. All this occurs while unemployment in the US remains under 4 per cent.
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https://www.afr.com/world/europe/us-says-russia-has-lost-25pc-of-combat-power-20220420-p5aene
US says Russia has lost 25pc of combat power
The Associated Press
Apr 20, 2022 – 5.57am
Key Points
· Russia’s renewed offensive in the Donbas region has begun in a limited way: US
· Germany says it will seek to get more weapons to Ukraine
· British officials say the next phase of the war is likely to be “an attritional conflict” that could last several months.
Russia is assaulting cities and towns across Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland in what both sides call a new phase of the war after losing about 25 per cent of the combat power it sent into Ukraine, according to Pentagon estimates.
Capturing the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas region would give President Vladimir Putin a badly needed victory, slicing Ukraine in two and depriving it of key industrial assets.
The Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said air-launched missiles destroyed 13 Ukrainian troop and weapons locations while artillery hit 1,260 Ukrainian military facilities and 1,214 troops concentrations over the last 24 hours.
The claims could not be independently verified.
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How to deter nuclear war in Ukraine
Robert C. O’Brien
7:28AM April 20, 2022
The most sobering briefing I received as White House national security adviser came on my third day in office, Sept. 20, 2019. I sat in the Situation Room with military officers and ran through the what-ifs and procedures for continuity of government and retaliation options in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S. or one of our treaty allies.
The idea that in 2022, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council would use nuclear weapons to conquer a neighbouring country is unthinkable. Yet here we are. For months, Russian officials and commentators have been rattling their nuclear saber and touting Moscow’s doctrine of “escalating to de-escalate” - in other words, if Russia is losing a war, even one it started, it reserves the right to use a nuclear attack to end it.
Today, after nearly two months of heavy combat in Ukraine, Russia appears to be losing. The dramatic sinking of the Moskva, flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, is only the latest setback to befall Vladimir Putin’s forces. With dark irony, a commentator on Russian state-controlled media denounced the sinking as an act of war and urged Moscow to “bomb Kyiv” in response.
If Ukrainian forces push Russia out of the Donbas and even Crimea, there would be no way for Mr. Putin to hide Russia’s humiliating loss from its people. If such an outcome became likely, would he use one of his thousands of “tactical” or “battlefield” nuclear devices to take out Kharkiv, Odessa or even Kyiv in an attempt to save face and end the war on terms he dictates? This possibility is surely on the minds of President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and his staff.
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By Invitation | Russia and Ukraine
Ian Bremmer counts the cost of the war to Vladimir Putin
The political scientist predicts that an ugly conflict is about to get uglier
Apr 19th 2022
THE OUTCOME of Russia’s war in Ukraine remains in doubt. But there is no question that Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a large-scale invasion is one of the worst strategic decisions any leader of a powerful country has made in decades. There is no plausible outcome in Ukraine that won’t leave Mr Putin and Russia far worse off than before February 24th, when the war began.
Mr Putin has cost his country the lives of thousands of young soldiers, some of them conscripts. He claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” but his war has given Ukraine a stronger sense of national identity than it’s ever had before and transformed it into Russia’s bitter enemy. He has shown the world that his army is ineffectual, and that billions of dollars spent on modernising Russia’s military has been wasted. He has given NATO a sense of unity and purpose it hasn’t had in decades and non-members like Finland and Sweden new reasons to join. His actions have driven members including Germany to boost defence spending. Others have dispatched troops close to Russia’s border. Mr Putin has convinced Europe that it must stop buying Russia’s most valuable exports. He has brought sanctions and export controls on his country that will inflict generational damage. For Europe and America he has crossed the Rubicon. Most grievously, he failed to prepare the Russian public for the true human, financial and material costs of his “special military operation.”
Jokes about Russian vaccines and long tables aside, a primary cause of Mr Putin’s miscalculation must surely be his personal isolation. He appears no longer to listen to opposing points of view. How else could he have believed his army could capture Kyiv in two weeks? (The former president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, says Mr Putin bragged as much to him in 2014.) How could Mr Putin have thought that Ukrainians would quickly surrender once the invasion began? In response to Ukraine’s invasion, threats to cut off European energy supplies and other “consequences you have never seen”, Mr Putin appears to have expected the West to do little more than it did when Russia seized Crimea eight years ago. He did not anticipate that America would so quickly render a large portion of his foreign-exchange reserves functionally useless.
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https://www.afr.com/world/europe/macron-le-pen-clash-on-russia-eu-in-angry-tv-debate-20220421-p5af07
Macron, Le Pen clash on Russia, EU in angry TV debate
Ingrid Melander, Elizabeth Pineau and Tassilo Hummel
Apr 21, 2022 – 8.41am
Paris | French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday accused his far-right rival Marine Le Pen of being in thrall to Russian President Vladimir Putin over a years-old Russian bank loan to her party during a fiery TV debate ahead of Sunday’s election.
While he also charged Ms Le Pen with harbouring an undiminished desire to pull France out of the European Union, she struck back with a pledge to put money back in the pockets of millions of French made poorer during his five-year presidency.
The debate - their only one of the campaign - was peppered with appeals of “don’t interrupt me” and accusations the other was not up to the job of leading France, a veto-wielding U.N. Security Council member and Europe’s second-largest economy.
“Stop mixing everything up,” a combative Mr Macron told Ms Le Pen during one heated exchange about France’s debt, which like others has swollen due to pandemic support measures.
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Nobel laureate Ramos-Horta reclaims East Timor presidency
Updated April 21, 2022 — 11.03amfirst published April 20, 2022 — 4.04pm
Singapore: A decade after being unseated, Jose Ramos-Horta is headed back to East Timor’s presidential palace where he will be in charge of resolving the country’s bitter political feud.
The Nobel Peace laureate and former president romped to victory in a run-off vote against incumbent President Francisco “Lu Olo” Guterres, securing 62.09 per cent of votes, according to preliminary election agency data.
“The results don’t surprise me and my main supporters, given the level of support given to my campaign in the whole country and our own polls in the last few months, even at township level,” he told Portuguese news agency Lusa.
Ramos-Horta, who was president between 2007 and 2012, had been only 30,000 votes short of claiming a decisive majority in last month’s presidential election first round in which Guterres and 14 other candidates were on the ballot.
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Kremlin insiders alarmed over growing toll of Putin’s war in Ukraine
April 21, 2022 — 3.34pm
Almost eight weeks after Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine, with military losses mounting and Russia facing unprecedented international isolation, a small but growing number of senior Kremlin insiders are quietly questioning his decision to go to war.
The ranks of the critics at the pinnacle of power remain limited, spread across high-level posts in government and state-run business. They believe the invasion was a catastrophic mistake that will set the country back for years, according to 10 people with direct knowledge of the situation. All spoke on condition of anonymity, too fearful of retribution to comment publicly.
So far, these people see no chance the Russian president will change course and no prospect of any challenge to him at home. More and more reliant on a narrowing circle of hardline advisers, Putin has dismissed attempts by other officials to warn him of the crippling economic and political cost, they said.
Some said they increasingly share the fear voiced by US intelligence officials that Putin could turn to a limited use of nuclear weapons if faced with failure in a campaign he views as his historic mission.
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World Bank and IMF need major ‘reboot’, US Treasury’s Janet Yellen says
By David Lawder and Andrea Shalal
April 22, 2022 — 8.09am
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and a top White House adviser called for major reforms at the World Bank on Thursday, saying the seven-decade-old multilateral development bank was not built to address multiple and overlapping global crises.
Yellen told reporters that both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were not designed to handle the multiple global crises they now face, including fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, and they lack the resources to tackle climate change.
Yellen said the IMF, which has about $US1 trillion ($1.35 trillion) in total lending resources, was intended to help individual countries deal with isolated crises, while the World Bank was created to finance development projects in countries that lacked access to capital markets.
“We face challenges that will now require investment on a scale that an international institution can’t manage on its own, like climate change,” Yellen said. “The investments for climate change will add up to just trillions and trillions of dollars.”
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Hunger and blackouts are just the start of an emerging economy crisis
By Shawn Donnan, Eric Martin, Andrew Rosati and Jihen Laghmari
April 21, 2022 — 11.15am
A barrage of shocks is building that’s unlike anything emerging markets have had to confront since the 1990s, when a series of rolling crises sank economies and toppled governments.
Turmoil triggered by rising food and energy prices is already gripping countries like Sri Lanka, Egypt, Tunisia and Peru. It risks turning into a broader debt debacle and yet another threat to the world economy’s fragile recovery from the pandemic.
Compounding the danger is the most aggressive monetary tightening campaign the Federal Reserve has embarked on in two decades. Rising US interest rates mean a jump in debt-servicing costs for developing nations — right after they borrowed billions to fight COVID-19 — and tend to spur capital outflows. And on top of it all: the stark reality that war in Europe, which is driving the latest food and energy shock, shows few signs of ending.
The cocktail of risks has already pushed Sri Lanka to the brink of default on its bonds. A handful of other emerging economies, from Pakistan and Tunisia to Ethiopia and Ghana, are in immediate danger of following suit, according to Bloomberg Economics.
Of course, the developing world’s commodity exporters stand to benefit from higher prices. Still, there are other troubles brewing, with a new COVID-19 outbreak locking down key cities in China, and growing angst that Europe and the US will fall into recession.
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The world’s food system is too dependent on wheat
By Jessica Fanzo
April 22, 2022 — 11.15am
Stunned by Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Europe is scrambling to diversify its energy supply — from piped Russian gas to liquified natural gas, more renewable power and nuclear power.
In the same way, and for much the same reason, the ongoing war should push countries to shift and diversify their food supply — to make it more secure and, at the same time, improve nutrition worldwide.
Russia and Ukraine together supply 30 per cent of the world’s wheat. This is why the war has caused wheat prices to skyrocket, along with the prices of many other food commodities. From February to March, the UN Food and Agriculture Association’s Food Price Index leapt 12.6 per cent to an all-time high. This threatens people around the world with unprecedented food insecurity.
It also highlights the need to reform the global food system, which now leaves too many people dependent for nourishment on just a handful of mass-produced grains, including wheat, rice and corn.
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Dow plunges near 1000 points as rate jitters trigger broad selling
Timothy Moore Online editor
Apr 23, 2022 – 4.47am
Shares fell broadly in New York, with materials and health care leading all 11 of the S&P 500’s industry sectors lower as investors surrendered to the prospect of a series 50-bais-point rate increases by the Federal Reserve.
At the close, the Dow was down 981 points or 2.8 per cent. The S&P 500 was 2.8 per cent lower and the Nasdaq had shed 2.6 per cent.
In New York: BHP -4.9% Rio -2.9 Atlassian -3.4%
Tesla -0.4% Apple -2.8% Alphabet -4.3% Amazon -2.7%
“After years of being very accommodative, the Fed has made it clear that policy is going to be tighter for the foreseeable future,” said Brian Price, head of investment management for Commonwealth Financial Network, and that’s giving investors reason to rethink positions.
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Ukraine: Russians shift elite units to the new battleground
David Keyton and Yesica Fisch
Apr 23, 2022 – 8.57am
Kyiv | Russia shifted a dozen crack military units from the shattered port of Mariupol to eastern Ukraine and pounded away at cities across the region, Ukrainian authorities said, as the two sides hurtled toward what could be an epic battle for control of the country’s industrial heartland.
Meanwhile, Russia reported that one serviceman was killed and 27 others were left missing after the fire on board the warship Moskva, which sank a week ago following what the Ukrainians boasted was a missile attack. Moscow previously reported everyone aboard had been rescued.
The Russian Defence Ministry did not acknowledge an attack on the ship. It continued to say a fire broke out after ammunition detonated, without explaining how that happened. The loss of the guided missile cruiser — the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet — was a humiliating setback for Moscow.
In Mariupol, reduced largely to smoking rubble by weeks of bombardment, Russian state TV showed the flag of the pro-Moscow Donetsk separatists raised on what it said was the city’s highest point, its TV tower. It also showed what it said was the main building at Mariupol’s besieged Azovstal steel plant in flames.
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https://www.afr.com/world/europe/why-we-admire-volodomyr-zelensky-20220421-p5af1i
Why we admire Volodomyr Zelensky
The Ukrainian president’s forthright courage is everything that the insecurity and paranoia of Putin is not. He shows that democracies can elect leaders who inspire, ennoble and even save.
Bret Stephens Contributor
Apr 22, 2022 – 12.37pm
Why do we admire Volodymyr Zelensky? The question almost answers itself.
We admire him because, in the face of unequal odds, Ukraine’s president stands his ground. Because he proves the truth of the adage that one man with courage makes a majority. Because he shows that honour and love of country are virtues we forsake at our peril. Because he grasps the power of personal example and physical presence. Because he knows how words can inspire deeds – give shape and purpose to them – so that the deeds may, in turn, vindicate the meaning of words.
We admire Zelensky because he reminds us of how rare these traits have become among our own politicians.
Zelensky was an actor who used his celebrity to become a statesman. Western politics is overrun by people who playact as statesmen so that they may ultimately become celebrities. Zelensky has made a point of telling Ukrainians the hard truth that the war is likely to get worse – and of telling off supposed well-wishers that their words are hollow and their support wanting.
Our leaders mainly specialise in telling people what they want to hear.
We admire Zelensky because of who and what he faces. Vladimir Putin represents neither a nation nor a cause, only a totalitarian ethos. The Russian dictator stands for the idea that truth exists to serve power, not the other way around, and that politics is in the business of manufacturing propaganda for those who will swallow it, and imposing terror on those who will not. Ultimately, the aim of this idea isn’t the mere acquisition of power or territory. It’s the eradication of conscience.
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Video detail heightens theories Vladimir Putin is sick
A video of Vladimir Putin is attracting attention due to signs the Russian leader may be seriously ill.
Lee Brown and Evan Simko-Bednarski and NY Post
April 23, 2022 - 8:56AM
New video shows Vladimir Putin looking bloated and awkwardly gripping a table for support — heightening suspicions that the warmongering president is seriously ill.
The footage released by the Kremlin on Thursday shows Putin, 69, tightly gripping the table with his right hand as soon as he sits down — then keeping it there throughout the nearly 12-minute clip, NY Post reports.
Putin sits with hunched shoulders and regularly fidgets and taps his toes during a meeting with his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, to discuss the fate of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
The clip shows Putin and his key adviser “both depressed & seemingly in bad health,” tweeted Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who was previously an adviser to Russia.
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Xi’s boasts are proving premature
12:00AM April 23, 2022
This was going to be the time of Xi Jinping’s crowning triumphs. The auspicious Tiger Year of 2022 was promising to become the Year of Xi’s Glorious Re-Coronation as Paramount Leader, the Year of Chinese Supremacy Over Western Covid Incompetence, the Year of the Resurgent Chinese Economy, and the Year of New Era Interdependence for the Twin World Powers of Russia and China.
Oh dear. It already has turned into Xi’s annus horribilis, smitten by triple trouble: pandemic, economic and geopolitical.
He pronounced proudly during his Tiananmen Square speech for the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary on July 1 last year: “In today’s world, if you want to say which political party, which country and which nation can be confident, then the Communist Party of China, the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese nation have the most reason to be confident!”
All he needed was stability to frame the dominant event in China in 2022: the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th five-yearly national congress, due in early November. Its core preordained outcomes comprise a further five-year term for Xi as party general secretary, and unanimous backing for the ambitious new platform for China’s future that Xi will deliver in his three-hour keynote speech.
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I look forward to comments on all this!
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David.
