August 18, 2022 Edition
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The main issue, probably of the year, is the increasing tension across the Taiwan Strait with all sorts of worries about how conflict can be avoided and prosperity maintained at a reasonable level as tensions continue. And hopefully ease.
The impact of climate change in Europe is really becoming obvious and worrying. I am not sure just how a realistic response is possible in any reasonable time.
In OZ the PM has come back after a week off to have the Chinese Ambassador tell us we are a vassal and to just shut up and behave. Astonishing and serious stuff IMVHO.
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Major Issues.
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‘Fake neutrality’: Amnesty report on Ukraine sparks furor, resignation
August 7, 2022 — 4.38pm
Kyiv: The head of Amnesty International’s Ukraine chapter has resigned, saying the human rights organisation shot down her opposition to publishing a report that claimed Ukrainian forces had exposed civilians to Russian attacks by basing themselves in populated areas.
In a statement posted on Facebook, Oksana Pokalchuk accused her former employer of disregarding Ukraine’s wartime realities and the concerns of local staff members who had pushed for the report to be reworked.
The Amnesty International report on Ukraine has generated a fierce pushback.
The report, released on Thursday (Ukraine time), drew angry denouncements from top Ukrainian officials and criticism from Western diplomats, who accused the authors of making vague claims that appeared to equate the Ukrainian military’s defensive actions to the tactics of the invading Russians.
“It is painful to admit, but I and the leadership of Amnesty International have split over values,” Pokalchuk wrote. “I believe that any work done for the good of society should take into account the local context, and think through consequences.”
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'Very bleak': warning over China, Taiwan
ROSIE LEWIS 7 July, 2022 10:55 am
Opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie has warned of a “very bleak” strategic outlook, as he calls for Australia to maintain “good relationships” on both sides of the Taiwan strait.
The West Australian MP, who was assistant defence minister in the former Morrison government, did not repeat Peter Dutton’s claims as defence minister that it would be “inconceivable” Australia would not join a conflict to defend Taiwan, but added: “If there was a conflict around Taiwan, whether we are involved directly or indirectly on the periphery, we would certainly be in the gun, and that's why we need to build our deterrence strength.
“That's why we need to exercise exceptional political leadership, diplomatic leadership, and these are things we need to think about as this (new defence strategic) review goes forward.”
On how he perceived Australia's strategic outlook, Mr Hastie told the ABC’s Insiders program: “The strategic outlook is very bleak. It is being driven by a rising China with both revisionist and expansionist ambitions.”
Asked if US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s historic visit to Taiwan made the region safer, Mr Hastie said that was a question for America to answer.
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Earnings season, surveys likely to subdue the start of trading week
August 7, 2022
Companies’ earnings season begins in earnest this week, providing a glimpse of whether the Reserve Bank’s most aggressive interest rate rises in 30 years are starting to bite the economy.
Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Suncorp, Insurance Australia Group, AMP, Telstra and Woodside are set to report financial results this week, interspersed with a flurry of business and consumer confidence surveys.
The benchmark ASX 200 is expected to open flat on Monday, based on futures trading and the performance of US shares on Friday night – which closed stagnant after surprisingly strong jobs data cast doubt the Federal Reserve would ease interest rates soon.
Investors were betting that central banks will switch to cutting interest rates as early as the first half of next year. But in the US, the labour market added 528,000 jobs in July – more than double expectations – returning payrolls to pre-pandemic levels.
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Manufactured crisis jumps the guardrails, edges closer to war
It is hard to see how either side can take a step back. And Australia is now intimately linked to possible war in the Taiwan Strait by bipartisan policy.
James Curran Historian
Aug 7, 2022 – 2.39pm
The short-term consequences of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan are clear.
The immediate result is heightened tension in a US-China relationship already reeling from a five-year period pockmarked with trade wars, rhetorical insults and a downward spiral of mutual suspicion and enmity.
For both sides the belligerents in Washington and in Beijing are only encouraged.
It is hard to see how either side can take a step back. And Australia is now intimately linked to possible war in the Taiwan Strait by bipartisan policy.
This is a new chapter in the military face-off between America and China. As former senior CIA official John Culver told the Financial Times, Chinese live-firing exercises are “going to become their benchmark and they may even do this as routine training”.
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https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2022/08/08/china-usa-australia-sanctions/
6:00am, Aug 8, 2022 Updated: 5:38pm, Aug 7
What if we had to sanction China?
This thought became a bit less hypothetical last week when United States House of Representatives speaker, Nancy Pelosi, stepped onto Taiwanese soil.
One can now imagine teams of analysts in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade producing briefing papers for federal cabinet on the prospects of Australian sanctions against China – what they might involve, and how much of a disaster it would be for the Australian economy.
We’ve sanctioned Russia and warned the tsar, but that’s a bit like the Brunswick branch of the ALP passing a resolution condemning US imperialism – we don’t do much trade with Russia, nor it with us, so that was gesture geopolitics.
But last week we were reminded of China’s importance to Australia with the June trade data from the ABS: Exports to China in June were $16.3 billion for the month, underpinning a record trade surplus of $17.8 billion with a huge increase in sales of coal and LNG to both China and India.
Leaving aside the obvious tenuousness in basing your economy on sales of fossil fuels, relying so much on sales of anything to China is not unlike Germany’s reliance on Russia for its supplies of energy, which has not turned out very well at all.
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Marles to prioritise strategic need over local construction in boat decisions
By David Crowe
August 8, 2022 — 4.48am
Defence Minister Richard Marles has cleared the way for a fundamental shift in the $90 billion plan for a fleet of nuclear-propelled submarines by saying Australia’s strategic need must take priority over calls for local construction even if that means buying vessels made overseas.
Marles said he was open to every option to bring forward the first submarine from the 2040 delivery date set out by the former government, stepping up his concerns about the looming gap in defence capability during the worst strategic environment Australia has seen in decades.
With Chinese fighter aircraft and ships encircling Taiwan in live-fire exercises for the fourth day in a row, the regional conflict has heightened Australian concerns about the capability gap in submarines, a new fleet of frigates and missile defence.
“Capability and strategic need must drive decision-making,” said Marles in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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‘We’re in trouble’: Australia risks food insecurity, expert warns
By Jessica Yun
August 8, 2022 — 5.15am
By the time it reaches your bowl, your Quaker Oats may have completed an international round-trip. The grain might be grown in Australia, but much of it is processed in the US before we import it back as the final product.
The process leans on global supply chains that have recently been pushed to the brink by climate-fuelled weather disasters, COVID-19, and Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, local experts are now warning the domestic food manufacturing and processing industry must be urgently developed to ensure Australians have access to a steady supply of food, or risk shortages and more frequent price rises.
“If there’s instability like there is now where supply chains are impacted, we then can’t bring in the food. Or if we do bring it in, it’s at a price that the consumer can’t afford,” La Trobe Institute for Agriculture and Food’s Professor Antony Bacic said.
“We can’t always rely on importing products and these supply chains have shown that we do need to have capacity ourselves to have a degree of independence.”
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Labor wants to work with business in a race to the top
A level playing field on tax is good for the economy and for smaller miners that can’t afford elaborate ways of avoiding taxation.
Andrew Leigh
Aug 8, 2022 – 2.52pm
With an area of around 700 square kilometres, Singapore is about 1/10,000th the size of Australia. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t have much of a mining industry. But starting around 2006, Singapore suddenly began to play a key role in Australian commodities exports. From 2006 to 2014, BHP sold $US210 billion ($303 billion) worth of resources to its Singapore subsidiary. They then marked it up by 10 per cent and sold it on. The iron ore never went near Singapore – it was shipped out of Western Australia to the final buyers in Korea, China, India and Japan. Yet somehow a chunk of the profits landed in Singapore.
The creation of Singapore marketing hubs isn’t the fault of the Singaporean government, which has a long and distinguished tradition of welcoming traders and financiers from around the world. It arose because some clever accountants at BHP and Rio decided to play a thimble-and-pea trick with their profits. Some called it “the Singapore Sling”, but while the cocktail is a deliciously sweet gin drink, these tax tactics left a sour taste in the mouth of Australian taxpayers.
Unwinding the problem of marketing hubs has taken decades. In 2015, questioning from Labor and independent senators on the Senate Corporate Tax Inquiry revealed the extent of the tax lurk, and put a public spotlight on the oddity of the practice. Most of us understand why marketing is a big deal if you’re selling Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone. But marketing iron ore doesn’t exactly pass the pub test.
These two settlements were worth around $60 for every single person in Australia. That’s more than loose change.
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Greens’ Lidia Thorpe lays out list of demands for Voice support
August 9, 2022 — 5.00am
The Greens will pursue a treaty with Indigenous Australians and a truth-telling commission in exchange for backing the Voice to parliament in negotiations with the Albanese government as it seeks to build cross-party support for the constitutional change.
Greens leader Adam Bandt and Senate deputy leader Lidia Thorpe will lead negotiations with Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney that are expected to begin by the end of this month.
“Treaty will provide that mechanism for us to negotiate equal terms on how we can live together in the same country and celebrate us as well,” Senator Thorpe told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in an interview.
“We’ve made it clear that the Greens want to see progress on all elements of the Statement [from the Heart]. We support legislation that improves the lives of First Nations people, and I look forward to talking with Minister Burney about how we achieve that together in this Parliament.”
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Voice to Parliament: the ‘trust us’ approach is never going to work
Senator
August 9, 2022 — 5.00am
First Nations people never ceded sovereignty. Before this country was invaded, there were over 500 sovereign nations on these lands. Each with their own laws, languages, and customs. Ours is the oldest living culture on earth.
It is our right and responsibility as traditional custodians to protect our lands, waters, skies, and totems. We never surrendered that right.
I have been accused of ceding sovereignty by entering Australian politics. That is offensive and untrue. When I swore allegiance in the senate last week, I identified myself as a sovereign woman. I called the Queen a coloniser. I said that because it is true.
As Bundjalung and Worimi Saltwater woman Phoebe McIlwraith writes: “My sovereignty predates the creation of the English language, it does not come from a crown or a throne, but the sea and soil. No parliamentary oath could ever take that away from me.”
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Budgets pushed to the brink as fixed interest loans roll off
Senior economics writer
August 9, 2022 — 5.00am
One of the first things you learn in economics is that all individuals face a “budget constraint”, under which they must balance their unlimited desires against their limited resources of both time and money.
When you boil it right down, economics is just the study of optimal human decision-making – both for individuals and for societies – under conditions of scarcity.
If time and money were limitless, the world would be entirely bereft of the need for any practitioners of this “dismal science”.
But life is short and so, increasingly, too, is money.
Indeed, with the cost of living rising at multi-decade highs and wages failing to keep pace, some of us – particularly owners of rather large mortgages – are about to become even more intimately acquainted with our budget constraints than we’d ever expected to be.
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Beijing aggro should send a rocket up Defence
12:00AM August 9, 2022
The Albanese government’s strategic review takes place entirely in the shadow of China’s extreme aggression around Taiwan. These are times, and currents in history, of immense importance for Australia. Nothing cataclysmic is likely to happen in the immediate future but once more we have been delivered the most colossal wake-up call.
The day after tomorrow is clouded in uncertainty and deepening risk. It is likely the worst will be avoided. But the worst is now a serious prospect. It’s impossible to overstate the potential gravity of what’s happening. If we don’t try our very best to understand it, and make our own provisions arising from that understanding, we are a nation of fools.
Why has China undertaken massive military reaction to US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan? Don’t trust anyone too dogmatic on this. Western intelligence hasn’t a clue about top Chinese leadership deliberations.
Some years ago Washington asked Australia to open a residential embassy in Pyongyang to assist with allied intelligence and strategic assessments of North Korea. Canberra (in my view wrongly) declined. One argument was that a residential embassy wouldn’t learn much anyway – look at the vast US and Australian diplomatic establishments in Beijing and consider how very little idea we have of what actually gets discussed and decided in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing.
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Consumer confidence dives 4.5pc: ANZ
MATT BELL - 09 August 2022
Consumer confidence falls 4.5 per cent, more than offsetting gains seen over the previous three weeks after the Reserve Bank of Australia lifts the official cash rate by 50 basis points last week.
The ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Index fell across all mainland states, with major declines in NSW, SA and WA. The reading for last week was 80.3, which is well below the neutral reading of 100.
‘Weekly inflation expectations’ increased 0.1 percentage points to 5.6 per cent, while its four-week moving average fell 0.1 percentage points to 5.7 per cent.
All five confidence subindices declined. ‘Current financial conditions’ dropped 1.9 per cent. ‘Future financial conditions’ decreased 5.5 per cent reversing the 5.3 per cent gain the week before.
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Half a million home owners will struggle to pay a 3pc rate increase
Nila Sweeney Reporter
Aug 9, 2022 – 4.20pm
One in five mortgage holders, or an equivalent of 551,000 home owners, would struggle to meet their repayments if their home loan rates were to rise by 3 percentage points, a new poll shows.
Comparison site Finder, which conducted the survey, also found that around 145,000 home owners who were struggling significantly would consider selling if their mortgages rose to that extent.
“If home owners paying 3 per cent now were asked to pay 6 per cent, there’d be quite a few looking to sell,” said Richard Whitten, home loans expert at Finder.
Meanwhile, more than one in seven home owners said they might fall behind on their repayments or other bills with the expected rate increases.
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We’ve got more than we’ve ever had, but are we better off?
Economics Editor
August 10, 2022 — 5.00am
It probably won’t surprise you that the Productivity Commission is always writing reports about … productivity. Its latest is a glittering advertisement for the manifold benefits of capitalism which, we’re told, holds The Key to Prosperity.
Which is? Glad you asked. Among all the ways to co-ordinate a nation’s economic activity, capitalism – which the commission prefers to call the “market” economy – is by far the best at raising our material standard of living by continuously improving our … productivity.
Productivity is capitalist magic. It means producing more outputs of goods and services with the same or fewer inputs of raw materials, labour and physical capital. This involves not working harder or longer, but working smarter – using new ideas to reduce the cost of the goods and services we produce, to improve their quality and even to invent new goods and services.
Find that hard to believe? Keep watching the ad.
We’re told that sustained productivity improvement has happened only over about the past 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution. Then, 90 per cent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, compared with less than 10 per cent today.
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ACTU presses for radical overhaul of economic structures to boost jobs
By Shane Wright
August 9, 2022 — 10.30pm
The ACTU has proposed a radical overhaul of the nation’s economic structures, pushing for a tax on businesses that profit from high inflation and price controls on some goods and services, while tasking the Reserve Bank with driving down unemployment.
In a plan it wants to be debated at the federal government’s jobs summit, the Australian Council of Trade Unions also called for penalties on businesses that funnel their money back to shareholders rather than expanding operations and restrictions on speculative borrowing for the property market.
The government is bringing 100 people from the public and private sectors to its September jobs and skills summit to canvass ways to keep unemployment low, boost productivity and increase real incomes.
On Wednesday, the federal government will invite Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to the summit.
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Defending democracy: Parameters of Western resolve may soon be tested
Military leader and strategist
August 11, 2022 — 5.00am
There is an old maxim attributed to Lenin. “You take a bayonet and you push. If you hit mush, you keep going; if you hit steel, you stop.” It is a brutal euphemism for the behaviour of Russia over the past decade, and in particular, its invasion of Ukraine this year.
The saying also applies to the Chinese reaction to the Taiwan visit by US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi last week. In a series of military activities that telegraph Chinese intentions to cut off Taiwan from the world, the Peoples Liberation Army has fired missiles, sailed ships, conducted cyberattacks and flown aircraft across the median line off the Taiwanese coast. They are seeking to bully the prosperous island democracy and establish a new normal in their aggressive and dangerous military operations around the island and in cyberspace.
The Russians have called their bayonet push into Ukraine a Special Military Operation. We might well call the actions of the Chinese this week a “special tantrum operation”. This might elicit wry grins in the political and national security communities if the situation was not so serious. And it is a serious situation. Because of the concurrent threats posed by the alignment of Putin and Xi and the capabilities of their military instruments, the democracies of the world face a situation as perilous as that they faced in the dark days of early 1940s.
The current situation, however, is far from the worst case we might face in the next few years. The actions of China in the past week – including their increasingly hysterical “wolf warrior” diplomatic attacks on the Australian foreign minister – have demonstrated their growing impatience over the Taiwan issue. Notwithstanding his current preoccupation with the Party Congress in October, President Xi is determined to resolve this issue in his lifetime. At 69, he is a relatively old man.
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Australian scientists solve dinosaur mystery
August 11, 2022
Scientists in Australia have solved a 120-year-old mystery and uncovered how some of the largest dinosaurs were able to support their weight on land.
Researchers from the University of Queensland and Monash University have used 3D modelling tools to add muscle and tissue to the bones of sauropod dinosaurs, a group of long-necked dinosaurs that included brontosaurus and diplodocus.
Sauropods were the largest terrestrial animals that roamed the earth for more than 100 million years.
In a unique approach that combined the cutting-edge technology with palaeontology and biomechanics, the team was able to test and confirm the hypothesis that soft tissue pads on the bottom of sauropods’ feet allowed their massive weight to be supported without damaging their bones.
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Bow to Beijing’s demands to reframe relationship: Chinese ambassador’s warning
9:54PM August 10, 2022
The speech by the Chinese ambassador, Xiao Qian, was full of menace and threat, lightly disguised by an emollient diplomatic tone.
At one level, the ambassador is on a charm offensive. The election of the Albanese government offered a chance to reset the relationship and encouraging early moves had been made, the ambassador said. But there was a need for further concrete action.
All Australia had to do was a few simple things: stop criticism of China for its well-justified actions against Taiwan and Japan; lift restrictions on Huawei and other Chinese companies; accept the imprisonment, isolation and secret trial of Australian citizens in China as a perfectly normal part of the Chinese judicial process; work to establish a positive image of China in Australia; accept that the one-China, two-systems experiment in Hong Kong is a tremendous success now that China has solved a few “loopholes” in its implementation; and half a dozen similar things.
In other words, if we simply capitulate on all of Beijing’s demands, we can have a happy life, or, to put it another way: tremble and obey.
On all the issues of substance, the ambassador restated the maximal, unreasonable position of the Chinese Communist Party government in Beijing.
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US would suffer ‘devastating losses’ in war over Taiwan
August 11, 2022
The US and Japan could successfully defend Taiwan if China attempted to invade the island, but not without “devastating losses” to the US military, according to a Washington think tank.
A naval battle between China forces and combined US and Japanese navies and air forces could destroy up to 150 Chinese amphibious and other surface ships, analysis from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies concludes.
However in the worst case scenario, around half of the US Air Force and Navy’s combat planes – 900 American fighter and attack aircraft – would be lost in four weeks, Pentagon and US Navy officials and other experts warn in the analysis.
The bleak report comes as Beijing staged a week of aggressive military drills around the island in the wake of the visit from US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most senior American politician to set foot on the island in 25 years.
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The jobs summit could go one of two ways: Hawke or Rudd
Treasurer Jim Chalmers wants ideas for the October budget. He will have to corral next month’s talkfest to generate a consensus on industrial relations and labour shortages.
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Aug 11, 2022 – 8.00pm
Next month’s Jobs and Skills Summit could go one of two ways.
It could produce something meaningful, in the spirit of the Hawke government’s 1983 economic summit, which cemented the Prices and Incomes Accord, paved the way for landmark economic reforms, and facilitated the exit from the recession.
Or, it could be a national celebration of windbaggery, a la the Rudd government’s Australia 2020 Summit, which involved 1000 handpicked bloviators, celebrities and chin scratchers.
That two-day event in April 2008, the size and scale of which were inversely proportional to its legacy, bequeathed us with such policy Goliaths as : “To engage the Australian community in the development of an ambitious long-term national strategic plan with accompanying benchmarks and measurable outcomes.”
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Australia can expect more of Xi’s fighter jets, less polite diplomacy
Chief political correspondent
August 12, 2022 — 5.00am
The way the Chinese air force sent a J-16 fighter to intercept an Australian surveillance plane on May 26 is the essential backdrop to the intransigent message delivered with a smile by China’s top emissary in Canberra this week. The timing of the interception said everything about a decision within the Chinese leadership to test Australia just five days after the May 21 federal election.
So, while it is tempting to regard the speech this week by the Chinese ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, as merely a restatement of belief from Beijing, it is part of a new and unsettling dynamic that seeks to shift debate inside Australia while the threat of war hangs over the region.
Will it work? So far, the federal government is showing no sign of changing the fundamental Australian position on China and Taiwan.
Yet the scrambling of the J-16 shows that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the cabinet will have to contend with direct and material challenges, not just rhetoric from the podium of the National Press Club, when Beijing pushes Australia to retreat on points of principle. What will those events be? “Use your imagination,” said Qian on Wednesday about the use of force against Taiwan. That ominous language puts all Australians on notice about an era of deepening conflict, even war.
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Almost 80,000 have $2m in super, costing the budget billions
Aug 12, 2022 – 7.00pm
Almost $3 billion a year could be returned to the federal budget if Labor opts to rein in tax concessions for 80,000 Australians who have more money in superannuation than they can use in retirement.
New data reveals about 700 people under 40 have more than $2 million in retirement savings.
About 1000 extra people joined the ranks of Australia’s most cashed-up superannuants in 2019-20, as newly released Tax Office data showed there are now 79,590 people with more than $2 million in super. That number would be higher today, after two years of rising asset prices.
With a cap of $1.7 million on the amount that can drawn from accumulation accounts to be used in retirement, the figures suggest the richest Australians are using superannuation as a tax shelter instead of for its intended purpose.
According to analysis by AFR Weekend, 683 people under 40 have more than $2 million in super – 40 times the median balance of working Australians. Of those with more than $2 million in super, the average balance was $3.8 million in 2019-20.
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https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/the-chook-super-fund-has-landed-in-the-doghouse-20220812-p5b99t
The Chook Super Fund has landed in the doghouse
It was a tough year for the Chook Super Fund with returns going backwards by 9.63 per cent, the worst year since 2012. But a strategic shift to unlisted assets is working.
Aug 12, 2022 – 7.29pm
A negative net return of 9.63 per cent in the year to June 2022 meant the Chook Super Fund failed to match the balanced option of its benchmark, Media Super, which fell 3.77 per cent.
The fund was set up in 2012 to gain greater control over investment decision-making, access professional advice, have flexibility in the retirement phase and strive for returns higher than those achieved in a balanced industry fund.
This strategy worked well in 2019 and 2020, but there was a slight hiccup in 2021. In 2022, the fund was in the doghouse.
The 2022 performance was the worst result since inception, largely because of a 19 per cent fall in international shares, which comprised 34 per cent of the fund. The international shares benchmark only fell 6 per cent.
In hindsight, it was a mistake to add to the bitcoin mining exposure by buying stock in Iris Energy before its Nasdaq listing. The combined value of Mawson Infrastructure and Iris, which at one stage comprised 7 per cent of assets, collapsed by more than 80 per cent.
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Hottest new super strategies to help your kids and spouse
Recontribution tactics made possible by rule changes are a game changer for older Australians and their families.
John Maroney Contributor
Aug 10, 2022 – 7.51am
The 2021 federal budget introduced sweeping changes to superannuation, most of which have become law. Two changes – removing the work test requirement for non-concessional super contributions for people between 67 and 75 and extending the eligibility for individuals under 75 to make non-concessional contributions using the bring-forward rules – are rewriting the rule book for recontribution strategies relating to estate planning and spouse equalisation.
First, the changes. Under the old rules, the bring-forward arrangements were available only to individuals aged 67 or less. That has been extended to those aged 74 or less on July 1 of a financial year. But no other eligibility requirements to access the bring-forward arrangements have changed.
It’s important to be aware of the 75 age limit and whether the recontribution strategy involves the full commutation of an existing pension. istock
It means individuals must have a total superannuation balance at the previous June 30 of less than $1.48 million to be eligible for a three-year bring-forward period and can contribute up to $330,000 of non-concessional contributions. Those with balances between $1.48 million and $1.59 million are eligible for a two-year bring-forward period and can contribute up to $220,000 of non-concessional contributions. Individuals with balances between $1.59 million and $1.7 million cannot use the bring-forward rule but can still contribute up to $110,000.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-needs-more-than-defence-speed-dating-20220812-p5b98w
Australia needs more than defence ‘speed dating’
New Defence Minister Richard Marles’ intriguing group of policy advisers were given just minutes each to lock down strategy for some of the biggest challenges of the times.
Andrew Clark Senior writer
Updated Aug 12, 2022 – 11.40am, first published at 10.58am
On Wednesday, Defence Minister Richard Marles hosted 25 members of Australia’s foreign policy and defence elite to, in effect, talk about China.
They were all there – former senior bureaucrats, think-tankers and academics – advising about Australia’s military “posture.”
Translated to the here and now, this means how Australia should handle China’s brinkmanship over Taiwan. Less discussed was how Australia should adjust to a possible future of rising Chinese and waning American influence.
Paradoxically, a foretaste of how this regional dynamic could emerge was taking place at the same time just down the road.
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The tax-cut promise Albanese should never have made, and must break
Columnist
August 13, 2022 — 5.00am
Australia has been changing even faster than we realised. As voters took a decisive turn to the centre-left in May by electing our most diverse federal parliament in history, yet another momentous threshold was crossed in the real economy. Professional and technical services overtook retail trade to become the second-largest employer after healthcare and social assistance, while construction dropped from third place to fourth.
This detail, confirmed in the rearview of official labour force data released late last month, reaffirms the story of the teal wave of professional women who wiped out the Liberal Party in heartland seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. They acquired political power at precisely the moment when the brain economy they work in overtook the old economies of consumption and property.
But it is a story with a deadly twist for Anthony Albanese’s government. The newly ascendant professionals also represent the revenue side of the budget that is bleeding ordinary workers. Welcome to the dilemma of the stage-three tax cuts, which Labor waived through the parliament last year even though they were unaffordable, regressive and biased towards men.
These are the tax cuts that Labor couldn’t afford to oppose before the election, but can’t afford to implement now. The cost to the budget was originally put at $15.7 billion in 2024-25, and $18.3 billion the following financial year, according to an assessment by the Parliamentary Budget Office. The revised cost is expected to be much higher.
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Friendly fire: Howard’s stinging critique of the Morrison era
From Scott Morrison’s ‘egregious’ attack on Christine Holgate to expelling Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Dutton and the former government’s failures, the ex-PM doesn’t hold back.
From The Weekend Australian Magazine
August 13, 2022
John Howard sits in a comfortable Chesterfield- style wingback chair in the corner of his office high above the Sydney CBD. Over his right shoulder is an expansive view of skyscrapers piercing the blue winter sky to Sydney Harbour and the ocean beyond. His office is bookended with tomes on law, politics and history. An Australian flag stands in the corner. A portrait of Winston Churchill hangs on the wall. A photograph of Robert Menzies sits alongside family portraits and one of the Queen with his ministers. His desk has a computer between piles of papers.
Howard arrived moments earlier, bouncing into the office carrying a briefcase and sharing his enthusiasm that he would later be at the St George Leagues Club for the “Dragons Team of the Century” announcement. A cup of tea is arranged and we sit down for what will be my 19th interview with the former PM over the past decade. The energetic 83-year-old has written his third book, A Sense of Balance, composed mostly during Covid lockdowns, which offers ruminations on policy and political issues at home and abroad, drawn from experience, observation and research.
It is almost 15 years since he exited parliament, losing his seat of Bennelong, and government. Today he is revered by Liberals and respected by Labor contemporaries. He was pressed into service during the recent election, campaigning across the continent, serving the party which served him. Out of politics, Malcolm Fraser sought international appointments, frustrated with how Australians regarded their former leaders, while Bob Hawke and Paul Keating pursued lucrative business interests. Neither model held much appeal for Howard, although he has taken board positions and consultancies such as that with JP Morgan.
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Liberals have lost the plot amid global crisis of the right
12:00AM August 13, 2022
Our politics mirrors big trends in other Western politics. Thus, consider the crisis of centre-right political parties. No one can possibly have any idea now what the Liberal and National parties believe in or stand for. Regrouping in opposition after a shattering defeat following nearly a decade in office is naturally a time to think things over.
But the intellectual vacuum across the Australian political right runs much deeper. It’s the greatest long-term threat to the Libs and Nats. The Coalition’s lack of conviction or direction about any basic issues or values, at state as well as federal level, indicates a profound crisis.
In Canada, Justin Trudeau, leader of the centre-left Liberal Party, has been prime minister since 2015 and won three elections so far. His first government legalised marijuana and imposed a carbon tax.
He is the world’s second most woke leader and political correctness is almost a state religion. The Canadian Conservatives are a long way from power.
In New Zealand, Labour’s Jacinda Ardern became prime minister in 2017 and won landslide re-election in 2020. She is a woke princess and her religious beliefs seem to be climate change and anti-nuclear. The NZ Nationals have recently been doing better in the polls but they long ago surrendered on many issues.
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Hit rich baby boomers, go easy on the younger workers
12:00AM August 13, 2022
It’s three years since the Coalition’s stage three tax cuts were consecrated L-A-W, and still two years from taking effect, but their legitimacy is again contested ground. A year ago, a tortured Labor opposition rolled over, laid down and let into its platform the controversial package.
Now the new tenants in Canberra hold the parcel worth $184 billion over eight years. Having limited the arena for conflict during the election campaign, the Albanese government contemplates a “dire” fiscal outlook with a mini mandate for repair. The budget is just over 10 weeks away.
Aged care workers have told Sky News Australia their low rate of pay is forcing them into tough choices such as… turning on heaters or foregoing basics as the industry approaches a wage rise. Unions are pushing for a significant pay rise of 25 per cent for aged More
Australia wants to spend more than it raises in revenue; the gap is getting bigger, and borrowing is more expensive, as Labor stretches its legs and is tempted to look over the horizon to “open doors of opportunity”, as Anthony Albanese envisages his policy nirvana.
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COVID-19 Information.
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Some experts warn COVID may be worse second time around, but questions remain
By Liam Mannix and Rebecca Sadique
August 7, 2022 — 2.17pm
Working in kindergarten, Fiona Efron is besieged by viruses. Sniffles and coughs, runny noses and gooey eyes. Some days she feels like she’s working in a Petrie dish.
But there was one virus she was pretty confident she wasn’t going to catch, even when she developed a sore throat: COVID-19. After all, she had only had it a few months ago. She got a PCR test thinking she had caught a cold from the kids.
“I was pretty surprised to go, ‘Oh, wow, OK, I’ve got COVID a second time,’ ” Efron said.
The reinfection, she says, was better than the first. “I had headaches and a cough. The first time, one of the days I felt a little difficulty breathing and I got an oximeter to test the oxygen in my blood.”
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Worst of Covid over, experts say
August 10, 2022
Australia has now seen the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic and future waves of infections are likely to be smaller with less severe disease, top infectious disease modellers say.
Evidence is emerging globally and in Australia that the widespread combination of vaccines and natural infection is likely to lessen the impact of future waves, as cases and hospitalisations from the Omicron BA.5 outbreak drop across the nation.
New Covid-19 infections on Tuesday dropped by nearly 10,000 in the space of a week from 35,659 new infections last week to 26,746 this week – and Covid-related hospitalisations have also fallen by nearly 5000 cases.
James Wood, a leading modeller for the NSW government, told The Australian on Tuesday it was unlikely Australia would see another epidemic wave this year. “I think the most likely situation is another variant will branch off Omicron,” Professor Wood said.
“There might be another Omicron-like leap, but if that doesn’t happen, we can expect the viruses to branch off from Omicron, and then we would expect hybrid immunity to be relevant, so we’d expect to see smaller waves and less overall health impacts on the population. If we don’t see an Omicron-like jump, this is as bad as it’s going to get.”
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Let’s not repeat the same mistakes with COVID response
Culture news editor and columnist
August 11, 2022 — 5.00am
Australia’s relative success in keeping COVID-19 case numbers down during the first two years of the pandemic, largely thanks to extremely strict national and state border closures other jurisdictions eschewed due to their impact on human rights, masked how confused and, at times, unhinged from reality our policy response actually was – and remains.
One of the enduring memories of Australia’s COVID response is how intensely policed public spaces were during lockdowns. Photographs of crowds gathering on beaches on sunny days went viral as Australians dobbed on each other for being outside. Mounted police patrolled iconic foreshore areas, issuing people with fines and move-on notices.
In Victoria, the policing of public spaces reached particular heights of absurdity, first with the edict that face masks could be removed in public for the consumption of all food and drink, except alcohol, and then with the specific shutdown of outdoor playgrounds.
Australia, despite the myths we tell about ourselves, is a rule-loving nation, with a deep respect for authority and an antipathy to social liberalism. COVID or no COVID, we love stopping people coming into “our” country, people who live near beaches have always hated “outsiders” taking up space, and we regularly ban public drinking.
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Too much COVID stimulus, not enough budget savings: Eslake
By Shane Wright
August 11, 2022 — 7.00pm
The Reserve Bank should have started tightening monetary policy last year rather than trying to catch up with large interest rate rises in recent months, one of the nation’s leading independent economists has argued while warning federal budget repair will probably fall to taxpayers.
Amid signs inflation may have peaked in the United States, Saul Eslake used an address in Canberra on Thursday night to contend the RBA’s use of quantitative easing to support the economy on top of record low interest rates would also create a budget headache for the government.
Having said as recently as November that rates were likely to remain steady until 2024, the RBA has raised rates four times since April – to 1.85 per cent from 0.1 per cent – and markets expect more increases in the coming months.
Housing Industry Association figures released on Thursday suggest the sharp rise in rates is starting to hit the property market, with new home sales falling 13.1 per cent in July. Sales in Queensland and NSW both fell by more than 15 per cent on their June levels.
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Climate Change.
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Australia needs a better way of taxing its gas riches
An ill-suited PPRT system means the country taxes its gas wealth embarrassingly lightly. It is time to play catch up.
Chris Richardson Economist
Aug 8, 2022 – 2.58pm
There’s a huge gap between what families are feeling and how much they’re spending.
Sales are strong even though sentiment is weak.
But will sentiment strengthen or will spending fall sharply? That’s vital, because how today’s gap between sentiment and spending closes will determine our economy’s outlook.
So far sales have been superbly resilient. Yet so too have disposable incomes. Although wage gains are still anaemic, job growth has been swift, and the personal tax system is delivering an enormous boost to family incomes via a last hurrah of pumped-up tax returns.
The outgoing federal government threw money at the election by raising a key tax offset to $1500. Those dollars are hitting bank balances this month, but then this boondoggle disappears into the history books. In the meantime, however, that $12 billion of assistance has helped paper over the pain of higher costs of a range of essentials – food, fuel and mortgage rates notably among them.
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https://thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2022/08/11/climate-change-biden-kohler/
6:00am, Aug 11, 2022 Updated: 5:40pm, Aug 10
Alan Kohler: How Anthony Albanese can do a Joe Biden on climate change
There are many lessons for Australia in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, passed this week by US Congress, but perhaps the main one is: Never Give Up.
A month ago I wrote here that this country, and the rest of the world, had a big problem because America was out of the carbon emissions reduction game, which would make most other countries think they might as well give up too. Without the US reducing emissions, we’re all cooked.
It was because the US Supreme Court had gutted the EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency] ability to deal with global warming, and more importantly, Biden could not get his climate action bill through Congress because of opposition from two Democrat Senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
But Biden didn’t give up: This week Manchin and Sinema both voted for the renamed bill, and it passed.
Rebranding the legislation was an obvious, but brilliant piece of marketing – it’s called the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but it’s in fact a climate bill with – as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, a “side helping of health reform”.
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The battery that charges 70 times faster than lithium-ion
Mark Ludlow Queensland bureau chief
Updated Aug 10, 2022 – 4.33pm, first published at 2.45pm
Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group believes it has found a solution to help replace lithium-ion batteries which charge 70 times faster, are longer-lasting and better for the environment.
While developers across the world are charging into what is expected to become a trillion-dollar battery market by 2050, GMG thinks it’s on a winner with its next-generation graphene aluminium-ion battery.
Lithium-ion batteries might be everywhere – used in everything from coin cell batteries, mobile phones to utility-scale batteries – but they require a range of rare metals which needs to be mined, creating a larger carbon footprint.
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IAG chief says climate change is adding to rising insurance costs
August 12, 2022 — 3.14pm
Insurance Australia Group chief executive Nick Hawkins says climate change is contributing to the upward pressure on premiums, alongside the La Nina weather pattern, as the company warned the price of home cover would jump by up to 10 per cent.
The company behind brands including NRMA Insurance and CGU was the latest insurer to predict more big jumps in premiums on Friday, as the industry passes on the costs of catastrophic flooding on the East Coast, supply chain woes, and higher reinsurance rates.
In its annual results, IAG said it was pushing through increases of 8 to 10 per cent in home insurance, and 7 to 9 per cent increases in car insurance, as the whole industry jacks up premiums sharply.
Hawkins said he expected home and motor premiums to continue rising at about this pace over the year ahead as inflation continued to affect the business. He also underlined the longer-term role of climate change.
“We know that at the same time as inflation, we’re having challenges with perils, and that doesn’t feel like that’s going to stop in the next few years either,” Hawkins said in an interview.
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‘Exceptional’ drought reshapes food and energy supplies across Europe
By Rob Harris
August 13, 2022 — 10.45am
London: The biggest drought in more than 20 years has been declared across the majority of England, with households warned their taps could run dry, farmers flagging major food shortages after failed crops and some supermarkets begin rationing bottled water.
Drought status was confirmed for eight of England’s 14 areas, spanning the south, east, south-west and centre of the country on Friday, as the United Kingdom experienced its driest summer for 50 years. Much of England has had little or no rain for almost 150 days.
The prolonged dry spell and extremely high temperatures are affecting households, industry, transport and tourism across Europe, as well as farming and agriculture. The tinder-dry ground has also provided ideal conditions for the wildfires that have ravaged France, Portugal and other countries.
Temperatures of up to 35 degrees are forecast for the weekend in Britain, after the mercury topped 40 last month for the first time in the UK since records began.
The situation is once again threatening Europe’s energy systems, adding to the gas crisis and exploding power prices which have stemmed from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In Western Europe, hydropower output dropped 20 per cent in the second quarter of this year compared to the average, with low river and lake levels starving plants.
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Royal Commissions And The Like.
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Big contracts, little staff amid ‘Uberisation’ of in-home aged care
By Cara Waters
August 10, 2022 — 5.00am
Key points
· More than 1,000 elderly residents in the Mornington Peninsula Shire are without care after the council exited and private providers took over while hundreds are impacted in Boroondara in Melbourne’s East.
· Private providers mecwacare and Bolton Clarke have struggled to find staff as they offer lower wages to aged care workers than the local councils.
Private providers have taken over from two Melbourne councils to provide in-home aged care despite lacking the staff to service all the additional clients as low wages and poor conditions fail to attract workers.
Aged care giants Mecwacare and Bolton Clarke have taken on the in-home care of elderly residents after the Mornington Peninsula Shire and Boroondara councils stopped providing the services, leaving thousands of residents without care.
More than 160 council employees were made redundant in Boroondara and the Mornington Peninsula Shire when the councils stopped providing in-home aged care services last month but only a handful of workers took on roles with the private providers. Mornington Peninsula Shire Council’s in-home aged care contract is worth $6.7 million a year.
At Boroondara City Council, aged care staff were paid around $34 an hour, received a travel allowance to get to homes, and were paid to receive training and attend meetings.
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‘Deeply sorry’: Minister apologises for system failing Defence and veterans
Updated August 11, 2022 — 5.20pmfirst published at 3.28pm
Veterans Minister Matt Keogh has apologised for the failings in Defence and the compensation system that have contributed to suicide rates and promised to respond speedily to royal commission recommendations.
The interim report from the royal commission into Defence and veteran suicides, which was released on Thursday, said a slow and complex compensation claim process could harm people’s mental health and may contribute to suicidality.
Commissioners Nick Kaldas, James Douglas, QC, and Dr Peggy Brown also found many of the problems were well known – there have been 50 inquiries making 750 recommendations since 2000 – but few have been acted on.
Keogh said on Thursday it was vital these now be addressed as a priority.
“Clearly, something’s not working in Defence and Veterans Affairs,” he said.
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Hospital processes come to aged care after trial cuts deterioration in half
By Mary Ward
August 12, 2022 — 5.00am
While aged care homes may conjure up images of “bingo and a cup of tea”, this is a distant reality for a sector housing older and frailer residents, facility manager Gaynor Squillacioti says.
“There is still bingo, sure, but people are here because they have complex care needs that mean they cannot be in their home any longer,” the chief operating officer of Southern Cross Care NSW & ACT said. Palliative care, allied health such as physiotherapy, and other healthcare is routinely provided in an aged care setting.
“The pandemic has led to a realisation that aged care facilities are health facilities, and we need to help staff to manage their care in a patient-centred way,” said Professor Ramon Shaban, clinical chair of communicable diseases and infection prevention at the University of Sydney and director of infection prevention and disease control at Western Sydney Local Health District.
A new program being trialled in Southern Cross Care facilities aims to bring emergency department-level infection control to aged care, a shift its backers hope will reduce transmission of COVID-19 among vulnerable residents.
The HIRAID system, developed by University of Sydney researchers, is a six-step infection control model for assessing emergency department patients. Unlike the “ABC (airways, breathing circulation)” triage method, it encourages nurses to also gather information about a patient’s medical history and infection risk.
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National Budget Issues.
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Australia is a nation of ‘accidental investors’. Is it time for more scrutiny of the superannuation system?
Whether you like it or not, having a retirement fund means you are a shareholder. So how much do you know about the stock market?
Mon 8 Aug 2022 03.30 AESTLast modified on Mon 8 Aug 2022 08.13 AEST
Margaret Thatcher sought to convert Britain from a nation of shopkeepers to one of shareholders. Compulsory superannuation and low rates – until recently – on traditional bank deposits have converted most Australians into accidental investors.
Beginning in the 1980s, retirement arrangements changed from defined benefits (an inflation-indexed pension based on your final salary, paid by employers or government in return for regular contributions) to defined contribution schemes (at retirement you receive your and the employer’s payments, plus investment returns).
Today, Australian retirement schemes are about 86% defined contribution, compared with 5% (countries with indexed pensions, like Japan or the Netherlands) to 64% (the US) globally.
The move away from defined benefits reflected its expense and often unquantifiable risk, such as longevity, for the provider.
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Power imbalance: Australia’s hidden inflation problem
Economics Editor
August 12, 2022 — 11.40am
Why is Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe so worried about getting inflation down when so much of the rise in prices comes from foreign supply constraints that will eventually go away, and so much of the rise won’t be passed on to workers in higher wages?
Because what he can’t admit is that inflation won’t fall back to the target range of 2 to 3 per cent until the nation’s businesses decide to moderate their price rises. And they’re not likely to do that until those rises reach the point where they’re driving away customers.
It’s said that using monetary policy (higher interest rates) to control inflation is a “blunt instrument”. The only way to discourage businesses from raising their prices is to get to their customers’ wallets - by cutting real wages, increasing mortgage payments and having falling house prices make them feel less wealthy.
When explaining problems in the economy, economists use two favourite analytical tools. First, determine how much of the problem is coming from the supply (production) side of the economy, and how much from the demand (spending) side.
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Health Issues.
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GPs diagnose Medicare musts
9:14PM August 11, 2022
GPs around the nation will lobby the federal government to introduce Medicare incentive payments to provide more health assessments for the elderly and mentally ill, raise the Medicare rebate by 10 per cent for consultations lasting 20 to 40 minutes, and introduce a new Medicare rebate for 60-minute consultations in order to manage people with complex health conditions.
They will also call for the restoration of telehealth funding, including phone consultations, for all GP consultation lengths and types. The demands are part of a newly released advocacy agenda by the Royal Australian College of GPs that aims to address the decline in primary care and a critical lack of remuneration, in particular for doctors managing complex health conditions in vulnerable patients.
The new agenda comes as a federal taskforce examines how to strengthen Medicare and bolster general practice following a declaration by Health Minister Mark Butler that primary care was “in worse shape than it’s been in the entire Medicare era”.
The RACGP’s advocacy guidelines for doctors state that “unless government invests in prevention, early intervention and ongoing management of chronic conditions in general practice, the system will fail”.
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Vulnerable patients asked to cough up as more GPs shun bulk billing
By Clay Lucas
August 13, 2022 — 5.00am
Key points
· A growing number of GPs are charging disadvantaged people instead of bulk billing them because the Medicare rebate isn’t covering their costs.
· Medicare patient rebates for GP consultations were frozen from 2013 to 2019, and received a small boost earlier this year, of 1.6 per cent.
· Just over 80 per cent of national medical services were bulk billed in the 2021-2022 financial year.
An increasing number of GPs across Australia are opting to charge disadvantaged people a fee instead of bulk billing them because the Medicare rebate doctors receive to see patients isn’t covering rising costs.
“Up until recently, those practices that didn’t bulk bill everyone, they would as a routine policy bulk bill pensioners and health care card holders,” said Leanne Wells, chief executive of the Consumers Health Forum. “But now some are starting to say ‘Look, we can’t even afford that guarantee any more’.”
Bulk billing is where medical practitioners charge the federal government for providing a service to patients, instead of the patient paying up front.
Health Minister Mark Butler on Friday said primary care was “in its worst shape since Medicare began” in 1984, and that stories were now common of Australians not being able to see a bulk billing doctor, or of GPs changing from bulk billing to charging a small fee, as well as getting the rebate.
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International Issues.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/taiwan-tensions-threaten-exports-of-electronic-chips-20220807-p5b7va
Taiwan tensions threaten exports of electronic chips
Tom Rees
Aug 7, 2022 – 9.17am
London | Rising tensions between the US and China over Taiwan threaten to trigger significant shortages of electronics such as mobile phones, one of the world’s largest chip companies has warned.
Intel’s Europe chief Frans Scheper said there would be a “huge impact” and a “major crisis” for the industry if Taiwan’s chip-making exports were cut off by Beijing.
Fears that supplies from the chip-making powerhouse could be disrupted have mounted in recent days after tensions surged in the region, following a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.
Mr Scheper told The Sunday Telegraph: “If you think about mobile phones, 80 to 90 per cent of chips are coming from Asia, from that specific area.
“For certain applications it would have a huge impact. Maybe for others a little bit less, but there are not always alternative sources available.”
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Beijing gives a history lesson as it warns Australia over Taiwan
Jacob Greber and Andrew Tillett
Aug 7, 2022 – 2.32pm
China has demanded Australia treat its handling of the “Taiwan question with caution” in a broadside that refers to “fascist” Japan’s World War II attacks on Darwin, ignoring decades of post-war peace.
In an escalation of tensions, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Canberra chided Australia, Japan and the US for condemning Beijing’s show of military force after last week’s visit to Taiwan by US Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
As the Coalition reiterated its support for Australia’s bipartisan commitment to strategic ambiguity over the island state, the embassy berated all three Western allies “for the finger-pointing on China’s justified actions to safeguard state sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
After accusing the US of being the greatest saboteur and destabiliser of peace in the Taiwan Strait, the embassy launched into a lengthy tirade about Japan’s war history and its effect on Australians.
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Chinese and Taiwanese warships eye each other as drills due to end
Yimou Lee and David Brunnstrom
Aug 7, 2022 – 2.02pm
Taipei/Manila | Chinese and Taiwanese warships played high-seas “cat and mouse” on Sunday, hours before the scheduled end of four days of unprecedented Chinese military exercises launched in reaction to a visit to Taiwan by the US house speaker.
Nancy Pelosi’s visit last week to the self-ruled island infuriated China, which responded with test launches of ballistic missiles over the island’s capital for the first time and the cutting of communication links with the United States.
Some 10 warships each from China and Taiwan sailed at close quarters in the Taiwan Strait, with some Chinese vessels crossing the median line, an unofficial buffer separating the two sides, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
As Chinese forces “pressed” the line, as they did on Saturday, the Taiwan side stayed close to monitor and, where possible, deny the Chinese the ability to cross.
“The two sides are showing restraint, the person said, describing the manoeuvres as high seas “cat and mouse”.
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China ups the ante for the West’s support of Taiwan
Clarifying the hard choices likely to come for the West may be the only benefit of Nancy Pelosi’s reckless visit.
Jennifer Hewett Columnist
Aug 7, 2022 – 5.28pm
Nancy Pelosi has come and gone from Taiwan but the volatile chain reaction from her visit will keep building.
China’s suspension of negotiations with the US over everything from climate change to narcotics to high level military communication is only part of the detonation of any prospects of improved cooperation between the two superpowers.
The world’s attention is forced to focus on the even sharper threat of military confrontation. Increasingly, this seems more a matter of when rather than if.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exploded illusions in the West that war in this century or this decade would be confined to smaller, distant countries that could mostly be conveniently isolated in impact.
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China, Russia and the west’s crisis of disbelief
Andrew A. Michta
August 8, 2022
Historical analogies are often lazy, and I cringe when I hear analysts liken the war in Ukraine and the West’s uncertain response to World War II and Munich. Yet as I watch the hesitant Western military effort — with the U.S., Britain, Poland and the Baltic states in the lead, Germany and France lagging, and the rest of Europe somewhere in between — I hear at least a rhyme.
The theme that comes to mind is “disbelief” — a widespread incredulity about the seriousness of the threat we face, which leads to unsteady leadership. It’s the product of decades of post-Cold War globalist dogma that weakened the West’s ability to acknowledge adversity and fight for what it holds dear.
This collective disbelief is what Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are banking on. Russia and even China have nowhere near the West’s resources, when measured in terms of gross domestic product, compared with the overall collective wealth the West commands. Russia’s economy is only about two fifths the size of Germany’s. Moscow poses an economic threat to Germany only because of Berlin’s self-induced weakness, the result of three decades of misguided policy that fostered Europe’s dependence on Russian energy. Russia is a problem for Europe in the military domain — again the result of Western policy. Russia’s nuclear-weapon modernisation and Mr. Putin’s selective investment in Russian-military modernisation overall was accompanied by Europe’s unrelenting disarmament after the Cold War. This is the root cause of the West’s military softness.
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Logic lost on Xi as world walks Taiwan tightrope
12:00AM August 8, 2022
The causes and courses of serious conflict are rarely rationally driven. The tensions over Taiwan are no different.
Yes, Beijing may complain that Foreign Minister Penny Wong has been “finger-pointing” by firing off calls for restraint. But when you’re firing off ballistic missiles yourself, the logic gets lost somehow.
And by now, the debate over US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s true motives for visiting Taiwan is already pointless except to historians. Hyped-up patriotic Chinese netizens may brand her a version of the Wicked Witch of the West, supportive Taiwanese an incarnation of Buddhist goddess Guan Yin.
But it matters little. She has flown away. The determination of Beijing to seize Taiwan, and of Taiwan’s citizens to live as they choose, has not changed.
For a few brief years, the prospect was held open – albeit with only very modest chance of success – that those two goals could be aligned, or at least be entertained in parallel, if the People’s Republic of China were to somehow persuade most Taiwanese people that while becoming part of the PRC they could retain some of their sovereign institutions under a “one country, two systems” arrangement as intended for Hong Kong.
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Britain is entering a profound social emergency. Why is nobody acting like it?
Sun 7 Aug 2022 22.00 AESTLast modified on Mon 8 Aug 2022 02.32 AEST
The surreal, often absurd Conservative leadership election meanders on. Both candidates frantically float ideas for disrupting everything from university term dates to doctors’ pensions, while the Sunday Telegraph endorses Liz Truss as “the first truly philosophy-driven leader since Margaret Thatcher”, and Rishi Sunak stoically insists that he loves dancing. But we all know the gravity of the crisis that is now enveloping us, and it makes the vanities of their battle seem like some strange hallucination related to the summer’s stifling heat.
By the autumn, the victor – Truss, in all likelihood – may well be still trying to convince us that they are leading a national sprint towards sunlit uplands that only they can see. But the game is already up: the immediate future will be defined by skyrocketing energy prices, economic woe and a profound social emergency – and power will be a grinding matter of crisis management.
Everything will become clear on 26 August, when the energy regulator Ofgem will announce the new price cap due to come into force on 1 October. Back in April, it increased by 54%, pushing up the typical annual household fuel bill to £1,971. Now, as Russia continues to choke off the supply of natural gas to western Europe, recent projections have suggested an increase of about 70%, to £3,359 a year – and in January, prices will go up again by an estimated 8%. Late last week, one group of analysts said that Ofgem’s decision to alter the price cap every three months meant that annual bills could exceed £4,200. Self-evidently, these hikes – which look as if they will endure into 2024 – will also have big consequences for general inflation. Some people, meanwhile, are having a whale of a time: last week, the oil and gas giant BP announced quarterly profits of £6.9bn, its highest figure for 14 years.
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US-China tit-for-tat escalations ‘very dangerous’: Ray Dalio
Timothy Moore Before the Bell editor
Aug 9, 2022 – 7.32am
Billionaire hedge-fund founder Ray Dalio said what’s happening between the US and China over Taiwan is following a “classic path to war”.
“If events continue to follow this path, this conflict will have a much larger global impact than the Russia-Ukraine war because it is between the world’s leading superpowers that are economically much larger and much more intertwined.”
In a LinkedIn post, Dalio said “the situation that now exists between the United States and China is very similar to that which existed between powers immediately prior to World Wars I and II and many other immediate prewar periods”.
Dalio said “stupid wars” happen as a result of a tit-for-tat escalation process.
“Miscalculations due to misunderstandings when conflicts are transpiring quickly are dangerous. All these dynamics create strong pulls toward wars accelerating even though such mutually destructive wars are so much worse than cooperating and competing in more peaceful ways. There is also risk of untruthful, emotional rhetoric taking hold in both the US and China, creating an atmosphere for escalation. ”
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War over Taiwan starts to seem probable, not just possible
In the past, a US-China war over Taiwan seemed like a real possibility — but no more than that. Now an increasing number of experts believe that a US-China conflict is not just possible but probable.
Gideon Rachman Columnist
Aug 9, 2022 – 8.47am
When an international dispute has been rumbling on for decades, it can seem like a chronic condition that will never become terminal.
The US and China were squaring off about Taiwan in the 1950s. I wrote a cover story for The Economist on the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995.
So, it is tempting to see the threatening military exercises that China is conducting off the coast of Taiwan as simply the latest chapter in a long-running saga.
But this time feels different. In the past a US-China war over Taiwan seemed like a real possibility — but no more than that. Now an increasing number of experts believe that a US-China conflict is not just possible but probable.
James Crabtree, the Asia director for the International Institute of Strategic Studies, says: “On our current course some kind of military confrontation between the US and China over the coming decade now looks more likely than not.“
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https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/what-australia-must-do-next-on-taiwan-20220807-p5b7yh
What Australia must do next on Taiwan
China views its dispute with Taiwan as a fight over territory. Australia should be more mindful of what Taiwan’s people actually want.
John Fitzgerald
Aug 8, 2022 – 12.13pm
Whatever we make of the visit to Taiwan by US congressional leader Nancy Pelosi, one good thing to come out of it is that Australians have a much clearer sense of President Xi Jinping’s determination to take Taiwan by force.
Let’s hope it does not come to that. Still, it’s probably better we get the message sooner rather than later.
Now that we have heard the warning, what can Australians do about it?
Australia’s formal responses to Beijing’s military reactions have been tightly constrained by the terms of our relations with China.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong expressed concern over Beijing’s disproportionate military response to what was, when all is said and done, a civilian initiative on Pelosi’s part.
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The world is behaving very strangely
Senior business columnist
August 8, 2022 — 11.58am
The current economic settings are weird. That creates novel challenges for the central bankers on the front lines of the efforts to tame rampant inflation rates around the globe.
Last Friday’s employment data in the US illustrates the point. The US economy added a surprising 528,000 jobs in July, more than twice the number expected. That’s despite the US economy having experienced two successive quarters of negative growth, a technical recession.
Quite clearly the US is not in actual recession, with the unemployment rate at its lowest levels for more than half a century, consumer spending strong and industrial activity holding up. The Australian experience is similar, although it would appear that Europe and the UK – hit hard by the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – are facing very real recessions.
It’s difficult to reconcile economies that are creating jobs faster than they can fill them – both the US and Australia are experiencing some labour shortages – and within which demand for travel, cars and goods is overwhelming supply, with data that suggests the economies are shrinking or slowing.
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‘Your beliefs don’t make something true’: at last a sign we’ve had it with fake news
The Times
August 9, 2022
Five long years ago, I was tasked by The Times’s magazine to investigate the then-emerging phenomenon of fake news. As a journalist, some stories change the way you think about almost everything. Along the way, I had the troubling epiphany that online disinformation is less about liars than it is about believers. And when somebody has gone wrong, I also learnt, it is no use to tell them the truth. For they don’t want the truth. They want the belief. And they will find a way to keep it.
Near the apex of the fake news ecosystem, then and now, sat and sits a man called Alex Jones, who runs a network called Infowars. It would take a while to list the various vogueish, batshit, Age of Nonsense conspiracy theories which he has had a role in spreading, but as a general rule of thumb, just assume it’s all of them.
Among Jones’s vilest lies, albeit in a crowded field, have been those he has spread about the Sandy Hook school shooting of 2012 in which 26 people were killed, 20 of them being children between six and seven years old. Repeatedly, Jones has claimed that the whole thing was a hoax staged by the US government, in order to bring in gun controls. He has accused grieving parents of being “crisis actors”, turning them into hate figures. Repeatedly, and understandably, those parents have sued him. Last week, after a case brought by two of them, a court in Texas hit him with $45.2 million in punitive damages.
Why did people believe what Jones said? That’s easy. It’s because they wanted to. They wanted to keep their guns and they didn’t want to feel that this made them complicit in the murder of children. So they cleaved to a version of events which told them that they were not. This is not complicated psychology. As to whether Jones believed it himself, well, who knows? More importantly, though, who cares? As Judge Maya Guerra Gamble put it last week in that Texas court: “Your beliefs do not make something true. That is what we’re doing here.”
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Bag of jellyfish chips, anyone?
By Ben Spencer
The Times
8:16PM August 8, 2022
Long before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, jellyfish swam in our seas. They have no spine, no eyes and no brain but, after 500 million years on the planet, they are one of our greatest survivors. They are on the rise – and they could be about to come in very handy for humankind.
Warming oceans are creating the perfect conditions for jellyfish to thrive.
Overfishing has reduced many of the species – whales, sharks, fish and turtles – that in the past kept their numbers down. Agricultural runoff provides nutrient-rich waters in which they feed. And man-made sea defences, oil rigs and even floating plastic pollution have given them an abundance of the hard surfaces they need to breed. Huge blooms, some measuring many hundreds of kilometres across, appear each summer around our coasts. And they are a global problem.
“The water gets hotter and hotter, and we can see more and more jellyfish,” says Guy Lavian, a marine ranger at the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.
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Pelosi fiasco pushes prospect of war to the brink
The problem now is that the Taiwan turmoil will be the backdrop to the next crisis that comes along.
John McCarthy Former US ambassador
Aug 9, 2022 – 11.35am
Years ago, one of Nancy Pelosi’s most noteworthy predecessors as speaker of the US House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, uttered the phrase: “All politics is local”. These words may have been on Pelosi’s mind when she decided to go to Taiwan.
O’Neill cut his political teeth in the Irish wards of Boston. Pelosi was the Italian-American daughter of the mayor of Baltimore. People who succeed in those political environments prosper because they remember what got them to where they are.
True, Pelosi has form on China. In 1991, she unfurled in Tiananmen Square a banner “to those who died for democracy in China” and – as some suggest – she may well have been looking to her legacy as a promoter of democracy if the Democrats were to lose the House in the November 8 midterm elections. But politicians, particularly those of Pelosi’s stature, do not like to lose.
Polling suggests Democrat’s chances of retaining the House are as low as 17 per cent-25 per cent. The favourable US publicity overall that has accrued to Pelosi on the Taiwan issue would have entered into her political calculus.
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Mutual agitation: Can US and China avoid conflict over Taiwan?
Political and international editor
August 9, 2022 — 5.00am
Why did Nancy Pelosi go to Taiwan last week? For the same reason that Xi Jinping responded with a tantrum of historical proportions.
Politics. Not geopolitics. Domestic politics. The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously held that war is politics by other means. So it pays to heed the politics if you wish to understand the war.
Pelosi has a long history of defending Taiwan’s democracy, but she has a short history ahead of her as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Unless something dramatic happens, that is. She is contesting her seat at the US Congressional midterm elections in three months. For a 19th term. She shouldn’t have any trouble winning her seat. But she’s also hoping to be re-elected as the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. And, if the party can hold enough seats, she could return as Speaker. For a fifth term. At 82 years of age, presumably it’d be her last.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/no-room-for-compromise-over-taiwan-china-envoy-20220810-p5b8pz
No room for compromise over Taiwan: China envoy
Andrew Tillett Political correspondent
Aug 10, 2022 – 4.17pm
China’s top diplomat in Australia has declared “there’s absolutely no room for us to compromise” over Taiwan and warned the Albanese government more work needs to be done to repair ties between Canberra and Beijing, offering no indication when bans on Australian exports could be ended or detained Australian citizens freed.
In a wide-ranging address to the National Press Club of Australia, ambassador Xiao Qian did not dispel the possibility of re-education for 24 million Taiwanese people if the self-governed island was reunited with the mainland and described China’s live fire drills as “legitimate”.
He also defended a Chinese fighter jet releasing chaff that was ingested by the engine of an Australian reconnaissance flight in a dangerous challenge over the South China Sea, and lashed out at Australian media for poisoning views of China.
But Mr Xiao offered a goodwill gesture towards repairing bilateral ties, saying he hoped Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Chinese President Xi Jinping would have a face-to-face meeting at the G20 leaders summit in Indonesia in November. He also said China would not open a military base in the Solomon Islands, a major strategic worry for Australia.
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China shares waver as inflation hits two-year high
Emma Rapaport Markets Reporter
Aug 10, 2022 – 4.35pm
Chinese shares faltered on Wednesday as traders evaluated inflation rising to its highest level in two years and surging pork costs. Weaker demand limited overall price pressures in the world’s second-largest economy.
US annual inflation for July is poised to slow to 8.7 per cent from a 41-year high of 9.1 per cent in June, based on economist consensus ahead of the release expected late Wednesday AEST.
Equity benchmarks in China and Hong Kong slumped, dragged lower by declines in technology stocks.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell 2.2 per cent to 19,559.33 ahead of the closing bell in Sydney and China’s Shanghai Composite Index fell 0.6 per cent to 3227.98.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/labor-toughens-stance-on-dominant-monopolists-20220811-p5b8wv
China likely to try and take Taiwan in the late 2020s, early 2030s: Rudd
Georgie Moore 11/08/2077
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd expects China to wait until the late 2020s or early 2030s to try and take control of Taiwan.
“That means when China believes that they’ll have a bigger balance of power advantage against the US and Taiwan at that time,” he told ABC RN Breakfast.
“And, furthermore, that China will have moved to a position of greater financial and economic resilience against the possibility, then, of Russia-style sanctions being posed against it.
“So our analysis is, it is dangerous because we’re now it’s seemingly on an historical trajectory.”
He was deeply concerned about the possibility of armed force being used late this decade or early next decade.
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Trump refuses to answer questions about his business
Ben Protess, Jonah E. Bromwich and William K. Rashbaum
Aug 11, 2022 – 4.30am
Donald Trump declined to answer questions from the New York state attorney general’s office on Wednesday (Thursday AEST), a surprising gamble in a high-stakes legal interview that likely will determine the course of a civil investigation into his company’s business practices.
Shortly after questioning began on Wednesday morning, Trump’s office released a statement saying he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, explaining that he “declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution”.
Two sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed that he was refusing to answer questions, citing the Fifth Amendment.
Since March 2019, Attorney General Letitia James’ office has investigated whether Trump and his company improperly inflated the value of his hotels, golf clubs and other assets. Trump has long dismissed the inquiry from James, a Democrat, as a partisan “witch hunt”.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/10/biden-us-historians-democracy-threat/
Historians privately warn Biden that America’s democracy is teetering
When Biden met with historians last week at the White House, they compared the threat facing America to the pre-Civil War era and to pro-fascist movements before World War II
By Michael Scherer Ashley Parker Tyler Pager
August 10, 2022 at 6:52 p.m. EDT
President Biden listens during a meeting with CEOs to receive an update on economic conditions across key sectors and industries on July 28. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
President Biden paused last week, during one of the busiest stretches of his presidency, for a nearly two-hour private history lesson from a group of academics who raised alarms about the dire condition of democracy at home and abroad.
The conversation during a ferocious lightning storm on Aug. 4 unfolded as a sort of Socratic dialogue between the commander in chief and a select group of scholars, who painted the current moment as among the most perilous in modern history for democratic governance, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting.
Comparisons were made to the years before the 1860 election when Abraham Lincoln warned that a “house divided against itself cannot stand” and the lead-up to the 1940 election, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled rising domestic sympathy for European fascism and resistance to the United States joining World War II.
The diversion was, for Biden, part of a regular effort to use outside experts, in private White House meetings, to help him work through his approach to multiple crises facing his presidency. Former president Bill Clinton spoke with Biden in May about how to navigate inflation and the midterm elections. A group of foreign policy experts, including former Republican advisers, came to the White House in January to brief Biden before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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China and Taiwan war risk ‘very high’
The best available analysis implies Beijing will attempt unification with Taiwan sooner rather than later.
Christopher JoyeColumnist
Updated Aug 12, 2022 – 9.55am, first published at 9.23am
About a month ago, one of our top geopolitical and military advisers – and far and away the most accurate forecaster on all matters China – called to say he had amended his views on the probability of the Middle Kingdom having a crack at that recalcitrant province, aka Taiwan. He was bringing forward his expected time horizon to the next 12 months.
I was surprised because our panel of about seven global advisers had generally coalesced around the opinion that China needed another five to seven years to militarily prepare for unilateral unification with Taiwan. Internally, we disputed the panel’s judgment. We countered that President Xi Jinping had a strong incentive to attempt unification in the short term for three reasons.
First, nobody expected it. All the Western analysts who had perennially underestimated the speed and sophistication of China’s military modernisation, and the expansive ambitions of Xi himself, thought they had time on their side. That is precisely why Xi should move earlier: to increase the chances of success as the Western dogs napped.
Second, the US administration presented a unique window of opportunity. Some of President Joe Biden’s most senior security advisers privately state that they would never counsel a war with China, even if Xi attempted to take Taiwan.
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US producer prices fall for first time since early in pandemic
Reade Pickert
Aug 12, 2022 – 3.30am
Washington | A key measure of US producer prices unexpectedly fell in July for the first time in more than two years, largely reflecting a drop in energy costs and representing a welcome moderation in inflationary pressures.
The producer price index for final demand decreased 0.5 per cent from a month earlier and rose 9.8 per cent from a year ago, Labor Department data showed on Thursday. The pullback was due to a decline in the costs of goods, though services prices only edged up.
Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the so-called core PPI rose 0.2 per cent from June and 7.6 per cent from a year earlier. Both the overall and core figures were softer than forecast.
The figures suggest some pipeline inflationary pressures are beginning to ease, which could ultimately temper the pace of consumer price growth in coming months. Commodity prices, including oil, have dropped sharply in recent months, and there are indications that supply-chain conditions are improving.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/china-says-taiwan-reunification-is-unstoppable-20220811-p5b930
China says Taiwan reunification is unstoppable
Michael Smith North Asia correspondent
Aug 11, 2022 – 5.06pm
Tokyo | China has defended its military exercises around Taiwan, insisting that they were necessary to stop “separatist forces” taking control over the island.
It also says the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will organise regular combat patrols in the future.
China said on Thursday that the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China was “unstoppable”, as state media went into overdrive defending Beijing’s claims to the self-governed island nation.
Beijing’s latest comments on the future of the self-governed island came a day after the PLA completed military drills launched in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit last week. However, top military officials said further training would take place in the future.
“They are justified and necessary actions to protect national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Ministry of Defence spokesman Colonel Tan Kefei said.
“For the well-being of the Taiwan people, we are willing to exercise the utmost sincerity to pursue the prospect of peaceful reunification, but the PLA will leave no room for Taiwan separatist forces and foreign powers to achieve their goals.”
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Attorney-General breaks silence on Trump raid, wants search warrant made public
Updated August 12, 2022 — 5.45amfirst published at 12.50am
Washington: US Attorney-General Merrick Garland has broken his silence following the raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, asking a court to unseal the search warrant due to the “substantial public interest in this matter”.
Seventy-two hours after the unprecedented event sparked a political firestorm across America, Garland finally commented on the issue amid growing fears that an information vacuum would give rise to more conspiracy theories or threats of violence by Trump supporters.
At a hastily convened press conference on Thursday afternoon (US time), Garland revealed to reporters that he had personally approved the decision to seek the FBI search warrant, adding that this was not a decision he took lightly.
He also pushed back against claims that the raid was a politically motivated “witch-hunt” designed to stop the former president from running for the White House again in 2024.
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Taiwan had the upper hand in the 60s, now China knows its power
By Eryk Bagshaw
August 12, 2022 — 11.58am
Singapore: When Yuan Hong, a retired civil servant from China’s south was in primary school, the Taiwanese air force would dash across the Chinese border and drop propaganda leaflets on the population below.
Some leaflets promoted a mix of economic freedom and civil liberties enjoyed across the Taiwan Strait. Others came with a sharper edge. “We will retake the mainland,” Yuan recalls them saying.
It was the early 1960s and China was in the midst of its disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign. Disease and malnutrition were rife. The People’s Liberation Army was large but poorly organised, China could not match Taiwan’s warplanes in the air and had little chance of winning a war against a neighbour less than 1 per cent of its size.
“China was a poor country at that time, it had just finished experiencing the Great Famine,” says Yuan, now aged 70, as she looks out onto Qishuiwan beach on the island of Hainan.
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Some frank advice for Beijing’s new envoy
A covid cover-up, an imprisoned friend, a vindictive campaign of coercion against Australia and, now, missiles flying over my apartment — here’s why I’ve changed my mind on China.
By Will Glasgow
12 August, 2022
I listened to the address in Canberra by Xi Jinping’s top Australian envoy from my apartment in Taiwan. Where you live undoubtedly colours your perspective. My views have changed profoundly as I have moved from Sydney to Beijing and, after an intermission back in Sydney, to Taipei.
Six days before ambassador Xiao Qian took the podium at the National Press Club, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army fired 11 ballistic missiles over and around Taiwan. One flew directly over Taipei, where I am writing this. They were blasted as the PLA conducted four days of blockade manoeuvres in six locations around Taiwan’s main island, another disturbing first.
“Allow me to be frank,” ambassador Xiao said on Wednesday, keeping an impressively straight face, “here in this country, the media coverage of China (is) mostly not positive.”
In January 2020, when I moved to Beijing to be The Australian’s China correspondent, I would have partially agreed with him that China gets an unfair run in the Australian media.
Events have changed my mind: a coronavirus cover-up, an imprisoned friend, a vindictive campaign of coercion against Australia and now PLA missiles flying over my apartment.
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The stuff of economic nightmares is playing out over Taiwan
The world is likely to split into rival blocs centred on the US and China, putting upward pressure on costs and reducing real incomes.
Roger Bootle
Aug 11, 2022 – 8.00am
At one point when he was UK prime minister, Harold Macmillan was asked what he feared most. He allegedly replied: “Events, dear boy, events.” Over the past few years, both statesmen and the rest of us have had more than our fill of “events” and now we have to face another one: namely the crisis over Taiwan.
The tension caused by the visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, is merely the latest episode in a long and serious deterioration of the relationship between China and the West. The Taiwan issue will not die down after Pelosi’s safe return. It is a festering sore.
This threatens to have dreadful consequences that go well beyond the narrowly economic. If this develops into a shooting war involving the United States then the results would be devastating. Even assuming we avoid the worst, the economic fallout is going to be significant.
Although it is a country of only some 24 million people, Taiwan is a significant player in the world economy. It is the leading producer of microchips, which are an essential input into all sorts of economic activity. China, of course, is still more important. It supplies about 15 per cent of the world’s goods exports, six times the total from Russia.
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https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/is-jailing-trump-in-the-public-interest-20220812-p5b9bu
Is jailing Trump in the public interest?
The question would be easier to answer if the criminal justice system in the US was not so politicised. And neither side pretends otherwise.
Clive Crook
Aug 12, 2022 – 11.57am
Without knowing what the Department of Justice has learnt about former president Donald Trump’s conduct, it’s impossible to say whether searching his home in Mar-a-Lago was justified.
Before all the facts are in, however, it’s crucial to understand that the verdict on this action and what follows can’t rest only on what the law says. Attorney-General Merrick Garland and his officials also had to be sure that they were acting – and would in due course be seen as having acted – in the public interest.
Assuming they had solid legal grounds for doing what they did, this second test is still extremely demanding. I’m hoping it wasn’t just ignored.
You might well ask: How can investigation and prosecution of crimes ever fail to be in the public interest? Very easily. A conscientious effort to prosecute every crime to the fullest extent of the law might leave surprisingly few Americans at liberty. This country has built such a vast constellation of criminal offences that prosecutorial discretion – that is, choosing not to prosecute – is not so much a function of limited resources as something that justice actually requires.
According to reports, the crimes Trump possibly committed might include such heinous acts as keeping a letter former president Barack Obama left for him in the Oval Office. No doubt that’s multiple counts of something all by itself.
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https://www.smh.com.au/national/when-the-chinese-tiger-roars-war-listen-20220812-p5b9bv.html
When the Chinese tiger roars war, listen
Political and international editor
August 13, 2022 — 5.00am
When the first Russian cruise missiles streaked through Ukraine’s dawn sky and smashed into the historic capital of Kyiv, Western leaders reacted with shock. But Edgars Rinkevics was not surprised. The foreign affairs minister of Latvia had arrived in Kyiv the day before to show solidarity with Ukraine.
“We knew that it’s going to happen, that Russia is going to try to restore what they call the ‘empire’,” Rinkevics tells me. His tiny nation of 2 million people, today a wealthy European democracy, borders Russia and has suffered the crushing deadweight of Russian occupation in the past.
How did he know Vladimir Putin would order his troops to invade Ukraine? “Some people are kind of alluding to the restoration of the Soviet Union. Our feeling for some time is that it goes beyond the Soviet Union; Mr Putin has the plan of greater Russia that goes back to imperial times, Tsarist Russia. He’s spoken about Peter the Great.
“Because being a neighbour – and many Latvians are still fluent in Russian, especially the older generation, my age – we had the opportunity to follow Russian propaganda channels and we saw that their rhetoric is actually increasing over the years. Last year, at the beginning of this year, it was clear Russians will try to attack Ukraine and will try to destroy the country.”
The lesson? “The rhetoric must be taken seriously,” says Rinkevics, who has served as foreign minister for 11 years. “People in Russia and China lose their sense of reality – they are caught up in their own rhetoric.”
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America’s last stand against Trumpification: uphold the rule of law
Journalist and author
August 13, 2022 — 5.00am
Florida has become a rumbling American fault line, the epicentre of a string of political quakes. It was the scene in the 2000 presidential election of an early 21st century attack on democracy, when a chino-clad militia, orchestrated by a right-wing political provocateur named Roger Stone, tried to storm an office in Miami-Dade County in an attempt to shut down the recount of disputed ballots that might have shown Al Gore was the true victor.
The Brooks Brothers Riot, as this act of election subversion became known, was only a foreshock. The major eruption came a few weeks later when five right-wing jurists, dressed in flowing black Supreme Court robes, blocked the Florida recount and effectively handed George W. Bush the presidency.
From this democratic convulsion, America has been suffering aftershocks ever since. Last week, the Sunshine State witnessed another volcanic event – the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s coastal mansion, Mar-a-Lago at Palm Beach, which inevitably registered high on the Republican Richter scale of outrage.
As the news choppers circled above, much of the immediate speculation focused on the electoral ramifications for the former president, who has seen himself weakened in recent months by the revelations from the January 6 hearings, and watched as his Republican rivals – like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – surged past him in some polls.
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FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents in Trump search, inventory shows
By The Wall Street Journal
AFP
8:04AM August 13, 2022
FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to a search warrant released by a Florida court Friday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the “President of France,” according to the three-page list. The list is contained in a seven-page document that also includes the warrant to search the premises which was granted by a federal magistrate judge in Florida.
“They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes long ago. All they had to do was ask,” Mr. Trump said in a statement issued Friday.
On Friday afternoon, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart issued an order making the warrant and inventory list public, after the Justice Department said in a court filing that Mr. Trump’s lawyers told federal prosecutors they didn’t object to the government’s request to unseal the information.
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Beijing’s charmless offensive loses hearts in free world
China can portray itself as strong and commanding at home but its propaganda falls apart in the West where doublespeak and absurdities are quickly exposed.
By Kevin Yam
August 11, 2022
Defence Minister Richard Marles was once considered a friend of China. Now the Chinese party state media outlet Global Times declares that “Marles’s string of comments on the so-called China threat make it increasingly difficult to distinguish him from his extremely anti-China Liberal predecessor Peter Dutton”.
More than 15,000km away, former British chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak had previously called for improved relations with China. But recently the Conservative prime ministerial hopeful has declared China and the Chinese Communist Party “the largest threat to Britain and the world’s security and prosperity this century”.
And in Taiwan, the increasingly pro-Beijing Nationalist Party chairman Eric Chu withstood pressure from China-friendly factions within his party to publicly support last week’s visit by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The evolving public positions of Marles, Sunak and Chu line up with the evolving attitudes of Australian, British and Taiwanese voters, who have become increasingly sceptical about China’s words, actions and intentions. Such scepticism has been observed across the free world.
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Chinese scientists ‘most influential in world’, according to Japanese analysis
By Didi Tang
The Times
9:50AM August 12, 2022
China has overtaken America and Germany to have the most influential scientists in the world reckoned by the number and reach of published scientific studies, a Japanese analysis has suggested.
The report by Tokyo’s science and technology ministry said Chinese research papers accounted for more than a quarter (27.2 per cent) of the top 1 per cent most cited papers between 2018 and 2020.
US scientific papers accounted for 24.9 per cent. Nikkei, the Tokyo-based financial newspaper, reported that China accounted for 26.6 per cent of the top 10 per cent most cited papers, while the US made up 21.1 per cent.
The results have been regarded as an indication of China’s growing capabilities in science and technology. Experts warned, however, that simply using citations as a measure of influence could be flawed.
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FBI seized ‘top secret’ documents from Trump home
Michael Balsamo, Zeke Miller and Eric Tucker
Aug 13, 2022 – 7.23am
The FBI recovered documents that were labelled “top secret” from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to court papers released on Friday (Saturday AEST) after a federal judge unsealed the warrant that authorised the unprecedented search this week.
A property receipt unsealed by the court shows FBI agents took 11 sets of classified records from the estate during a search on Monday.
The seized records include some marked not only top secret but also “sensitive compartmented information”, a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets that if revealed publicly could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to US interests. The court records did not provide specific details about information the documents might contain.
The warrant says federal agents were investigating potential violations of three different federal laws, including one that governs gathering, transmitting or losing defence information under the Espionage Act. The other statutes address the concealment, mutilation or removal of records and the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations.
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https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/trump-vs-the-fbi-it-is-just-perpetual-chaos-20220814-p5b9no
Trump vs the FBI: ‘It is just perpetual chaos’
James Politi and Courtney Weaver
Aug 14, 2022 – 8.14am
Washington | Merrick Garland had been quiet for three days about the search warrant executed on Monday by two dozen FBI agents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
But on Thursday, when the 69-year-old attorney-general stepped in front of the cameras to break his silence on the unprecedented move against a former president, he defended the FBI’s actions, suggesting that both legality and democracy were at stake.
“Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the justice department and of our democracy. Upholding the rule of law means applying the law without fear or favour,” he said. “Under my watch, that is precisely what the justice department is doing.“
The swoop on the Florida property, endorsed by a federal judge and personally approved by Garland, was part of an investigation by the US justice department into Mr Trump’s handling of classified materials from his time in the White House that had been running for several months, according to people familiar with the probe.
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I look forward to comments on all this!
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David.
