PM close to Tokyo accord on trade

Very good news for Australia if it happens

Australia and Japan are on the verge of forging a historic trade and economic treaty, in a move that could prise open the Asian power's lucrative farm sector. Amid forecasts that the deal could add nearly $40 billion to Australia's economy, the countries are close to announcing formal negotiations - 50 years after the signing of the post-war trade agreement. The breakthrough in almost two years of preliminary talks may come as early as next week, when John Howard meets the new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, for the first time. It was Mr Abe's grandfather, then prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, who signed the Commerce Agreement with Australia in 1957.

Concerned at China's rising economic power and its increasingly close links with Australia, Japan's leadership is understood to have decided boldly to pursue a comprehensive trade pact. The progress of the Australia-Japan discussions has surprised both sides, with the pace of feasibility talks outstripping those on the FTA with China, which have bogged down. Australian and Japanese officials are optimistic the talks will include agriculture, despite Japan's previous reluctance to open its specialised beef and rice sectors to import competition.

Japanese industry is also keen to lock in stable supplies of energy and resources, especially liquefied natural gas, from Australia and has been pushing its Government to fast-track the trade talks. Mr Howard and Mr Abe will meet next week at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, being held in Vietnam. Talks between Japanese and Australian officials continued this week, with agriculture the remaining hurdle, although Japanese ministers have been pushing publicly for advancing trade with Australia.

Trade Minister Warren Truss will visit Japan next week for further talks on the deal. While one government source said the deal was not yet a "fait accompli", there is strong hope of a breakthrough within the next few weeks. A trade pact would cement Japan as Australia's largest trading partner, including the country's largest market for coal, LNG, aluminium and crude petroleum. The economic benefits, over time, are forecast to be significant, including adding $38billion to the value of Australia's economy over the next 20 years.

The two countries have been examining the feasibility of a broad trade pact since Mr Howard and Japan's former leader, Junichiro Koizumi, first agreed on the deal in April last year. It would come at a sensitive time during Australia's continuing negotiations with China over a free trade pact. That remains on track, despite concerns from Australian industry that it will cost thousands of jobs, particularly in manufacturing. Mr Howard yesterday reiterated his intention not to "sell out" Australian manufacturing during talks with Beijing.

The push to forge closer trade links comes as regional leaders, including US President George W. Bush and China's President Hu Jintao, prepare to discuss the stalled world trade reform agenda during the APEC summit in Hanoi next week. Australia is hoping the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation bloc will deliver a strong pro-reform message to the World Trade Organisation, breathing new life into the Doha round. But discussion of an APEC-wide trade bloc - comprising all 21 members - is not expected to deliver any tangible results.

The US has reportedly asked Japan and other APEC economies to consider a regional trade pact, as Washington seeks to maintain its economic strength in East Asia. But a high-level study prepared for the APEC Business Advisory Committee has found the trade pact is "not politically feasible" because of strong differences between the US, China and Japan. "The main reason for this assessment is that the political challenges of negotiating an FTAAP (Free Trade Agreement Asia-Pacific) are so massive when placed against any likely political will," the study says. It said there were "powerful political interest groups" within APEC opposed to offering concessions in touchy areas such as agriculture and behind-the-border issues, such as law and intellectual property.

The free trade agreement with the US just before the 2004 election was estimated by the Centre for International Economics to deliver a boost of $6billion or about 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product. The total increase to the economy over 20 years is expected to amount to almost $60billion in today's dollars.

The economic benefits of the deal with Japan are subject to a feasibility study but estimates suggest it could boost the economy by similar proportions, with a $40 million boost in consumption gains and $20 billion in competitive and other effects by 2020. Japan is Australia's largest market for coal, LNG, aluminium, LPG, and crude petroleum. It is also Australia's largest market for agricultural exports. It is the second largest source of tourists for Australia with more than 685,000 Japanese visiting Australia last year.

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GREENIE ATTACK ON AUSTRALIAN COALMINING

It used to be that carrying coals to Newcastle was considered the height of idiocy, a wasted effort without the hope of a financial return. The new height of idiocy is to stop coal going from Newcastle.

The backbone of NSW's second-largest city - a Labor town built on the steel of the BHP mills and the coal from the Hunter Valley - is still coal, despite all the changes the valley has been through. It is also the undeniable backbone of Australia's domestic energy needs for decades to come and will continue to supply the bulk of the world's energy until 2050. And this is not the pipedream of a fossil industry but the conclusion of the British Stern report, which urges economic changes to fight greenhouse gas emissions. We can't do without coal; we have to learn to live with it.

To try to kill off the $9 billion coal industry in NSW and the exports shipped from Newcastle is to condemn the city and thousands of workers and businesses. Yet this week, in the grip of greenhouse hysteria, the Newcastle City Council, at the behest of Greens councillors and supported by Labor councillors, determined that Newcastle's coal shipments should be limited. The motion said the council recommended "the NSW Government establishes a cap on coal exports from Newcastle at existing levels" and "initiates a moratorium on new coalmines at Anvil Hill and elsewhere in the Hunter Valley and Gunnedah Basin". It went one further by backing calls from conservation groups to shut down the coal industry, and called for the industry "to fund the just transition to sustainability in the Hunter beyond coal". That is, levy the coal industry to fund its own closure and find jobs for the displaced workers. "Just transition" is greenhouse-friendly code for sack workers.

Not surprisingly, local federal MP Joel Fitzgibbon, a Labor frontbencher and former resources spokesman, went ballistic: "Extreme environmentalists are launching a jihad against the industry in an attempt to close it down, and the community must be told the other side of the story," he said. "We must strive to increase the share of electricity produced by renewable technologies, burn our coal more cleanly and efficiently and tighten environmental safeguards. But killing King Coal would be a disaster for the valley."

The heresy committed in Fitzgibbon's electorate allowed him to publicly vent feelings about anti-coal campaigns being conducted by conservationists in the name of fighting greenhouse gas emissions. There is trepidation in the ranks of Kim Beazley's supporters about the ALP being swept along in the emotional surge of anti-coal feeling.

Endorsed federal Labor candidate and potential ALP leader Bill Shorten and Victorian state Labor candidate Evan Thornley both suffered collateral damage this week because of their links with the GetUp campaign. As the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Shorten was defending the pay and conditions of the unsung heroes of the Melbourne Cup, the jockeys, but at the same time GetUp, of which he and Thornley are board members, was calling for an end to the coal industry and a "just transition". Both rapidly distanced themselves from any suggestion they supported the closure of the coal industry.

Beazley also made it clear yesterday that the future of Australia's baseload electricity power would come from coal and that he was backing the coal industry: a clean coal industry. The Opposition Leader was emphatic about the Newcastle council's ban: "That's not the right answer. The right answer is to go down the road of active measures for clean coal technology. We've got to become the world experts at clean coal technology and, as we export coal, we need to export those technologies with it, make sure we can survive economically and also survive environmentally."

Beazley is right: it's a mixture of surviving economically and environmentally. But there has been too much emphasis from Labor on the potential effects of greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power stations. Certainly there is a clear political differentiation between the Howard Government and Labor over the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and entering a carbon emissions trading scheme that makes coal more expensive. But Labor has to be careful not to be seen as embracing unreal emotional claptrap that threatens the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Australian workers. Labor's industrial relations campaign and its position on Iraq have rebuilt the ALP base and secured it a steady spot above the crucial 40per cent of the primary vote in opinion polls, but it cannot afford to alienate that base in pursuit of a new campaign to pick up concerned green Liberals in leafy suburbs and keep faith with the progressive Labor Left.

Howard's response on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions has been ad hoc and sloppy. Some sort of an emissions trading scheme is inevitable, yet the Coalition is poorly placed to deal with the politics. However, don't dismiss the prospect of Howard preparing an important statement on greenhouse emissions and climate change before Christmas in which he sets out a more coherent agenda that is unapologetically worker friendly. Howard learned in 2004 that playing cat and mouse with Mark Latham over the Tasmanian forest issue worked in his favour in two ways: first, Latham went too green too early, and second, the reverberations of defending jobs went far beyond Tasmania. Putting forward practical steps to address greenhouse emissions and protecting jobs is a political winner.

The anti-coal brigade is already damaging Labor by association and creating internal tensions, and the next frontier of forests is yet to be reached. Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation Minister Eric Abetz started the forest fire in the Senate this week when he pointed out that plantation forests cut carbon emissions and offset greenhouse gas emissions from industry. Conservation groups have also pointed to a forgotten aspect of the Stern report, which urges a halt to deforestation and highlights the positive aspects of planting trees and using wood instead of other materials in building.

Howard was surprised last week in the face of Senate committee evidence that in 2002-03 electricity generation emitted 160 megatonnes of greenhouse gases while in just three weeks bushfires released 130 megatonnes. Old-growth forest management, logging state forests, plantation timber and pulping are the next frontiers in the greenhouse war. Howard has been slow to enter the fray but Labor has more to lose if the realisation dawns before the election that there are drastic and unjustified changes being proposed in the name of greenhouse panic.

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PM: STERN PREDICTIONS WILL BE QUESTIONED

The economic predictions of the Stern Report into climate change would increasingly be questioned, Prime Minister John Howard said today. "I think as time goes by, some of the economic underpinnings of the Stern review are going to be continually and increasingly questioned," Mr Howard said.

Mr Howard has long been critical of some of the harsher assessments of global warming. He has previously warned against people being mesmerised by the British government-funded Stern Report. Among the report's dire economic warnings on climate change is that global warming could cost as much as the world wars and the Great Depression. Sir Nicholas Stern's report also warns the worst outcome of climate change could result in global consumption falling by 20 per cent.

Mr Howard described the review as "another report". "We should not get mesmerised by one report," Mr Howard said. "But I do accept that we need to take steps, take out insurance, be certain that we do reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

However, Mr Howard maintained his support of Australia's large coal industry. "I'm certainly not going to target the coal industry ... because that would do great damage to the economy of this country," he said. "One thing I am frozen in time about and that is a determination to protect the industries of this country that give us a natural competitive advantage."

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Baby death shame files in Tasmania

All due to the lazy social worker dictum that children MUST be left with their parents, no matter what

The State Government has admitted it failed to protect a baby boy who died of a methadone overdose in the state's South last year. A further nine children known to the state's failed child protection system have died since 2005 and suspected child abuse is blamed for at least three of the deaths.

The files of the dead have revealed a disjointed and overwhelmed system that failed to adequately protect the vulnerable children. The children came from homes with a history of family violence and where sustained drug and alcohol abuse occurred. Doctors, teachers, neighbours and health professionals had told the system multiple times that the children and their brothers and sisters had been abused and neglected.

Their files contained hopeful assumptions from swamped workers such as "doctor will keep an eye on him" and "extended family making alternative arrangements". Their families had struggled to access help to cope with complex issues including poverty, drug and alcohol abuse and family violence.

Health Minister Lara Giddings admitted to being shocked and saddened at the stories of abuse, neglect and death and promised the Government would learn from them. "I'm not proud of this story," she said. "There had been failings in the child protection system in relation to that child."

A Health and Human Services Department committee will investigate the deaths to determine whether the child protection system could have prevented them. The Government has accepted the recommendations of former children's commissioner David Fanning contained in two reports into child deaths. Ms Giddings said a new, $600,000 IT system would be running early next year to replace the paper files case workers have struggled to navigate and cross-reference.

Laws to trigger the automatic independent review of deaths or serious injuries of children known to the system will be introduced to Tasmania. Mr Fanning noted there was "no clear and routine process for departmental reviews of child deaths" and only two deaths had been reviewed since 1997. One report said "unfortunately there is very limited data on numbers of child deaths in Tasmania where a child was known to child protection services". It said the service could use such data to learn from experience and "reduce the incidence of preventable child deaths".

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