Australia's economic 'lucky streak' jeopardised by political infighting, reliance on China, report warns

This is a repeat of Donald Horne's old jaundiced claim that Australia does well only because it is a "lucky" country. 

But it's not luck and never has been.  The Australian continent is resource-rich but so is the African continent.  Need I say more on that? Australia is very similar to the USA in its economic and cultural arrangements so gets prosperity by its own doing, just as the USA does. 

Past Prime Ministers, Hawke, Keating and Howard all instituted economically rational policies which have been very beneficial to prosperity and the present conservative government even seems to have reined in the debt splurge inflicted on Australia over six years from 2007 to 2013 by the Rudd/Gillard Leftist government

As to the threats enumerated above, political infighting among the conservatives has been deplorable but nonetheless has seen economically constructive policies adopted throughout.

And the idea that problems with China will be anything more than superficial is absurd.  What end would it serve for them to restrict the major inflows of coal, iron, copper, wool and dairy products that they presently get from Australia? 

Australian mines and miners are very efficient and Australia is located only a short shipping distance from the major Chinese ports so they can buy from Australia very cheaply, often cheaper than they can buy from Chinese sources


Australia has an "enviable economic record" but its "lucky streak" could come to an end due to domestic infighting and an over-reliance on Chinese trade, according to a report published today.

Political infighting and a revolving door of PMs has become a cause for concern

The report, written by The Economist's Asia editor Edward McBride, says Australia has one of the "world's top economies" based on its steady economic growth and relative resilience during two financial crises.

It adds that no other wealthy country has had comparative economic growth when looking at the stable increase of wages in contrast to widespread global wage stagnation.

McBride attributes this to reforms made 30 years ago by former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating — who floated the Australian dollar and deregulated the financial sectors — as well as the more recent diversification of the economy at the end of the resource boom.

Speaking to the ABC, McBride said Australia's 27 years without a recession and affordable health care and pensions were some of the key reasons for Australia's position.

However, the report says Australia's reliance on Chinese trade, as well as domestic infighting, has the potential to destabilise policies which have underpinned the country's economic success.

A Beijing boycott would shake Australian livelihoods
China is Australia's largest bilateral trading partner with imports and exports worth some $183 billion last year, according to the Australian Trade and Investment Commission.

The second biggest trading partner is now Japan at $71 billion after it took over the United States last year.

But China is Australia's largest buyer of iron ore, copper, wool and wine, and it also provides 16 per cent of Australia's tourists.

In his report, McBride says a potential economic boycott by Beijing could have a significant impact on Australia.

"Should Chinese tourists disappear, or Chinese drinkers stop slurping Australian wine, many Australians would lose their livelihood," he writes.

A boycott situation would not be beyond the realms of possibility as similar events have happened in the past. Last year Beijing orchestrated a boycott against South Korea due to Seoul's decision to allow the installation of an American anti-missile system.

However, Hans Hendrischke, a professor of Chinese business at the University of Sydney, said the trade relationship was reciprocal.

"The problem with this scenario is that any unilateral reduction of trade links between China and Australia would cause immediate economic harm for no as of yet evident political benefit," he said, adding both sides provide goods and services the other does not have.

Minister for Trade Tourism and Investment Simon Birmingham told the ABC Australia would continue to support the multilateral trading system, and it was "opening new doors" for Australian businesses through trade deals with Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the European Union.

"We have strong trade and investment ties with China, the United States, and many other countries," he said in a statement.

"I continue to urge all parties to respect the long established rules of international trade and to avoid action that could ultimately damage their economies and those of other nations."

Domestic politics 'a cause for concern'

In another key finding, the report says while the Australian economy "is without equal in the rich world … its [domestic] politics are a cause for concern".

But the infighting within Australian political parties has impacted businesses to the point of being a cause for concern not only for the economy, but also for diplomatic relations.

The report says Australia's recent fast turnover of prime ministers has created feelings of disillusionment towards future policies.

"That is especially alarming because the trend of rising incomes which marks Australia out from the rest of the rich world is running out of steam, and the consensus around policies that underpinned it, such as openness to immigration, is eroding," the report says.

If politicians do not sort themselves out, the report adds, Australia risks becoming as troubled as everywhere else.

"I'm surprised by how few Australians seem to realise how much their country stands out, not just in terms of how long it has gone without a recession, but also in terms of income growth, immigration and economic reform," McBride said.

"It's an amazing record, and one that is important not to jeopardise."

SOURCE 







'Knuckle-dragging philistines': Labor targets Liberals for blocking arts grants

So we have a Leftist party wanting to transfer taxpayers' money to middle-class ivory-tower types.  That leaves the conservatives as defenders of the workers' money.  Something wrong there?

My own first degree was an Arts degree but I think the argument in favour of Humanities involvement is greatly over-egged.  I am not sure that any arts and humanities courses should be publicly funded.  There is very little evidence that they do any good.  All we get are high flown assertions to that effect

I myself greatly enjoyed my studies of Homer, Thucydides, Chaucer, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Goethe, Wittgenstein, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven etc. and still do -- but I can't see that I needed to go to university to acquire that familiarity


Labor has accused former education minister Simon Birmingham of pandering to “knuckle-dragging rightwing philistines” by blocking 11 Australian Research Council grants in the humanities totalling $4m.

Senate estimates hearings on Thursday revealed that Birmingham blocked $1.4m of discovery grants for topics including a history of men’s dress from 1870-1970, “beauty and ugliness as persuasive tools in changing China’s gender norms” and “post orientalist arts in the Strait of Gibraltar”.

Birmingham, now trade minister, also blocked $1m of early career awards announced in November 2017 including a $330,000 grant for research into legal secularism in Australia and $336,000 for a project titled “Soviet cinema in Hollywood before the blacklist”.

Two further grants announced in June 2018 were also blocked: “The music of nature and the nature of music” ($765,000) and “writing the struggle for Sioux and US modernity” ($926,372).

The grant projects were proposed by researchers at universities including the Australian Catholic University, the Australian National University as well as Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales and Monash universities. All grants were independently approved by the ARC.

Labor’s innovation spokesman, Kim Carr, accused Birmingham of judging research on its title and targeting the humanities because no research in other disciplines such as science were blocked.  "He’s pandering to rightwing extremism in an attempt to peddle ignorance,” Carr told Guardian Australia. “There is no case for this blatant political interference to appease the most reactionary elements of the Liberal and National party and the shock-jocks.

“These are grants in arts, culture, music and history which somehow or other in his mind are not acceptable … what is his research expertise to justify interventions of that type?”

Carr said that when the former education minister Brendan Nelson vetoed humanities grants in 2004-05 there was “outcry from the Australian research community”.

When in government Labor instituted a protocol that blocking research required a special declaration so the decision was public, which Carr said the Coalition had rescinded.

Birmingham responded on Twitter: “I‘m pretty sure most Australian taxpayers preferred their funding to be used for research other than spending $223,000 on projects like ‘Post orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar

In a statement the Australian Academy of the Humanities expressed “shock and anger” that the minister intervened and called for the $4m of funding to be restored.

The academy president, Joy Damousi, said Australia’s research funding system “is highly respected around the world for its rigour and integrity”. “Political interference of this kind undermines confidence and trust in that system,” Damousi said.  “The rigour of that system and the competition for funding means that only exceptional applications make it through the process.

“A panel of experts have judged these projects to be outstanding, yet that decision has apparently been rejected out of hand by the former minister.”

SOURCE 






Australia: King coal surges 60pc as ministers agree to work on reliable power

Coal has emerged as the nation’s most valuable resource commodity — increasing in value by almost 60 per cent over the past five years — as states and territories agree to a December timeline for a deal to make electricity supply more reliable.

Following a meeting with his state and territory counterparts yesterday, federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor said progress had been made on a key element of the now-scrapped national energy guarantee, the “reliability obligation”. The obligation, to be implemented by mid-2019, would help to shore up stability of the ­energy system by requiring retailers to contract ahead to guarantee supply during forecast shortfalls.

State and territory energy ministers used the Council of Australian Governments’ Energy Council meeting in Sydney to agree to consider a draft bill in ­December establishing the new obligation amid concern about the security of supply over summer. “The reliability obligation is absolutely crucial,” Mr Taylor said. “We know this summer we’re facing some real challenges.”

Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Audrey Zibelman briefed the ministers on preparations to buttress the security of supply in the national electricity market over the Christmas holiday period. AEMO warns of the need for “additional measures” to guarantee greater reliability.

Its warning coincided with the release of a new data series from the Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday showing that coal mined in Australia in 2017-18 was valued at $65.6 billion, up from $41.4bn in 2013. “This is the first time that statistics for output (by commodity) and intermediate use of inputs have been published for the mining industry,” the ABS said.

Queensland Resources Council chief executive Ian Macfarlane said the data showed the mining industry added 8.8 per cent of the value of the Australian economy in the past financial year compared with 4.7 per cent in 1994-95.

“In 1994-95, Australian coal production was worth $8.8bn, compared with an incredible $65.6bn in June this year,” he said.

Gas production also increased dramatically over the past five years, rising from $22bn in 2013 to $46.5bn in 2018. In 1994-95, gas production was worth $2.6bn.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan seized on the results, saying it was “another reminder that Australia’s mining industry remains crucial to our nation’s wealth”.

“Fossil fuel exports from ­Australia are helping our economy maintain positive growth and get the budget back into surplus,” he said. “Just in the past two years, coal and gas exports have surged by $50bn — that’s equal to our ­entire exports of agriculture.”

The growth coincides with a debate over a new government plan to shortlist a “pipeline” of ­potential baseload power generation projects, including new clean coal stations, by early next year. The projects would be eligible for government assistance under a scheme being designed. Mr Taylor has signalled the government could potentially indemnify a new coal project against the risk of a ­future carbon price.

A government plan to establish a “default market offer” against which energy retailers would set their prices was also discussed at the Energy Council meeting. The ministers agreed on the “need to develop a reference point/comparison rate against which all ­offers could be measured”, for consideration in December.

SOURCE 






Challenging the Campus Rape Narrative in Australia

written by Bettina Arndt

What do senior university administrators chat about when they attend overseas conferences with others of their kind? Surely when vice-chancellors hobnob with American college presidents the conversation must sometimes stray to their troubles—particularly the costly business of managing the so-called “campus rape crisis.”

So how come these smart leaders from the Australian higher education sector haven’t twigged to the dangers ahead? Ripples from the fallout of the campus rape frenzy on American college campuses have travelled across the world. Back in the 1990s, there were campus protests with furious young women brandishing placards claiming one in four students are raped. The alarmist 2015 propaganda movie The Hunting Ground was screened across the country, showing serial rapists preying on college women. By 2011, the activists had achieved their main goal, with Obama requiring all publicly-funded universities to set up tribunals for determining sexual assault cases.

So American universities got into the criminal investigation business, with lower standards of proof greatly increasing the chances of conviction in date rape cases. Such cases remain a stumbling block in the highly successful and much needed feminist push for justice for rape victims. Rape allegations are now treated far more seriously, convictions are more common and attract far higher penalties. According to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, in my own state of New South Wales, numbers of sexual assault convictions have almost doubled since 1995, and over 50 percent of such convictions receive prison sentences compared to about 10 percent of other crimes.1

But in he-said, she-said cases, often involving intoxicated youngsters, juries are notoriously reluctant to send young men to jail, particularly when they don’t know who to believe. The American college tribunal system lowered the bar, requiring lower standards of proof, with the accused not protected by lawyers, often denied full access to allegations, and lacking other legal rights available under criminal law. It’s led to a steady stream of young men (and occasionally women) being suspended from college, their lives derailed by this “victim-centred justice.”

That’s proved a mighty costly exercise for the American university system, particularly with a number of these accused young men and their families winning legal cases and receiving substantial payouts from colleges that failed to protect due process rights. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against universities alleging such violations. In most cases, judges have ruled in favor of the accused student and there has been increasing public disquiet about the unfairness of these kangaroo courts. In a 2016 ruling against Brandeis University, a US district court judge wrote:

If a college student is to be marked for life as a sexual predator, it is reasonable to require that he be provided a fair opportunity to defend himself and an impartial arbiter to make that decision. Put simply, a fair determination of the facts requires a fair process, not tilted to favour a particular outcome, and a fair and neutral fact-finder, not predisposed to reach a particular conclusion.

All of this has played out publicly on the world stage. Yet, despite all the warnings, Australian universities are cheerfully bounding down the same road. What is quite astonishing is that here they are doing in the face of solid evidence that the campus rape crisis simply doesn’t exist.

In August 2017, the Australian Human Rights Commission released the results of a million-dollar survey into sexual assault and harassment on university campuses, following years of lobbying by local activists. Designed to provide proof of the rape crisis, it proved to be a total fizzer. Only 0.8 percent per year of the 30,000 surveyed reported any sexual assault, even using the broadest possible definition including “tricked into sex against your will” and sexual contact with a stranger on the bus or train trip to university. In response, the activists immediately shifted ground, issuing alarmist warnings about high levels of sexual violence which was actually low grade harassment, including staring, sexual jokes or comments.

The results were in, but I was the only journalist writing in mainstream media that day to celebrate our safe campuses. My news story included data from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics showing campuses are about 100 times safer than the rest of the community for young women.2

Across the country, vice-chancellors kowtowed to the feminist activists with endless displays of virtue-signalling, promising to tackle the sexual violence with 24-hour help lines, sexual assault and harassment units, and sexual consent courses. I wrote to all our major universities posing a series of questions about why our cash-strapped universities are choosing to lie about the safety of our campuses, and risking scaring off Asian families from sending their daughters to study in this country. The result was endless weasel words from University media units—not one acknowledged that the whole thing is a farce.

The emperor has no clothes. This was the image that inspired me. Our pompous vice-chancellors parading before us, totally naked, whilst the entire university sector, including eminent social scientists, cowered in silence, denying the solid research evidence of safe campuses. That is what led me to embark on a campus tour, seeking out student groups to invite me onto campuses where I could discuss the illusory rape crisis and the related push for university involvement in adjudicating sexual assault. My background as one of Australia’s first sex therapists with a long history of writing about gender issues made this process easier.

The results have been pretty much as expected. My first talk, scheduled for August at La Trobe University in Melbourne, was suddenly cancelled when university administrators claimed it didn’t align with the values of the University. Following media pressure, the university backed down—but only after a conversation with one of the administrators who suggested they may need to offer counselling to students attending the talk. The event went ahead, despite protest demonstrations and a very noisy crowd of protesters bashing on the doors to the venue, shouting into megaphones and doing their best to drown out our discussion.

At Sydney University, the protests were far more alarming. Here, the University insisted on charging the student club hosting the event a security fee of nearly $500 for guards who had no authority to remove the aggressive mob of abusive protesters who blocked the corridor leading to the venue, preventing my audience from accessing the room and roughing up anyone who tried to get through. The escalating violence and abuse led the guards to call in the riot squad, who removed the protesters, allowing the event to proceed.

I’ve asked the university to take action against named key protesters for breaches to the University’s code of conduct and bullying/harassment regulations. An investigation is currently underway. Yet it seems unlikely that the University will act. Last year, the University’s own workplace disputes consultants recommended the key organiser of my protest should receive a suspension for misconduct because she had subjected an anti-abortion group on campus to all manner of abuse, including exposing her breasts to them. Yet still the University failed to follow through. Charges were dropped, without any explanation.

We are taking further action following up on the vice-chancellor’s decision not to fully refund the security fee. (Some was returned due to an administrative error leading to overcharging.) Vice-chancellor Michael Spence declared the guards had fulfilled their protocols, despite the riot squad being required for the talk to proceed. Sydney University has long been allowing a heckler’s veto to flourish on campus, whereby conservative student groups are charged prohibitively high security fees to protect them from violent radical protesters.

The whole fracas has proved quite a tipping point for community frustration over the failure of universities to protect free speech. All manner of eminent people spoke out, including former High Court chief justice Robert French, who warned that universities were risking their reputations by restricting speech on campus. They should “maintain a robust culture of open speech and discussion even though it may involve people hearing views that they find offensive or hurtful,” he suggested. The newly appointed Federal Education Minister has been raising the issue with vice-chancellors, Senators are grilling bureaucrats in parliamentary committees, and there’s been much public discussion about the need for our universities to sign up to a Chicago charter.

The free speech debate is encouraging but it’s not my main game—which is exposing the false campus rape narrative and the related push towards university-based justice for sex crimes. It is proving mighty difficult to break the stranglehold of the activists silencing my attempts to call attention to this dangerous trend. Just this week, the student group hosting my next talk told me we couldn’t mention a “rape” crisis in a poster because it might trigger rape victims during their current exams.

Meanwhile, Australian universities are already caving to pressure to get involved in sexual abuse investigations. Last year, I spent eight months helping a PhD student at Adelaide University ward off a university committee which was investigating a sexual assault allegation from another student. I found a criminal barrister set to give him pro bono advice, and eventually the university dropped the charges but only after a long and stressful battle. That committee had the power to withhold the young man’s PhD unless he cooperated.

Across Australia, universities are introducing regulations to support such investigations, whereby the lower standard of “balance of probabilities” will be used to decide sexual assault matters. At UTS in Sydney, the committee investigating sexual assault includes students amongst its members.

How is it possible that all this is happening just when the Trump administration has announced changes to the tribunal system to wind back victim-centred justice and protect due process rights for the accused? Earlier this year, over 150 American criminal lawyers, law professors and scholars signed an open letter denouncing the victim-centred investigative practises which flourished under the Obama system:

By their very name, their ideology, and the methods they foster, ‘believe the victim’ concepts presume the guilt of an accused. This is the antithesis of the most rudimentary notions of justice. In directing investigators to corroborate allegations, ignore reporting inconsistencies, and undermine defenses, the ‘believe the victim’ movement threatens to subvert constitutionally-rooted due process protections.

Last year, a series of UK rape cases collapsed following revelations of deliberate withholding of key evidence by prosecutors and police, part of the same victim-centred justice. In the ensuring scandal which followed, the former Director of Public Prosecutions stepped down and it was decided that key rape and serious sexual assault cases should be reviewed. The Metropolitan Police have now announced that they are ditching their previous practice of “believing all victims.”

The evidence is there for all to see. Our Australian universities are on a hiding to nothing by surrendering to the bullying tactics of a small group of feminist activists and agreeing to get involved in the criminal justice business. The sensible majority need to speak up and give them the courage to withstand this dangerous nonsense.

SOURCE 

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here