Australian Politics
Vietnam's biggest steelmaker set to import iron ore from its new mine in the Northern Territory
More royalties for the WA government. And these royalties should resist fluctuations in the price of ore. Because the ore is going to a dedicated user, the price will not be subject to market prices
And many secure jobs for Australian workers will be created. Long live the Hoa Phat company!
Hoa Phat Group received approval from Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) to buy the Roper Valley iron ore project last year and has now started trucking ore more than 500 kilometres to the Darwin Port for export.
The Acting CEO of Darwin Port, Peter Dummett, said the company's first shipment was due out later this month.
"This mine was initially developed by Sherwin Iron and Hoa Phat have now purchased that mine, which included about 300,000 tonnes of ore already stockpiled there," he said.
"So we've got a number of trucks coming in each day with the product and it's good to see it coming in.
"Hoa Phat is the largest steel producer in Vietnam, so this product is going to its steel mills — it's not for on-selling."
Mr Dummett said the company was aiming to export the 300,000-tonne stockpile by the end of this year.
"Hoa Phat have their own vessels and will probably move this in five shipments," he said.
Mr Dummett said the ore was currently being transported entirely by road to the port, but the company's long-term plan was to use the rail line to Darwin.
The ABC understands the company is still working through the necessary approvals to restart mining.
The company said it was looking to buy more Australian mines to supply raw materials to its mills in Vietnam.
"Hoa Phat Group is continuing to research to invest in purchasing some other new iron mines in Australia to ensure a long-term supply of at least 50 per cent of its iron ore demand — equivalent to 10 million tonnes a year," it said.
"The group is also studying to buy some Australian coking coal mines in the future to gradually become self-sufficient in this important production material."
The company said it produced 780,000 tonnes of crude steel in May this year, which was up 16 per cent over the same period last year.
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Greenie-inspired disaster in the Netherlands: Lessons folr Australia?
Only a few months ago it was the Canadian government that attacked its own citizens in the most grotesque and terrifyingly authoritarian manner during the so-called Truckers Convoy revolt, when the Trudeau government actually froze the bank accounts and in essence attempted to starve out any individuals involved in what were legitimate peaceful democratic protests against onerous and job-threatening Covid mandates. That ended badly for Trudeau, particularly after the shameful incident in which Canadian mounted police trampled over a peaceful woman protestor. His popularity deservedly took a hammering.
Here in Australia, we also saw unacceptable authoritarianism and police brutality being employed against ordinary, everyday Aussies who were peacefully protesting against mandatory vaccinations, lockdowns and other Covid restrictions. Under Dan Andrews’ Victorian Labor government, a pregnant woman was harassed and arrested in her pyjamas, a gran was hurled to the ground and pepper-sprayed, a man was smashed to the ground, another was rammed by a police car, another had his head repeatedly hit with a rifle butt. And so on. All in the name of keeping us safe.
Now it’s the turn of the Dutch to go ‘full totalitarian’, albeit not over Covid restrictions. This time it’s Covid’s equally ugly authoritarian twin, namely climate change. Currently the government of Mark Rutte’s laughably and ironically named ‘People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy’ is embarked upon insane efforts to slash greenhouse gases and reduce the amount of nitrogen ammonia in the soil by up to 70 per cent by 2030, or even by up to 95 per cent in some places, to meet green EU climate change targets they have signed up to. This literally means turfing people off their land. Indeed, the Netherlands House of Representatives has released a statement saying: ‘The honest message is that not all farmers will continue in business. Those who do will have to farm differently.’
Whether coincidentally or otherwise, it was only last year that Mark Rutte appeared at the World Economic Forum boasting about Holland’s involvement with the WEF’s global food innovation hubs program, which has the stated goals of ‘transforming food systems and land use’. Well, forcibly turfing farmers off their land is certainly one way to ‘transform land use and food systems’.
Everyday hard-working Dutch family farmers have other ideas, and we are now seeing massive and growing protests, tractor blockades, manure being dumped onto government property and so on, with accusations the Dutch secret police are infiltrating the protesters, which is much the same playbook alleged to have been used by Trudeau during the Truckers Convoy.
Is this what happens when governments get infiltrated by globalist activist politicians who have supped at the feet of Klaus Schwab in Davos? If that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, you’d be right. But alas, that is the claim of Mr Schwab himself back in 2017 when he boasted in an interview of how many world leaders today are graduates of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program, and went on to claim how proud he was to have successfully ‘penetrated the cabinets’ of governments around the world, including claiming that ‘more than half’ of the Canadian cabinet were WEF acolytes.
This should of course concern anyone who is even remotely beholden to the democratic ideal of a parliament and indeed a government being composed of the representativeness of local constituencies whose first loyalty is to those same constituents and not to the power point agenda of some shady globalist cabal of billionaires, powerful trade union organisations and the CEOs of multinational corporations.
Which brings us back to the National Press Club speech last week by Labor’s hapless Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who proudly proclaimed that ‘the Prime Minister and I have notified the UN of Australia’s new 43 per cent emissions reduction target’ before boasting that this was a deal ‘between big energy corporations, trade unions and climate (activists)’. This, he claimed, means ‘we are all in this together’.
In doing so, Mr Bowen and Mr Albanese have almost certainly put us onto the Dutch path of authoritarian and draconian restrictions being required at some point further down the track in order to meet these otherwise almost certainly unachievable targets and climate change obligations.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/all-in-it-together/
**********************************************************Leftist corruption of langusge
Perhaps we could pay tribute to the US Supreme Court’s courageous decision to remove an entitlement to wholesale abortion that should never have been allowed by discarding the dishonest term ‘reproductive health’ from our everyday speech. Leftists invented it to mean what plain speakers call abortion or foeticide.
While we’re at it, we could clear out a whole lot of other linguistic lies and prevarications the Left tries to make us use. Language is the vehicle of thought and if we unresistingly accept leftist distortions of words we end up thinking like leftists.
How many of us now say ‘gender’ when we mean ‘sex’? But ‘gender’ has become a leftist trap word. By using it we are tacitly or unwittingly assenting to the leftist notion that an artificial sexual identity called gender exists in the mind, ‘constructed’ for us by either ourselves or some arcane social force, and which may or may not align with the sex of our birth.
Avoid accommodating leftists by using their terminology. Never say ‘woman’ of someone who isn’t one. Don’t fall for expostulations like, ‘of course I’m not a sexist’. If you do, you have already conceded ground by recognising a leftist concept as legitimate. ‘Sexism’ only exists in the imaginations of feminists, who invented the term to discredit opposition to their spurious campaign against that other mythological entity, ‘patriarchy’. To this end they turned ‘lady’, ‘gentleman’ and anything ending in ‘-man’ into ‘boo words’. Let’s ignore that and use these words when we can.
Leftists have mounted a linguistic attack on the family. Resist this and say ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘husband’, ‘wife’. Revive the use of ‘Christian name’ whenever appropriate.
(By the way, the latest boo word, not just among leftists in this case, is ‘Putin’. Putin is what you blame when anything that is the responsibility of government, like keeping the lights on, or controlling inflation, goes wrong. President Biden is adept at this.)
‘Racism’ and ‘racist’, were adopted to demonise anyone not wholly on board with the leftists’ BLM-mandated goal of white subordination. You can defy this bullying by being as ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ as you like, since sensible people accept racial and sexual differences as part of human nature. All humans have an affinity for their own kind, for people who speak the same language and share their beliefs. That doesn’t mean, which leftists try to twist it to mean, that they regard everyone else as inferior.
‘Racist’ has a particular application in Australia, where indigenous activists apply it to ordinary Australians doubtful of the wisdom of going down the path once followed by South Africa and dividing our national legislature racially. Imagine the screams of rage from proponents of the ‘Voice’ if a separate voice were suggested for Irish Australians, or Australians of Indian origin or any other racial group.
It’s best to avoid debate with leftists on subjects which have no existence outside their chimeric world. Sane people should treat statements such as ‘Australia is a racist country’ as the Logical Positivists treated metaphysics, as not wrong or right but as utterly without meaning.
Leftists have long, to use one of their favourite terms, ‘colonised’ many words, misusing them to mean the opposite of what they really mean. Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ was not the dawn of prosperity for millions but a mass push backwards into a communal grave. The various ‘liberations’ wrought by Stalin, Castro and others have invariably meant enslavement. ‘People’s’ means ‘relating to the oligarchy that rules the people’. In this sense it wouldn’t be out of place in contemporary Canberra. Albanese and co. would be in good socialist company if they described themselves as the ‘people’s government’, given that two-thirds of the ‘people’ didn’t vote for them. And if anti-monarchist obsessives ever manage to foist their shoddy republic on us, they could go the whole hog and call it a ‘people’s republic’ like the Beijing regime so uncritically admired by Labor luminaries such as Richard Marles.
‘Democratic’ in national names invariably means undemocratic. Arbeit macht frei over the gates of Hitler’s concentration camps didn’t mean that ‘work sets you free’. It meant, as Dante wrote, ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here.’
When leftists say ‘comedy’ as in comedy festival it means utterly unfunny, and if the event is funded by the taxpayer or (which is the same thing) produced by the ABC, coarse, scatological and blasphemous as well. ‘Your ABC’ is probably the concisest lie ever told. Only the ABC’s ‘friends’ are fool enough to believe it; the rest of us know the ABC is ‘ours’ only insofar as we have no choice but to pay the prodigious sums wasted producing its unique mixture of propaganda and incompetence.
‘Your ABC’ holds a place in another category, that of words used untruthfully, such as that ominous phrase creeping through public discourse, ‘the Great Reset’. This, invented by that sinister pair of James Bond-villain lookalikes Klaus Schwab and George Soros, is meant to sound like a wonderful fresh start for humanity but really means a plot to impose ‘global governance’ by unelected authoritarians such as themselves, intent on filching what’s left of our freedom.
Leaving the mentally sick to shiver and starve in the street is described as ‘community care’. Responsibility-shirking governments have encouraged this lie.
Near me in Melbourne is a wide expanse of green sward with a lake and a golf course. ‘Welcome to Albert Park’ reads a sign. That’s meaningless as well as being based on an untrue premise. Albert Park is publicly owned so who is doing the welcoming? Ourselves? Or is that a giveaway revealing that the ‘public service’ confuses stewardship with proprietorship?
‘The climate’ is a leftist fantasy-land bearing little or no relation semantically to the weather. Antarctic depths of cold in normally temperate seasons, leftists still say the planet is ‘warming’. In the 1970s they were predicting a new ice age. Perhaps they will again if global warming really sets in, such is their perversity with words.
Even the humble pronoun has been pressed into service in the language wars. Leftists have always hated third-person singular male pronouns used generically and confusingly replace them with ‘they’, ‘their’ or ‘them’, as in ‘a fool and their money are soon parted’. In such contexts it is clearer to continue the traditional use of ‘he’ or ‘his’ unless the subject is female. And as for all those ‘gender-diverse’ individuals who want to be pronominally referred to as ‘they’ and wail that they are not respected if ‘misgendered’, take no notice. It is far better to respect the integrity of the English language.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/aussie-life-76/
*************************************************Booster value ‘uncertain’ for the under-50s
Top vaccine experts have advised younger people that having a second booster shot is unlikely to substantially reduce their risk of catching Covid-19, with very limited evidence available on the efficacy of fourth doses in reducing transmission and hospitalisation in those under 50.
The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation said the rapidity with which immunity from the first booster shot wanes just as Australia faces a worsening winter Omicron wave had prompted it to lower the age at which it recommends fourth shots from 65 to 50.
ATAGI is advising older people to get a fourth shot three months after their initial booster.
It also said that young people who wanted to reduce their risk of catching Covid-19, avoid having to take time off work and minimise the risk of long Covid should be allowed to have a vaccine if they chose, even though there was uncertainty as to how much of a boost in immunity they’d gain.
It was largely pressure from healthcare workers who have been demanding a fourth jab that prompted ATAGI’s change of position on second boosters.
Australia will become the first country in the world to open up fourth shot vaccination to healthy people aged between 30 and 50.
ATAGI and the government’s key focus, however, is on protecting older people from severe disease. The fourth shot will boost that protection at least fourfold.
ATAGI said a key reason for lowering the recommended age for fourth shots was the pressure on hospitals as a result of the winter Omicron wave, but it said other public health and social measures such as mask wearing and wider use of antivirals would have a bigger impact on limiting transmission and severe illness.
“Increasing the uptake of winter booster doses of Covid-19 vaccine in populations most at risk during this time is anticipated to play a limited, but important role in reducing the risk from Covid-19 to individuals and pressure on the healthcare system,” ATAGI said in a statement.
The number of people in hospital is below the peak of the January Omicron wave of 5000 people, but the current BA. 5 strain is even more infectious and experts predict numbers in hospital will eclipse January levels.
The take-up of first boosters is only 70 per cent nationwide, and only 59.5 per cent of those currently eligible had a fourth shot.
ATAGI said the evidence was uncertain.
“ATAGI recognises that some people aged 30 to 49 years would also like to reduce their risk of infection from Covid-19 and therefore may consider a winter booster dose,” its statement said.
“While rates of hospitalisation, severe disease, and death from Covid-19 are low in this age group, other factors … may influence an individual’s decision to have a winter booster dose.
“The impact of vaccination on transmission and maintenance of healthcare capacity in this age group is uncertain but likely to be limited.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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