Australian Politics
Why Australian iron ore could save Taiwan as China ponders the economic ramifications of invasion
If Beijing does decide to take Taiwan by force, Canberra would be left with little option other than to impose trade restrictions.
Washington, Tokyo, London and Brussels would demand it. The idea we could continue supplying vital military ingredients to a global superpower threatening to up-end international stability through force would be inconceivable.
As unpalatable as that may seem, for the past five years, it has been Beijing that has used trade as a blunt weapon to bludgeon Australia.
It systematically has locked us out of its markets for almost everything from coal to lobsters using increasingly flimsy excuses about tainted grain, pest-infected wood, protected wine and whatever else to punish our perceived indiscretions.
There is only one commodity for it has steered well clear and that is iron ore. There is a good reason for that. Beijing can't afford to.
Australia supplies about 60 per cent of the world's iron ore, netting around $150 billion in 2020/21. The vast bulk of those shipments, almost 80 per cent, finds its way to China.
It's difficult to understate the importance of iron ore to China's economy. For decades, massive state-directed investment in infrastructure and private investment in property construction has helped boost growth, drive employment and avert recessions.
It also has allowed the regime to build a vast military complex.
The breakdown in the relationship with Australia poses an acute threat to the Middle Kingdom at a time when it is facing enormous economic challenges on multiple fronts.
A rapidly ageing and shrinking population, rising and massive debt levels, slowing growth, a property meltdown and crackdowns on high-tech ventures have left the economy wounded and deeply scarred. Then there are the ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns wreaking havoc.
While China produces massive amounts of iron ore itself, it mostly is low grade, dirty and expensive. Brazil couldn't fill the breach and Beijing's ambitions to ramp up production in Guinea, West Africa will take years, and possibly a decade, to come to fruition.
That leaves it vulnerable and exposed to any immediate disruption to the trade.
What are Beijing's options?
For years, Beijing desperately has looked for alternatives. It has recognised that Australian iron ore, and its dependence on the trade, is its Achilles heel both from an economic and strategic viewpoint.
Another possible sources of high-grade iron ore for China is the Donbas region of Ukraine. But again, with the ongoing war likely to continue for quite some time, developing that region may require a good deal more time than China could afford.
Beijing's dependence on Australian iron ore potentially places us in a very powerful but extraordinarily difficult diplomatic situation.
Shutting off Australian iron ore would be a hammer blow to China's domestic economy for at least the next few years.
It would hurt here too. Our national income would take a massive hit, particularly in terms of federal tax income. Some of our biggest and most powerful corporations — many of which have profited hugely from China's economic transformation over the past three decades — would suffer the most.
In relative terms, however, the hit to the Australian economy most likely would pale against the damage inflicted on China.
Australian mining overwhelmingly is dominated by foreign shareholders which means most of the profits flow offshore. Take Rio Tinto, the biggest operator in Australia. Its biggest shareholder is Chinalco — a Chinese state owned company — with 15 per cent.
Foreign investment houses, sovereign wealth funds and rich international investors all gravitate towards Australian miners given they are amongst the world's biggest. So, the income hit would be distributed well beyond our borders.
Even on the employment front, the effects — while devastating for those in the industry — would be manageable. Mining is a highly mechanised, capital intensive and hugely efficient operation.
The key difference between the two countries is that iron ore is an external source of income for Australia and a lucrative one at that. But for China, it is a vital ingredient that powers its internal growth.
If the western alliance were to impose trade restrictions or bans on Beijing that included iron ore, Premier Xi Jinping's ambitions for a One China could come apart at the seams as the economy tanks.
For all the military drills and the show of force over Taiwan in the past fortnight, the prospect of economic collapse resulting from trade bans on key raw materials would make Beijing think twice about an invasion of Taiwan.
At least for the next few years.
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More victims of a rogue corruption watchdog
Luke Smith is a broken man, the human face of a justice system in Queensland that goes awry when a corruption body suffers from overreach. He’s lost his job, his family and his dignity. Like so many targeted by the Crime and Corruption Commission, the former Logan Mayor is now left to pick up the pieces after a failed prosecution by the corruption watchdog.
It follows the so-called Logan Eight case where the council was sacked and eight councillors charged with fraud after a CCC probe into the dismissal of its former chief executive Sharon Kelsey.
The CCC charges were subsequently thrown out of court after the DPP said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to prosecute.
It was one of many examples where the CCC played bovver boy and lost and it sparked the appointment of Tony Fitzgerald and another retired judge Alan Wilson to try to bring the CCC back into line.
They haven’t done that with their recommendations, but in their defence, their terms of reference were so narrow and constricted that they couldn’t possibly do the job properly.
It was yet another example of a government calling an inquiry, pledging reform, and then ensuring a result to frame a narrative where they blame a bureaucracy or a quasi statutory body for the malaise.
The reality is that this Labor government is so mired in mediocrity, incompetency and deceptive conduct that it can’t reform. Where were the public hearings for Fitzgerald 2.0? Why didn’t Mr Fitzgerald stand in front of the media and explain his findings?
Where was the apology from the Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to the scores of people whose lives have been turned upside down by this mob?
Expect massive compensation claims.
Former state archivist Mike Summerell said the report was a “non-event’’ designed to take the heat off the government’s ongoing integrity crisis.
In his report released last week, Mr Fitzgerald declined to criticise the CCC, instead suggesting a series of damp squib reforms. He forfeited – as did the government – a golden opportunity to put an end to the tyrannical ways of the CCC and its obsession with going after local government figures.
Just like the Coaldrake report, the government is restricting proper scrutiny by limiting the terms of reference.
Time and time again we’ve watched the CCC use its extraordinary powers to target individuals, with flawed briefs of evidence that in most cases are thrown out by the courts. There’s also the issue of who it goes after.
It has targeted local government, yet the other tier of government in Queensland – state matters – have largely escaped unscathed.
Not one successful prosecution has been launched against a Labor cabinet minister or state MP since the Palaszczuk government was elected in 2015.
Not one. They must be the most well behaved political class on the planet. Yet we know through integrity scandal after integrity scandal, that this is simply not the case.
We even had the extraordinary scenario of a former Labor deputy premier Jackie Trad, ringing the then commissioner, Alan MacSporran, on his private mobile to discuss her own CCC investigation.
A central feature of the administration of justice under the common law is “that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done’.
When Premier Palaszczuk personally appoints the commissioner of the CCC, she has control over his or her contract renewals. It doesn’t take two former judges to be able to understand that the ability of a sitting Premier to appoint a commissioner and control future contract renewals for that commissioner is wrong.
Fitzgerald and Wilson had an opportunity to stop the CCC being weaponised by any incumbent government by removing the right of a sitting government to appoint a commissioner or renew a commissioner’s contract by recommending a bipartisan appointment system.
If the legal profession has a strong influence on who becomes a judge, why then does it not have the same strong influence on who becomes the CCC commissioner?
This report has been described as Fitzgerald 2.0. For me, that’s the mark out of 10 they receive for a disappointing report.
Meanwhile, people like Luke Smith ponder what could have bee
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Official response to Covid was mismanaged
Trust the experts, journalists say – ignoring the fact that experts often disagree.
Polarised media have worked out which experts to quote to reinforce the political positioning of different news businesses.
The ABC and Guardian Australia often quote members of the OzSAGE group, that describes itself as “a multidisciplinary network of Australian experts from a broad range of sectors relevant to the wellbeing of the Australian population during and after the Covid-19 pandemic”. It advocates for stronger public health mandates, popular among leftwing journalists for whom resilience is not a virtue and no spending by governments is ever enough.
Why wouldn’t Australians, almost 10 million of whom have now had Covid and recovered quickly, not be sceptical of calls for increasing mask mandates or getting vaccine boosters? The messaging around both has been misleading.
Australians should have been told earlier that vaccination does not prevent infection. They need more exposure to the truth about the side effects of vaccines. This column reported heart disease side effects of mRNA vaccines last July, but this has not received the same level of publicity that the rare side effects of AstraZeneca did earlier last year, largely because AZ became a symbol for journalists and doctors campaigning against the former Coalition government.
Australians should have been told that mask-wearing may be wise in some places but that masks are not a barrier to viruses. Governments need to admit they got a lot wrong in the first two years of the pandemic when people were locked down – golf, fishing and swimming were deemed too dangerous and people were arrested for sitting in public parks.
READ MORE:The ABC of never admitting one’s mistakes|Why good Covid news goes unreported|Media’s usual suspects revert to type as Omicron emerges|Anti-vax tricks of the trade|Left media exposed on Covid, climate and China
Some journalists have recently been breathlessly reporting Australia now has the world’s highest Covid mortality rate. Of course Covid case numbers and deaths have risen in our winter.
About 12,600 have died with the virus. Yet our death rate per million people last week sat at 484 since early 2020, compared with more than 3000 in the US and over 2500 in much of Europe. Even New Zealand, lockdown capital of the world, has a higher death rate than Australia, at 489.
Nick Coatsworth, infectious diseases specialist, told ABC radio’s The World Today on Wednesday that our recent higher death rates were because we kept the virus out, with closed borders, for two years. “But unfortunately what that meant is our susceptible population, which is elderly Australians, were not exposed to the virus … so our death rates stayed down. When Omicron … moved through the community those individuals who were susceptible, sadly many of them lost their lives.”
Catherine Bennett, chair of epidemiology at Deakin University in Melbourne, said death rates needed to be understood in a wider context. The age standardised death rate in Australia had fallen in 2020 and 2021 compared with pre-pandemic years because lockdowns and closed borders kept influenza and seasonal colds to a minimum.
Catherine Bennett, chair in epidemiology at Deakin University.
Catherine Bennett, chair in epidemiology at Deakin University.
“Absolutely we need to understand if there are preventable deaths,” she said. “We need to make sure public health messaging ensures people understand the importance of early testing and treatment pathway options, like antivirals. But it is true that with infection, community wide the most vulnerable people sadly will be affected.
“Yet, compared with most other countries, we did save 20,000 lives in the first two years of the pandemic and extended life for some beyond what would have been expected. Some of what we are seeing now are some delayed deaths, and we need to examine death rates over a three or four-year window.”
Discussing whether people with comorbidities were dying of Covid or with Covid, Coatsworth said that for many people with a life-threatening illness, the eventual cause of death long before Covid came along was always infection. If not Covid, it would have been flu, norovirus or the common cold.
Reflecting on media calls for the return of health mandates, Coatsworth told this column: “I wonder whether the ABC, the Nine papers and the Guardian’s health reporters would have a story to tell without the medical experts behind them. The question becomes what is driving the medical groupthink of the influential medical group OzSAGE.”
OzSAGE members have the ear of many senior journalists, particularly ABC health editor Norman Swan. Many journalists have been calling for a return of mask mandates and big public spending on ventilation.
Said Coatsworth: “Some experts have led us down a path to disunity among medical professionals and uncertainty in the general community. The reason is the people who should be constructing the unified narrative, the chief health officers, have not been getting in front of some of these debates.
“Paul Kelly (federal CMO) tried to get in front of the narrative in January when he said we should not be looking at deaths but at excess deaths. In response to that, Norman Swan and the OzSAGE group absolutely pilloried him. Every time the CMOs try to get in front of the narrative these guys come out and misrepresent the data.
“First it was AstraZeneca which they criticised at a time we should have been making sure it was getting to older Australians. Then they moved to Omicron and instead of reassuring Australians it was a milder variant they moved on to the debate about schools when we should have been entirely focused on aged care, boosters and infection control in aged centres.
“We probably had higher death rates because we were not focused where we should have been.
“Now as Omicron is receding we should be gathering evidence on which interventions actually work – what is the evidence for masks in schools or spending $4.3bn on what these guys call the ‘ventilation revolution’. They have co-opted the left side of politics including the ABC and the Guardian to the idea of a health-economy divide. It’s a false dichotomy because it’s not just about money but about wellbeing, people’s mental health and their human rights.
“Most of the OzSAGE crew believe their interventions have a neutral effect. They are starting from an ideologically motivated position – disease control at any cost. Plus the idea that anyone with a dissenting view in the scientific community is tarnished as a neoliberal even though most would be centre left.”
Coatsworth and Bennett pointed to the negative effect of social media on public health advocacy. Coatsworth wrote last year: “Twitter is the graveyard of nuance, the assassin of good public policy and the enemy of consensus.’’ He was “troubled by the behaviour of some practitioners on social media during the pandemic”. He singled out the Burnet Institute – Burnet is an ABC favourite.
“The Burnet Institute is the perfect example of what we don’t want in a possible Australian version of the US Centres for Disease Control. Either there are sensible voices in that institute who are suppressed by the leadership or they are just subject to an incredible amount of group think. This is a problem because much of the public health firepower that has been going to support Victorian CHO Brett Sutton has come from Burnet.”
Coatsworth and Bennett believe society needs to be more honest about death and the cost of marginal increases in life expectancy.
“The OzSAGE insistence that all deaths are equal and a tragedy and that any other position is ageist is an immature position that very few practitioners share. Most of us realise quality of life is more important than longevity, whether one is talking about deaths from Covid or any other cause,” Coatsworth said.
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Australian conservative leadership needs to be selected with more reference to the base
When you look around the Anglosphere you soon notice that right-of-centre voters in Australia have the least sway over the political party that purports to represent them. Put differently, the political class has captured the party far more here than in the UK, Canada or the US.
Start in Britain with the contest to replace Boris as leader of the Conservative party. Party rules give the first say to MPs. They vote until just two names are left. Those names are put to all paid-up members of the party. In other words, MPs cannot foist their preferred leader on the party. In the current contest, Rishi Sunak, who worked for Goldman Sachs and a hedge fund before getting elected to parliament in 2015, was the clear choice of Conservative MPs. He oozes establishment vibes and though he talks about Thatcher (think Josh Frydenberg) Sunak has overseen the biggest spending, highest taxing UK government since Attlee. He is also suspect on standing up to the EU and illegal boat immigration. Sunak scored 137 votes to 113 for Liz Truss in the last round of MP voting.
But when the contest moved to the party base, Truss streaked ahead. She’s going to romp home it seems because her tax-cutting, anti-EU (and probably anti-woke) credentials are much more plausible than his. This is not a perfect set-up, but compare it to Australia and ask: Would the Liberal party base ever have voted for Malcolm Turnbull if the alternative were Tony Abbott? No. And that would have disciplined backstabbing MPs. Or imagine a 2019 contest between ScoMo and Peter Dutton. The left-leaning partyroom picked Morrison. But the party base would have opted for Dutton in a landslide. We lack constraints on the political class.
Meanwhile, in Canada the MPs have been completely taken out of the process. Anyone can run for Tory party leader and it is only party members who decide. Of course there are problems with this set-up. But MPs are far more focused on what their core voters want than in Australia. The Canadian Conservative party base is about to choose Pierre Poilievre. He would never be picked by MPs (there or here) because he supported the trucker protesters, wants to slash the budget of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; promises to fire the staff of the Reserve Bank for incompetence. Oh, and recent polls show him attracting increased support for the Tory party from young voters. Early tip. He’s going to beat Trudeau at the next election.
I would move to the British or Canadian set-up in a second. Overnight it would silence the Simon Birmingham/Christopher Pyne Black Hand wing of the Liberal party because these MPs – and everyone else – know that the ‘let’s wallow in net-zero fantasies and try to out-woke Labor’ approach is immensely unpopular with the party base. Right now these ‘moderate’ politicians can thumb their nose at the Liberal party base.
Here’s another problem that exists only in Australia. We have a preferential House of Reps voting system that works as a protection racket for the two main parties and their existing MPs. The US, Canada and Britain all have First-Past-the-Post (FPP) voting, the democratic world’s oldest and most successful system. You go into the ballot box and tick one name. That’s it. So, if you think your old, established conservative party has drifted way too far left you just vote for a small party more in tune with your views. If 5 or 10 per cent of conservative voters do this the established party is stuffed.
It was not Boris and the Tories that delivered Brexit. It was Nigel Farage and the Brexit party. They never won anything except, ironically, a few EU seats. But they effectively put the Tory party in a position in which it couldn’t win. So, David Cameron offered up the 2016 referendum, confident his insider, pro-EU, establishment views would prevail. Wrong! My point is that a small party offering policies in line with those of the party base only needs to win 5 per cent of the vote to spell big trouble for the established conservative party under FPP. In the 2021 Canadian election, the People’s party, led by Max Bernier, scored five per cent. Now the Tories are about to choose Pierre Poilievre.
You see FPP allows a party’s core voters to constrain and discipline their elected MPs in a way our preferential system does not. How many times have you heard the Mark Textor line that Liberal voters have nowhere else to go because at some point on their ballot they will opt to preference the Libs over Labor no matter how left the Libs drift? You see it is way harder psychologically to put Labor above the Libs (in our system) than it is to simply pick a third party (under FPP).
A last difference is this. Look at the US and how seriously Republican pre-selection battles are contested. There are no Morrison-Hawke stitch-ups where you shamelessly game the system by never turning up so that the PM et al. can choose the party’s candidates. Americans call them ‘primaries’ and long-established members of the political class have to face off against challengers from their party. So, they have to keep their local base happy.
We are seeing all sorts of establishment politicians seeking to run as a Republican for the Senate, the House, and for State Governor lose to anti-establishment challengers. Sure, this is partly being driven by Mr Trump, who believes the Republican establishment let him down badly (a point that is hard to dispute by the way). Trump’s endorsements this primary season are running at something like 172-10. It is this sway that makes me believe no one, not even DeSantis, can beat Trump if The Donald chooses to run in 2024. (And to be clear, I really like DeSantis and believe he’d have an easier route to winning the presidency but I think he cannot beat Trump for the Republican nomination. And Trump will win too, although it will be much closer.)
Imagine how many ‘moderate’ MPs in Coalition partyrooms would be under threat if we could challenge sitting MPs. I doubt you’d hear many supporting the Voice or net zero by 2030 or all things woke.
In conclusion, incentives matter. In Australia there are few ways to discipline Liberal MPs who exhibit inner leftiness compared with Britain, Canada and the US. And it shows.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/debasing-the-base/
************************************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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