Australian Politics
Australia should heed Robert F Kennedy’s health policy deal with Trump
There is good evidence that ultra processed foods are NOT bad for you:
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/05/fresh-health-warning-over-ultra.html
But RFK's view is popularly accepted so should win votesWhen Robert F. Kennedy Jr decided to pull out of the US presidential race he approached the Democrats to do a deal. The backing of the great Kennedy name would have probably locked in a Kamala Harris victory.
But the Democrats rejected Kennedy so he turned to Donald Trump and they made an incredible deal that means that if Trump wins, the global food industry and US health will be transformed. Australia will follow.
Kennedy was called a traitor by the Democrats but, according to the opinion polls, the Kennedy support has put Trump back in the presidential race although, as Paul Kelly points, out he has been campaigning badly.
The presidential race in the US is too close for an Australian business commentator to fpredict the outcome. But Down Under we can pick up potentially world changing events in the campaign that get missed in the frenzy of US political reporting.
The Kennedy-Trump deal is one such event.
The Kennedy campaign received high levels of support in some states because he was backed by a massive team of volunteers. Kennedy has agreed to use that team to campaign for Trump in the five key US swing states led by Pennsylvania.
And what makes Kennedy so dangerous to Harris is that his team will concentrate on one issue – the food processing deal Kennedy secured with Trump.
Kennedy has a passion about the health of Americans and believes his Trump deal, if implemented, is a key to improving US health. To illustrate the passion he will take to the electorates I will use his words to describe what is happening on the US health scene and what he will do about it.
Australia has similar problems.
Kennedy: “Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one per cent.
“In America, 74 per cent of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50 per cent of children. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is three per cent.
“Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
“There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s.
“In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed.
“About 18 per cent of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79 per cent.
“One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication: 40 per cent of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Today, 15 per cent of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs.
“So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70 per cent of American children’s diet is ultra-processed – industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
“Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods.
“The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting.
“It is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And it is the fastest-growing cost.
“The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations.
“Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again.
“With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.”
Back to my words.
If Trump wins and honours the deal (highly likely) allowing Kennedy to transform US food products we will also change because most of the food processors in Australia are foreign owned and follow US patterns.
Like most Australians I am greatly concerned at the health issues that are emerging in our youth. I don’t know whether the Kennedy remedy is the answer but he may be right.
Meanwhile Kennedy will also use his heritage and words skill to add power to his health campaign.
“My uncles and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days,” he said.
“This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?
“My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world,” Kennedy concludes.
There is lots more to come in this US election campaign.
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Smart politics sends university Group of Eight a clear message
The Albanese government has done what it was always going to do and will regulate international student numbers from next year.
This is smart politics, plus it is an improvement on existing ineptly managed immigration rules, and it sends vice-chancellors of old and rich universities a clear message – they can protest as much as they like (and they have) but their opposition is politically irrelevant.
It is also ordinary policy. The creation of international enrolment quotas for universities and vocational colleges demonstrates the government is back in the business of regulating higher education and training – there will be more of this very soon. It is also in the business of blaming universities for the national housing shortage and immigration rackets that bother voters.
The first is ridiculous – international students paying top rental dollar occurs in inner-cities and has nothing to do with skilled labour shortages delaying housing starts across the country.
The second is blame shifting – student visa rorts are mainly a problem in the training sector where bodgy colleges pretend they are educating so-called students who are actually in Australia to work.
While the new quotas rightly apply to training colleges, including universities demonstrates the government is on to immigration and housing problems. It is also why the opposition will be wise to wave the student caps bill through the Senate, unless it wants to give Labor the chance to blame the Coalition for both.
Yet all universities enrolling international students have their quotas and the losers are already complaining. There will be warnings of a collapse in Australia’s international research ranking as international student fees stop funding new science kit, and of job losses as casual teaching staff will not be needed.
It won’t occur all at once and not everywhere. The cash cut will hurt worse Group of Eight capital city campuses (the universities of Sydney and Melbourne are standout examples), which have used international student fees to fund opulent building programs and capital-intensive research.
Early estimates put their 2025 international quotas at around pre-pandemic numbers, but 20 per cent plus down on this year.
In contrast, there are vice-chancellors who hope their universities will pick up international students the big metro campuses cannot accommodate.
This is unlikely: students in China know about Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and that’s about it. Yet hope springs eternal and some universities have already supported the new scheme.
It’s one reason the government will get away with it – the higher education system is split on caps.
All up, this looks like an immediate win for the government with another to follow.
The government has a new agency, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, ready to go. It would have powers to regulate Australian student admissions, allocate funding and create closer links with training. If vice-chancellors think international student caps is peak interference, they ain’t seen nothing yet.
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40°C in August? Why is Australia so ridiculously hot right now?
Blaming the heat on global warming is absurd. It is mere unprovable assertion. And note that is was as hot in 1910, long before the modern undustrial economy was widespread
It’s winter in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, the weather is unusually warm. The top temperatures over large parts of the country this weekend were well above average for this time of year.
The outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia recorded 38.5°C on Friday and 39.4°C on Saturday — about 16°C above average. Both days were well above the state’s previous winter temperature record. In large parts of Australia, the heat is expected to persist into the coming week.
A high-pressure system is bringing this unusual heat — and it’s hanging around. So temperature records have already fallen and may continue to be broken for some towns in the next few days.
It’s no secret the world is warming. In fact 2024 is shaping up to be the hottest year on record. Climate change is upon us. Historical averages are becoming just that: a thing of the past.
That’s why this winter heat is concerning. The warming trend will continue for at least as long as we keep burning fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere. Remember, this is only August. The heatwaves of spring and summer are only going to be hotter.
The Bureau of Meteorology was expecting many records to be broken over the weekend across several states. On Thursday, bureau meteorologist Angus Hines described:
A scorching end to winter, with widespread heat around the country in coming days, including the chance of winter records across multiple states for maximum temperature.
The amount of heat plunging into central Australia was particularly unusual, Hines said.
On Friday, temperatures across northern South Australia and southern parts of the Northern Territory were as much as 15°C above average.
Temperatures continued to soar across northern parts of Western Australia over the weekend, with over 40°C recorded at Fitzroy Crossing on Sunday. It has been 2–12°C above average from Townsville all the way down to Melbourne for several days in a row.
Bear in mind, it’s only August. As Hines said, the fire weather season hasn’t yet hit most of Australia, but the current conditions — hot, dry and sometimes windy — are bringing moderate to high fire danger across Australia. It may also bring dusty conditions to central Australia.
And for latitudes north of Sydney and Perth, most of the coming week will be warm.
What’s causing the winter warmth?
In recent days a stubborn high pressure system has sat over eastern Australia and the Tasman Sea. It has kept skies clear over much of the continent and brought northerly winds over many areas, transporting warm air to the south.
High pressure promotes warm weather — both through clearer skies that bring more sunshine and by promoting the descent of air that causes heating.
By late August, both the intensity of the sun and the length of the day have increased. So the centre of Australia can really warm up when under the right conditions.
High pressure in June can be associated with cooler conditions, because more heat is lost from the surface during those long winter nights. But that’s already less of an issue by late August.
This kind of weather setup has occurred in the past. Late-winter or early-spring heat does sometimes occur in Australia. However, this warm spell is exceptional, as highlighted by the broken temperature records across the country.
The consequences of humanity’s continued greenhouse gas emissions are clear. Australia’s winters are getting warmer overall. And winter “heatwaves” are becoming warmer.
Australia’s three warmest Augusts on record have all occurred since 2000 — and last August was the second-warmest since * 1910 *. When the right weather conditions occur for winter warmth across Australia, the temperatures are higher than a century ago.
The warmth we are experiencing now comes off the back of a recent run of global temperature records and extreme heat events across the Northern Hemisphere.
This warm spell is set to continue, with temperatures above 30°C forecast from Wednesday through to Sunday in Brisbane. The outlook for spring points to continued above-normal temperatures across the continent, but as always we will likely see both warm and cold spells at times.
Such winter warmth is exceptional and already breaking records. Climate change is already increasing the frequency and intensity of this kind of winter heat — and future warm spells will be hotter still, if humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions continue.
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Peter Dutton has the Anthony Albanese government rattled and it shows
Several poor poll results and a drubbing in the NT election on the weekend has the Labor government lashing out in an increasingly nasty fashion.
Labor has decided that the best way to deal with the serious issues afflicting the country – from the cost of living crisis to the Gaza visa furore to suicidally stupid energy policies saddling households and businesses with crippling bills – is to attack the Opposition Leader. Typically it’s opposition leaders who are accused of being overly negative and in permanent attack mode, but Labor has flipped the playbook and is targeting Dutton as if he’s the prime minister.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers intensified the government’s attacks against Dutton when he launched into a particularly shrill diatribe at the John Curtin Research Centre in Melbourne on Monday night.
“Leadership which is destructive, and divisive, is not really leadership at all.
“And that’s what we are seeing from Peter Dutton. He is the most divisive leader of a major political party in Australia’s modern history – and not by accident, by choice,” Chalmers said. “It is the only plank in his political platform. He divides deliberately, almost pathologically. This is worse than disappointing, it is dangerous. His divisiveness should be disqualifying.”
To call Dutton dangerous and the most divisive leader in modern Australia is not just hyperbole but stinks of desperation and delusion.
Polls show that despite the consistently harsh treatment Dutton receives from the bulk of the mainstream media, he is cutting through on consequential issues from the economy to national security to cultural issues.
Dutton’s response to Chalmers’ astonishing attack hit the nail on the head.
“If Australians were doing so well, and if the economy was running as great as Jim Chalmers claims it is, why is he dedicating his speech to me?” he said.
And, it’s rather rich for Chalmers, or anyone on the Left, to call the Liberal leader “divisive” when it was Labor who tried to enshrine racial division into the Australian constitution.
Far from being the sensible centrists they claimed, the Albanese government has proved to be radically Left and willing to back reckless, irrational policies.
Ideology is trumping reality and reason, and that never ends well.
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related. I hope she recovers soon from her encounter with Guillain-Barré syndrome
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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