Tweets of the Week

The gas industry lobby group APPEA have put some ads on social media boasting about how much tax and royalties the gas industry pay.

Here's what they don't tell you.

Climate & Energy Principal Advisor @MarkOgge explains. #auspol pic.twitter.com/6WFafdobkZ

— Australia Institute (@TheAusInstitute) July 25, 2022

With inflation now running at 6.1% annually & wage growth at only 2.4% we have moved from the era of wage stagnation to the new era of cuts to real wages.

— Josh Bornstein (@JoshBBornstein) July 27, 2022

If the Morrison Coalition Government remains stubbornly opposed to a domestic price on carbon, then Australia can expect to lose more of its share of the world market in goods and services, along with further diminishing its global reputation.

The European Union (EU) is a political, economic and trade bloc acting on behalf of 27 Northern Hemisphere nations.

Annual two-way trade between the EU and Australia is valued at est. Aus$106.1 billion and Australia’s exports to the EU at Aus$33.4 billion or est. 10% of the total value of Australia’s annual export sales.

If the Morrison Coalition Government remains stubbornly opposed to a domestic price on carbon, - as well as continuing to enact half-hearted climate change mitigation policies - then Australia can expect to lose more of its share of the world market in goods and services, along with further diminishing its global reputation.

On 14 July 2021 the European Commission issued this 5 page media release explaining in detail the following proposal put to its member nations…..

European Green Deal Commission Proposes Transformation of EU Economy and Society to Meet Climate Ambitions by clarencegirl on Scribd

https://www.scribd.com/document/515965182/European-Green-Deal-Commission-Proposes-Transformation-of-EU-Economy-and-Society-to-Meet-Climate-Ambitions

No matter how Morrison & Co try to spin the Australian Treasury's 2021 Intergenerational Report, it reveals lacklustre economic growth expected over the next 40 years

In June 2021 the Australian Treasurer and Liberal MP for Kooyong, Josh Frydenberg released the Treasury’s 2021 Intergenerational Report: Australia over the next 40 years

Although a traditionally impartial Treasury complied most of the report’s contents, the partisan political nature of this report can be found kicking off at Line 19 of the Executive Summary, which starts with this untruthful statement:

Australia entered the COVID-19 pandemic from a position of economic and fiscal strength. The budget was in balance for the first time in 11 years…..

North Coast Voices readers would be well aware that 2019-20 national budget papers released in April 2019 forecast a then as yet unrealised balanced budget and return to surplus by 30 June 2020, with surpluses continuing over the medium term. This was a risky assertion to make on the basis of optimistic assumptions not hard facts.

Just how risky became apparent soon after February-March 2020 when the word “surplus” was quietly scrubbed from the Liberal-Nationals political lexicon due to the social and economic upheaval caused by both six years of the Abbot-Turnbull-Morrison Government in Canberra and a highly infectious global pandemic.

By June 2020 Australia’s net debt was expected to peak at $392.3 billion and, by June 2021 there was an est. $829 billion in gross public debt and $617.5 billion in net public debt on the books and an underlying cash deficit in the vicinity of $161 billion, with no budgetary surplus on the horizon.

That might almost be considered to qualify as good news given some of the forecasts contained in the 2021 Treasury intergenerational report. Because that report clearly shows that the COVID-19 global pandemic could cease tomorrow and it would make little difference to Australia’s long term economic recovery.

There will be no post-pandemic ‘snapback’ which will see the national economy quickly flourish.

From 2014 to the present day successive federal governments have trashed the goodwill and tolerance of our political allies and trading partners with anti-science, climate change denialist polices, demonstrated a crass clumsiness and sometimes downright ignorance of international relations and, the complete absence of diplomacy in negotiations with our largest trading partner. While increasing impacts from climate change will, more frequently than in the post-climate crisis era, see a fall in the seasonal/annual volume of agricultural products for export.

The domestic industry and business mindset that insists employers are doing workers a favour by employing them on a low wage with no job security, rather than recognising that the worker creates cashflow and profits by producing actual goods to sell, will in all likelihood actively discourage decent wage growth over the next 40 years.

According to the Executive Summary in the 2021 Intergenerational Report:

….real gross domestic product (GDP) is projected to grow at 2.6 per cent per year over the next 40 years, compared with 3.0 per cent over the past 40 years. Real GDP per person is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.5 per cent, compared with 1.6 per cent over the past 40 years. Nominal GDP growth is projected to slow to 5.0 per cent per year over the next 40 years, compared with 7.0 per cent over the past 40 years. Real GNI is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 2.3 per cent, compared with 3.3 per cent over the past 40 years. Real GNI per person is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.3 per cent, compared with 1.8 per cent over the past 40 years. The larger slowdown in GNI growth than GDP growth reflects an assumption that the terms of trade will decline before stabilising at long-term levels.

Real GDP per person = Gross Domestic Product per person adjusted for inflation
Real GNI per person  = Gross National Income (wages & other earned income)
per person adjusted for inflation
Real GDP = Gross Domestic Product adjusted for inflation
Real GNI = Gross National Income (wages & other earned income)
Nominal GDP =  measures total value of the output produced in Australia, by
adding together Real Gross Domestic Product and prices to produce a close estimate.

Australia's terms of trade is calculated as the ratio of export prices to import prices. If this index increases it implies that Australia is receiving relatively more for its exports; if it decreases then Australia is receiving relatively less. An increase in export prices relative to import prices
implies that Australia is better off; thus an increase in the terms of trade
is sometimes referred to as a favourable movement in the terms of trade. [Australian Parliament House Library, retrieved 07.07.21].


After the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) Australia's terms of trade under Labor federal governments peaked in 2010-11 & 2011-12 at 2.1 before falling to 1.0. Subsequent Coalition federal governments peaked at 1.1 in 2020-21. Australia's terms of trade are predicted to return to the 0.9 of the Global Financial Crisis period and stay at
that level until after 30 June 2061. 



Australian Treasury tables attached to the 2021 Intergenerational Report predict that Average Labour Productivity Levels will remain at 1.5
until after 30 June 2061. This is the same level of average labour productivity between approx. 1981 and 2020.


In those same tables Average Gross National Income per person adjusted for inflation is expected to fall from the current 1.8 to 1.3 for the next 40 years. This does not indicate strong wages growth across the board over the next four decades.


After credibly surviving the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis under a
Labor federal government, Australia now faces forty years of struggling
to move past social and economic consequences of the current federal Coalition government’s six years of poor policy decisions and its appalling mismanagement of the global COVID-19 pandemic once it became clear the virus would breach our national borders.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison's arrogance brings Australia closer to an all out trade war with China

 

China is said to account for around one-third of Australia's export income. 

This may not continue into the future.

Given the growing tension between Australia and China, caused in great measure by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison acting as US President Donald Trump's annoying little barking dog snapping at the heels of Xi Jinping, it is possible that in 2021 Australia could face over $105 billion in lost trade with China.

 The Monthly, 15 December 2020:

…..Beijing appears to have officially blacklisted Australian coal for the foreseeable future. The Chinese government sure knows how to hit where it hurts. Australian coal exports to China were worth $14 billion last year, and, for the many coal-lovers in the Coalition, the one argument for the industry’s continued existence – the financial one – has just been crushed. It was hard enough justifying a project such as Adani’s Carmichael mine before; now it looks ridiculous. Trade Minister Simon Birmingham has urged China to clarify the reported ban, calling it unacceptable and discriminatory, while Scott Morrison somewhat hopefully called the reports “media speculation”, and warned that a blacklisting would “obviously be in breach of WTO rules and our own free-trade agreements, so we would hope that it is not the case”. It’s a lot more than media speculation, of course. And it’s hardly coincidental that this news has arrived hard on the heels of the stoushes over Australian iron ore. Where is all this heading?

Australian businesses are going to suffer, and people are going to get hurt. Journalist Anna Krien has been tracking a terrible situation involving sailors marooned off the coast of China, on ships full of Australian coal. For up to eight months, these ships have been unable to offload their cargo into Chinese ports due to an informal government ban. “China doesn’t want it. The seller won’t leave. A game of chicken except these men’s lives are at stake. Three are on suicide watch,” Krien reported via Twitter. “Their medicine has run out. The water they are being supplied with is bad – causing rashes that won’t heal and [are] pus-filled. They have families. One sailor’s father back home in India has died, his mother is dying.”

Some of the stranded seafarers haven’t been allowed to disembark for 20 months due to COVID-19. Do Birmingham, Morrison, Canavan, Pitt and Payne care about these workers? Does the Minerals Council? Let alone the hundreds of thousands of workers in the other sectors hit by China’s abrupt strikes on Australian products…...

Australian Coal exports will continue at high levels, but the latest World Energy Outlook forecasts a big transition to renewables in the next two decades.

 

ABC News, 19 October 2020:

Demand for Australian thermal coal has peaked, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), and renewables will deliver 80 per cent of the world's energy needs in the next few years.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia has been saved by its mineral exports, especially iron ore and coal.

Exports are worth $70 billion and they have doubled in the past decade.

But the IEA's report said the global economic slump caused by the pandemic would cause a fall in demand for energy, with oil and coal the hardest hit.

Co-author of the report Tim Gould said while demand for energy was expected to rebound when the pandemic was brought under control, demand for coal was not expected to recover with it.

"Energy demand is set to fall by 5 per cent this year, the largest shock in 70 years," he said…..

In New South Wales mining corporations do not appear to accept the inevitability of King Coal's decline.

This is a snapshot of coal mining leases (red), coal assessment leases (yellow), coal exploration licenses (dark blue) and coal exploration applications (light blue), stretching from the Illawarra region in the south to the New England region in the north of the state as of 20 October 2020.

Image: MinView

No two ways about it - 'Scotty From Marketing' Morrison has political egg on his face

In mid-April 2020 Australian Prime Minister & Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne decided that the middle of a global pandemic and, with a domestic economy in freefall, was a good time to antagonise our biggest trading partner.

Their weapon of choice was China's initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had escaped from a research facility in or near Wuhan.

It didn't go unnoticed that this foray into conspiracy theories marched side by side with media statements and outlandish ant-China comments being tweeted by a hypocritical* US President Donald J. Trump, whom Morrision professes to admire and with whom he consults during this pandemic.

Morrison's actions in particular raise the suspicion that he wanted to be seen as a 'world leader' that month because emerging domestic economic news was not encouraging and he saw the need for a political diversion.

Why else would he eschew normal diplomatic channels? Channels which would have allowed him to privately discuss his concerns directly with the Chinese Government.

Well, he certainly got that diversion.

It came in the form of an effective loss of Australia's barley export market in China due to the imposition of 80.5 per cent anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties and limitations on beef exports impacting 35 per cent of the beef trade with China.

But hey! The World Health Assembly issued a resolution eventually signed by 136 co-sponsors out of a total 194 WHO member countries.

Unike the Morrison-Dutton-Payne rhetoric, this measured document carefully refrains from targeting China and focusses on World Health Organisation (WHO) responses to the pandemic and the effectiveness of International Health Regulations. 

Resolution co-sponsors included both Australia and China. However, after all Trump's yelling and finger pointing, the resolution did not include the United States as a co-sponsor.

This left Scott Morrison with egg on his face. 

Particularly as three days ahead of the 73rd World Health Assembly Conference and four days before the announcement of that high barley tariff, the Australian public learned that China had increased its imports of barley from the United States and sourced additional beef from Russia. 

It doesn't matter how much Trump blusters about China's initial response to COVID-19 now - it's all for show, always was. The grain deal is done and the U.S. is moving in on our major market.

It would appear that out of the three principal buffoons leading Western democracies - Donald John Trump, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Scott John Morrison - it is Morrison who is the most foolish when it comes to international relations and the most easily tricked by other buffoons.

Note

* On or about 11 January 2020 China announced the first confirmed death from the novel coronna virus. By 24 January Donald Trump on behalf of the American people was publicly congratulating the Chinese Government on its public health response:

Thanks a lot Scott Morrison & all those Lib-Nat goons who piled on China once he opened his mouth. The NSW Northern Rivers really appreciates the loss of trade

In mid-April 2020 Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne decided that the middle of a global pandemic and, with a domestic economy in freefall, was a good time to antagonise our biggest trading partner.

It didn't take long for National Party backbenchers to join these three Liberal Party ministers and mainstream media reported the situation thus.......   

"But given clear evidence that China is deeply unhappy with Australia’s aggressive calls for an inquiry, in a way that it sees as Australia teaming up with the Trump administration to point the blame at China, the foreign exchange markets are making up their own minds on the prospects of Australia being on the brink of a serious deterioration of ties with our largest trading partner." [The Australian, 13 May 2020] 

"Mr Morrison said Australia could not rule out that the virus escaped­ from a Wuhan lab, but “the most likely (origin) has been in a wildlife wet market”."  [The Australian, 6 May 2020]

"..it was immediately clear that the purpose of the Australian "initiative" was not to conduct a review of benefit to the whole world, but to engage in political warfare with the Chinese state, using failures of organisation and leadership as a stick with which to beat the state. This was underlined by the way in which the first Australian public mention of the need for such an inquiry, along with some words about "accountability and transparency'', came from Peter Dutton, otherwise in a witness protection program avoiding any transparency or accountability for Commonwealth failures to screen several thousand passengers and crew from cruise ships. Marise Payne took the idea further, if with every appearance of playing to a pre-prepared script several days later, before Morrison took extra steps to make the proposals unacceptable to the Chinese by advocating the equivalent of weapons inspectors battering down doors to catch those with secrets to hide."  

"Scott Morrison insists it would be "absolutely nonsense" to suggest the coronavirus started anywhere other than China. The prime minister is pushing ahead with calls for a global inquiry into the origins of the deadly disease despite diplomatic blowback from the Chinese government. "I don't think anybody is in any fantasy land about where it started - it started in China," he told 2GB radio on Friday. "What the world over needs to know - and there's a lot of support for this - is how did it start and what are the lessons to be learned."  [AAP Bulletin Wire, 1 May 2020]

"The Morrison Government is leading the international call for an independent review of the COVID-19 crisis to determine the origin of the virus and if more could have been done to slow its spread."  [The Mercury, 20 April 2020]

Morrison, Dutton, Payne & Co got the column inches and media attention they craved, but it is rural and regional areas like the NSW Northern Rivers which are bearing the brunt of their total lack of a genuinely diplomatic approach to China on the issue.....

The Daily Examiner, 15 May 2020:

Casino’s Northern Cooperative Meat Company is one of the four Australian abattoirs that China imposed an import ban on this week. 

The black-listing of the three Queensland and one NSW red meat abattoirs is believed to be a “trade war tactic” from Beijing as trade tensions between Australia and Chine rise. There are fears the bans from China come after Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent investigation into the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak. 

Northern Cooperative Meat Company chief executive Simon Stahl revealed the ban on imports relates directly to labelling and product description non-compliances. 

Mr Stahl was uncertain of the short or long term financial impacts to the business, but revealed NCMC production imports ranged from 15 to 25 per cent. 

“It’s too early to tell you about the financial impacts, I couldn’t put a figure on it at this point in time, could be a week, could be a month,” he said. “I’m always optimistic we can satisfy the authorities..... 

Food Leaders Australia general manager Bruce McConnel said it was unknown yet whether the bans were because of a breach of protocol or an act of political retribution. 

“The technical reasons have not been made available,” Mr McConnel said. “We’re not sure whether there has been a breach of protocol or if it’s pure political retaliation. 

“We’re awaiting details on how to alleviate tensions. “It’s not catastrophic, but it is a real issue that needs to be sorted out.” 

Mr McConnel said the banning of the Northern Co-operative Meat Company at Casino was a major concern for smaller beef producers, who use that meatworks to sell to China.

“The government need to get sorted how real are the technical aspects of this and how much is political tension around the relationship with China,” he said....

Morrison Government caught out attempting to retrospectively censor native bird export information

The Guardian, 4 April 2019:

The Australian government has attempted to retrospectively censor critical information related to exports of rare and exotic birds to a German organisation headed by a convicted kidnapper, fraudster and extortionist.

Guardian Australia revealed late last year that Australia had permitted the export of 232 birds, some worth tens of thousands of dollars, to the Brandenburg-based Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots (ACTP) between 2015 and November 2018.

Conservation groups and federal politicians had repeatedly expressed concern about the group, which is headed by Martin Guth, a man with multiple criminal convictions.

The Guardian’s investigation relied on internal government documents secured through freedom of information laws, released in August.

Guardian Australia made subsequent freedom of information requests and received further documents in January. But the federal department of environment has now attempted to retrospectively redact parts of the documents, saying it accidentally released information it shouldn’t have.

Some of the inadvertently released information could “facilitate fraudulent export applications”, the department said. The department had also accidentally released “personal information, such as birth dates and name, and confidential business information”.

The department has asked Guardian Australia to destroy its copies of the documents, and not further disseminate the newly redacted details.

“While we understand that the FOI decisions have already been made, and that you are under no obligation to follow the department’s wishes, we kindly request that you either: destroy the documents that the department has previously released to you and instead, use the redacted documents attached to this letter; or otherwise ensure that the information in question … is not further disclosed or made publicly available,” the department said in a letter emailed to the Guardian on Wednesday, but dated last month.

The documents have not been published on the department’s online FOI disclosure log. The department’s stance suggests that other parties – journalists or conservation groups, for example – would be subject to the newly introduced redactions if they requested the same documents.

Freedom of information experts say the government’s actions have “no legal basis”……

The new redactions remove details that made it possible for Guardian Australia to establish that the operator of ACTP’s Netherlands facility was convicted in 2015 of involvement as a buyer in a trading ring that was illegally selling protected exotic birds.

The department has also removed identification numbers for the birds that were exported to Germany, arguing that its original decision to release that information could lead to “fraudulent” exports of Australian birds overseas.

It has also blacked out permit numbers from the export permits issued in Australia, the names of individuals who operate other ACTP facilities in Germany and in other countries, and removed information relating to ACTP’s exemption status from corporate tax.

The redactions remove images of ACTP’s main breeding facility and maps that illustrate its layout.

In recent months, Guardian Australia has been trying to establish whether the department undertook adequate due diligence to ensure that all of the birds sent to ACTP were legally captive bred.

But the department has refused to release names of suppliers in Australia that would show the chain of custody for each of the birds before they were exported to Germany. Those details were redacted from FoI documents released to the Guardian in January and from documents tabled after an order for the production of documents in parliament.

Attempts by government agencies to retrospectively recover or redact FOI documents have previously been found to have no lawful basis under NSW freedom of information law. Landcom, the NSW government’s land and property development organisation, attempted to retrieve documents it had accidentally released to a school committee group in 2005, and took its case to the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal.

The tribunal found it had no power whatsoever to retrieve previously released FOI documents.