The news that a Communist Chinese naval vessel with surveillance facilities has been sailing in international waters (albeit part of our exclusive economic zone) not far off the coast of Australia near to some of our more sensitive naval facilities has been greeted with the proper expressions of horror by our Defence Minister, Lord Voldemort.
Proper that is, several days out from a federal election. Calling it a provocative act might not be diplomatic but it is probably a good short term way to drum up the fear and alarm of voters and corrale them in the right direction on Election Day.
This also coincides with denunciations about how Lord Voldemort’s current overlord, Prime Minister ScoMo, kept the negotiations on the AUKUS pact very hush hush, to the point where he not only did not adequately consult with the Federal Opposition in a timely manner (as required by US President Biden in one of his rare lucid moments), but apparently misled the French President (and cougar affectionado) Macron about our intentions in relation to the French submarine contract.
Well, right now we are a long way from acquiring any sort of submarine, be it French, British, or American, and with the Communist Chinese navy peeping over the horizon at our bases, we need a practical and immediate solution:
French scuba divers.
Since the end of the Second World War, few powers have had any experience in sinking hostile vessels in the Indo-Pacific region. The French are probably the exception to that rule. In 1985, in Auckland Harbour, two French scuba divers from their secret service successfully sank the Greenpeace protest vessel The Rainbow Warrior.
We do have some similar experience in wartime – Australian and British commandos successfully raided Singapore Harbour when it was occupied during the Second World War and sank a number of Japanese ships with limpet mines. But that was a lot longer ago. For panache and sheer effrontery, no one can compete with the French.
Let us mend our relations with Macron now. Let us hire some of his scuba divers in case the Communist Chinese send another ship into international waters near our shores.
I like a good cargo cult. Last April, at the time of the sad demise of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, I wrote at length about how he had his own cargo cult in Vanuatu, The Prince Philip Movement, which worshipped him as a god. (I do hope that they have chosen one of his descendants as a successor by now.)
Cargo cults appear to have emerged as a result of the US Armed Forces dropping what seemed to Pacific Islanders like unimaginable bounties of plenty during the Second World War, the surpluses of which the islanders got to keep and enjoy. The Prince Philip Movement is the offshoot of the John Frum (as in John From America) cargo cult.
Pacific Island nations have, post colonialism, a lot of challenges facing them. There are the threat of rising sea levels, limited resources, petty official corruption, no industries, and few opportunities for economic activity aside from tourism.
As a result, it is not surprising that political leaders in this region turn to a new international form of cargo cultism to guarantee them the bounty which the John Frum of legend used to drop on them.
The security deal between the Solomon Islands and Communist China is the most blatant of this new internationalist cargo cultism manifested so far.
For well over 20 years, Taiwan and Communist China have been competing, with larger and larger chequebooks, for diplomatic recognition as the legitimate Chinese government in the Pacific. Countries in that area have frequently, depending on what they have been offered, changed their official recognition between Taipei and Beijing.
Until Xi’s moves to be more expansionist in recent years, this sort of shuttlecock diplomacy was more a source of bemusement to nearby observers, such as Australia.
But now, with the Solomon Islands, which occupies what is potentially a very strategic corridor in the approaches to Australia, signing a deal with Communist China, it appears that our security may be threatened.
I am not one of those people who argue that we should abandon foreign aid to our neighbours. The goodwill and soft power which accumulates from a well managed and generous foreign aid budget will serve us a whole lot better and more cheaply than having, later on down the track, to commit a whole lot more funds to defence spending.
[Let’s try not to dwell too much on the far greater resources and manifold lives inevitably lost if an actual shooting war breaks out where we could have avoided or minimised the threat by building strong friendships with our neighbours.]
A lot of recriminations have been flung about, possibly with less responsibility than would otherwise have been the case if an election campaign was not underway, about whether the Morrison government has been asleep at the wheel in allowing matters to get to the point where Communist China has been able to saunter in and sign such a deal with a near neighbour.
What little reading I have done on the subject in the past few days suggests that we have been reasonably generous with the Solomon Islands. There is currently an ongoing plan to spend $250 million there in foreign aid in coming years, as well as a rugby league development program. We have also risked the lives of numerous of our police over an extended period in helping to keep the peace in times of civil unrest there.
However I think that perhaps we needed to be a little more observant about our near neighbours, rather than taking them for granted the way that we have. Whilst the world stage is a big arena to strut on, you cannot really get there unless you can perform in the local suburban theatre first. We have not paid close attention to those neighbours, or listened closely to their concerns.
It does not help when former treasurer and subsequent ambassador to the US Joe ‘Shrek’ Hockey describes the Solomon Islands in an interview as corrupt. Nor it is smart when an international relations commentator writes that if soft power fails to stop the China pact, Australia and the US need to invade. Diplomacy is meant to involve the most subtle form of tact, and soft power remains our best tool to prevent the situation from escalating into one where a genuine threat to our security emerges.
Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare appears to be playing a masterful role as high priest of this modern internationalist cargo cult. Communist China will inevitably give him the resources he wants for his nation state, and quite possibly the muscle to help him stay in control. Taiwan will continue to try and bid to keep itself relevant in the area. Now Australia, New Zealand and the USA will also have to pay closer attention, and deliver ‘cargo’ in greater quantities.
However, doing deals with dictatorships have their risks. I doubt very much that Sogavare really would like to see Communist China base warships or planes in his country, or to see the South Pacific militarised. Whether he is able to keep control of the situation to his own and his country’s benefit, remains to be seen.
The lesson for Australia is that we do need to work a lot harder, and spend a lot more, to keep our Pacific neighbours contented and willing to shun PRC overtures in favour of our security interests. There has been talk of PNG allowing a Communist Chinese fishing base in the south part of their country, facing Australia. That would be a much more serious escalation of the diplomatic crisis than we currently face.
Every dollar we spend on foreign aid now is a hundred dollars less than we will have to spend on our defence budget later, and a thousand dollars less than we would lose if a war transpired.
The above image was the Commonwealth Bank’s mascot back in the 1980s, when I first seriously engaged with them as a customer as a teenager. I think I took out a term deposit with a 13.75% interest rate in 1982.
Back then, I think we saw our banks, particularly our local branches, as trusted partners in our financial lives. Interest rates, both as a borrower and as a depositor, were much higher than we have now, but home loans were a whole lot smaller, particularly as a ratio of the average wage.
But I digress, mostly to explain the use of the elephant image to match the title of this post. One of my friends texted me after I wrote last night’s posting about house prices to point out another particular elephant in the room which both major parties do not really want to talk about, and which really does impact severely on home affordability.
That is, that foreign investors are able to buy homes in Australia.
Kevin Rudd, probably in order to encourage more investment in Australia from communist China, opened up home ownership to non-permanent residents after his election in 2007. In the intervening 15 years, house prices have continued to spiral upward as a result of the clever policies of both sides of politics, and neither has been willing to address the foreign ownership issue.
I see three upward drivers on house prices from permitting foreign ownership: increased competition for housing from the increased demand, misplacement of capital investment in housing construction to target the new foreign market, and land banking.
The first of these is obvious. Rich non-permanent residents either park their children here (obviously a better place to live than under a Communist dictatorship) or otherwise choose to buy property here, particularly in premium areas. This increased demand results in direct competition for existing and new housing stock with locals, driving up the prices and driving locals out of the market.
The second and third are closely connected. Have you ever been to Melbourne Docklands? It is a hole, a soulless and sterile place. Many of the giant apartment towers there, anathema to the way that Australians prefer to live, have been built to particularly target the foreign investor market.
I would suggest that government policy should have encouraged construction firms to invest their capital in ways which were more likely to target the local market, and perhaps to invest in infrastructure to make outer suburbs more accessible, rather than hoping to hive off existing infrastructure in the inner city.
Land banking is widespread in places like Docklands. Foreign investors consider a property as new for as long as no one has lived in it. Therefore they are happy to not rent out properties and to leave them to sit vacant. Vacancy rates in Docklands, based on water usage, are estimated at 25%. A lot of apartments have been built which are not being released onto the local rental market.
The consequences of government policy enabling foreign investment and then structurally encouraging it have contributed greatly to forcing ordinary Australians out of the suburbs where they have grown up and into more distant suburbs on the outer fringes of the metropolitan area, suburbs where new houses are being built on much smaller blocks and with very little infrastructure in terms of transport, established parklands, schools, and amenities.
My friend has suggested to me that one of the matters causing angry voters in the safe Liberal seats targeted by the ‘Teal’ independents to turn to those new candidates is that they see themselves and their families being forced out, by unrelenting policies driving up house prices, from those suburbs they have considered their intergenerational home towns. The Teals do not offer solutions, but a protest vote is the best way that a message can be sent to try and cause politicians to seriously consider the consequences of these policies and end what is starting to seem like intergenerational theft.
We talk about being ‘slaves to the Man’, about having 30 year mortgages that stifle the quality of our lives in order to keep a roof over our heads. However, that was not previously the case for most people. Mortgages were smaller and houses more affordable, and people would pay their homes off much sooner than 30 years.
A society where a large proportion cannot afford to ever own a home, or spend a large part of their lives in financial serfdom to a crippling mortgage, is not a happy society, and not one which can remain stable and prosperous. This is an issue, an elephant in the room, which the politicians are failing to address, at their own cost.
The cliche we know as the ‘Great Australian Dream’ is not new, nor original to Australia. Captain John Truslow Adams popularised a similar but not original idea in 1931 as the ‘American Dream’, which then became aggrandised.
And even before such ideas of mundane, suburban, petit bourgeois prosperity and moderate affluence became clearly defined, we had critics of those concepts.
Perhaps the first such critic was the Roman satirist Juvenal, who sneered at the bread and circuses which kept the Roman populace contented in the time of empire.
My favourite philosopher, the quite insane Friedrich Nietzsche, definitely despised the suburban bourgeois life of mediocrity which contented his neighbours in late 19th century Germany.
American writers, like Sinclair Lewis in novels like Main Street and Babbit, and then, a generation or so later, John Updike in his Rabbit series, did write about the stifling nature of the middle class American life in a way which presented the American Dream as a nightmare.
I do get these people. I occasionally, in my more deluded and megalomaniacal moments, do think that I am destined for greater things than my blog and veggie patch and brick veneer pile in Avondale Heights.
But then I wake up to myself and realise that stifling though the lack of creative expression might be in this existence, I still have far more in material security, educational opportunity, and a peaceful environment than my peasant forebears did, and for that I am truly grateful.
Perhaps it is that few writers in Australia get a widespread platform to sneer at the mundane and materially secure lives of their neighbours. No one reads Jane Caro, nor Clementine Ford (so I rely on reports of their lawsuits and twitter tantrums to know what ideas might pass through their heads), and when I did read something by an actually talented Australian writer, David Malouf’s novel Johnno as a teenager, the self hatred and general loathing of the protagonist was something, to be honest, I found utterly repulsive.
And so it goes that I still believe in some sort of myth such as a banal but materially secure suburban existence, and wish for such both for myself and for all of my fellow Australians (yes, even for smug writers like our friend Clementine). Our local culture does not enable our literary glitterati to impose such self-doubts upon our society.
Let’s face it: what is wrong with having a reasonably secure and well paying job and a modest house with a garden (and a few gumtrees in the front yard, and at least a lemon tree and perhaps a few other fruit trees, in the back)?
It won’t make you a literary giant like Patrick White or David Williamson, but it is better than what Henry Lawson had (plus, if you had Henry’s predilections, you would appreciate a garage and a few vines over the driveway so that you could make your own plonk!).
Which is probably why home ownership keeps getting raised by both parties at election time, and both keep coming up with sad policies which do cause the prices of houses to keep getting inflated.
It is election time this month, and let’s pause and look back at what house prices are right now. Median house prices in Melbourne are about 10 times the average wage. When I bought my brick veneer pile almost 20 years ago, they were 5 times the average wage. In 1980, when a Space Invaders arcade machine was installed at my still extant local milkbar and I was in my last year of primary school, house prices were 3 times the average wage.
The media is full of the speculation about how the high (for 22 years) inflation rate of 5.1% and the first interest rate increase for 11 years (0.25%) are going to impact on current mortgage holders.
Politicians keep coming up, like Albo this week (and ScoMo during the Plague), with ways of making housing affordable by pumping more taxpayer money directly into the pockets of potential homebuyers.
What everyone is missing is economic reality.
Taking government interventions first, first home buyer subsidies just cost the taxpayer and the home buyer by increasing the amount which each home buyer has available to spend on a house, which enables them to borrow more and to bid more on each house, which will force house prices up even further out of reach.
Taking interest rates next. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, or the early 1990s for that matter, double digit interest rates kept house prices affordable for most people, whilst wage inflation kept pace with consumer inflation, making it easier for people to pay their houses off in a a reasonable period.
Trick Question: What would you rather have: a $700,000 mortgage at 1.8%, or a $70,000 mortgage at 19%? It depends of course on what wages are, and wages right now have not kept up with the increase in value of house prices over the past 30 years.
The political debate needs to shift to a more honest level. Do we need to increase the demand for housing through increasing migration? Do we need to subsidise house purchases by providing subsidies to potential home owners which then cause further house price inflation? Do we need to pursue monetary policies which inflate assets generally by keeping the cost of borrowing money artificially low?
And possibly most controversially… do we need to reward people for acquiring real estate, particularly, investment properties, with tax benefits, or should we be broadening the idea of land taxes to a lower threshold – perhaps even to owner-occupiers? This is something which would reduce the tax minimisation value of real estate as an asset class for investors and which might start to deflate its value.
Until such a discussion, raising interest rates is a crude but effective mechanism for reducing real estate prices, and which might make housing more affordable to owner occupiers rather than investors.
Not too many Australian beer companies are owned by Australians. Broo, the publicly listed micro-brewery, is the exception that empathically proves the rule. You can’t own shares in Fosters (aka Carlton & United) or Lion Nathan (aka Tooheys) anymore unless you buy shares in Asahi or Kirin on the Tokyo stock exchange, and where is the joy in that?!?
Late last week, Broo announced to the ASX that the sale of its Ballarat land (which could have brought in a profit of some double the initial price paid for that site) has fallen through. It did not come as a surprise to me – the required approvals to sell that land for development to another party have been held up for many months, and obviously do not look like being forthcoming.
Here is some more informed beer related journalism on this topic:
As I am a long standing shareholder of this company, with my colourful share certificate from the 2011 Australia Day promotion (buy a slab and get 10 shares!) newly framed and occupying pride of place in my water closet, I do pay more than passing attention to the activities of this company.
After the commencement of the recent board room ‘putsch’ (an apt but still unfortunate term to describe such machinations in a beer company), I started reading http://www.brewsnews.com.au which is a website dedicated to the Australian beer industry. It has various interesting and quite fascinating articles on the subject of how Broo has attempted various ambitious undertakings, which have all seemed to remain unfulfilled. The attempt to develop a high tech brewery in Ballarat is the most high profile of those.
Where now for Broo? 6 years ago, when they were about to IPO, I felt fair value for the shares was 2 cents each, rather than the 20 cents of the float price. Now, with the tangible real estate assets only worth about $3.5 million, and a potential fire sale in front of them, I think that the 0.8 cents the shares are currently trading at is a somewhat optimistic valuation.
What was it that the shade of Achilles said when Odysseus met him in Hell (or Hades if you prefer) on the latter’s long journey home to Ithaca? It was something along the lines of much preferring to be a day labourer in the world than a prince in Hell.
Well, I am an office worker rather than a day labourer, and perhaps as a middle manager of such people, in a bit of a better situation than what Achilles aspired to resume. But I am 53, slightly older than the recently demised Shane Warne and Senator Kitching, and about the same age as Robert Holmes A Court, descendent of hereditary barons, and mostly self made robber baron, was when he suddenly died in 1991.
Much as I do not have a dog in the fight for the current federal election, the idea of various supposedly independent candidates being funded by some very rich posh person with deep pockets does intrigue me.
The ability for people with any significant wealth, particularly unearned and inherited, to potentially shift election results, is of concern to myself and other responsible citizens.
Simon Holmes A Court, one of the younger children of 1980s corporate raider Robert Holmes A Court, and descendent of the 2nd Baron Heytesbury (after whom his father named his main investment vehicle) is a person whom we do need to examine a little closely.
His patronage of the Climate 200 group, which is funding supposed independents to compete with Liberal Party moderates in safe Liberal seats, is a matter of concern.
We do not examine the motives of our own oligarchs and timocrats anywhere near as well as we do those of tyrants we criticise. Yet Simon HaC is a timocrat with great privilege in the form of his deep pockets of inherited and unearned wealth, which he is now using to try and turn the outcomes of elections in key seats.
He is worse than the Oligarch Clive Palmer, who is, like me, born in Footscray and who has (unlike me) earned his own fortune rather than inherited his wealth which he now wants to use to influence the outcome of our democracy.
Some 30 years ago, when the late Brian Buckley wrote the authorised biography of his friend and former employer Sir Phillip Lynch (a book sadly titled ‘Lynched’ which reflected poorly on both the author and the subject, alas, although I was too naive to quite understand why until years later), some of the ending paragraphs were devoted to Lynch’s interactions with the hubris driven Robert Holmes A Court.
At page 224 of that book, it does talk about the family’s history of supporting socialist causes and a Soviet-front peace group. Lynch (he is from what I have heard of him, sufficiently an arrogant a-hole that he does not deserve the deference I usually would show to a Knight of the Realm – ie I would call him Sir Phillip) apparently observed that he felt that Robert Holmes A Court did not feel ‘comfortable with our side of politics’.
The family continued at the time of that book’s publication in the early 1990s to financially support independent anti-defence senator Jo Valentine, leading that author to suggest that the Holmes A Court family and their holding company had a contempt for ‘democratic capitalism’.
That is what we plebs all love to see, poor little rich boys (and girls) like Simon and Allegra who have lots of money and privilege and power, who want to manipulate our democracy in favour of their own little agendas, whilst they at the same time maintain and protect their own wealth and power.
A friend of mine read my posting about the rise of independents like Allegra Spender, and immediately sent me a detailed text with her thoughts. She is obviously not as generous as I am about posh patricians like Allegra Spender.
I must say that her words have resonance with me, given that the involvement of my mother and other female relatives of the migrant generation in the fashion industry was restricted to working in textile workshops, rather than the glamorous life of Allegra’s mother Carla Zampatti.
Here are my friend’s words in italics:
Allegra Spender is not an independent, she is a largely out of touch elitist: a new class of candidate.
She is staunchly running on gender equality from a place of privilege, and like other ‘voices of’ candidates, Allegra has little understanding of gender equality and it’s locations, manifestations and dynamics. I note she has no acknowledgement of intersectionality in her discourse on gender inequality. Allegra does, however, represent an arrogant and paternalistic reformulation of privileged women seeking to fight for the rights and equality of less privileged women. Advocating for greater voice and empowerment of those women, while ensuring at all relevant times, that their privileged voice is the loudest and they get all the accolades. The absence of those gender oppressed women in their campaigns actually disempowers the women whose status they are grifting to advance their own political standing. Irony, no?
What people like Allegra reflect is that the Liberal Party has lost some of its broadness because privilege and money can buy a person (not just a party) a seat. This is something we should all be concerned about.
I have to wonder whether Allegra Spender and Zoe Daniel will be campaigning and pushing for electoral reform to make it much easier for poorer and less privileged women AND men to run for a seat in Parliament. Now THAT would be genuinely pursuing equality and democracy.
Not all men are equal and privileged and not all women are underprivileged, discriminated against and face inequality.
As for being a champion of climate change based on her concern for the environment, the narrow range of policies she has put forward do not reveal a depth of appreciation of the issues and considerations. I wonder, whether as Managing Director of her mother’s fashion business, they stopped producing dry clean only clothes, or whether they sought to improve the longevity and wear of the clothes they produced, or whether they sought to use recycled fabric or to have product stewardship built into their business model? Perhaps Allegra was waiting for a government subsidy to push them into the sustainability direction.
I heard John Spender QC speak once. It was July 1989 and the topic was the Tiananmen Square Massacre which had happened weeks earlier. I am not sure whether he was shadow foreign affairs minister at the time, but that was a portfolio which he had held recently.
He impressed me as well-informed, intelligent, articulate, and perhaps, most importantly, highly likeable.
Eight months later, his political career hit a brick wall when he lost his safe Liberal seat to Ted Mack, a popular independent.
A generation later, his daughter, the joyfully named Allegra Spender (Allegra is the Italian word for Cheerful), is standing against a federal Liberal MP in a safe Liberal seat as an Independent.
There are several ironies, nuances, and takeaways from this.
The irony is obvious: the daughter of a 1980s Liberal MP and front bencher (and granddaughter of a Menzies era cabinet minister) has decided to stand as an independent against the party which her father and grandfather represented for many years, particularly given that another independent prematurely ended her father’s political career.
But there is a nuance. Grandfather Sir Percy Spender KC did not enter parliament on the endorsement of the Liberal Party’s predecessor, the UAP (no resemblance to Clive’s current vehicle). He defeated a sitting UAP member as an independent and then was accepted into the UAP (and then Liberal) fold, whilst continuing to assert his affinity for independent action.
So Allegra’s current action in standing as an independent does not really go against the grain in terms of the family history, even though father John came off worse for wear against an independent 32 years ago.
And there is also a takeaway. Amongst us, there are those who are more privileged, powerful and propertied, the posh people who usually vote Liberal and who trust their Liberal party representatives to best serve their interests.
The Spenders have, ever since the future Sir Percy obtained his law degree a hundred years ago, been counted amongst the posh people.
What we are now seeing is that many of the posh people of privilege are now turning against the Liberal Party, an organisation which they have long seen as the vehicle protecting their interests. They cannot bring themselves to support the social democratic (and occasionally democratic socialist) machine which is the Labor Party, as to do so would be tantamount to a peacock demanding that Colonel Sanders extends his menu to include game birds rather than mere poultry.
But they are finding the Liberal Party repulsive to their own sensibilities and interests. There is nothing genteel, subtle, or opera going, about the brutally ruthless and blunt steam roller which is the political machine the Liberal Party has now become. Such directness and tactlessness is vulgar to the posh people.
When the posh people turn against their own party, as is happening at the moment, the result is an existentialist crisis (and not of the Nietzschean variety). The Liberal Party needs the votes and the chequebooks, and perhaps even the physical support, of the posh people in their nominally safe upper middle class seats.
Where that is lacking, there is no amount of support from cashed up bogans in marginal seats which will make up for the loss of the lost soul of the Liberal Party in its heartland.
Bring popcorn, my friends, and beer. Especially beer. The next few weeks will be interesting.
He actually lives in Travancore – which is about 7km down the road!
Saw the above campaign poster on a wall just off Military Road last night.
Much as some might find it reassuring to think that our rather inauthentic local federal MP loves Avondale Heights (read the small print in the bottom right hand corner), one of my friends suggested that this is a good reason for me to sell up and move.
Happily, I have not seen him dining out in any of our few local restaurants, although if he (or any other candidate) comes knocking on my door, he is welcome to share a bottle of garage wine with me, much as I tend to disagree with his politics.
I usually only actively practice my Catholicism once a year or so – I sometimes attend the Italian service of the Stations of the Cross at the local Catholic Church in the evening of Good Friday.
Last night, I chose not to do so, as it was dark and gloomy at 7.30pm. But I did go for a walk earlier on before sunset.
What I found was that there were a lot of local restaurants and takeaways open: the seafood restaurant on the corner, the Thai restaurant near the church, the fish & chip shop, the pizza shop, and the gourmet burger joint.
And of course, the McDonalds near the supermarket.
Back when I first moved into Avondale Heights 19 years ago, when wandering off to the Catholic Church on Good Friday to attend that Italian service in the evening, there would only be the McDonalds open.
I think that what has happened in the past few years has not been a growing secularisation of society, but that the Covid induced lockdowns which shut down small business and civil society for two years have taken an indirect toll. That is, small business people do not take the right to open their doors for granted at the moment, and so they treat Good Friday not as a solemn public holiday to close up and stay home, but as another business day where they have an opportunity to try and earn some money and keep their businesses afloat.
Lost For Words! 