We cannot afford a narcissistic fool for Prime Minister
When dealing with countries like China and Japan – members of the inscrutable Orient – an issue which must never be forgotten is that of ‘losing face’.
Xi Jinping has, for quite sometime, made it very clear that China resents its past treatment by western countries.
Like Morrison, Xi is a bully and, having secured lifetime tenure as the supreme leader in China, he clearly has no intention of turning China into a democracy, so Australia’s big mistake has been allowing our economy – which is currently in pretty poor shape – to become so dependent on trade with China.
About our only weapon in a diplomatic brawl with China is iron ore.
Rather than demanding apologies for an offensive, online post – knowing full well that it will never be offered, so making Morrison the one who loses face – or getting into a childish brawl over who is the worst offender on protecting human rights, Morrison should shrug off the insult by making little of it (“such a pity China should choose to be insulting over an acknowledged human rights issue when it constantly lies about its own”) and, instead, be beavering away to reduce dependence on trade with China.
If we manufactured our own steel, we would not need to export iron ore.
We have abundant renewable energy and a desperate need to create more employment, so what is holding us back?
We absolutely must reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, which means manufacturing electric vehicles and establishing recharging stations at frequent intervals – as well as looking at road trains having their own solar panels.
As far as agricultural produce is concerned, what crops would find a good market in other other Asian/Pacific countries? Most crops are seasonal so a switch of crop and market could solve some problems.
Xi is justifiably proud at the progress made in China in bringing people out of poverty and can, currently, look pityingly at the chaos in Europe and the Americas, where so many countries – claiming to be democracies – have failed to handle the pandemic anything like as effectively as has China – and Australia, thanks to the Premiers!
At our 2019 election, we were ourselves foolish in allowing the wool pulled to be pulled over our eyes by a man who offered no policies, projected the ‘Daggy Dad’ image, bribed all but the poorest with offers of tax cuts, and conned us into a dead end.
The pandemic gave him the chance to brush Parliament on one side to the maximum extent, enabled by an Opposition Leader who ought to resign, and he has become increasingly a petty dictator, who is all bluff and marketing, and no substance when it come to leadership.
Former finance minister Mathias Cormann held a barbecue during a stop in Berlin as he campaigned for the top job at the OECD (Photo from Twitter)
The last Q and A for 2020 highlighted his total failure to fulfil promises of help to those who were victims of the 2019/2020 bush fires – and whose temporary homes, in caravans and make shift humpies, will shortly be again at risk in the current bush fire season.
He is all bluff and bluster and becomes more Trump-like every day, with his personal photographer shadowing him round and keeping his increasingly narcissistic image on the front pages of the Murdoch – and some other – press.
Now that COVID-19 is under control, and we seem to be making sufficient plans to maintain that state, we need to be spending money in a much more effective way, creating new markets and jobs and enabling the economy to benefit from people having money for non-essentials.
Germany has its Oktoberfest so why cannot Australia offer some carnivals around wine – and, with cruises starting up again, offer wines to the cruise lines on terms they cannot refuse!
And – most importantly – now we can, let’s get out in the streets and protest the Coalition’s failure to do what is necessary for our support, instead of spending our money on buying votes and supporting a climate-change denying Mathias Cormann OECD job campaign!
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Mark Shields
Return to home pageAgree. Attacking our largest trading partner without a “market replacement plan” in place, is idiotic. Reacting to provocation without “seasoned” diplomatic advice is idiotic. #ScottyFromMarketing is playing to his “support base” and hang the consequences. Though you could say the common thread in all Fed policies is to make sure the “masses” are left “hungry and desperate”, so worried about personal survival as to be distracted from the Fed Gov special skill of robbing the country and supporting only its donors. Regarding fossil fuel replacement, heavy machinery “will” be Hydrogen Fuel Cell based, using Green Hydrogen. (Planes, Ships, Trucks, Harvesters -> “if” it gets a chance to startup!)
Totally agree, Rosemary. This government seems to be frightened of manufacturing. Manufacturing made China very powerful. It’s time overdue that we did at least some of it ourselves. Train and employ Australians. Reduce our dependence on China. Nothing to lose and plenty to gain and would set us up for the future, helping and providing for ourselves. Simply ripping things out of the ground and sending them to China has not made us great, it has made us weak. Now we have a PM with a sensitive hide as well as a soft brain. Gawd help Australia.
The fake bbq, as fake as that political mercenary Cormann.
The BBQ is not even alight.
Now RosemaryJ36 you are being very naughty, exposing the fundamental fatal flaw in the long standing conservative policy that “If it is Australian made then it must be inferior to imports, especially Imperial imports”. This has also applied for too long as cultural imperialism with the swamping of cinemas with American films and the radio waves with American artists playing American music.
Australia was ”The Lucky Country” having abundant natural resources that would have kept Australian citizens employed for generations ….. except for the greed of the managerial classes and short-sightedness of the politicians.
Why are we exporting raw materials without any primary or secondary processing in Australia creating jobs for Australian voters? Why are we preparing to export electrical energy to Asia when it could be sold for a peppercorn rate to industries that move their operations into Australia?
The answer is simple. Too many Australian ”leaders” have sold Australia and Australians short by failing to see beyond the ends of their noses.
‘Globalisation’ and the policies of both parties over the last thirty years have effectively gutted Aus manufacturing. We used to be self sufficient because of our isolation, now our pants have been well and truly dropped…by our ‘leaders’
All Australia is doing is selling off our main assets (resources, land, farms, water, coal, gas, live exports etc at bargain basement prices. The general populace receives little or no benefit from all these trade deals with China. Keep our natural resources to manufacture in Australia, so much we could make here, it would employ people, improve our economy, get people off the streets and we could export quality products instead of importing cheap poor quality goods from China. Unfortunately, the LNP government has little in the way of positive/creative policies that would benefit all Australians, not just the top end of town. Bending to China’s will does not achieve anything other than make us even weaker, it is like giving your lollies to school bullies in the hopes he will stop bullying you, it does not work.
“enabled by an Opposition Leader who ought to resign”
Have we even got an Opposition leader atm?”
It would be interesting to know where Morrison is getting his riding instructions from.
Just over a week ago Scomo shuffled off to Japan to meet the new prime minister, Yoshihide Suga and sign a ‘defence pact’ which was clearly aimed at getting up the nose of the Chinese government : and it did.
Morrison flew straight back and went into fourteen days isolation saying to the Australian media : ” that the two countries shared fundamental values such as democracy and the rule of law and would “cooperate to realise a free and open Indo-Pacific”.
He told reporters at a hurried joint press briefing that “Australia and Japan shared an alliance with the US and significant trading relationships with China”. He said the importance of the new defence pact “cannot be understated”.
The new Japanese Prime Minister seemed rather startled by all this !
At a time when world leaders tend to be communicating by Zoom and other electronic means it seemed odd to me that our PM would be taking this personal initiative to fly to Japan for a few hours and then going into isolation for fourteen days. Who was he doing this for, was it the US to curry favour with the outgoing Trump administration, was it for domestic consumption or was it to annoy the Chinese ?
If the latter, it certainly worked as our bilateral relationship and our trade relationship have since sharply deteriorated.
The Tweet of a doctored, deeply offensive photograph by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, is the latest in this tit for tat relationship and it got the expected response from Morrison.
How did we get to this point with our largest trading partner ?
I can’t help feeling that this all came to a head when Eric Abetz, who many may view as our crazy uncle from Tasmania but who the Chinese see as a Senator of the Australian parliament, recently called on three Australians of Chinese descent at a Senate hearing :
There are consequences for bigoted and narrow-minded talk !
I would describe Cormann as more a con-man and a liar.
I suspect him taking that position would greatly assist in Morrison’s plan to continue heating the world to make a profit.
It’s not Scomo any longer but Momomo Motor Mouth Morrison
We can use our own wallets to show our disdain for China, stop buying Chinese made items wherever possible. Actively support local and Australian made.
The only way to show a bully you don’t care, is to show him you don’t care. Sticks and stones ??
No Pierre, pretty sure we have two arms of government – Labor just sits on the left.
China is is effectively one big Multinational Company/Country run as a dictatorship. Who can compete with that?
Morrison’s pre election machinations alone should have been enough to alert people as to the lack of character in this egotistical moron. Anyone who claims that snake oil salesman Houston as their mentor has no place in public office far less be calling the shots. If god raised Johnson, Trump and Morrison to their positions his sheer lack of judgement alone would certainly confirm my belief in science and reason.
Keitha
I recently took issue with Woolies over just two items in their store.
The first was roasted peanuts in the shell. I come from a peanut growing area of Queensland and was dismayed to find that the roasted peanuts in the shell and the salted shelled nuts were imported from China.
The second was the sliced peaches in those screw-top plastic bottles : Woolies home brand and imported from China.
i pointed out to Woolies that we had a viable peanut industry in Australia and we have a high quality stone- fruit industry – by Woolies favouring Chinese products over those made and grown in Australia they were damaging our domestic industries. Their response was corporate double-talk about giving customers choice.
We have a long way to go and by the time we start thinking about buying Australian our producers will have shut up shop and turned into property developers : it’s a problem !
Rosemary, I agree with your idea of doing something about value-adding to ag exports. There is a market for non-GMO food that has not undergone the ritual destruction that is modern day food processing: https://www.foodnavigator-asia.com/Article/2017/11/02/Australia-s-top-10-food-firms-by-revenue-revealed-and-soon-none-will-be-wholly-home-owned
That tweet was meant to wind-up the peasants who identify with Aussie battlers made good, eg. elite SAS soldiers. When a Ministry spokesthing made a ‘joke’ about a crime that told me something about the mentality of said twit who posted the ‘joke’ and nothing about those who committed the crime. To spot the fool, it’s a matter of vision and timing, look at who is doing what now.
For years our politicians and business leaders continually bragged about our trade with China, but there is a price to pay for open trade with a country with an on-going human rights record that includes a million Ughurs in detention camps for ‘re-education’, many of whom are unwilling participants in a $1B/yr organ harvesting scam. Hypocrisy it seems is a core value of international politics.
Terrence, “communicating by Zoom” leaves an auditable record, if there’s something contentious to be said, forget Zoom. As for Coles/Woolies, the duopoly rolls on, local producers are in their sights, cheap imports of inferior products another tool in the box.
I wonder if at the same time as we get our steel industry running again, and start stockpiling the iron ore we mine and sell to China, we might not have a look a a few of the other Sino/Australian inequities.
Whilst so many of us run about castigating the government for their lickspittle approach to Chinese diplomacy so as not to offend or confront the Whine Industry for example, we are quick to rush off to another Murdoch mate, Gerry Harvey, to buy a directly imported TV or microwave, with zero tariff on the import, even though the middle kingdom is directly responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
Likewise the constant sale of land to chinese interests, sale of our great stations to them, only to find that Australians refused to work for them.
No houses. No farms. No stations. No state assets (Port of Darwin), no critical supply companies at all (milk, beef production, milk products, medical companies and so on). Nothing.
The election of Morrison et al in the last election, proves that Australians in general are a bunch of gormless cretins, fully engaged in saving a dollar, even at the cost of their own jobs. Let’s see how many of us are able to resist that $799 big screen television.
Dear oh dear, it would seem that for some this is new territory and not an intellectual road well travelled. A Buy Australian campaign in various forms was pushed by various governments over recent decades, although the idea first emerged in the 1920s. The Kiwis have been doing it since 1988 and the British have been doing it since 1931.
While such programs may have a slight impact on consumer preferences, the evidence is pretty clear that they do not make significant differences to market share of locally made products, particularly over time. Research suggests that consumers are more concerned about product quality and price than country of origin. So why do we expect them to buy Australian?
Businesses are expected by their shareholders to buy materials at the best possible price in order to get the best return for their money. As many of these shareholders are offshore, no CEO is going to be popular if he or she allows a purchasing department to use company revenue to subsidise Australian industry. Indeed it’s their fiduciary duty to do what’s best for these shareholders.
Research demonstrates consumers are more concerned about product quality and price than country of origin in the longer term. When the evidence over years suggests consumers do not respond to buy locally campaigns, there is no reason to think that businesses and consumers would do any different.
Perhaps the enemy is the generalised us?
Totally agree with the article and the following comments, perhaps our education system needs some revision I can remember studying history of the Second World War not just the battles but the underlying ramifications ie German industrialists hardly penalised while the common people reaped the shame and sanctions of the loosing side. Sweden vowing to never be in the same position as it was during the war with little industry or manufacturing so Volvo became the national car with good reductions to buy locally manufactured cars, telecommunications (Nokia) and many other factories bought to life with government backing.
Maybe it’s time as many commentators have said start making our own steel again stop live export and value add in this country instead of being a quarry and selling ourselves short. To do this we first need to boot Scotty from marketing out on his arse and all the incompetent bozos he has around him.
Terence Mills,to me, the overriding reason for the Liar to invite himself to Japan, was to be out of town when the Afghan thing dropped, and when the report on superannuation was released,The bonus being he could avoid Parliament, which he so manifestly loathes,for 2 weeks.I doubt he was doing it to prick China,it’s just his usual shocking judgement.He has a form sheet a mile long of fucking everything he touches.He is nothing, if not consistent in avoiding all responsibility.He is ,in my opinion, borderline deranged.
Anybody else noticed that the Union Jack has suddenly disappeared from the Australian flags behind Morriscum? You never saw the Union Jack in the shots from his recent Japanese junket and now he must be ordering his minions to furl it totally out of sight. Bit of a contrast with Tones who loved it and would have got rid of the blue and the stars if he could.
Must be time now to get rid of it (the Union Jack) entirely as it is a red rag to a bull for a lot of the previously colonised countries of Asia. They don’t have particularly fond memories of the British, Dutch or French.
Personally I just can’t help despising that horrible ensign. There is probably no flag which has flown over more atrocities than the Union Jack.
Harry Lime… can I just add, Scummo the fuckwit is basically a thug, who uses bullying as his default strategy, whether its domestic politics, or kicking around defenceless people, like when he was immigration minister. He has gotten away with that style because his party of dickheads think that that is his best characteristic, which guarantees them continued success. He sucks up to other bullies, like that fool in the White House, assuming that it’ll work for him too.
Until he came up against the masters of bullying, the Chinese Communist Party. And his benefactor, the crinkled old bastard with the propaganda machine, cannot have any influence on their brutal and ferocious reaction. Scummo is now in an unwinnable position where he either backs down or causes the Australian economy huge and lasting damage. So much for ‘macho’ Scummo and his party of arseholes.
Maybe singing halleluja with even more gusto, might do the trick, but he’d better have a plan B.
Very well put Rosemary; one of your greater articles, succinctly exposing the real matter at hand: We lazy Australians have allowed religious fervour to overcome scientific evidence and thus far we are left with a miracle-believing-religious idiot, who CANNOT see the importance of Nature/Environment/Science for his myopic evangelical religious view of the world. But don’t gloat, Labor’s ALBO, is also just as ignorant; his long held yearning for power has also managed to ignore, forego and surrender scientific evidence, for votes from the coal-workers lobby group – Probably the strongest and most powerful lobby group in our country! No, neither of our traditional political parties are able or willing to deal with the might of the fossil fuel industries! Let’s face it, if Australia is to survive without fascist nationalism; it will take a major anti-colonial, indigenous plan of re-education from the grass roots: But it’s going to take a long time for indigenous culture to supercede corporate behaviour! Let’s hope that words of reason will eventually destroy words of power.