Come on down, house of Murdoch, followed by a token Groaning from the mouse that didn't roar...

 

Why not start with the artwork for a proposed wrap-around that WaPo decided that Washington and the world didn't need to see ...

Interesting questions, but perhaps more interesting how these free speech warriors manage to induce abject silence ...

There was a second part ...

Poor fella that country ... democracy dies in the darkness of a billionaire's purse.

Happy fascist day. Drive it with pride ...

Whoa, as Uncle Leon might ejaculate when discussing a paternity matter, another distraction hovered into view.

Muh lud, can the pond suspend standing reptile orders to discuss crucial Murdochian matters? 

The request pertains to a piece by McKay Coppings in The Atlantic, Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.

Relax, for those troubled by the paywall, it's at the archive here. (Who knows how long the service will last, but it's handy while it's there).

The piece is very long, and richly rewarding, and so the pond only wants to do a teaser trailer by showing a few highlights.

Our Henry would be delighted by both the Freudian elements and the invocation of Tolstoy and Shakspere in this gobbet:

...Now, at the Manhattan law office, James sat across the table from his father and prepared to be deposed. For nearly five hours, Rupert’s attorney asked James a series of withering questions.
Have you ever done anything successful on your own?
Why were you too busy to say “Happy birthday” to your father when he turned 90?
Does it strike you that, in your account, everything that goes wrong is always somebody else’s fault?
At one point, the attorney referred to James and his sisters as “white, privileged, multi­billionaire trust-fund babies.” At another, he read an unsourced passage from a book about the Murdochs to suggest that James was a conniving saboteur.
James did his best to concentrate, but he couldn’t help stealing glances at his father. Rupert sat slouched and silent throughout the deposition, staring inscrutably at his younger son. Every so often, though, he would pick up his phone and type. Finally, James realized why. “He was texting the lawyer questions to ask,” James told me. “How fucking twisted is that?”
When the session ended, Rupert left the conference room without saying a word.
James Murdoch likes to think of himself as a student of dynastic dysfunction. He quotes Shakespeare and cites Roman imperial history in casual conversation. He is not sure he agrees with Tolstoy’s dictum—“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Because when he surveys the literature on families wrecked by wealth and power, he mostly sees the same sad patterns in endless repetition.
The contours of his own family’s story are familiar to the point of cliché—the legacy-obsessed patriarch slipping into senescence and paranoia, the courtiers whispering in his ear, the siblings squabbling over their portion of the kingdom. “It’s all been written down many, many times,” he said. “The real tragedy is that no one in my family doing this bothered to pay attention.”

Each day the pond reads the lizard Oz, it thinks “How fucking twisted is that?”

On with more to delight our Henry by the conjuring up of Shakepere's King Lear:

...James had long ago internalized the edict that you never talk to reporters about the family. This was an inviolable rule of Rupert’s—one of the first things Kathryn had learned when she and James started dating. James hated the books and articles written by professional Murdoch chroniclers, which he mockingly referred to as “the canon.” It wasn’t until his father’s texts and emails came out in the trust litigation that James realized just how many insidious stories over the years—the ones that portrayed Kathryn as a meddling “former model” and James as a liberal dilettante—had been planted by Rupert’s camp. The revelation was liberating.
The couple’s motives in talking to me were surely mixed. Sometimes, they seemed fueled by raw anger at what they see as Rupert’s betrayal. Other times, they seemed preoccupied with reputation management—eager to present themselves as evolved, socially conscious billionaires, and distance themselves from certain unfortunate associations with the Murdoch name. (Rupert and Lachlan declined to be interviewed for this story, but a spokesperson objected to what he called a “litany of falsehoods,” noting that they came “from someone who no longer works for the companies but still benefits from them financially.”)
James also seemed compelled, in part, by a desire to add his chapter to the literature of family dysfunction, in hopes that some future family might take the lessons more seriously than his own had. During our first meeting, he told me about a document that one of his father’s lawyers had written, which included a quote from King Lear: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”
James and Kathryn found it darkly amusing. Did Rupert and his lawyers not realize that the famous line uttered by the mad king is aimed at Cordelia, who turns out to be Lear’s only honest daughter?
“The whole point is that the crazy old man doesn’t know that Cordelia is telling him the truth,” Kathryn told me. Her husband studied a spot on the table in front of him.

Who'd have guessed that the dirty Digger's lust for power would even lead to him cheating at Monopoly?

 ere's another one for the Freudians:

...Kathryn was living in Australia at the time, and James was in New York, so for their second date, they met halfway, in Hawaii. For their third, James invited Kathryn to meet his family on his father’s 158-foot superyacht, Morning Glory, off the coast of Australia. They were already talking seriously about their future, and the trip was a chance for Kathryn to see what she’d be getting into.
The experience was enlightening. She caught Rupert cheating at Monopoly (he just smirked and shrugged), and observed constant sniping—at one point, Anna got up and left a family dinner in tears. Lachlan had brought along his latest girlfriend. When they got into an argument, Kathryn recalled, Lachlan shaved his head, jumped off the boat, and swam to shore. “He has a weird, dramatic side,” James told me. (A spokesperson for Lachlan denied James’s version of events.)

Then there's the self-styled pirates and gamblers routine. Ahoy me hearties, channeling Blackbeard and Long John as role models:

...Sky was profitable, but stagnant. Among Brits, it was widely seen as a price-gouging service that bought Premier League soccer rights and ransomed them to resentful subscribers. Its internal culture was macho and belligerent. The predominant mentality, James recalled, was “Everybody hates us and we don’t care.”
Early on, James laid out his vision for a new, respectable Sky. The company was going to have a set of “values,” he told executives, and would adopt the best practices of a modern workplace. “All these grumpy, old English guys were looking around like, ‘What the fuck is this guy talking about?’ ” James told me.
He pushed out Sky’s CFO and several other executives. After hearing that an employee had gotten drunk at a Royal Television Society banquet and thrown a dinner roll at the former director-general of the BBC, James ordered a manager to sack him. James told me that when the manager resisted, he had to explain why “being a dick in public when you’re an ambassador for the company” was a fireable offense.
Under James’s leadership, Sky’s brand image improved and subscriber numbers grew. “He took what was this Aussie-inflected cowboy operation, and turned it into a respected, high-growth company,” Matthew Anderson, an executive who worked with James at Sky, told me.
But James could feel Rupert’s ambivalence. He had succeeded in large part by rejecting the corporate ethos cultivated by his father. Rupert had a well-known management modus operandi: Hire aggressive executives, give them their own fiefdoms, and let them run wild. It was central to the Murdoch mythology—the empire built on instinct, run by a shrewd band of self-styled pirates and gamblers.

Is there climate change and gay marriage in the Freudian divorce courts?

...In London and New York, James told me, the pattern was the same: Nobody seemed to listen to the in-house lawyers if they could help it, and human resources was an afterthought at best. “When I’d say things like ‘compliance,’ they’d be like, ‘Oh my God, he uses business-school speak!’ ” James recalled. “And it’s like, ‘No, it’s the English language, and it’s kind of an important idea.’ ”
Rupert, for his part, seemed to resent his son for what he saw as a preoccupation with respectability, according to former News Corp employees. His misgivings were exacerbated by his apparent belief that Kathryn had indoctrinated James in fashionable left-of-center politics. The caricature periodically popped up in press coverage of the family: the witchy, liberal daughter-in-law casting a spell on Rupert’s impressionable son.
It was true that Kathryn was becoming more political. An awakening came, of all places, at a News Corp retreat in Pebble Beach, California, where she listened to Al Gore deliver his famous presentation on climate change. Soon after that, Kathryn went to work for the Clinton Climate Initiative. She also became more outspoken while sparring with her in-laws.
Once, during an argument over gay marriage, Rupert asserted that allowing same-sex couples to wed would be an affront to the institution.
Some people would say the same thing about divorce, Kathryn told her father-in-law. Rupert was then on his third wife.
Still, Rupert couldn’t afford to push away his younger son. Lachlan had left the company in 2005 after a series of confrontations with his father’s lieutenants in New York. The final indignity came when Lachlan, who was in charge of Fox’s TV stations, delayed green-lighting a police series developed by Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News. Ailes went over Lachlan’s head to Rupert, who reportedly told him, “Do the show. Don’t listen to Lachlan.” After years of being undermined by his father, who seemed conspicuously uneager to retire, Lachlan had had enough. He resigned and moved his family back to Australia.

How about racism, wild conspiracy theories and sexual misconduct in the house? Sure thing ...

To replace Ailes, James wanted to hire David Rhodes, the president of CBS News, who’d gotten his start at Fox News. He thought Rhodes could clean up the network’s culture and instill more rigorous editorial standards. Lachlan was fiercely opposed. After letting the brothers squabble for a while, Rupert announced that he would run Fox News himself as interim CEO.
To James, the result was predictably catastrophic. Under Rupert’s nominal supervision, the Fox News talent was free to run wild. Tucker Carlson, whom Murdoch had promoted to prime time, began airing monologues about the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (aided by a head writer for the show who was later revealed to be posting racist content under an online pseudonym). Other hosts publicly sounded off about the injustice of the accusations against Ailes.
In January 2017, the anchor Bill O’Reilly settled a $32 million lawsuit with a former on-air analyst who’d accused him of sexual harassment. When news of the payout became public later that year, Rupert and his sons said they hadn’t been privy to the dollar figure, but they did know a settlement had been reached, and had decided to renew O’Reilly’s contract anyway.
In June 2017, British regulators punted on approving the Murdochs’ second bid for Sky, James’s longtime dream acquisition. The regulators cited antitrust concerns, but James thought he knew the real reason: He was now presiding over a company that was known around the world as a scandal-ridden propaganda machine for Donald Trump.

Are there Nazis in the house? You know, in the light of the lizard Oz reptiles going full Zionist:

...Then, in August 2017, torch-bearing white supremacists marched through Charlottes­ville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” In the days that followed, the cable-news channel that James ostensibly ran spent hours defending Trump, who had asserted that there were “very fine people” marching with the neo-Nazis.
James wanted to say something to his employees about Charlottes­ville. But he also knew how it would look to his father and brother: pious, nagging James once again shoving his personal politics in everyone’s face. He dreaded the prospect of arm-­wrestling with Lachlan over every word in the statement, as the brothers had earlier that year when they issued a companywide memo responding to Trump’s travel ban. (James had wanted to reassure their Muslim employees and oppose the policy; Lachlan insisted on watering it down.) Maybe, James thought, it wasn’t even worth trying this time.
Finally, Kathryn asked a clarifying question: “If you’re not going to stand up against Nazis, who are you going to stand up against?”
James decided to put out his own statement without consulting Rupert or Lachlan. In an email sent to friends, and promptly leaked to the press, he denounced the protesters in Charlottesville as well as Trump’s reaction to them. “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis,” he wrote. He and Kathryn would be donating $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League, and he encouraged others to join them.
The couple thought Rupert might speak out, too. He had long considered himself a proud opponent of anti-­Semitism, and had even once been honored by the ADL. But Rupert remained silent, as did Lachlan.

Rupert remained silent, as did Lachlan?! 

Bold as brass in their braying in the lizard Oz, except when it might interfere in the accumulation of brass ...

Then there's the inhouse gossip and a crack-up as big as the Ritz, a dangerous exploration of greed, morality, and the secret horrors of the ruling class. 

Sorry, F. Scott-Fitzgerald didn't have the copyright on that yarn:

...The final phase of the Murdoch-family crack-up, as best James could tell, began with a woman named Siobhan McKenna.
A longtime friend and confidant of Lachlan’s, McKenna served as his managing director in the family trust. Her fierce loyalty had helped make her one of the most power­ful media executives in Australia—CEO of News Corp’s Australian broadcasting arm, chair of the Australia Post, and managing partner at Lachlan’s private investment firm.
In the summer of 2023, McKenna approached Lachlan with a proposition: She believed she could devise a plan that secured Lachlan’s future control of the companies and permanently sidelined James without necessitating an expensive buyout. Lachlan, intrigued, told her to start working on it. (McKenna did not respond to requests for comment.)
On September 14, 2023, Rupert, Lachlan, and a consortium of Fox and News Corp executives gathered to hear McKenna’s pitch for Project Family Harmony. The family trust, they all agreed, was untenable as it was currently structured.
Lachlan had by now spent years building the case to his father that James was plotting a coup. In the fall of 2022, an unauthorized biography of Lachlan had been published in Australia containing an incendiary quote from an anonymous source about James’s purported plans: “Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies.” When the quote made international headlines, Lachlan told Rupert that James’s camp was responsible. A few months later, in January 2023, the Financial Times ran a story detailing “how the scions could battle for control” of the family trust after Rupert was gone. Once again, Lachlan pointed the finger at his brother.
As it turned out, according to evidence that would later surface at trial, James had no involvement in either story—but Lachlan did. It was McKenna who had, with Lachlan’s approval, spent more than 14 hours giving anonymous interviews to the biographer. And Brian Nick, an executive at Fox, had anonymously briefed the Financial Times. (Nick denied providing information to the Financial Times.) But to Rupert, the stories only confirmed that he needed to act decisively.
In October 2023, Kathryn told James that she thought he should reach out to his father and brother. They’d barely spoken in years, and though she didn’t yet know about their plans for the trust, she worried that Rupert and Lachlan were sinking too deep into their own conspiracy theories. James never got around to calling them. Later, he would wish he’d taken her advice.
Over several weeks that fall, the participants in Project Family Harmony explored a range of aggressive options to neutralize James. PowerPoints were prepared; legal memos were produced. James was rarely invoked by name in these materials; he was referred to as “the troublesome beneficiary.”

Rupert ultimately decided that the best course was to negate the voting power of James and his sisters. To do this, Rupert would have to amend the Murdoch family trust to give Lachlan unilateral control after he died. And because the trust was irrevocable, with amendments allowed only if they were in the interest of the beneficiaries, Rupert would have to show, in effect, that disenfranchising three of his children was actually best for them.
McKenna drafted talking points for Rupert to use when discussing the amendment with his children. New directors were also secretly recruited to the trust, including Bill Barr, the two-time attorney general and a personal friend of Rupert’s, and a pair of lawyers who had scant experience with trust management but had the advantage of being politically connected in Nevada, where the inevitable litigation would play out.

Want final confirmation of how weird it all was, and continues to be?

A month after the trial’s conclusion, while the commissioner was still deliberating, James decided to reach out to his father. The trial had gone well for him and his sisters; their lawyers were confident. Still, he knew the damage to his family might never be undone. Thanksgiving was approaching, and James was feeling sentimental. Maybe, he thought, his father might be open to a personal appeal, especially now that he looked to be on the verge of defeat.
James, Liz, and Prue wrote their father a letter suggesting an alternative course. “Thanksgiving and Christmas are upon us and the three of us wanted to reach out to you personally to say that we miss you and love you,” they wrote. “Over and above any other feelings all of us may have—of upset and shock—our unifying emotion is sorrow and grief.”
Maybe they could try to talk things out without lawyers and probate commissioners—and reach a compromise they all agreed on: “We are asking you with love to find a way to put an end to this destructive judicial path so that we can have a chance to heal as a collaborative and loving family.”
A couple of days later, Rupert wrote back. He’d read his children’s testimony from the trial twice over. “Only to conclude that I was right,” he told them. He instructed them to have their lawyers contact his if they wanted to talk further. “Much love, Dad.”
On December 7, the commissioner issued his ruling. Rupert and Lachlan had lost.

PS much love, big Daddy, PPS, talk to my lawyers, and only to them you bastard child ...

Paragraph after paragraph were pure delight.

James and Kathryn were usually cautious when I asked about changes they would want to see at the family’s news outlets. But I got glimpses of their thinking. Once, over dinner in Washington, Kathryn told me she wasn’t sure if Fox News could still be reformed. “It doesn’t have a clear purpose in the ecosystem anymore,” she said.

Sorry, it does have a clear purpose - the installation of a king and a billionaire oligarch atop the American system of government - but the pond will cede Jimbo's WSJ point.

On another occasion, I asked James if The Wall Street Journal ’s editorial page might serve as a model for a more responsible Fox News. He winced and said he hoped they could do better than that. 

So that's why the lizard Oz reprints WSJ pieces. They can't do any better than that. The pond winced at the reptile shame of it all.

At this point The Bulwark crept into the story, with a link to another Coppings in The Atlantic

Naming and Shaming the Pro-Trump Elite,The Bulwark’s writers are the new outlaws of conservative media. (archive)

The reptiles, it turns out, are revolting:

At various points, both of them mentioned their investment in The Bulwark, which was founded as an organ of Never Trump conservatism, as proof that they weren’t categorically averse to “center right” media—though, of course, re­inventing Fox News in The Bulwark’s image might be the surest path to a viewer revolt.

And so - spoiler alert - to the closing, and here again the ghost of Henry descended with delight into the pits, what Hadrian turning up to offer a totally douchey metaphor (at last a new word for our Henry - prize douche):

The one thing James has said consistently is that any reforms he might seek would focus on corporate and editorial governance, not political orientation. Fox News, he thought, could still report from a conservative perspective without, say, giving a platform to unqualified doctors to spread medical misinformation during a pandemic, or misrepresenting an oil-company shill as an expert on climate change. James believed this wasn’t just the right thing to do, but the fiscally prudent one: Allowing Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell on air to spread voting-machine conspiracy theories had already cost Fox three-quarters of a billion dollars, and an even larger defamation suit was still pending. (James stressed that reforming the outlets would require support from the board.)
For now, James is left struggling to answer the question he found himself asking in the courtroom—how did we let it come to this? His 93-year-old father will, despite his most fervent wishes, die one day. And when he does, he will leave behind a family at war with itself—a bevy of estranged children and ex-wives exchanging awkward greetings at an expensive funeral.
Last year, James told me, he reread Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 novel about the titular second-century emperor of Rome. “I hate to use Roman emperors as a metaphor, because it’s totally douchey,” he told me in a moment of self-deprecating clarity. But when he came across a passage about a dying ruler in search of an heir, James felt that he suddenly understood something about his father. He committed the paragraph to memory, and quoted it repeatedly in the time we spent together. Hadrian’s imperial predecessor is “refusing to face his end.” Hadrian pities him: “We were too different for him to find in me what most people who have wielded total authority seek desperately on their deathbeds, a docile successor pledged in advance to the same methods, and even to the same errors.”
For decades, James realized, Rupert had tried to turn his children into vehicles for dynastic ambition—walking nodes of immortality. In the process, he’d wrecked the family. Now, at 52, James seems as if he is trying to disentangle himself from the character he once played in the Murdoch story.
One day late this past fall, I met James in his office. The trust trial had recently concluded, and he was tired and uncharacteristically disheveled—bags under his eyes, hair askew. He recounted the beats of the courtroom drama in between stifled yawns, but eventually lost interest. He seemed to have something else on his mind. He told me about a commencement speech he’d once given at a small university in Europe, where he told the graduates never to get themselves into a position where other people were defining success for them. It was good advice, he thought, and he wondered how his life would have been different if he’d taken it himself.
“My kind of regret—” he began, before hastily correcting himself. “I try not to have regrets, because I’m so lucky.” His eyes drifted toward the window, and for a moment, he looked strangely small at the end of the long conference-room table, almost like a little boy. “I used to paint a lot,” he told me. “I thought about being an architect. I did film animation in school.”
He was struggling to express what he wanted to say. “I had a story—” he tried, but started over. “In my head, there were so many—” He stopped again, and seemed to give up.
Maybe it was hopeless. Maybe nobody wanted to hear a rich heir from a powerful family complain about his father. History had plenty of those.

Coulda been, shoulda been, woulda been, and dear sweet long absent lord, even those Reader's Digest highlights were a long read ...

The pond thought about sending this teaser out on its own, so long it was ...

Dammit, it took considerable powers of concentration for the pond to focus on the lizard Oz this day ... but dammit, maybe one reptile now, and one later in the day ...

First the usual survey of what titillated the alleged "news" division ... which is to say what propaganda could they dish up ...

Aw, down at the very bottom, simpleton Simon was sounding sad ... what the country needs is rampant inflation and high interest rates ...

Over on the extreme far right, the usual suspects battled to be top of the world, ma ...

Phew that's a relief. 

The pond can get away with indulging Jimbo and the Swasticar. 

Just Simpleton Simon on top, and down at the very bottom, weird rustic bush boy Johnny. He can easily be made to wait in the corner, become a late arvo treat ...

All that's needed is a standard serve of Dame Groan and the pond is home free ...

Even better, there's no loud keening or wailing or groaning this day from the Dame this day. 

Why not even a mouse stirred, and certainly the mouse was adverse to roaring ...

The real reason why Australia should keep shtum on US tariffs, We may want to stay quiet before the US movers and shakers realise that China is Australia’s largest trading partner by a country mile.

Sssh, be very, very quiet. Stand well clear, US President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office as he announces reciprocal tariffs. Picture: AFP

Dame Groan was on mute this day, cranked down to one from her usual eleven. Not even renewables or nuking the country surfaced to disturb the calm ...

It’s hard to keep up. Most newly elected heads of government take a while to get going, but US President Donald Trump really has hit the ground running.
Each day there are several new executive orders as well as important foreign policy announcements.
Mind you, we shouldn’t really be surprised about most of these policy initiatives since he made his intentions completely clear before being elected. On tariffs, for instance, he declared his love for the word and signalled his plan to impose tariffs on goods imported into the US.
Not only is he keen on the revenue that tariffs would generate – he has even established a new office, the External Revenue Service (that’s a little play on the Internal Revenue Service, the equivalent of our Australian Taxation Office) – he also wants to level the international trade playing field as he sees it.
In the normal modern course of events, the revenue from the imposition of tariffs is generally reasonably small, dwarfed by revenue from income tax, for instance.
But Trump’s determination to continue the tax cuts that he enacted in his first term comes at a high price. Lest the fiscal position of the US deteriorate even further (and place upward pressure on interest rates), there is no alternative but to seek out other major sources of revenue.

Dear sweet long absent lord, it was so serious the reptiles even wheeled in another simplistic Simon as an AV distraction:

Former federal trade minister and ANZ Head of APAC Engagement Simon Birmingham discusses whether Australia could be exempt from the Trump administration’s global steel and aluminium tariffs. “I think they [the Australian government] have some strong arguments that they can and do appear to be making, such as in terms of the AUKUS card and the extent to which Australia is in a strong position,” Mr Birmingham told Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood. “It should be underestimated the degree of difficulty for any Australian government in terms of the Trump administration this time around, where you have some serious purists who have clearly lined their arguments up in advance to try and apply those tariffs as broadly as possible.”

Hush now ... the mango Mussolini has a point, and Dame Groan is tempted to praise him, perhaps fearing his wrath ...

This point needs to be borne in mind when considering the endpoint of the claims by various countries for exemptions or other concessions in relation to the new suite of tariffs.
Trump regards international trade as a win-lose situation and a trade deficit with a country as indicating that the exporting country is taking advantage of the US in some way. He clearly skipped the classes when the theory of comparative advantage was being explained; it’s not clear that he has any intention of ever retaking them.
One way around this may be to start with exchanges between sellers and buyers located within a country. There is no doubting that mutual benefit is generally the result as sellers vie for customers by offering value for money goods and services. International trade is essentially an extension of that proposition.
But Trump has a point that the distortions to international trade are considerable.
Those who argue for a “rules-based” international trading system with the World Trade Organisation as final arbiter often sound naive. In any case, multilateral trading rules have been in retreat for some time as many countries enter into bilateral trade deals, including Australia.
Having said that, it’s not always clear these bilateral trade agreements – often euphemistically called free trade agreements – are worth the paper they are written on.
Australia has a free-trade agreement with China but that didn’t prevent China from imposing massive tariffs on wine as well as lower ones on barley and lobsters. China’s reasons for doing so had nothing to do with trade but a breakdown in the cordiality of bilateral relationship between the two countries.
The imposition of these tariffs directly violated the agreement but nothing happened.
Eventually the Chinese government relented, which illustrates that the citizens of the tariff-imposing country often are harmed by the action more than the exporting country, although Australia’s wine industry was badly damaged.

Ah the perfidious Chinese and then a snap with a mysterious caption, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese may be better to maintain a low-key relationship with Trump. Picture: Martin Ollman

May be better? Than whom or what? The pond pressed on, hoping for a clue, a decoding, by Dame Groan ...

Getting back to what is happening in the US, the blanket 25 per cent tariffs to be imposed on Canada and Mexico – there was a lower rate for oil and gas – have now been stayed for a period. Trump demanded that these countries do more to stem the flow of illegal migrants and fentanyl to the US, again issues that are unrelated to trade. In other words, tariffs are being used as a political-geostrategic weapon as well as an economic measure.
Trump’s announcement of a 25 per cent tariff on aluminium and steel last week was greeted with considerable dismay here, in part because Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister had been able to negotiate an exemption in 2018 from a similar Trump initiative. It’s not clear at this stage whether an exemption will be forthcoming this time, in part because there seems to be some dispute as to whether Australia complied with an informal agreement to cap aluminium sales to the US made in 2018.
The details matter less than the seeming determination of Peter Navarro, a key adviser to Trump on this matter, to press on with the tariffs on aluminium and steel without exemptions.
But the fact is we are talking small beer when it comes to Australian exports of aluminium and steel to the US – about $1bn in total. We are one of the smaller exporters of these products to the US, with China and Canada the main ones.
An important political conundrum has now emerged. Should the Australian government seek to use some of its political capital with the US – there is clearly a fixed reserve of it – and negotiate an exemption or concession for these two products? Should we talk up the importance of our alliance with the US in general and AUKUS in particular? Would it be wiser to keep our powder dry to negotiate on the bigger matter of the imposition of reciprocal tariffs, something that has now been proposed by Trump as well?
After all, if there are no exemptions from the aluminium and steel tariffs, all our competitors in the export game are in the same position. The low value of our dollar is also helping at this stage.

Talk about a mouse putting the best spin on things, even the sight of an ogre didn't startle the mouse, Defence Minister Richard Marles, Britain's Defence Secretary John Healey and former US defence secretary Lloyd Austin talk AUKUS. Picture: AFP

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

What could possibly go wrong?

Sorry, the pond wanted a little aerial excitement. This Groaning is exceptionally tepid, such a dull mouse ... doing her best to bite her tariff tongue, showing no artistic flair ...

See how she labours in the garden of tranquility in her final gobbet ... 

Oh there might be problematic perturbations, but the Groan will abide ... King Donald I can piss on her tariff rug, but she just wants Walter - or is it Donny? - to just shut the fuck up ...

The reciprocal tariff idea is much more far-reaching and potentially problematic. What is being put forward is that the US will impose tariffs on other countries in proportion to the barriers, both tariff and non-tariff, that affect the sale of US goods and services in that country. Included in the calculation will be value-added taxes (GST) that exempt exports.
Compared with the aluminium-steel announcement, this is massive. Apart from the almost impossible task of calculating the non-tariff assistance given to local industry, it defies logic to include a GST in the calculation.
Exports are exempt for good reason. The GST is a tax on local consumption. Exports are free of the GST because the importing country can then levy taxes on these imports as they see fit. It is completely compliant with WTO rules, although that probably doesn’t impress Trump.
The point here is that Australia is probably at the end of the pack when it comes to the imposition by the US of reciprocal tariffs, in part because the US runs a trade surplus with us, one of the few countries where this is the case. If it were to come to pass, it may turn out that our low GST rate is a plus. Don’t forget that in many parts of the world the rate of GST is as high as 20 per cent.
We also may want to stay relatively quiet before the US movers and shakers realise that China is Australia’s largest trading partner by a country mile. By selling all that iron ore and coal to China, we have facilitated China selling cheap goods into the US.
There are occasions when the less said the better. This may be one of them, even though the political timing is not great.

Sheesh, it's all Australia's fault. 

What a relief ... just don't tell the bromancer, we'll never hear the end of it ... next thing he'll be calling for a ban on selling all that iron ore and coal to China, thereby ruining the United States and the chance of a war with China by Xmas ...

Meanwhile, hushed like a clever mouse, the pond sees the immortal Rowe has observed a different kindnof terror stalking the greens ... and quivering mice shaking in the bunker ...