In which the pond discovers the pearls of wisdom arising from the grit in the furriner oyster, and Mein Gott provides a rare understanding of the benefits of selling off the earth ...

 

The pond had hoped to begin by talking about the weather and the unseasonable heat.

After all, even that colonial import the Graudian featured it ...

... and it was prominent in that other rag, The Sydney Daily Real Estate News ...

After all, records and jolly good attempts at records seem worth noting ... but it would be wrong to expect any mention of such capers in the lizard Oz, which after all, is an Australia-wide rag, and so it's beneath the rag's dignity to record what might be happening in the parochial south east and in cockroach land...

... except that it seems to be affecting a very big part of Australia... and trust teh Graudian to drag in talk of floods and climate change ...

Sheesh, silly pond,  fancy forgetting that the reptiles have a special heat dome over their Surry Hills HQ, and so are completely immune to the vagaries of the weather, especially as they have coal-fired air conditioning on hand in all offices ...

Never mind, that still leaves time for a couple of filler items ... though sadly the pond still couldn't find room for Dame Slap, donning her MAGA cap again with pride and joy ...

ASX shake-up proves Trump insurgency rolls on
The ASX’s dramatic decision to dissolve its corporate governance council mirrors a global rebellion against excessive regulation that began in Trump’s America.
By Janet Albrechtsen

She's there in the archive for anyone who bizarrely imagines that being King Donald somehow amounts to an "insurgency"...

The pond doesn't much enjoy being the word police, but still ...

An insurgency is a violent, armed rebellion by small, lightly armed bands who practice guerrilla warfare against a larger authority. The key descriptive feature of insurgency is its asymmetric nature: small irregular forces face a large, well-equipped, regular military force state adversary.

Only on Planet Janet, in a land way above the Magickal Faraway Tree ...

On to the current horde of invading, pesky, difficult furriners who are roonin' the country and making things very hard for the reptiles...

The header: Emotive migration debate now totally unmoored from reality, Rapid immigration is rivalling the cost of living as the public’s top policy concern, yet many of our political, bureaucratic and educational leaders are unwilling to discuss the issue.

The caption: The anti-immigration rally in Hyde Park. Picture: Thomas Annetts

The pond rarely has time for pearls of wisdom, but this was just a three minute read, or so the reptiles said, and the pond wanted to attend to this pearl of wisdom dropping as proof that it's not just Dame Groan setting the pace when it comes to furriners...

For some strange reason, the grit in this oyster seemed to think that emotion and polarisation was coming from outside the hive mind ...

Views on immigration in this country are becoming increasingly polarised.
Leading conservatives, including Andrew Hastie, are calling for a big reduction in our migrant intake, pointing to the almost one million people who have entered this country (reflected in our net overseas migration numbers) since July 2022.
This is gaining popular traction. Rapid immigration is now rivalling the cost of living as the public’s top policy concern, prompting large protest rallies in our major cities in recent weeks.
Yet, despite this, many of our political, bureaucratic and educational leaders are unwilling to discuss the issue, with some labelling immigration sceptics as racists or populists. This dynamic is not a healthy one for our country.
As the temperature rises, the debate – if we can call it that – is becoming increasingly emotive and unmoored from reality, with both sides guilty of overreach.
In the interests of rationality, let’s try then to dispassionately examine the issues.
Three economic questions stand out.

Just as these pearls of wisdom were about to drop, the reptiles immediately interrupted with a snap, an entirely fatuous aerial view, The cost of Australian housing has increased since the pandemic. Picture: iStock

On the other hand, a meaningless, gratuitous image seemed to sit well with the text ...

Is immigration the major cause of rising house prices and rents since the pandemic? Is it exacerbating supply constraints across the economy, including in the areas of transportation, education and health. And is immigration to blame for our poor productivity performance and declining living standards in recent years?
While there is strong evidence of a link between immigration and rents in parts of the country, its impact on house prices is far less clear.
In the year to September 2023, temporary migrants accounted for more than 90 per cent of net overseas migration to this country, most of whom were students.
The vast majority of this cohort rents rather than buys, which helps to explain the strong positive correlation Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) has found between where migrants choose to live and local rental rates, at least in the short term.
On the house price question, a debate is taking place between those who blame immigration for rising prices and others who point to the adverse effect zoning restrictions and other factors are having on housing supply.
While both sides make legitimate points, they ignore the elephant in the room: the interest rate policies of the RBA board.
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, net overseas migration fell off a cliff and for much of 2021 was actually negative. Yet between late 2020 and early 2022, average house prices grew by a whopping 22 per cent.
The culprit? The rock-bottom cash rate the RBA board maintained across this period, in which the average mortgage rate fell to 4.55 per cent in March 2020 and stayed there in 2021.

Then came another snap, Decisions made by the RBA and its then-governor Philip Lowe during the pandemic contributed to a 22 per cent increase in house prices. Picture: Getty Images

After blaming it on the the RBA, the troubled Pearl was still worried by traces of grit in the oyster, and had more questions ...

Do high levels of immigration exacerbate supply shortages across the economy, as some critics claim?
It is true that immigration adds, at the margin, to congestion on our roads and the demand for public education and health services, but it is also alleviating labour short­ages across the economy, including in childcare centres, aged-care facilities, the retail sector and in a number of trades.
These are two sides of the same coin, a fact immigration opponents and supporters like to ignore. The effect of immigration on wages, productivity and our living standards has long been debated by economists.
When considering this question, we should disregard the fallacious notion that the economy is a fixed pie to be shared between those who live here.
According to this view, immigration must necessarily reduce wages (or increase unemployment) and shrink GDP per capita. This is not the case.
Immigrants will depress the wages of some workers (those in direct competition with them for jobs) but raise those of others (including those in complementary roles); at the same time, some consumer prices will fall and others will rise, depending on where immigrants work and what they consume. Immigration’s impact on productivity will turn, in part, on the skill profile of the immigrants themselves (and the domestic jobs they fill), but it is not that simple.
A larger labour force will provide greater scope for specialisation, which will boost productivity, yet if the nation’s capital stock does grow commensurately, this benefit might be diluted. The key point to make is that immigration is not a major determinant of our productivity performance, good, bad or ugly.
It pales into insignificance compared with our self-harming energy policies, our union-dominated industrial relations arrangements and our anti-aspiration tax system. If immigration’s critics are sometimes guilty of over-egging their case, they make legitimate points that need to be addressed.
They have also drawn attention to a structural flaw at the heart of our system which, in my view, is undermining public confidence in it. It is our educational export industry, which has hijacked our public universities for private gain, earned its billions on an implicit promise of permanent residency and seen educational standards in this country plummet.
This should be heavily scaled back, starting with our major universities. If that results in labour shortages, let them be filled by a dedicated short-term immigration program while we work on getting welfare-dependent locals back into the workforce.
A net-zero immigration policy would be as big an economic disaster as our net-zero emissions commitment is proving to be. If our elites refuse to respond to legitimate concerns about our program, that is what we might end up with.

Is there any upside? Well yes, emphasise "former" ...

David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.

What a splendid piece of both siderism, and surely Dame Groan will be back to ensure that these "legitimate concerns" are trumpeted from the Surry Hills balcony ...

And so to Mein Gott, with the pond bitterly disappointed at not being able to include him in this morning's reptile coverage ...

The header: Inside the rare earths agreement that could rival iron ore boom, A landmark US-Australia rare earths deal signals a new resources boom, but success hinges on technological breakthroughs and complex global politics.

The caption: Anthony Albanese with US President Donald Trump at the White House. Picture: AP

Mein Gott was on a sugar-induced high (it's not widely understood that sugar is one of those rare earth minerals that can produce a heady excitation in reptiles):

Again the reptiles clocked it at a humble three minute read, so where was the harm?

Australia’s post-World War II boom was driven by iron ore, gas and coal. A fourth boom was launched this week in the White House – heavy rare earths like terbium and dysprosium, plus other critical minerals.
When it matures, this boom will be different to the other three because we are returning to the practices that built Broken Hill and Mount Isa in the 19th century.
With the help of our gas and US capital, Australia is going to refine more of our heavy rare earth minerals in Australia rather than export concentrates.
But there is another difference. A rare earths and critical minerals boom will require significant advances in industrial technology to extend markets beyond defence and current industrial markets.
US President Donald Trump embraced the Australian refining strategy (thanks in part to the brilliant work of Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd).

At this point the reptiles introduced a very familiar AV distraction - at least three posts were gifted with the blather, and with that splendid tie still working overtime ... The Australian’s Washington Correspondent Joe Kelly and Political Editor Geoff Chambers report from outside the White House moments after Anthony Albanese met with Donald Trump. In a high-stakes meeting that secured an $8.5 billion critical minerals and rare earths agreement, both leaders projected warmth despite deep policy differences. With China’s dominance in rare earths tightening and Aukus assurances on the table, the encounter marked a major geopolitical moment and a political win for Albanese.

At this point, the pond wanted to introduce its own AV distraction.

The pond wanted to express its dismay and outrage at the cardigan wearers, and in particular the choleric Kohler, outrageously proposing that the pay-off could be decades away ...

Even worse, there were graphs, in the usual ABC Finance fancy pants way ...

Steady Mr Kohler, none of your saucy reptile-denying time line doubts, it's just so those of us in Brigadoon can get by in relative peace for the next few years ...

Meanwhile, Mein Gott had turned his attention to Ukraine ...

Sadly, in Trump’s earlier meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, the US President did not appear to realise how Ukraine fits into the jigsaw as a global leader in rare earths technology, which it is initially applying to drones.

Trump’s desire for another “peace deal” means Ukraine technology is in grave danger of falling into Russian hands because Zelensky was not able to convince Trump that the Russian-Ukraine borders Trump was proposing could not be defended without enormous expenditures.

Sheesh, hasn't Mein Gott been following the thoughts of the couch molester JD and the Secretary for Quisling Lickspittle fellow travellers...

Besides, King Donald was rock solid behind Ukraine in his usual way ...

While Washington refutes that Hegseth’s tie is any indicator of favoritism, a reportedly fiery meeting between Zelensky and President Donald Trump has only fueled the debate.

Trump was pressuring his Ukrainian counterpart to accept Russia’s terms for a ceasefire during an explosive White House meeting on Friday, according to the Financial Times, telling Zelensky that Russia would “destroy” Ukraine if he didn’t agree.

Trump demanded that Zelensky surrender the entire Donbas region to Russian President Vladimir Putin, sources said.

European officials told the Financial Times that Trump repeated many of Putin’s talking points “verbatim” during the meeting, telling Zelensky he was losing the war and that “If [Putin] wants it, he will destroy you.”

The tense encounter came after Trump reportedly spoke with Putin by phone and seemingly welcomed the Russian dictator back into his good graces.

Oh wait, it's all off again: Trump doesn’t want ‘wasted meeting’ with Putin as he confirms talks on Ukraine war are off for now

So hard to keep up with the flip-flopping TACO King, as the reptiles provided a chance to celebrate the way Albo avoided a stabbing thanks to a bribe, Anthony Albanese and US President Donald Trump hold up signed agreements on critical minerals and rare earths, in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Picture: AP

Never mind, there might yet be war ... Donald Trump's war on Drug Boats.

Nothing like hauling the guilty before a court to make them pay ...

...When the U.S. struck the first Venezuelan boat, in September, one detail immediately caught the attention of former government officials: eleven people were said to have been on board. In drug-running operations, it is highly unusual for so many passengers to be on a single vessel. “There’s almost always three or four: a navigator, a pilot, and a person to put gas in the boat,” Story told me. “There are never eleven people on a drug boat because each person is drugs that you can’t transport.”

It was possible that some men on the boat were involved in trafficking and that others were simply hitching a ride. The boat was intercepted off the northern coast of Venezuela, near a small fishing town called San Juan de Unare, which, in the past two decades, has become a transit point for the smuggling of cocaine and marijuana. One Venezuelan woman told the Times that her husband, a fisherman, left for work and never returned. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the families of the men killed posted testimonials on social-media accounts. But the Venezuelan government, for reasons that remain unclear, appears to have pressured them to take down their accounts. “This is the problem with the situation,” Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan crime journalist, told me. “Both governments”—the U.S. and Venezuela—“like to lie.”

The other vessels struck by the U.S.—five speedboats and a semi-submersible—have had fewer passengers, but they were said to have been intercepted in coastal areas that are not typically associated with large-scale drug smuggling. According to Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia, a Colombian fisherman was killed in one of the strikes, in mid-September. “U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” he said. After another bombing, late last week, the U.S. Navy apprehended two survivors whom Trump later said were citizens of Colombia and Ecuador. On Saturday, he announced that they would be repatriated. Had they remained in U.S. custody, as the first to be captured under the new “armed conflict” against international cartels, it would have brought legal scrutiny to Trump’s whole gambit, either by a military tribunal or a civilian court. Apparently, this wasn’t yet worth the risk.

Nothing like a little murder on the high seas me hearties ...

All good, peace in our time for a piece of the country, as Mein Gott drilled down deep, in the way he loves to do ...

Ukraine’s drone and heavy rare earth technologies, plus the oil embargoes, are boxing Russia into a corner. Trump did not believe him and preferred the explanation of what was happening in Ukraine than that put forward by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It’s important for Australia to understand how heavy rare earths technology is set to change a wider area of global industry.

Current usage is linked to combining the heavy rare earths with other materials for specialist defence and industry applications. Technically, there is no reason why the heavy rare earths cannot be combined with, say, iron to produce materials that will compete with many other metals and metal alloys.

What prevents this research and development is the high cost of the heavy rare earths. But such a reduction is now looking closer. Australia and China have developed similar technologies to lower extraction costs, and the ores at Northern Minerals’ Browns Range and Haoma’s Bamboo Creek are higher grade than many of the other Australian heavy rare earth deposits.

And the looming boom has an ironic twist. The ‘Big Australian’, BHP, was pivotal in the iron ore, coal and gas booms and now analysis of samples it took from Bamboo Creek almost 30 years ago will be pivotal in determining the size and grade of a potential heavy rare earths deposit.

We will know in about a month. BHP sold its stake in Bamboo Creek when it exited gold.

The Chinese understood the potential of the Northern Minerals deposit at Browns Range well before most Australians and purchased a significant equity. The pilot plant at Browns Range is using Chinese technology, which is similar to Haoma’s Elazac separation process being used Bamboo Creek.

At this point, the reptiles flung in the sort of image that gives Mein Gott wet dreams, Northern Minerals’ Browns Range heavy rare earths project.

You see, Mr Kohler, it's boom times, and with any luck we'll see another Poseidon ... and why don't you learn to drone on like Mein Gott does?

Australia ordered the Chinese to sell their Northern Minerals equity, but it looks like the buyers are mainly based in Hong Kong, which means the deposit is still under Chinese influence. Haoma is using the technology to extract gold, platinum and silver before separating Terbium and other heavy rare earths which transforms the economics

Apart from Bamboo Creek and Browns Range, Australia has other heavy rare earth deposits which will be important in the US agreement.

Preliminary testing work indicates that there may also be iron-linked heavy rare earth deposits in the Pilbara, which will increase supply and reduce the price to facilitate technology to widen the application of heavy rare earths.

At the moment, China and Ukraine are world leaders in drones – another defence technology using heavy rare earths.

Ukraine is able to pinpoint Russian oil targets and has destroyed about 20 per cent of Russia’s naval fleet (the rest is out of action being tucked away in remote places to avoid being destroyed) and it killed an unprecedented number of Russian and North Korean troops creating a World War I-type stalemate. Russia is paying very high interest rates on the borrowings it requires.

Russia does not seem to have the same control over its drones, which prompted Poland to close its border with Russian ally, Belarus, which impacted China’s ability to trade with Europe via land. China now realises the dangers.

Russian drones over Denmark caused Denmark to start searching the old Russian oil-carrying vessels in the Baltic Sea, delaying their passage. Ukraine is now able to export its wheat and other agricultural commodities.

The one fly inn the Mein Gott ointment? Russian President Vladimir Putin with US President Donald Trump during a US-Russia summit on Ukraine in August. Picture: AFP

That sent Mein Gott right off ...

But Putin has the ear of Trump.

Germany and Poland are emerging as major European backers of Ukraine and will not want a peace deal that could enable Russia to invade at a future date.

Ukrainian technology and its deposits of rare earths could transform Europe, if Russia takes control then Putin or his successor will gain the Ukraine drone and industrial technology plus Ukraine’s rare earth deposits.

Relax, Mein Gott, a few sacrifices have to be made as King Donald prepares his mighty constructions.

He might not get into heaven, should such a real estate nirvana exist, but he'll leave many mighty edifices behind, even as The Bulwark mob carp and moan ...

...One of Trump's most successful cons is that he is a patriot. He literally hugs the flag and dubs anyone who supports him—disgraced and jailed former congressmen, criminals who attacked police on January 6th, convicted war criminals—patriots. Anyone who opposes or even criticizes Trump is tarred as an enemy of the people and an America hater.

But the bitter truth is that Trump is an antipatriot. He destroys things that make America worthy of love and admiration, and he is twisting the country toward a mean, crass kleptocracy. Our global reputation for humanitarianism? Gone. Our investments in scientific research for the betterment of humanity? In trouble. Our status as a secure financial center? Wobbly. Our reliability as an ally? No more. Our dedication to the rule of law domestically? Teetering. Our rock-solid dedication to freedom of speech? Under threat.

Would a patriot have turned excavators on the White House? For the sake of a gargantuan, tacky monarchical event space? Would a patriot show so little regard for how it would feel to his countrymen to see this desecration of a national symbol?

And again ...

...How much did all this matter? Well, as Churchill said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

Eighty-two years later, the president of the United States is reshaping the White House. In July, Donald Trump announced he wanted to add a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to the existing building. The ballroom would dwarf the 55,000 square feet footprint of the main part of the White House. Still, Trump assured one and all, “It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it—and pays total respect to the existing building.”

It turns out Trump was lying. Shocking, I know. Yesterday, construction workers began the demolition of part of the East Wing in order to build a new, Mar-a-Lago-like ballroom.

Trump hasn’t gotten approval for this project from the National Capital Planning Commission, which regulates the construction of federal buildings. The Trump-appointed head of the commission, Will Scharf—who, conveniently, is also the White House staff secretary—said during the only public meeting about the matter that the board has no jurisdiction over demolition or site preparation.

While Trump is proud of his new ballroom, others in the administration seem touchy. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that the Treasury Department instructed employees not to share images of the demolition, after photos of construction equipment dismantling the front of the building made their way online.

It’s unclear what legal authority the Treasury Office of Public Affairs has to tell employees what photos they can take during their lunch break. But why would that matter to the Trump administration?

In any case, Trump—aided and abetted by all the corporations and wealthy donors who have contributed money to his project—will presumably be able to do as he pleases. And perhaps it’s foolish to object. If we’re going to transition under Trump’s rule from a (mostly) dignified democratic republic to an ostentatious oligarchic autocracy, our buildings should reflect and reinforce that progress. After all, we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

Oh come on, you have to destroy in order to build a fourth Reich ...