The pond deliberately didn't focus on the lizard Oz's "news" this morning ...
If correspondents wanted to read that typically alarmist story at the top of the page, dressed as a news EXCLUSIVE, they could have just clipped the url, and armed with it, headed off to the archive to READ THE BRIEFING...
Bills will rise and 2030 target needs ‘rapid’ push, Bowen warned
Previously secret government documents caution that electricity prices will climb and emissions must be cut faster for Australia to meet its 2030 climate target | READ THE BRIEFING
by Paul Garvey
It was just more alarmism and hysteria, panic mongering of a reptile kind.
Oops, tt's true that the archive version missed out on the BRIEFING, but as the entire point of the story was to bitch and moan about assorted redactions, just consider the loss of the briefing another redaction.
Another story that could do with redaction ...
Labor’s green-tape loophole to speed up projects
Environment Minister Murray Watt will gain powers to bypass green laws for national interest projects as Labor seeks Coalition support for reforms to fix approval delays.
By Greg Brown
This put the reptiles in a very tricky spot. What with all the endless baying about red tape and needless over-regulation, and greenies ruining things, what to do, oh what to do?
Assuming that the tattered coalition ever returned to power, what fun they could have evoking "rare circumstances" to ignore greenie laws.
Here beckoned a golden future, yet the automatic response of any reptile to any government move is set to "outrage", "crank to II".
Oh what to do, what to do? Could the reptiles swallow their pride, and support the strong man theory of government?
The Brown-out did his best to steer a steady course through the fog of war ...
As business demands Labor and the Coalition compromise to fix the approvals system and pushes the opposition to retain a net-zero emissions target, new sections of the Environmental Protection Reform Bill were released on Monday that would make it harder for activist groups to wage lawfare.
As the government aims to rapidly increase the supply of critical minerals under the $13bn deal signed with Donald Trump last week, sections of the draft bill show Environment Minister Murray Watt could make a decision that was inconsistent with national standards if “it is demonstrably in the public interest and with a clearly articulated statement of reasons”.
Existing projects can also gain exemptions to environmental laws in special circumstances if it is necessary to keep the site operational.
The bill will also impose a 28-day time limit on challenging a minister’s decision not to assess a project referred under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, while giving the minister the power to allow work to continue while a claim is being assessed.
A government source said this would make it harder for green groups to stall projects in the courts for “years”.
It will also enable the minister to provide “protection statements” giving more clarity on what will be considered to protect threatened species or native plants when approving a project.
Ramping up pressure on the Coalition to strike a deal on the reforms, Senator Watt will release figures on Tuesday showing median approval times have blown out from 48 weeks in 1999 to 118 weeks.
“These measures will ensure decision-makers have a toolkit to respond rapidly to serious and urgent emerging events,” Senator Watt said. “The Coalition and the Greens need to decide whether they will support the reforms, or if they’ll be the reason our environment, business and Australian communities suffer.”
Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black and Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar said the Coalition should do a deal on green-tape laws to keep the Greens out of the process.
While business is pushing for a raft of changes to the draft bill, Mr Black said he believed there was “scope to get this done”.
“We are very firmly of the view that there is a window open now for reform,” Mr Black said.
“It is a window that people have been calling to have opened for a long time now and it’s because the system, as it stands, doesn’t deliver for the environment and it certainly doesn’t deliver for business.
“But to get that balance right, we need the parties of government to come together and pass this legislation. That is the way that we can go about delivering the longevity that these reforms require.”
Mr Black said business had a number of concerns with the draft bill, including stop-work orders, the ability to reject a project quickly based on an “unacceptable impact” assessment and the requirement for major projects to submit carbon-reduction plans.
In the end, it was all too hard, and it seemed like the desire to give the government to rule by diktat, just like King Donald - everybody wants to be Tsar for the day - won out ...
Clearly stressed by all this, the Brown-out filled up the rest of his tale by reverting to an old favourite...the lettuce v. Susssan v. net zero ...
This is a story that looks like it won't get old anytime soon, and the pond still has high hopes for the lettuce, if not by Xmas, then in the new year silly season.
Truth to tell, the pond had really wanted to do a late arvo post in order to feature the keen Keane, deeply unhappy yesterday at Crikey.
It being a late arvo post the pond hopes that Crikey won't mind a little re-telling, what with it being relevant to lizard Oz herpetology students ...
The keen Keane wasn't happy ...
The claim that the “hollowing out of domestic production of essential goods in favour of often inferior imports has been a strategic mistake” is a little hard to take from one of the organs that so assiduously promoted neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s. But it aligns News Corp with the right-wing nationalism now being espoused by the company’s candidate for the next Liberal leader, Andrew Hastie, who has called for a return to the era of Australian manufacturing of muscle cars as an alternative to being a nation of “flat white makers”.
Such winner-picking is fundamentally at odds with the Liberal Party’s traditional free market ideology, but completely consistent with MAGA Republicanism’s angry protectionism. Ironically for a company spruiking Made In Australia, News Corp is borrowing its economic ideology — like the conspiracy theories and culture wars it peddles — from its US owners.
News Corp’s campaign urges ordinary Australians — the vast majority of whom ignore the company’s dying newspapers — to “redirect $100 a week from the existing family budget with Australian businesses”. Put another way, News Corp wants Australians, instead of buying the product that is cheapest and best suited to their needs from under-pressure household budgets, to buy more expensive, less suitable, locally made products.
Let’s call it what it is: voluntary inflation. And for what? Fewer than 40,000 new jobs and an additional GDP of $16 billion, News Corp claims, without evidence. However, 40,000 new jobs comprises just 0.25% of the jobs market; some months see far more than 40,000 jobs added anyway.
The campaign is backed, News Corp boasts, by a group of big businesses: Bunnings, BHP, Cadbury, Coles, Harvey Norman, Qantas, REA Group, R.M. Williams, TechnologyOne, Vodafone, Westpac. That’d be wage thief Bunnings, wage thief BHP, price gouger and wage thief Coles, price gouger, deceiver of customers, wage thief and illegal sacker of workers Qantas, price gouger and majority News Corp-owned REA Group, and wage thief and Australia’s worst money launderer Westpac. Doubtless all are grateful to News Corp for helping them whitewash their reputations.
We could recite, again, all the reasons why such protectionism — whether in the form of witless voluntary protectionism, or Labor’s Future Made In Australia project, or Trump’s tariffs — is economically harmful and means higher taxes, higher costs and lower productivity for consumers and businesses. We could ask for the umpteenth time where the workers are going to come from to staff the manufacturing nirvana this nostalgia for the 1970s requires. We could note the dismissive misogyny that underpins this obsession with manufacturing.
But instead, let’s note how The Australian starts its justification: “the critical minerals agreement between Australia and the US highlights the new reality taking hold in global trade and affairs, and our place in it. Nations that are overly dependent on others for essential goods or spend their resources offshore rather than invest them at home are exposed to a heightened level of risk.”
And so on ...
It was all terribly unfair, especially when reptiles of the Mein Gott kind, still enraptured by mining, were also on parade yesterday ...
The header: BHP shifts focus overseas as SA copper projects face delays to 2030s, Australia's largest miner celebrates 140 years by eyeing overseas expansion while its historic homeland becomes increasingly hostile to resource development.
The caption for a splendid snap of digging: BHP worker Alli Braidwood at the Carrapateena mine.
The reptiles clocked it as just a three minute read, so where's harm in a little "dig it up and ship it out" worship?
Sure it was a little stale, and had to be reheated in the microwave, but there's none of that manufacturing nonsense that sent the keen Keane right off.
Just dig it up and ship it out ...and never mind from where to where ...
For most of the first 130 years of BHP, chief executives were driven by the desire to increase the resources of the company above the level of those handed to them by their predecessors.
Profits were important, but resources and development came first.
Now profits and returns on capital take precedent. Shareholders have been winners.
And for most of those 130 years since 1885, Australia was a country that knew its prosperity would depend on its export of agriculture and mining products, and in turn that would require cheap energy and strong agricultural support.
Today, Australia makes mining and agricultural development harder and has abandoned low-cost energy.
Give Mein Gott his due, that's an excellent snipe at renewables, in quintessential reptile style, as a snap slipped in, showing the sort of machinery that gets reptiles hard, BHP recently announced Olympic Dam projects worth $840m. Picture: Brett Hartwig
That cruel jibe?
Liberal MP Garth Hamilton and Nationals MP Michael McCormack also condemned business groups for urging the Coalition to stick with net zero. “BCA members include Ampol, BHP, BP, Transurban, Woodside, Origin, South32 and Shell. These guys profit the most from fossil fuel usage but want to ensure a policy that pushes up electricity prices on pensioners. Their hypocrisy is astounding,” Mr Hamilton said.
Astounding hypocrisy?
There's a lot of it to go around, but all is forgiven in Mein Gott world ...
Nothing illustrates BHP’s change in direction better than its vast gold, uranium and copper resources in South Australia. At the anniversary in Melbourne there was a glint in BHP executives’ eyes when they pointed out that, although BHP had exited gold around 1990, the combination of South Australia and Chile made BHP the 14th biggest gold miner in the world and the third or fourth largest in Australia.
Uranium is booming because it has emerged as one of the lowest cost ways of generating long term base power, and copper prices have skyrocketed.
Yet although BHP’s South Australian operation is booming it has lost its place in the development queue to copper developments in Chile and Argentina, and very likely in the US because costs in Australia are too high led by energy and new government rules boosting labour costs.
BHP is modernising its existing mines, but the big South Australian development will have to wait until the 2030s, when hopefully Australians will learn (perhaps the hard way) that their standard of living depends on being competitive in agricultural and mining developments.
BHP’s desire to be bigger reached its zenith in 2001 when, after some expansion disasters, it merged with Billiton.
The second last of the BHP’s CEOs in the old mould was Chip Goodyear, who bought WMC because of the fantastic ore reserves in and around South Australia’s Olympic Dam, which he believed would underwrite the company’s prosperity for decades.
Cue a snap, a lad off the old block, Former BHP CEO Chip Goodyear in 2006.
How Mein Gott revelled in it all, a like a Bill Hunter spruiking to camera...
But in 2012, when uranium copper and gold prices were low, BHP’s board refused to proceed with Kloppers’ plan even though his projections showed that uranium and copper would surge in price.
Arguably, that was the end of the tradition that had started in 1885.
A year later, in 2013, Andrew Mackenzie was made CEO and BHP separated its smaller operations into South 32.
Ken MacKenzie became chairman in 2017 with a clear mission to enhance shareholder returns. When Mike Henry became CEO in 2020 he tackled BHP’s iron ore productivity. The industrial relations legislation introduced in the first Albanese term gave unions much greater power and the union movement has decided to use its new powers to regain its ability to be a co-manager of BHP’s WA iron ore operation – a situation that contributed to BHP’s previous low productivity.
A final snap, BHP CEO Mike Henry and chairman Ross McEwan at the mining group’s recent AGM. Picture: Supplied
And at the very end a pious hope that everybody would do a News Corp and head off overseas, and loot and pillage there, what with renewables ruining everything, and never mind the planet or that perfidious hypocrisy ...
BCA members include Ampol, BHP, BP, Transurban, Woodside, Origin, South32 and Shell. These guys profit the most from fossil fuel usage but want to ensure a policy that pushes up electricity prices on pensioners. Their hypocrisy is astounding,” Mr Hamilton said.
Reading the lizard Oz routinely astounds the pond, but the pond does look forward to reading the Daily Lizard Oz Argentinian News, with Mein Gott fleeing the country to provide ongoing coverage ...
However, if BHP were to expand in South Australia, it would almost certainly be used as a lever to force them to change direction in iron ore.
Chile, Argentina and the US – at least under President Donald Trump – will not face those issues so they go first. Accordingly, the great iron ore cash flows will be used to develop mining outside of Australia.
Meanwhile, BHP shareholders have had a wonderful time enjoying the fruits of managing resources developed by previous boards and managers in a more efficient way. The Big Australian is insulating itself from the disturbing developments in Australia by expanding in Chile, Argentina Canada and the US where returns and energy costs are competitive.
Speaking of digging it up, perhaps the keen Keane should have a final word ...
While China was investing in its goal of taking control of those technologies, countries like Australia and the US were claiming climate change didn’t exist or nothing could be done about it — led, of course, by the climate denialists of News Corp, who are still campaigning against net zero.
Another climate denialist and friend of News Corp, Donald Trump, is now also panicked about that Chinese dominance — while continuing to promote US fossil fuels. Among his many denialist policies is his assault on electric vehicles in the US and promotion of now-outdated internal combustion engine vehicles of the kind US auto manufacturers specialise in, and which are fetishised by right-wingers as symbols of Western male superiority. Not for nothing did Hastie warn of our streets being filled with “silent, soulless electric vehicles, made mostly in China”.
Underneath all this is a nostalgia for a simpler world in which white men wielded unquestioned dominance and Western governments pandered to them with protectionism — with consumers and taxpayers paying the price. The revanchism of Trump, MAGA, its acolytes on the right here and their supporters at News Corp is a scream of rage at a world in which white men might have to compete with Chinese workers and engineers to see who can make the best cars, in which evidence-based policy is preferred to tribal aggression and the maintenance of privilege, in which a broad range of skills and training are required to provide the services communities need, rather than trying to dictate what communities should want, which is the basis of all manufacturing protectionism.
Both the Chinese and the US are engaged in industry interventionism at a level that Australia can never possibly hope to match while retaining the benefits of being a smaller trading economy. But the Chinese have proven far better at it than the West, which is now desperately playing catch-up. The more we allow ourselves to be dragged into that game, the costlier it will be. There’s no going back, no matter how intense the nostalgia.
So it goes, and so to end with a celebration of where costs are truly competitive ...
From Keane: "The Australian starts its justification: ' Nations that are overly dependent on others for essential goods... are exposed to a heightened level of risk'". In a recent podcast by Saul Griffith it is pointed out that we import huge amounts of diesel fuel, and so if we electrified our trucking fleet (yes, it can be done), we would be reliant only on good old industrial strength Australian sunshine.
ReplyDeleteSo of course The Oz will be jumping on the (electric) bandwagon soon!