The fear of 'death duty' is quite a uniquely Australian worry. The vast majority of modern democracies have some form of estate tax. It's amusing how much it draws ire here.

Ireland's inheritance tax – or Capital Acquisitions Tax (CAT) – is a hefty 33%. As a child, you are entitled to inherit a certain amount (up to € 310,000 in your lifetime) tax-free; after this point, you are charged 33%.

At that rate the Greens will form government in 2095

Chris Bowen to withdraw from Labor leadership race as Albanese and Chalmers deal firms

By Michael Koziol
May 22, 2019 — 2.49pm

Labor's treasury spokesman Chris Bowen is set to withdraw from the race to lead his party just 28 hours after launching his bid, after a deluge of senior figures threw their support behind Anthony Albanese.

It paved the way for a deal to install Mr Albanese unopposed, with finance spokesman Jim Chalmers as his deputy - though it is understood some in the party are still encouraging Mr Chalmers to run against Mr Albanese for the top job, and he is still considering that option.

Multiple Labor sources said a deal between Mr Albanese and Mr Chalmers was likely but not yet finalised on Wednesday afternoon.

Under that scenario, the ticket would call on Shoppies union figure Don Farrell to vacate the Senate deputy leadership position to allow a female duo of Penny Wong and Kristina Keneally to lead the Labor Party in the upper house

...

This Albanese chap, am I right in reading that he has never held a post-graduation job outside of politics?
Seems he just did the classic route of MP bag carrier, MP. Not sure about Australia but that sort of background is anathema to swathes of the electorate in the UK, commonly referred to as the 'Professional Politician' and has given us such genii as Osborne, Clegg, Cameron, the Milibands etc.

How the global push against Huawei began in a Canberra basement

By Cassell Bryan-Low and Colin Packham
May 22, 2019 — 10.20am

Canberra: In early 2018, in a complex of low-rise buildings in the Australian capital, a team of government hackers was engaging in a destructive digital war game.

The operatives – agents of the Australian Signals Directorate, the nation's top-secret eavesdropping agency – had been given a challenge.

With all the offensive cyber tools at their disposal, what harm could they inflict if they had access to equipment installed in the 5G network, the next-generation mobile communications technology, of a target nation?

What the team found, say current and former government officials, was sobering for Australian security and political leaders: the offensive potential of 5G was so great that if Australia were on the receiving end of such attacks, the country could be seriously exposed.

The understanding of how 5G could be exploited for spying and to sabotage critical infrastructure changed everything for the Australians, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

Mike Burgess, the head of the signals directorate, recently explained why the security of fifth generation, or 5G, technology was so important. It will be integral to the communications at the heart of a country's critical infrastructure - everything from electric power to water supplies to sewage, he said in a March speech at a Sydney research institute.

Washington is widely seen as having taken the initiative in the global campaign against Huawei Technologies, a tech juggernaut that in the three decades since its founding has become a pillar of Beijing's bid to expand its global influence.

Yet interviews with more than two dozen current and former Western officials show it was the Australians who led the way in pressing for action on 5G; that the United States was initially slow to act; and that Britain and other European countries are caught between security concerns and the competitive prices offered by Huawei.

The Australians had long harboured misgivings about Huawei in existing networks, but the 5G war game was a turning point.

About six months after the simulation began, the Australian government effectively banned Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecom networking gear, from any involvement in its 5G plans. An Australian government spokeswoman declined to comment on the war game.

After the Australians shared their findings with US leaders, other countries, including the United States, moved to restrict Huawei.

The anti-Huawei campaign intensified last week, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively banned the use of Huawei equipment in US telecom networks on national security grounds and the Commerce Department put limits on the firm's purchasing of US technology. Google's parent, Alphabet, suspended some of its business with Huawei.

Until the middle of last year, the US government largely "wasn't paying attention," said retired US Marine Corps General James Jones, who served as national security adviser to President Barack Obama. What spurred senior US officials into action? A sudden dawning of what 5G will bring, according to Jones.

"This has been a very, very fast-moving realisation" in terms of understanding the technology, he said. "I think most people were treating it as a kind of evolutionary step as opposed to a revolutionary step. And now that light has come on."

...

Interesting read, that... at first I was impatient, thinking it was more fluff than stuff but perservering and reading the whole thing is well worth the time,

cheers kiap. The first paragraph missing changes the context a little mate...

Albo v ScoMo...

it'll be an o-down.

Admire your optimism, Mat.

Albo v ScoMo...

it'll be an o-down.

“I’m really into Gang of Youths at the moment and I voted for their song ‘Let Me Down Easy’ in the Triple J Hottest 100,” DJ Albo tells InDaily.

“It’s a great track, you know – it starts with the big bass and it kicks off from there.”

...

“I’ll be playing some Gang of Youths, for sure, as well as Vera Blue, Tkay Maidza, Sticky Fingers, The Cure, New Order, Polish Club and [David] Bowie,” he says.

You might pardon the intrusion gents for a quick question.

Is three years not very short for a fixed term parliament?

Thought provoking article

https://quillette.com/2019/05/20/at-aus ... -to-roost/

Senior Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese is set to become the party's next leader, promising to sharpen its economic message and refocus on its traditional blue-collar base, after his only remaining challenger, Jim Chalmers, pulled out of the race.

Dr Chalmers spent Thursday morning calling colleagues to see if he had the numbers to get through a five-week leadership ballot but called Mr Albanese before lunch to offer him his "enthusiastic support".

"There were good reasons to run," he said. "But in the end I couldn’t be assured of winning, and if I did win, the extra responsibilities of leadership would make it much harder to do my bit at home while the youngest of our three little kids is only five months old."

Dr Chalmers, the opposition's Queensland-based finance spokesman, remains the favourite to become deputy leader, with his withdrawal from the contest viewed favourably among colleagues. The Brisbane MP, from the right faction of the party, is likely to be paired with Mr Albanese, as the opposition looks to regain support in northern Australia.

I honestly don't understand why we have had nearly ten years of pretending that the Adani Carmichael mine is viable. Here's some really simple maths explaining why it just doesn't stand up financially:

1. Plan is for a 10m ton per year mine, rising to 20mtpa

2. Galilee coal is ~5,000kcal/kg NAR -- about the same as Indonesian Envirocoal which currently sells for $66/ton before shipping costs (at a time when thermal coal prices are at multiyear highs)

3. So your revenue is ~$660m in the first stage

4. What are the mining costs? Adani doesn't say but BHP's Mt Arthur, a ~20mtpa in the better-located Hunter Valley run by one of the most efficient miners in the world, does $46/ton. So that's ~$460m a year on mining costs, leaving $200m/year left over.

5. But wait! You have to build the mine and a railway first. Again Adani are rubbery on the numbers but the best estimate from the unofficial figures they've put out for the scaled-down project are $1.5bn for the mine and $1.5bn for the railway. So that's $3bn.

6. Adani owns Abbot Point port, which is a project with a guaranteed customer (Glencore). Its bonds on this yield about 7% which is a good proxy for what they'd pay for the Carmichael project. 7% of A$3bn is US$140m of interest each year.

7. So we're down to $60m of profit. But wait! The railway they're building only gets you halfway to the coast. They'd have to pay Aurizon for the remaining distance which ballpark comes to about $6/ton on 10mtpa of product. The project is now not making a cent of profit.

8. BUT WAIT! You also have to amortize the loan principal, and depreciate your A$3bn/US$2bn capital asset. Hard to see how accountants would allow a depreciation schedule longer than 30 years and you'd have to amortize over -- guessing here -- ~10.

9. That puts you an extra ~$260m the hole. Adani is losing $26 on every ton it digs up. More if coal prices fall from their current highs.

10. If the output rises to 20mtpa this maths improves, sorta. You have $400m of gross profit. But then subtract the $140m in interest, $260m in D&A and now $120m to Aurizon and you're still losing $6/ton.

11. And the plan is to self-fund the expansion to 20mtpa, which clearly doesn't work because the 10mtpa mine is already losing money so can't self-fund a chook raffle.

PS an interesting parallel is Glencore's Wandoan mine, a 1.2bn ton 5000/kcal project in the Darling Downs. It's about half the rail distance to port of Carmichael (and remember that rail freight is one of the biggest cost elements for coal) but Glencore mothballed it in 2012ish

Wandoan is basically a more viable version of Carmichael, but Glencore are convinced that developing it would crash that end of the seaborne coal market and have promised to cap their thermal coal output at current levels.

This isn't because they're scared of greenies -- are you fkin kidding me? It's because Glencore are really good at forecasting long-run supply-demand dynamics and they don't see sufficient demand to justify additional supply. People should take that judgement seriously.

I'd just like to take a moment to address the proposed Adani coal mine which is going to occupy some media space over coming weeks and suggest this as valuable analysis on why the project is a dud and a con...

https://twitter.com/davidfickling/statu ... 5124242432

Personally, I don't want any new thermal coal mines, but putting the environmental realities to one side, financially, what does it matter if the mine is projected to lose money? Genuine question. Adani won't stay and jobs won't be realised? Government funds all coming to nothing?

I thought Adani wanted to be vertically integrated, so comparing to Indo coal is a bit irrelevant?

(d) "Coal prices in the market don't matter because we're selling to our own coal generators" -- an argument Adani have made. But of course, they do. Why build a A$3bn infrastructure project to buy low-quality coal from a remote basin when you could buy it for less on-market?

And more to the point, the generator still has to sell *electricity*, and at present coal plants in India are being badly undercut by renewables, operating at loss-making capacity factors, and loading up the entire Indian financial sector with bad debts.

There's a serious financial risk to Australia if any govt funds are used to set this thing up, which is a ridiculously likely scenario.

as for Adani's vertical integration,



The Carmichael Coal project strikes me as having devolved from a tenuously viable project 7 years ago, swamped by the rise of renewable technology at scale and now noting more than a vanity project for Guatam Adani and Matt Canavan.

I like Albo but I don't even know what this means...

"I believe very firmly that this country needs a Labor Government that is committed not to economic growth for its own sake, but to growth in order to expand jobs, opportunity for workers, families and their communities".

From his press conference today.

At that rate the Greens will form government in 2095

In Ipsos’s defence, the company had long been ringing alarm bells for Bill Shorten by predicting a worryingly low primary vote - the final poll had Labor gaining just 33 per cent of first preferences. These warnings were criticised by rival media outlets or, in the case of the Labor campaign team, ignored. As of Thursday afternoon the AEC count has the Labor primary vote from Saturday at 33.72 per cent.

But Ipsos can’t walk away from the fact its overall polling forecast the wrong result. Moreover, polling companies are the main reason Saturday night’s result took voters, the media and many political operatives by surprise.

The implications of our major pollsters making the same mistakes in a consistent way are serious.

ANU vice-chancellor and Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt wrote in The Guardian earlier this week the likelihood of the 16 polls published during the campaign predicting such a narrow range of results was greater than 100,000 to 1. He went on to suggest that “the polls have been manipulated, probably unintentionally, to give the same answers as each other”.

Ipsos director Jessica Elgood told me Schmidt’s analysis should be included in an industry-wide review, in which Ipsos would gladly participate.

But it’s not just the pollsters who need to reflect on their approach in the wake of this election - the Herald and Age newsrooms have some decisions to make.

Many months before the election, so therefore not influenced by the polls’ failure, we agreed that we would reassess our arrangements after May 18. From this week we have no ongoing contract with Ipsos or any other polling company.

This is not to say we will never poll again. As chief political correspondent David Crowe says, accurate polling can be an invaluable reality check when journalists are faced with relentless spinning by political parties, interest groups and think tanks.

However, we have a responsibility to put our finite reporting resources into journalism that best serves our readers. During this campaign our best reporting on the mood of the electorate was done by journalists out on the road (and I don’t mean the carefully controlled campaign busses organised by the political parties). Michael Koziol’s report from Queensland midway through the race, which suggested Labor was in deep trouble north of the Tweed, was informed by old-fashioned boot-leather journalism. Nick Bonyhady detected no dramatic shift to Labor as he travelled from Hobart to Cairns on public transport.

The cadence of polls is also worth examining. Very few would argue the country has been well-served by the political class’s obsession with the fortnightly Newspolls, which Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull weaponised to their advantage and their demise.

“Did polling create a parallel universe where all the activity of the past few years, especially the leadership coups and prime ministerial changes, were based on illusions, phantoms of public opinion that did not exist,” Labor pollster John Utting wrote in The Australian Financial Review.

He is sometimes known as DJ ALBO



https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newsl ... 66a20bd177





https://indaily.com.au/arts-and-culture ... -adelaide/

I dunno really mate...

unless they expect to gain some financial assistance that will help them reduce their losses so far.

As much as I would have preferred to see Albo as leader instead of Shorty, I am of the opinion that he is not the answer. Six more years of Scummo.

Never seen the point of propping up marginal businesses