PIVOT TO TRUMP
The repercussions of Donald Trump returning to the White House in January are still dominating global and domestic headlines as governments and institutions brace for the prospect of the 78-year-old once again dominating the world stage.
The shockwaves of Trump’s victory are manifesting in endless ways, with the Coalition seemingly bursting with ideas and policies for what Australia should do next. As flagged yesterday, Nationals MPs calling for a pledge to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change and a reassessment on supporting net zero by 2050 has been rather rapidly rejected.
The Australian now flags Coalition MPs are calling for Australia to embrace cryptocurrency following the support Trump received from blockchain investors and the high-profile figures in his team who strongly support crypto. The paper reports Liberal MP Simon Kennedy expressed his support for the sector and called for clearer government regulation during an address to the National Tech Summit in Melbourne.
Opposition financial services spokesperson Luke Howarth also reckons he’s spoken to people in the crypto industry who aren’t happy with Labor, while Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg said of the Coalition’s current crypto plans: “We’re yet to announce all the details of our policy, but we have a strong policy for the last election … and that remains our starting point.” Meanwhile, the Labor government’s special envoy for digital resilience, Andrew Charlton, told the paper: “Australia can’t be left behind — crypto is not only an important financial asset, the technology underneath it will be transformative for the finance industry.”
The Financial Times highlights US stocks including Elon Musk’s Tesla are currently up, with the US dollar at a four-month high and bitcoin hitting a new record high.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, as has been written countless times, has already embraced parts of the Trump playbook and has been using the Republican’s favoured tactic of asking if people feel better off since the last election. On ABC’s 7.30 last night, Treasurer Jim Chalmers hit out at Dutton’s messaging, highlighting the “are you better off” question dates back to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 US election. “Peter Dutton can rip off slogans from 44 years ago, but he can’t come up with any credible or costed economic policies, and that should be his focus,” the treasurer said.
However, Chalmers did also admit the government had a lot of ground to make up when it came to providing cost of living relief to Australians, as the polling continues to show voters want more from the government. “Australians are doing it really very tough, and they’d be doing it even tougher were it not for our cost of living help, the tax cuts, the wages policy, the energy rebates,” Chalmers told 7.30. “We know people have got a lot of ground to make up. We know that they’re under pressure.”
During the interview, Chalmers repeated his belief Australia would be able to weather whatever tariffs Trump imposed and any other impacts on the domestic and global economies caused by his presidency.
When it comes to the state of the economy and cost of living, Guardian Australia has led overnight on new research from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute which has found three in five Australian renters expect to never own their own home.
The AAP also flags the board of supermarket chain Coles is preparing for a shareholder grilling at its annual general meeting in Melbourne, while Aldi fronts an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission inquiry into the supermarket sector.
WORLD ON FIRE
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) decided to help everyone’s nerves earlier by announcing 2024 is on track to be the world’s warmest year on record.
The BBC reports the WMO said between January and September this year the global average temperature was around 1.54C above that of the late 19th Century. The 1.5C target set in the aforementioned Paris Agreement has not yet been breached though, according to the UN, because it refers to a longer-term average.
More than 100 heads of state and government are expected to attend COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, over the coming two weeks, although the likes of US President Joe Biden and Australian PM Anthony Albanese will not be in attendance.
On Monday, John Podesta, the current US climate envoy, reflected on the prospect of another Donald Trump presidency. “For those of us dedicated to climate action, the election was bitterly disappointing, particularly because of the unprecedented resource that Biden and Harris brought to the fight,” the BBC quotes him as saying. Podesta said the result of the American election was “more difficult to tolerate as the dangers we face become more catastrophic”.
Talking of the US election (for a change), Trump administration appointments are continuing to trickle through, with Tom Homan, who served as acting director of the Immigration Department during the first Trump presidency, named as “border tsar”. It has also been confirmed New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik will become US ambassador to the United Nations.
CNN cites two sources familiar with the planning process in reporting Stephen Miller will be made White House deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller was a senior advisor to Trump during the first administration. CNN flags Miller has been “a leading advocate for a more restrictive immigration policy and is expected to take on an expanded role in the president-elect’s second term”. As CBS News recalls, Trump has pledged to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants as president.
Elsewhere in world news, the UK Labour government is apparently intrigued by the proposal from the Australian government to ban social media for children under 16.
The Times reports ministers are considering similar plans to the ones announced by Albanese recently. The UK government is apparently weighing up supporting a private member’s bill that would raise the age at which social media companies would be allowed to collect data on children.
The paper reports that Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle is said to be watching the developments in Australia with interest, while Health Secretary Wes Streeting has also previously expressed support for the bill. A government source is quoted as saying: “It’s a ripe area and it’s not just a kind of middle-class mum’s concern, it’s across the country.” Make of that quote what you will.
Finally, the headline of the week has maybe already gone to Guardian Australia’s “‘I can hear dry-retching from inside’: Queuing for hours to smell Geelong’s corpse plant”.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
Thousands of cyclists have brought traffic in China to a standstill thanks to a viral quest for dumplings.
Back in June, four university students in Zhengzhou decided to ride share bikes several hours to Kaifeng in search of the ancient city’s famous oversized soup dumplings, The Guardian reports. Their adventure captivated social media, with one of the four posting: “You don’t get a second chance at youth, so you must go for a spontaneous trip with friends”, the BBC said.
Fast-forward to last Friday and a reported 100,000 people, known as the “Night Riding Army”, took part in the same epic odyssey and, according to The Guardian, jammed up traffic, overwhelmed Kaifeng and attracted the attention of the authorities in the process.
Sky News reports police in Henan province have now closed the bike lanes connecting Zhengzhou and Kaifeng in an attempt to reduce the number of students making the 37-mile journey. Three rental bike providers in the province also said their bikes would become locked if ridden outside of designated zones in Zhengzhou.
Henan University student Liu Lulu told state media outlet China Daily of the ride: “People sang together and cheered for each other while climbing uphill together. I could feel the passion of the young people. And it was much more than a bike ride.”
Say What?
I think we should just take a deep breath on trying to be Trump-esque here in Australia.
David Littleproud
The National Party leader responded to calls from within his own party for the Coalition to promise to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change and reconsider its support for net zero by 2050 in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the US election.
CRIKEY RECAP
Jim Chalmers says the direct impacts on Australia of tariffs are unlikely to be too big, given a floating exchange rate, but the bigger threat will come from the eruption of a trade war. As it stands, Trump plans to impose punitive tariffs on our biggest trading partner, China, and promises to make our third-largest trading partner, the European Union, “pay a big price”. Both are almost certain to retaliate with their own sanctions on US products. How Trump reacts to that retaliation, and what he does when — as happened last time he imposed tariffs — the US trade deficit worsens, rather than shrinks, could determine whether we have a full-blown trade war that harms economies everywhere.
Australians, too, want retaliatory tariffs in response to any Trump tariffs on Australian exports: 46% of respondents to a poll this week want sanctions applied to US exports, with just 13% opposed. Or, to put it another way, just 13% of respondents understand the most basic aspects of economics and trade.
Perhaps it’s because 46% of voters are confused by the relatively innocuous term “tariff”, and don’t understand that it means “tax” — a consumption tax, on imports, which increases prices unless the importer and/or the retailer selling the imports opts to pay the tariff themselves, the odds of which are vanishingly small. So, 46% of voters want to increase prices, despite apparently being worried about the cost of living, just because Donald Trump wants Americans to pay higher prices. It’s like a competition to see who can punch themselves in the face harder.
I will never trust my instincts again, nor be so dismissive of people I previously considered fools and simpletons. After all, maybe it was I who was both fool and simpleton. I’m not saying I’m wrong about what I think and believe, or that I’ll betray my principles any time soon. What I’m saying is I’m in the minority. In a battle that is often binary and about barracking rather than holding anyone to account, perhaps we shouldn’t be so intolerant of someone wanting to express a contrary point of view. It may well be wrong-headed, but no-one appreciates being laughed off and sniggered at!
Of course, I’m a so-called comedian and don’t tend to take any of what’s happening in the world all that seriously. Politics, especially. But some folk aren’t in the mood for jokes about things they believe in, particularly when they’re at the expense of something or someone they’ve imbued with a pulsating messianic glow and are convinced will deliver them from the evils of the deep state and whatever else it is preventing them from being rich and beautiful like the stars on TV.
In real life, though, I shouldn’t be as snotty as that. Nor should I be condescending about their simple, home-spun and uneducated ways. They can’t help being ignorant, and who am I to say they are and whose fault it is they can’t see it. Same with willful stupidity. I need to get my head out of the clouds (or very likely, my arse), get down off my nose-bleedingly high horse, and fall down the steps of my ivory tower so I can rub shoulders with the great unwashed and largely unvaccinated hoi polloi (I’ve probably been wrong about Ivermectin too).
One of the loudest voices campaigning against the social media giants has been News Corp, which launched a campaign called “Let Them Be Kids” and whose executive chair has called for social media companies to be regulated by way of a “social license”.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese singled out the company’s campaign as one of the key driving factors behind the policy (which has strong bipartisan support), with News Corp scribes insisting that the company is merely motivated by the welfare of children. But Crikey’s political editor Bernard Keane has previously argued that that is a somewhat novel position for the company to take given its track record, particularly when it comes to the welfare of Indigenous kids or the “miserable little doom goblins” that believe in climate change.
The efficacy of a ban is also contested. The vast majority of academics who research teen use of social media and the internet don’t support a full ban for children, and Crikey’s Cam Wilson argues the government has cowed to “vibes and vested interests”.
So how did we actually get here? Crikey looks back at the timeline.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Get out of our way, Trump’s ‘border tsar’ tells Democrats fighting deportation plans (BBC)
Kremlin says reports of Trump-Putin call about Ukraine are ‘pure fiction’ (The Guardian)
Banksy forgeries: Huge European fake art network uncovered in Italy (Reuters)
PsiQuantum’s $1bn deal under threat as Queensland’s LNP government launches funding review (The Australian) ($)
Who decides what’s true? The ‘gaping hole’ in Labor’s misinformation bill (The Sydney Morning Herald) ($)
‘Wicked’ Dolls: Mattel Apologizes for Mistakenly Linking to Adult Porn Site on Packaging (The Hollywood Reporter)
THE COMMENTARIAT
The Trump shadow hanging over Baku — The Editorial Board (The Financial Times): An early test of how the election result will reverberate will come in Baku. Trump’s campaign team has said he will again pull the US out of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which he announced in 2017 and formally did in late 2020, only to watch Joe Biden restore membership in early 2021.
No country followed the US out then and there is no sign of any exodus forming now, so far. But Trump advisers hope the incoming president will this time pull the US out of the Paris Agreement’s parent treaty, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — a harder-to-reverse step that would deal a much deeper blow to international collaboration. That prospect is expected to taint a central task in Baku, where envoys are due to agree on a new finance goal to help poorer countries deal with a hotter climate.
Wealthy nations struggled to meet on time an earlier target of $100 billion a year first formally agreed in 2010. Negotiating a larger goal on the eve of a potential US Paris pullout is a steep ask. Ultimately, Trump is unlikely to kill off the COP process nor bring the energy transition to a halt. But the EU and China must be ready to help fill a US void. Further delay in a climate shift that is already going at a dangerously glacial pace is something the world cannot afford.
Donald Trump says Kamala Harris cared more for trans rights than struggling Americans. Can his potent message work in Australia? — Patricia Karvelas (ABC): Pronouns and gender are a proxy for so much more. This conversation is being weaponised to send messages about ordinary people versus “elites”, setting up tension between “us” and “them”.
Again on Sunday Dutton was using key Trump language and messages including Trump’s most potent line of all, are you better off than you were four years ago? Or three years ago, in our context.
And while Dutton may have stepped back from abortion, he’s all in on this theme, and not only used pronouns again on Sunday but added Aboriginal rights and the Voice referendum in a list to frame the Albanese government as being out of touch with the mainstream.
