Before we proceed to a brief summary of electorally relevant current events in federal politics, please note the other quality content that it’s pushing down the order: a guest post from Adrian Beaumont on the threat of US debt default and other international events, a post on a Tasmanian poll with a summary of recent events in that state, and a detailed analysis of results from last year’s federal election in thirteen seats in inner Melbourne.
• The Fadden by-election has been set for July 25, with nominations to close on June 23. As was covered in the previous post, a Liberal National Party preselection that has attracted five nominees will be conducted today. Phillip Coorey of the Financial Review reports that Anthony Albanese would rather Labor forfeit the by-election for a seat the LNP holds on a 10.6% margin, but must reckon with a local branch “agitating to run a candidate”.
• The New South Wales Liberal Party will hold its preselection this weekend to fill the Senate vacancy resulting from the death of Jim Molan in January. The field have candidates has narrowed to three: former state Transport Minister Andrew Constance, former state party president Maria Kovacic and Space Industry Association chief executive James Brown. The Sydney Morning Herald reports the latter has a long list of high-profile backers including John Howard, Julie Bishop and Dave Sharma.
• The Byron Shire Echo reports comedian Mandy Nolan will again run as the Greens candidate for the Byron Bay and Tweed Heads region seat of Richmond at the next federal election. Nolan added 5.0% to the party’s primary vote share last May to outpoll the Nationals, although preferences from right-wing minor parties pushed the Nationals candidate ahead of her at the final exclusion.
It a
“ I have to declare I’m a huge Musk fan re his technology. His personal life and political drift is a different matter. I’ve been driving a Tesla since 2019, depend on Starlink, have two Tesla powerwall batteries in my own drift toward off grid, would have Tesla roof tiles if I could (have ground mounted solar), would get an Optimus if ($) and when (ever), and if I needed to connect my spinal cord to my brain …. The guy is some boundary pusher.”
Agree with all your sentiments, positive and negative, with one exception. Musk promised that autonomous evs would be a thing, with regulatory approval as such, in various countries around the world starting in 2021. He is both boundary pusher and . . . a pusher of plenty of bs. Hence polarised attitudes of course.
Musk is reminiscent of those great Captains of Industry of the Nineteenth Century. Most especially, George Westinghouse.
Player One says:
Friday, May 26, 2023 at 6:28 pm
Rusty Groupy Stooge @ #131 Friday, May 26th, 2023 – 1:05 pm
We can specialise in things where our advantages lie.
I think we already are. Digging stuff up for export is soon going to be our only significant industry. Of course, it doesn’t require a skilled workforce and doesn’t actually employ many people, but it does make a shitload of money for a very few, and surely that’s enough?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
As Phillip Adams has stated in the past – Australia is basically a donut
Windhover @ #200 Friday, May 26th, 2023 – 6:45 pm
Well, here’s the latest FSD (Full Self Drive) 11.4.1.
It’s getting pretty good.
A 10 minute no hands smack your gob drive around San Fran at 50 mph. It will get to point that insurance with be cheaper for the Auto Drive than for the apes. And with no one else within cooey of this level of AI, who’s not to say this technology won’t be the next that other manufacturers scramble for. There’s heaps of uploads of FSD – San Fran to LA FSD for example, but takes a bit longer. 😉
https://youtu.be/tZ67R-ifsIk
And once RoboTaxis are a thing, you can have your Tesla out all night working while you dream the sweet dreams.
The whole arson for hire thing in relation to the Surry Hills fire seems grossly farfetched. I could be wrong but seems highly unlikely. These kids will be interrogated and all it would take would be for the police to remind them that they face harsh prison time and they would spill the beans.
According to Ch 7 news the victim was shot about a minute after the police arrived. Also their body cameras were not turned on. Ch 7 also interviewed the victim’s brother who denied a police claim that he “was known to police”.
At the moment the MSM seem to be taking a very critical view of NSW police actions, which is quite a turnaround. We now need to wait and see how the MSM will treat any future confrontation between an Indigenous person and police.
When I first heard about the fire in Surry Hills I was hoping that it was the nearby News Corp building . Sadly I was disappointed.
EV Council article and submission to government re emissions. There’s an ability to sign in support of the EVC submission to government at the bottom of the article for those of us so inclined.
https://thedriven.io/2023/05/25/ev-council-says-vehicle-standards-needs-to-catch-up-with-rest-of-world-before-2030/
A Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker provided prosecutors key evidence in Justice Department’s investigation of Donald Trump over the former president’s handling of classified documents, The New York Times reports.
The maintenance worker told authorities that they witnessed an aide moving boxes into a storage room the day before a Trump lawyer met with FBI agents and a prosecutor who visited the former president’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents.
The worker had offered to help the aide move the boxes, according to the report, but the worker was not aware of what was in the boxes. The aide is identified as Walt Nauta, who served as Trump’s valet in the White House.
The revelation follows reporting from The Washington Post earlier in the day that two of the former president’s employees moved boxes containing papers in a development that’s being viewed as suspicious by investigators. Additionally, The Post reported that Trump’s aides conducted a “dress rehearsal” for moving sensitive documents before his office received the May 2022 subpoena.
The Times’ Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman write that “The worker’s account is potentially significant to prosecutors as they piece together details of how Mr. Trump handled sensitive documents he took with him from the White House upon leaving office and whether he obstructed efforts by the Justice Department and the National Archives to retrieve them.”
“Mr. Trump was found to have been keeping some of the documents in the storage room where Mr. Nauta and the maintenance worker were moving boxes on the day before the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, Jay Bratt, traveled to Mar-a-Lago last June to seek the return of any government materials being held by the former president.” Weeks earlier the Justice Department issued a subpoena demanding the return of the documents.
Windhover : “autonomous evs”
Autonomous EV requires AI. That’s why Musk wants it; AI that is. It’s transactional. Like Forrest; A fellow industrialist
ItzaDream says:
Friday, May 26, 2023 at 7:20 pm
Windhover @ #200 Friday, May 26th, 2023 – 6:45 pm
Agree with all your sentiments, positive and negative, with one exception. Musk promised that autonomous evs would be a thing, with regulatory approval as such, in various countries around the world starting in 2021. He is both boundary pusher and . . . a pusher of plenty of bs. Hence polarised attitudes of course.
Well, here’s the latest FSD (Full Self Drive) 11.4.1.
It’s getting pretty good.
A 10 minute no hands smack your gob drive around San Fran at 50 mph. It will get to point that insurance with be cheaper for the Auto Drive than for the apes. And with no one else within cooey of this level of AI, who’s not to say this technology won’t be the next that other manufacturers scramble for. There’s heaps of uploads of FSD – San Fran to LA FSD for example, but takes a bit longer.
https://youtu.be/tZ67R-ifsIk
And once RoboTaxis are a thing, you can have your Tesla out all night working while you dream the sweet dreams.
————————————-
Itza
Yep, good continual FSD improvement, never as fast as we’d like but I’m confident it’ll get there soon enough. The impact on safety, insurance and transport as a service (TAS), particularly in cities, will be revolutionary.
S. Simpson says:
Friday, May 26, 2023 at 7:30 pm
The whole arson for hire thing in relation to the Surry Hills fire seems grossly farfetched. I could be wrong but seems highly unlikely.
________________
That’s because you don’t understand the criminal mind like Socrates. He assures us that when looking for top quality arson work you go to local 13 year olds.
“The limited research I’ve done continues to identify understandable psychological misgivings of humans working with humanoids. Even battlefield applications appear best suited to well-balanced wheeled or tracked platforms rather than humanoid soldiers.”
Or cheap and basically disposable. But cheap is hard to control or “tune” using conventional means, hence the need for AI here too, in the form of deep reinforcement learning. I have a fantastic student working on aspects of this, co-supervised by a simply excellent roboticist (I’m just the third wheel/last co-author).
The arson by developers theory made some sense as a first hunch when little was known but the wise conspiracist would have leaped off that horse today as soon as the likely culprits were known.
I think anything promised with a 2021 deadline in this world has a pretty good excuse for not making it. Self driving cars also run up against the issue that people expect them to be perfect; every bingle is held against them. To me, a few percent better than the average human driver is good enough to get them on the road, and they’ll only get better, but for legal and regulatory reasons I think the bar is being set much higher than that. Still, we are seeing a small number of makers in small areas take the leap from “L2” systems where the driver must legally keep their eyes on the road, hands on the wheel etc to L3 where the driver isn’t legally responsible unless the system tells them it needs them to take back over manual driving. Full self driving is coming, and with it a complete change to our cities, probably moving away from anywhere near as much private car ownership and need for parking in residential housing and cheaper and easier mobility. And the improved sleep, relaxation or productivity that all those driving hours can be used when they no longer need to be spent focussing on the road!
nath
Musk is reminiscent of those great Captains of Industry of the Nineteenth Century. Most especially, George Westinghouse.
Unlike the contemporary robber barons, George Westinghouse treated his employees well – by the standards of the day. Can that be said of Elon Musk?
Shogun says:
Friday, May 26, 2023 at 8:57 pm
nath
Musk is reminiscent of those great Captains of Industry of the Nineteenth Century. Most especially, George Westinghouse.
Unlike the contemporary robber barons, George Westinghouse treated his employees well – by the standards of the day. Can that be said of Elon Musk?
____________
Well, he’s no Bezos. As far as we know.
The other way to look at the fire is arson by neglect- leave it sitting vacant in the city for 10 years, with basically free access (it was inhabited by people sleeping rough and young vandals) and sooner or later the ‘heritage’ building will tumble down by decay or misadventure.
Dandy Murray @ #160 Friday, May 26th, 2023 – 2:36 pm
Maybe, though I’d just call it “sanity prevails”. Do we have manufacturer-exclusive petrol stations? No, because that would be a horrendously bad idea. Manufacturer-exclusive charging stations are exactly as bad of an idea.
It is well known that anything listed for heritage protection is likely to spontaneously combust
nath
That’s because you don’t understand the criminal mind like Socrates. He assures us that when looking for top quality arson work you go to local 13 year olds.
I saw the results of this arson work this morning. It was hardly top quality. Totally botched, mess everywhere.
In future, if you want the job done properly, avoid sourcing your arsonists from anyone named ‘Fagin’.
The Tesla deal with Ford just handed Elon a few Billion to roll out an even bigger charging network:
___________________
The move helps Tesla qualify for a share of billions of federal dollars on offer to improve the experience of charging electric vehicles in America…. as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging.
https://fortune.com/2023/05/25/tesla-ford-charging-station-deal-unwelcome-for-tesla-owners-congestion/
“Do we have manufacturer-exclusive petrol stations?”
No, but we do have fuel standards.
(Yeah yeah, I know)
Shogun says:
In future, if you want the job done properly, avoid sourcing your arsonists from anyone named ‘Fagin’.
____________
The Artful Dodger has always been a personal hero of mine. And as a teenage thief I emulated his exploits.
World’s richest people ($ billion)
Bernard Arnault: 219.8
Elon Musk: 187.5
Jeff Bezos: 137.8
Larry Ellison: 129.5
Bill Gates: 114
Warren Buffet: 111
Larry Page: 105
Steve Ballmer: 100.3
Sergey Brin: 99.7
Carlos Slim: 96.7
Michael Bloomberg: 94.5
Mark Zuckerberg: 89.9
Mukesh Ambani: 89.1
Pi @ #209 Friday, May 26th, 2023 – 7:52 pm
Not “requires”, exactly. That’s just (part of) the approach everyone is gunning for right now. AI’s flavor-du-jour status doesn’t rule out alternative solutions.
ar: Not “requires”,
Yes. Quite right. As if anyone could make such a call. mea culpa.
Zwaktyld :
Indeed.
Player One says:
Friday, May 26, 2023 at 6:28 pm
Rusty Groupy Stooge @ #131 Friday, May 26th, 2023 – 1:05 pm
We can specialise in things where our advantages lie.
I think we already are. Digging stuff up for export is soon going to be our only significant industry. Of course, it doesn’t require a skilled workforce and doesn’t actually employ many people, but it does make a shitload of money for a very few, and surely that’s enough?
The resources sector makes up about 1/6 of the economy….a bit less than health and education, about 2.5 times greater than manufacturing and about double the size of the construction sector. Australia has an advantage in natural resources. It would be very unusual not to invest in that. It’s true that it’s a capital intense sector. Just as well: capital intense industries have high productivity and generate high per capita income. Sectors that are starved of capital generally produce nothing at all.
What a bunch of cultural savages.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/26/sacred-indigenous-site-on-sunshine-coast-defaced-with-religious-message
A cringe factor is alive and well when it comes to resources. Really, without raw materials the global industrial economy could not operate. The basic needs of the world’s peoples would not be met.
What is really very interesting is that the real terms of trade to resources and agriculture have ceased declining wrt manufacturing for several decades. In general the terms of trade have improved, in some cases very substantially. This follows a very long – at least 200 year long – attrition in the terms of trade to primary production. Australia has been fortunate to have had successful resources and agricultural sectors – bulk commodity sectors. If our 1960s economy had been forced to compete on price terms with, say, China, real industrial wages would be about 1/3 of what they now are. Economic adaptation has conferred very obvious income benefits on Australians. We have diverted resources away from sectors where we are disadvantaged. Good idea.
The desire to relive the 1960s is essentially reactionary. It is feeble nostalgia. It is not going to be realised.
Dr John – what’s your arson tips? How do you do the job properly without unwelcome police interference? Are you fan of the tie a tampon to a mouse and light it inside the building approach?
Carlton sucks
RSG: “It is feeble nostalgia.”
Ha. I love it.
Those who think Australia was “clever” in concentrating essentially all our economic eggs in the unprocessed resources basket might want to read a bit more widely. Here is a pretty good one page summary …
https://www.sydney.edu.au/business/news-and-events/news/2021/12/06/going-for-gold-in-economic-complexity.html
Australia has traditionally relied on being the “lucky country”, but it was probably not wise to rely on luck alone. We have missed the boat on manufacturing anything of significance here, but there may still be opportunities to add value to our exports that will assist other countries to do so, rather than just digging them up and shipping them out essentially unprocessed, as we currently do.
We may still have potential. But what we no longer have is time.
I’m more interested in the person who can give us all our own personal space ship, a la The Jetsons.
I’m also a big supporter of the lady whose name escapes me right now but who leads the UN Climate Change group that reported this week that, considering the rate of global implementation of renewable energy projects, we look like we will be able to keep the global heating to 1.5 degrees. 🙂
News on the latest cynical Russian missile strike upon a civilian target in Ukraine – this time, a medical facility in the city of Dnipro:
“The death toll from a Russian missile attack in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro has risen to two, with 23 people wounded, Reuters reports.
A Russian missile hit a clinic in Dnipro overnight, killing a 69-year-old man had been killed as he was “just passing by”, the regional governor said.
Serhiy Lysak said another man’s body had been pulled out of the rubble, and that 21 of the 23 wounded had been taken to hospital, with three seriously injured.”
“Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, reports that the number of injured in the strike on a Dnipro medical facility has increased to 30. It cited regional governor Serhiy Lysak.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/may/26/russia-ukraine-war-live-missiles-launched-at-kyiv-overnight-japan-announces-new-sanctions-against-moscow?filterKeyEvents=false
Cat perhaps you should read the latest paper from James Hansen. It was his testimony to Congress that led to the establishment of the IPCC. In this paper he and his Co authors suggest that the earth system sensitivity the current forcings will lead to an eventual temperature rise of 8-10°C
This is over a millennium or so. But short term 1.5°C will be seem most likely within the next few years.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/CommittedWarming.25May2023.pdf
Socrates,
I am assuming that you are referring to the fire which destroyed Ipswich Reeds Department Store (owned by Kern Corporation) in 1984. I worked in the Buying Office of Reeds at the time of the fire which was not burnt because it was separated from the main building by a loading dock (indeed I was the first one – other than the fieries – back into the building on the morning of the fire). At the time I had no doubt it was an “insurance job” because the owners had been trying to sell it. However, a young street kid (girl) was charged and convicted with arson (there may have been others but she was the scapegoat as she was well known on the streets by the cops.)
Interestingly, a few years later I worked in the Ipswich Probation and Parole Office and got to meet her. Her Probation Officer was in no doubt of her innocence – I can’t remember exactly whether she was pardoned or not, but I do believe that she was exonerated. I saw her many years later at a local MacDonalds where she was having a meal with her grand children.
I too smell a rat with respect to the Sydney fire.
Oh, and also the Reeds building – formerly Cribb and Foote – was heritage listed.
Player One says:
Friday, May 26, 2023 at 10:47 pm
Notwithstanding all your laments, it’s very obvious that in your own choices, and like 94% of the Australian workforce, you’ve fled manufacturing. Like so very many others, you’ve also sought a living in the resources sector too. You might ask why it is you’ve chosen not to become even a corporal of industry.
Foul demented potato dutton has mined and unleashed a dark black seam of hatred…
“Sacred Indigenous site on Sunshine Coast defaced with religious message”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/26/sacred-indigenous-site-on-sunshine-coast-defaced-with-religious-message
despicable 😡
Value adding to bulk commodities.
How do you value-add to wheat, or rice? Or to oats and hay? Canola is refined. Barley is malted and turned into beer or whiskey. There are attempts being made to use the proteins in lupins for human consumption. Sugar is refined. There’s value-extraction from sugar. A lot. How to add value to gold? Should we make jewellery for the market in India? In the absence of a stainless steel industry, how to use nickel? How to use copper without an electric cable or electronics industry? Bauxite, zinc, lead, uranium and silver are refined. Coal and gas are shipped in bulk so they can be burned. Hopefully this will soon cease completely. It will soon enough cease in this country, and then there will be no onshore value-adding from coal or gas.
We tried to value-add to iron ore – to upgrade the value embedded in the ore – but the technologies failed.
Australia dominates raw wool production but eventually we almost completely gave up selling even wool tops (cleaned and carded wool). Australia sells raw wool because that is where the money is. The terms of trade do not favour milling wool. They favour growing it. There’s money in fashion – in textiles for apparel – but for all that’s good about them, Launceston, Hobart, Perth, Adelaide, Wangaratta, Sydney and Melbourne are not yet Milan, London, Tokyo or Paris. The textile milling industry – for both wool and cotton – in Australia exists. But it is minute. This is not for the want of trying. We value-add to grape production by making wine and brandy.
Seriously, if Australian resources were to be mostly allocated to value-adding rather than to bulk export, the economy would shrink.
No-one complains that Ukraine mostly exports wheat instead of flour or baguettes. Likewise, we should not take such criticisms of Australian resource exports at face value. They are mostly cringe.
In totally unsurprising news.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/05/26/almost-half-worlds-species-seeing-rapid-population-decline-study-finds
“Seriously, if Australian resources were to be mostly allocated to value-adding rather than to bulk export, the economy would shrink.”
Yeah we shouldn’t think above our station. Dumb c*nts is us.
RP @ #239 Friday, May 26th, 2023 – 11:54 pm
My reading of it suggests a particular focus on Carbon Capture and Storage whilst hypothesising that fossil fuels (or biofuels to the author), continue to be burnt. Whereas, the actual trend, as in Australia and America (if they keep electing Democrats) and other 1st World countries, is to replace the burning of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. So an element of catastrophising appears to be redolent throughout that paper.
Also, Fig 25 and the ‘Best Linear Fit’ line, tends to suggest I was right to say that the suggestion that global heating (or climate forcing as he puts it), can remain at <2C, out to 2040. And that's going on data he has supplied himself.
Of course, he models the catastrophic scenario, so as to alarm laggards and sceptics, no doubt, however, I prefer to be on the side of the angels and to think that we will pull back from the edge of the climate cliff, if only because renewable energy modalities have become the new wealth generator for the Chinese and the Western Capitalist Class.
Also, for the simple reason that electorates don't like seeing their communities burned down or washed away and they love their children and grandchildren and those children and grandchildren love their world. 🙂
https://www.pollbludger.net/2023/05/26/miscellany-fadden-by-election-liberal-and-greens-candidate-selection-open-thread/comment-page-5/#comment-4115207
It isn’t bulk vs value add, it is ‘and’.
Besides banana republic, white trash of Asia, supply chain issues etc tend to be exposed by having too many eggs in one basket, or out alone.
Bad when inevitable shocks happen.
Up the value chain (Porter) is an expression for a reason. As is disrupting the value chain (Gluck).
Mega trends seem to be geopollyTICs, climate change and technological shifts. The likes of Elon Musk seem to have gotten quite the airing on PB of late.
Trade won’t go away. (Main Australian exports iron ore, coal, gas, gold, alu, beef, …, main imports petrol, cars, telecoms, vehicles, computers, …)
Or the Poms being good at pomp and pageantry. French/ Italians at design. Germans at manufacturing and so on. Swiss at pharma and microelectronics, besides squirreling. Americans export 4/ 10 of the world’s arms. Comparative advantage.
Complex economy.
Self-sustainable.
Productivity.
There’s more than blowing up humanity, land clearing, climate change resources, such as services, knowledge and experiences, especially as thinking moves beyond growth to sustainability to circularity.
Planet’s finite.
Permacrisis don’t seem to be going away, be it GWOT/ WW5 IVL, GFC, fires/ flooding/ extreme weather, pandemic, …
I like to use various indices as to the state of nations, take iHDI/ SDG, GNH/ BLI, WCI/ WCR, CPI, … GDP (Australia’s 2/3s services, construction 1/ 10, mining half that, similar for manufacturing though much of it would be assembly and the value from IP would go elsewhere, agriculture a few percent) isn’t as worshipped as it used to be, it seems well-being is in.
Be it WTO, WEF, IMF, OECD all have sections on living standards. Australia does better than the average on most. Same for disposable income. Debt is high, not sure how that’s between good or bad. Though it only shows about 5% of energy as renewable.
Quite good at applied innovation, though there have been notable successes in core research. Though Csiro (Wi-Fi) seems to be under pressure. Telstra Research Labs went some time ago (not that it doesn’t talk thought leadership repackaged from vendors, content, services, devices, networks these days).
Change/ [progression/ conservation] policy since 2022, 2007, 1983 across opportunity, cost of living, education, environment, healthcare, human rights, infrastructure, public safety and security, we shall see.
Besides prior to the end of WW2’s tribunals, UN etc it used to be quite acceptable to explore the unknown, do a deal once there, or just stake a claim.
Risks to be managed seem to feature climate disruption, public health, inequality/ (social) housing, powershift, governance (social, direct, liberal, fascist, theocrazy, commie).
#weatheronPB
Sun cuts silhouettes.
Tight sharp blue sky arcs across.
Uncompromising.
Those who have criticised Stan Grant for his comments about the monarch, and in particular the timing of his comments perhaps missed the intent of the ABC commentary special leading up to the coronation.
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/how-the-abc-s-betrayal-of-stan-grant-exposed-its-racism-problem-20230523-p5dalw.html
Seems to me the perfect timing to discuss the relevance (or otherwise) of the monarchy to Indigenous Australians is during a talking heads special examining how relevant the monarchy is to the lives of Australians!
And from the same article, this might explain a lot about the ABC and how it responds to cultural diversity. Seems ABC needs a hefty injection of diversity among its leadership, especially at the Board level.
ABC Board members. Not a lot of diversity there…
https://about.abc.net.au/who-we-are/the-abc-board/
Ronzy
Yes Reeds was the one. I was working for an engineering firm designing the development for Kern. That was back in the Russ Hinze era, which we both know what was like.
Small world.