Asked whether the announcement of A$270bn in defence spending was linked to the by-election for a seat surrounding defence HQ, Molan said something to the effect of "that's politics, that's how this game works".
But it's not. It's really not.
Westminster systems go into caretaker mode/"election purdah" and avoid major substantive announcements during campaigns that could have an effect on the result, precisely because control of the government budget could be used to swing a result, especially in a close race.
The rules are a bit vague on by-elections because you can't stop all government business the way you would for a general election, but the principle is very clear.
To then see a government Senator just casually joking about this and saying the quiet bit out loud is shocking.
I'd like to find the actual excerpt where Molan was talking, but the thing you'd expect him to say (if even just in a "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue" sense) is "it's a total coincidence, no connection between the announcement and the result".
Instead he boasts about the swing in defence-heavy booths and goes hur hur hur about how no one said politics isn't a dirty game etc.
It's not a joke. It's corruption of the democratic process.
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I've long been a huge fan of @michaelxpettis and agree with him about most aspects of China's economy, but I think there's good evidence that clean tech, at least, is seeing solid, operationally-financed, productivity-enhancing growth right now. 🧵
A pretty common argument you hear these days to justify trade restrictions on Chinese EVs, solar panels, and batteries is that the industries are only prospering because of unfair subsidies. I don't think that's supported by the data:
The argument goes something like this: China is awash in easy money from state banks; its renewable manufacturers are undercutting overseas rivals; ergo, its comparative advantage isn’t scale, efficiencies or innovation, but the availability of cheap government cash.
Last September I made one of the scariest calls I've made as a columnist — a prediction that consumption of crude oil had already peaked, despite predictions that this was a decade or more in the future:
Well, much of the ocean floor is strewn with these potato-sized pebbles, which appear to form through complex processes over millions of years and are rich in manganese and other useful base metals.
From time to time, people have thought about mining these nodules. The most famous case was an extraordinary Cold War caper in the 1970s, when Howard Hughes set up a fake nodule mining company as cover for a CIA operation to salvage a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
I would like to suggest that the best explanation for this contradictory series of facts is that oil demand is in decline and every party is behaving rationally.
If you think oil demand is in fact rising then the entire global oil industry, with ~$3 trillion of annual revenues and ~$500 billion of annual capex, has taken a collective decision to just leave trillions of money on the table for ~reasons~
Today I want to tell a story about the con artists of cryptoland, and how they have a lot more in common with the founding fathers of modern capitalism that one might initially think (thread):
At this point it's pretty clear that cryptoland is in deep trouble. Sam Bankman-Fried can now add allegations of bribing Chinese officials to the string of accusations stemming from the collapse of crypto exchange FTX: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
His nemesis Changpeng Zhao is now facing a lawsuit against his rival Binance exchange from the CFTC: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Methane is a huge and somewhat underappreciated problem in climate.
It represents only about 1% of the tonnage of carbon dioxide that we pump out.
But the @IPCC_CH this week estimated it may be responsible for as much as 0.5C of warming so far, against 1.2C for CO2.
Governments are finally looking at tackling this directly. The Global Methane Pledge announced 18 months ago by the US and EU -- a plan to reduce human-caused methane emissions by 30% this decade -- now has more than 100 countries signed up to it.