A personal view of Australian and International Politics
Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Deanna Fernance is seeing the impacts of climate change on her farm. (ABC North Coast: Hannah Ross)
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Beef
producer Deanna Fernance has done what she can to mitigate the effects
of changing local weather patterns on her farm, and she wants her bank
and super fund to do the same.
Three-quarters
of her 32-hectare property north of Grafton, in New South Wales, is
flood plain, so moving her herd to higher ground around the house is
nothing new, but increasingly hot summers are posing a new challenge.
The cattle are losing condition in the hot and humid conditions, which also reduces nutrition in the grass.
Ms Fernance says although she is "small fry", she wants to make a difference. (ABC North Coast: Hannah Ross)
To adapt she is breeding lighter-coloured animals and she has planted a diversity of ground cover to improve soil health.
She has also planted hundreds of shade trees, but half were lost when another flood came through.
"The floods, the fires, the storms — there's no real break in between, that is the real difference," she said.
Ms
Fernance said she was trying to meet the challenges by also looking at
what should could do beyond her front gate, including volunteering with
Landcare and joining lobby group Farmers For Climate Action.
She said
although she was "small fry", she had deliberately opted to do business
with a bank and super fund that aligned with her concerns.
"I
have less than average income, I'm a single parent, but when I invest
money I try to do it where the money is going to be well spent.
"I think it's tricky for farmers because we generally like to stick to ourselves and try keep our heads down.
"But I don't think we can do that anymore, we have to be more out there."
Power of pressure
Crikey.com
founder and well-known shareholder activist Stephen Mayne said this
type of pressure on corporations had limited impact until the weight of
numbers became too big to ignore.
"Unless it's done at scale, it won't be particularly impactful unless it comes with a broader brand damage," Mr Mayne said.
"Companies
don't wish to have their reputations damaged because they will lose
both customers and shareholders — they will lose their social licence."
Mr
Mayne said while sitting through 993 annual general meetings in his
capacity as a shareholder, he had seen countless lobby groups pressure
companies by putting forward shareholder resolutions.
Banks are under pressure to stop financing fossil fuels. (ABC AM: Rachel Hayter)
In
December, shareholders put forward resolutions at the annual general
meetings of the ANZ, Westpac and Commonwealth banks designed to
effectively increase disclosure on matters relating to the fossil fuel
transition plans of its customers.
All three boards opposed the resolutions and they were not carried by a majority of shareholders.
Ulmarra farmer Peter Lake, 73, was among the shareholders who attended the NAB meeting, and is now planning to change banks.
Peter Lake says he likes to think individuals can influence corporations. (ABC North Coast: Hannah Ross)
He
said he went along to support the shareholder motion because he was
keen to leave his 41-hectare holding in a better state than when he
moved there in 2007.
"I'm
depressed about our political system that enables us to just keep not
doing what we say we are going to do in terms of cleaning up our
environment," Mr Lake said.
"Any significant group, but farmers in particular, are powerful if we are united so I see it as an incremental momentum."
Mr Lake is focused on the future of his community and the environment. (ABC North Coast: Hannah Ross)
Lobbyists at work
Market
Forces Australian banks analyst Kyle Robertson said the lobby group was
trying to ensure banks in particular upheld their commitment to the
goals of the 2016 Paris climate agreement.
Mr
Robertson said its strategy involved tracking and publishing detailed
analysis of the investments of the big four banks, including their
funding to companies with ties to fossil fuel projects.
He said the not-for-profit had been applying the strategy for close to a decade, but it was now gaining greater momentum.
The big four banks are feeling the heat from pressure groups and lobbyists. (ABC News: Michael Barnett)
"It's
pressure that has continued to grow from a range of stakeholders for
the banks, we are talking about their customers and the banks' own
investors," he said.
"So it's
all really just heading one way, which is that they are under an
increasing amount of pressure from their stakeholders to live up to
their commitments."
Mr
Robertson said this type of pressure paid off last year when the
Commonwealth Bank announced it would no longer be providing new finance
to its coal, oil and gas producing clients that did not have a plan to
transition away from fossil fuels in line with the Paris Agreement.
He said people were waking up to their collective power.
"They
are getting organised and they are raising their voices and they want
not just our governments but also the custodians of our money to take
responsibility for what they are funding."
Ukraine has deployed a number of units to hold its captured territory in the Russian region of Kursk. (Reuters: Thomas Peter)
In short:
Ukraine
first captured a part of Russia's Kursk region in August last year,
after it launched a counteroffensive across the border.
Western allies say Russia has deployed roughly 11,000 North Korean soldiers to the theatre to dislodge the incursion.
Russian military bloggers say a renewed push by Ukrainian forces over the weekend has put pressure on Moscow's forces.
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Russian
forces are reportedly under pressure amid a fresh push by the Ukrainian
military to claim more territory in the partly occupied Kursk region.
Ukraine staged a surprise counteroffensive in early August, sending troops over the Russian border into Kursk.
They have held a small part of the Russian region ever since.
On Sunday, Russia's defence ministry released a statement saying it had repelled two Ukrainian attacks.
"Artillery
and aviation of the North group of [Russian] forces defeated the
assault group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces," the ministry said.
Russia's
influential war bloggers, who support Moscow's war in Ukraine but have
often reported critically on failings and setbacks, indicated that the
latest Ukrainian assault had put Russian forces on the defensive.
"Despite
strong pressure from the enemy, our units are heroically holding the
line," the Operativnye Svodki (Operational Reports) channel said.
It
said artillery and small-arms battles were taking place, and Ukraine
was using Western-armoured vehicles to bring in large numbers of
infantry.
Ukrainian officials offered limited information about the offensive.
"Russia is getting what it deserves," Ukrainian presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak said.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian and North Korean losses in Kursk have been significant. (Reuters: Viacheslav Ratynskyi)
Some analysts have speculated Ukraine's occupation of Russian territory in the Kursk region could be a valuable bargaining chip if peace negotiations are held between the two sides.
Incoming
US president Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to broker peace and end
the conflict, which has been raging since February 2022.
Zelenskyy says North Korea suffering losses
In
recent months, approximately 11,000 North Korean troops have been
deployed in the Kursk region to support Moscow's forces, according to
Western and Ukrainian intelligence.
Russia has neither confirmed nor denied their presence.
Russia's
President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un are
forging closer ties, including in the battlefield in Ukraine.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russian and North Korean forces had suffered heavy losses.
"In
battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka, in Kursk
region, the Russian army lost up to a battalion of North Korean infantry
soldiers and Russian paratroops," Mr Zelenskyy said.
"This is significant."
On Sunday, Ukraine's air defences shot down 61 out of 103 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack, the air force said.
Russia said it had destroyed five Ukrainian drones over Russian territory.
If
2024 was the year of democracy, with elections taking place that
directly affected more than half of the world’s population, how will
2025 come to be defined?
Given a billionaire is set to return as
US president, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, conveys the
impression of being his de facto co-president-elect, perhaps it will be
the year of plutocracy. Government by the wealthy.
Or given how
many of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees have questionable qualifications
— Robert Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic, has been asked to head the
Department of Health and Human Services, while a wrestling impresario,
Linda McMahon, is the president-elect’s choice as education secretary —
perhaps 2025 could be the year of kakistocracy. The term describes a
government run by the state’s least suitable or competent citizens.
Maybe
2025 will be the year of anocracy, which describes a country that is
part democracy and part autocracy. Some fear this increasingly voguish
term could come to characterise Trump’s America. The incoming president,
after all, has joked about becoming a dictator on day one, raised the possibility of terminating the US Constitution and pledged to use the Justice Department and FBI to pursue his political enemies.
The
Trump restoration could easily be driven by revenge and retribution.
Washington veterans who witnessed the excesses of the Watergate scandal
in the early 1970s fear that Trump could make Richard Nixon look like a
choir boy. During his transition, he welcomed the idea of imprisoning members of Congress who led the investigation into the storming of the US Capitol — including his Republican nemesis, former congresswoman Liz Cheney — and promised to consider presidential pardons for felons convicted of offences related to the January 6 insurrection.
The
simple fact that terms such as kakistocacy and anocracy are not in
common usage, nor widely understood, speaks of how we are living in such
hard-to-decipher times.
The United Nations, in declaring 2025
the year of quantum science and technology, hardly helped bring clarity.
For most people, quantum science is a field shrouded in a fog of
uncertainty and incomprehension. It brings to mind a quantum leap into
the unknown.
Perhaps that should be our tagline for 2025: The
year of the unknown. The final weeks of 2024, which brought a spate of
December surprises, underscored the uncertainty of our age.
At
the beginning of the month, few would have predicted the fall, after
more than half a century of murderous rule, of the House of Assad in
Syria. Nor, for the first time since 1980, that martial law would
briefly be imposed in South Korea. Easier to foresee was the fall of the
French prime minister, Michel Barnier, after the country’s first
successful no confidence vote since 1962. Still, the fact that he will
become the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the Fifth
Republic speaks of the volatility of our times.
Almost everywhere,
the ground is still shaking from a succession of tectonic events that
are reshaping the geopolitical landscape, and continually producing
foreshocks and aftershocks.
Trump’s first term. The COVID
pandemic. The messy withdrawal during the first year of the Biden
administration of US forces from Afghanistan. The war in Ukraine. The
atrocities of the Hamas terror attack on October 7, and the regional
Middle East war they sparked. Then there is the ongoing climate
emergency and the rise of generative artificial intelligence, both of
which pose civilisational threats.
In
trying to predict what lies ahead in 2025, it is important to remember
we aren’t clairvoyants. As a forewarning, it is worth recalling the
cover art of The Economist’s “The World in 2016”
magazine, published on the threshold of the populist wave that brought
Brexit in Britain and, five months later, its trans-Atlantic twin, the
victory of Trump.
A photo-montage of international figures
thought destined to shape 2016 included Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel,
Barack Obama, David Cameron, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. But no place
was found for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, the godfathers of the
UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, or even Donald Trump.
Preview
pieces should come with health warnings and a respectful nod towards
the cautionary words of Sir Winston Churchill: “History unfolds itself
by strange and unpredictable paths.” One certainty about the future is
its uncertainty, a banality which serves as a truism in the age of
Donald Trump. And, yes, an age it now is. For near on a decade, he has
dominated US and global politics. June 16, 2025, will mark the 10th
anniversary of his descent down that fabled golden escalator.
As
we enter the new year, there are known knowns. President-elect Trump
will take his oath of office at noon on January 20, standing on the very
spot that the MAGA militia used as the staging post for the storming of
the US Capitol four years ago. In that very instant, however, we will
cross into the realm of known unknowns. Trump will again become the most
powerful figure on the planet that much is for certain. But it is hard
to foresee precisely how he will wield that power.
If the
president-elect’s words are to be taken at face value, then a global
trade war is in the offing, not just with China but with all of
America’s trading partners. Describing them as “the greatest thing ever invented”,
Trump has threatened 60 per cent tariffs against China, and 10 to 20
per cent tariffs against all other countries. Mexico he has threatened
with 100 per cent penalties.
Protectionism
is one policy area where Trump has been ideologically consistent for
decades, reaching back to the 1980s when Japan, rather than China, posed
a threat to US economic hegemony.
Other countries have been
ripping off Uncle Sam for decades, he has long believed, by running
trade surpluses with the US. So on tariffs, real determination lies
behind his words. Proof of that came on his first day in office in 2017,
when he instantly withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific
Trade Partnership (TPP), which President Barack Obama had negotiated
with other Asia-Pacific countries to contain China. It marked the start
of a new protectionist age.
Trump’s tariffs, which he does not need congressional approval to impose, affect us all.
Last
year, a report from the OECD weighing the effects of a global trade war
projected it would cause a 10 per cent reduction of trade across all
sectors. It also warned Australia could be hit by the second-largest
national income fall in the world, with only South Korea worse hit.
Australian output could fall by $30 billion, or 1.2 per cent of GDP,
which given the country’s anaemic economic growth could tip it into
recession. The mining, agriculture and metals sectors would be
particularly hard hit.
It would come as no surprise, however, if
the trade war does not turn out to be as intense or expansive as Trump’s
rhetoric suggests. Originally, Robert Lighthizer, the former US trade
chief, was tipped to become Trump’s field marshal in this mercantile
tit-for-tat. But this longtime protectionist and China trade super hawk
has been overlooked for the posts of Treasury secretary and Commerce
secretary, the jobs he most coveted. For Treasury, Trump has picked the
more Wall-Street friendly Scott Bessent, a hedge-fund billionaire whose
nomination was opposed by strident protectionists within Trump’s orbit
because he is not seen as sufficiently aggressive in applying universal
tariffs. For Bessent, tariffs should be “layered in gradually,” and
treated more like precision weapons than a blunderbuss.
That maybe
music to the ears of financial institutions on Wall Street, which fear
tariffs will lead to a spike in inflation and a reversal of the Federal
Reserve’s recent relaxation of interest rates. But Trump could end up
being influenced more by his incoming Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnik,
the billionaire founder of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald,
who will lead the tariff and trade agenda. At the Madison Square Garden
Trump rally on the eve of the presidential election, Lutnik delivered an
impassioned speech where he located American greatness at the turn 20th
century. “We had no income tax,” he shouted, “and all we had was
tariffs.”
Ultimately, the markets might act as a moderating
influence. No modern-day president has had such a fixation with the
stock market, and if shares head south as a result of the trade war — or
even nosedive — Trump might rein himself in. He will be the president,
but the markets may end up being king.
A lesson from the first term is that Trump’s bark is often worse than his bite, and that hardline stances are often pliable.
At
the United Nations in 2017, during his first speech to the General
Assembly, I watched him threaten to “totally destroy” North Korea, a
member state, and mock its dictatorial leader, Kim Jong Un. “Rocket Man
is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime,” he thundered. But
just two years later, I was travelling with Trump on the Korean
Peninsula when he embraced his new buddy, the self-same “Little Rocket
Man”, in the DMZ buffer zone, an impromptu summit set up with an early
morning tweet which gave it the feel of online dating. Quickly he went
from threatening “fire and fury” to a firm and almost flirtatious
friendship.
Nor, despite his bellicose rhetoric and sabre
rattling, is Trump an impulsive warmonger. During his first term, he was
prepared to take military action, by ordering the assassination of
Iran’s most senior general, Qasem Soleimani. Early in his presidency, he
also authorised air strikes in Syria, to punish its then president,
Bashar al-Assad, for using nerve agents against his own people.
Crucially,
however, Trump did not start any new wars, and he steered clear of
military adventurism or mission creep in which a short-term operation
becomes an unplanned long-term commitment. Far from being trigger-happy,
in many ways he inverted President Theodore Roosevelt’s famed dictum
“speak softly and carry a big stick.” Trump conducted megaphone
diplomacy but rarely reached for a cane. Watch what he does rather than
listen to what he says is the advice from the former Australian prime
minister Scott Morrison and former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, who
worked with him closely.
That said, Trump frequently does
precisely what he says he will do. Indeed, one way he has sought to
differentiate himself from conventional politicians is to make good on
campaign promises.
Running for the presidency in 2016, he pledged
to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord and did
just that — making his announcement from the Rose Garden of the White
House on such a scorching day in June 2017 that both my phone and laptop
overheated. Likewise, he withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal
negotiated by the Obama administration. In the Middle East, Trump
promised to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which
happened with great fanfare in May 2018. His pronouncements on foreign
affairs need to be taken both seriously and literally.
This time
he has claimed he will end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”, which
suggests a land-for-peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow that would reward
Vladimir Putin with the territory presently occupied by Russian forces.
Given that Russian forces are slowly advancing, public support in
Ukraine for the conflict is waning, and continued resistance is
contingent on US aid which Trump has threatened to reduce, President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is open to some kind of deal. But Ukraine would want
effective security guarantees from the US and the west, such as the
promise of future NATO membership, which Putin would likely balk at, and
which Trump might not even offer. Given these stumbling blocks, the war
will not be brought to an end in 24 hours.
Close
attention will be paid to what happens in Ukraine because of its
knock-on effects for Taiwan, another geopolitical flashpoint. Back in
2016, Taipei was joyous when, after his shock victory, president-elect
Trump accepted a call from the then Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen — a
dramatic gesture since the United States does not formally recognise
Taiwan as a country. Now, though, Taiwan is looking trepidatiously on
his return, after Trump’s comments during the campaign that it should
devote 10 per cent of its GDP towards defence (the US spends 3 per cent
of its GDP on its armed forces), and that it was “stealing” America’s
semi-conductor industry.
Taipei is understandably concerned that
the US commitment to its defence will no longer be as strong, and that
Trump’s “America First” foreign policy will primarily be transactional
rather than values based. Yet it will draw some comfort from the fact
that he has picked China hawks for the top diplomatic posts in his
administration. Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida set to
become Secretary of State, was the author in 2023 of the Taiwan Peace
Through Strength Act, which proposed increased coordination between the
US and Taiwanese military, and technology transfers to bolster Taiwan’s
defences. Congressman Mike Waltz, the former Green Beret who Trump has
made his national security advisor, is another China hawk with sharp
talons. In 2021, Waltz, a member of the bipartisan Taiwan caucus on
Capitol Hill, proposed the Taiwan Defence Act, with the aim “to maintain
the ability of the US Armed Forces to defeat attempts by China to
invade and seize control of Taiwan”.
The staffing of Trump’s
foreign policy team is worth dwelling on, not least because these have
been his most conventional appointments. Alongside Rubio at the State
Department and Waltz heading up the National Security Council in the
White House will be the New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, his pick
for the US permanent representative to the United Nations. After
graduating from Harvard, Stefanik joined the Bush administration and
launched her electoral career in 2014 as a moderate conservative. All
three have become Trump loyalists, but all three would have felt at home
in previous Republican administrations, which cannot be said of the
president-elect’s more outlandish picks. Certainly, more Trumpian
options were available. Before the election, the former diplomat and
intelligence chief Richard Grenell was tipped to become secretary of
state. Grenell is far more of an America Firster.
To
the Middle East, Trump has blithely promised to bring “lasting peace” —
which is very much in keeping with his habit of simplifying the most
complex and intractable of problems.
Yet there are hopes he could
reduce the present bloodshed by exerting more influence than Joe Biden
on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I think he knows I want
it to end,” Trump told Time magazine before Christmas, when asked about
the war in Gaza. At times the two have had a fractious relationship,
especially after the Israeli prime minister congratulated Joe Biden on
his victory in 2020, while Trump was still disputing the result. But
Netanyahu is more likely to listen to the incoming than the outgoing US
president.
Further
afield in the Middle East, Trump will almost certainly look to build
upon the most notable diplomatic achievement of his first term in
office, the signing of the Abraham Accords which normalised relations
between Israel and two of its Arab neighbours, the United Arab Emirates
and Bahrain. Trump covets a Nobel peace prize, and it rankles that
Barack Obama was awarded this honour less than eight months into his
presidency ostensibly for becoming the first Black occupant of the White
House. So, with his legacy in mind, ideally, he would like to
orchestrate an even more momentous accord between Israel and Saudi
Arabia. Riyadh, however, would demand as part of the deal the creation
of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital,
something which Trump has stopped short of explicitly backing. Nor is
Marco Rubio in favour of the two-state solution, what most western
powers regard as the sine qua non, the precondition, for lasting peace.
Following
the unexpectedly rapid fall of the Assad regime, the entire region is
in a state of flux. Even before the lightning events in Damascus, Iran
had watched the collapse of its “axis of resistance” after the
decimation of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump’s intentions
towards Iran are from clear and could well be impacted by an alleged
Iranian plot uncovered by the FBI to assassinate him during the
presidential campaign. But while some reports hint at a return to the
“maximum pressure” approach adopted during his first administration,
there have also been signs of a softening. In November, Elon Musk met
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations as part of an attempt to defuse
tensions between the two countries.
As his withdrawal in 2018 from
the six-nation Iranian nuclear deal underscored, Trump’s brand of
“America First” hyper-unilateralism brings into question the immediate
future of multilateralism. Trump has promised to withdraw the US — again
— from the UN Framework Committee on climate change. He is set to
withdraw the US — again — from the UN Human Rights Council. The United
Nations Secretary General António Guterres could well end up spending
the final two years of his tenure fretting that Trump could kill off the
world governing body “with a single tweet”, as he once told me during
Trump 1.0. As things turned out, Guterres proved adept at dealing with
Trump and forged a strong partnership with Trump’s then UN ambassador,
Nikki Haley, who understood the body’s worth as well as its foibles.
Guterres — who in media interviews made a point, Voldemort-like, of
never mentioning Trump by no name, out of fear of enflaming him — will
doubtless seek the same kind of partnership with Stefanik.
One
area in which 2025 could see a burst of multilateralism is artificial
intelligence. In February, governments and tech companies will meet at
the AI Action Summit in Paris. Canada, the host of this year’s G7
summit, is making AI a main focus, in the hope of nurturing greater
international cooperation on the question of global governance. From
February, prohibitions on certain AI systems covered by the European
Union AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive attempt at regulation,
will come into effect.
After
the year of democracy in 2024, when elections were held in more than 70
countries directly impacting more than half of the world’s population,
the 2025 democratic dance card looks pretty empty by comparison. The
most noteworthy election will come in Germany in February, where polls
suggest the conservative Christian Democratic Union, and its Bavarian
sister party, the CSU, is headed for victory after just three years in
opposition. Much of the attention will focus on the far-right
Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which polling suggests is running
ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party
(SPD). But Scholz will almost certainly be superseded as chancellor by
the 68-year-old leader of the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich
Merz.
Parliamentary elections are not as yet scheduled in France,
but they will almost certainly have to be called to break the deadlock
in the National Assembly, where the first successful no confidence vote
since the early 1960s led to the ouster in December of the prime
minister, Michel Barnier. The European Union’s two major powers are both
experiencing a period of political turmoil. The Franco-German axis, the
spine of mainland Europe, is looking shaky.
Aside from Germany
and possibly France, the most eye-catching electoral contests will come
in Australia and Canada. Both will provide a test of whether
progressive-minded parties can retain power at a time when the centre of
political gravity is shifting rightward. Justin Trudeau is seeking to
extend his run as the G7′s longest serving leader in the year that
Canada hosts the G7 summit. But it is hard to foresee his Liberal Party
winning a fourth consecutive mandate.
Here
in Australia, Anthony Albanese will struggle to defend his three-seat
majority, although he could end up leading a minority government. Peter
Dutton is aiming to dislodge Labor after just one term in power, partly
by making the Liberals more of a populist party and adopting elements of
Trump’s political field guide — another measure of the
president-elect’s global influence.
My hunch is that Trump wanted
to win the presidential election more than the presidency itself, partly
as a score-settling exercise and partly out of his desire to stay out
of prison. There were times during the campaign when I wondered whether
his heart was truly in it. Certainly, he did not repeat the punishing
stadium rally schedule that was such a marked feature of his 2016
campaign.
A lot will depend on the energy levels of a 78-year-old
who has become the oldest candidate ever elected president — beating
Joe Biden by five months. World-altering questions could turn on how he
apportions his time between the Oval Office and his beloved fairways and
greens.
Golf is often called the world’s most unpredictable sport. It is a fitting pastime for America’s most unpredictable president.
Credits
Words: Nick Bryant
Editing and production: Leigh Tonkin and Catherine Taylor
