Down Under Disappointment

Australian voters have overwhelmingly rejected a referendum to give Indigenous people rights as a recognized group, because that would be racist against anyone who isn't a member of that class, you see.

Australia has overwhelmingly rejected a plan to give greater rights to Indigenous people in a referendum.

All six states voted no to a proposal to change the constitution to recognise Indigenous citizens and create an advisory body to the government.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said defeat was hard: "When you aim high, sometimes you fall short. We understand and respect that we have."

Opposition leader Peter Dutton said the result was "good for our country".

The referendum, dubbed "The Voice", was Australia's first in more than a quarter of a century. With almost 70% of the vote counted, the "No" vote led "Yes" 60% to 40%.

Its rejection followed a fraught and often ill-tempered campaign.

Supporters said that entrenching the Indigenous peoples into the constitution would unite Australia and usher in a new era.

No leaders said that the idea was divisive, would create special "classes" of citizens where some were more equal than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

They were criticised over their appeal to undecided voters with a "Don't know? Vote no" message, and accused of running a campaign based on misinformation about the effects of the plan.

The result leaves Mr Albanese searching for a way forward with his vision for the country, and a resurgent opposition keen to capitalise on its victory.

 

So, Indigenous Australians will continue to not actually be Australians under the country's legal system, with fewer rights than other Australians, and that's what the 95% of Australians who are non-Indigenous voted for.

You don't have to work as hard as Republicans here in America have for the last 60 years to reverse the civil rights era if like Australia, you never actually have one. After all, we still have most Native American on reservations, and that's not going to change in my lifetime either.

There's no debating the racism in America or Australia (or the UK, Canad or New Zealand), the debate is over whether or not it's a bad thing, and for most folks in these coutries, the answer is no.

For those who actually are harmed by it, well, too bad, the majority has spoken.

Democracy!

The Green Thunder Down Under

Conservative, if not Trumpy Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been booted from office by voters over the weekend, and that means that white Labor PM Anthony Albanese will be PM, it also means he's going to have to convince Independents and Greens to form a coalition government as the BBC's Nick Bryant explains.

Tumbling down have come the walls of conservative citadels. Parliamentary seats where Liberals had for generations dominated now look like barren lands.

The shoreline of Sydney Harbour, which is home to the most expensive real estate on the continent, is a case in point. It has been overwhelmed by a "teal" wave, the colour adopted by the swathe of independents who have had such a transformative effect on the country's political geography.

Remarkably, the Liberals no longer control any harbour-side seats that stretch from the Opera House to the ocean. These include Wentworth and Warringah, which were represented up until recently by two former Liberal prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott.

It is akin to San Francisco, another great harbour city, losing all its Democrats.

Nor did the teal wave just wash over the Liberal ramparts of Sydney.

In Melbourne, the party looks to have lost the seat of Kooyong, which was once the fiefdom of Robert Menzies, Australia's longest serving prime minister, and which had remained faithfully conservative since Australia became a federation in 1901.

The same electoral dynamics played out. A party that has become fixated in recent decades with attracting working class battlers in traditional Labor strongholds has lost touch with Tesla-driving professionals in blue-ribbon seats.

For the first time in more than a decade, the electric car nudged out the coal train.

The rise of the teal independents has shattered the main party duopoly in the major cities - urban Australia accounts for 86% of the country's population.

So, too, have the Australian Greens, one of the hitherto under-reported stories of this election.

With votes still to be counted, the Greens are confident of achieving what they are calling a "greenslide" in Queensland.

That is a startling statement, because, if true, it would shatter the conventional wisdom of Australian politics: that green politics is anathema to the country's "Deep North" state.

Labor's phobia of alienating voters in this mining and resources hub has had a paralysing effect on its approach to climate change.

Here, then, the Greens have been beneficiaries of Labor's timidity regarding emissions targets.

If parts of Queensland become "Greensland" then the ground has truly shifted beneath our feet.

 

Understanding that, Albanese has promised a "new green superpower" plan for Australia, but how far that actually gets, we'll see. Independents and green want radical, if not transformative climate action, and they may just very well have enough seats to force Labor to make good on that promise.

The French Correction

France is so unhappy with America's decision to sell Australia nuclear sub technology that for the first time in the history of the US and France, Paris has recalled its Ambassador to Washington for consultations, in what amounts to yet another major international incident on President Biden's plate.

The rift between the Biden administration and the oldest U.S. ally widened Friday, as French President Emmanuel Macron ordered the recall of France’s ambassador to Washington in response to this week’s announcement of a secretly negotiated U.S.-British deal to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the unprecedented move an “extraordinary decision” that “reflects the exceptional seriousness” of the situation.

What he called “a new partnership” excluding France, and the resulting cancellation of a $66 billion Australian contract to buy diesel-powered French submarines, “constitute unacceptable behavior among allies and partners,” Le Drian said in a statement.

France also recalled its ambassador to Australia.

In a statement, the White House played down the breach. “We have been in close touch with our French partners. . . . We understand their position and will continue to be engaged in the coming days to resolve our differences, as we have done at other points over the course of our long alliance,” National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said in a statement.

“France is our oldest ally and one of our strongest partners, and we share a long history of shared democratic values and a commitment to working together to address global challenges,” Horne said.

 

France is pissed, and if you're wondering why, well, here you go.  

There are a number of reasons. For one, the deal was of virtually unrivaled economic significance to France’s defense sector, said Pierre Morcos, a French visiting fellow at the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The deal was crucial for “a whole network of small and medium enterprises” in France that were supposed to benefit from it, he said. The economic significance of the Australia deal has been compared to a landmark 2015 agreement between India and French company Dassault Aviation to supply 36 Rafale fighter jets.

Second, France stands to lose strategically as a result of Australia bowing out of its previous commitment. When the deal was struck, the French government celebrated a “strategic partnership … for the next 50 years.”

“This overall framework is now jeopardized,” Morcos said.

A third key reason for the French anger is the way the deal between Australia, Britain and the United States was announced. A French official said Thursday that Paris learned of the decision only through media reports — even though it had been negotiated among the three participants for months.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that France was “aware in advance” of the new agreement, although Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated that awareness came only in the past day or two.

The fact that the Biden administration did not apparently anticipate the furious French reaction means that “we are heading toward difficult times between Paris, Canberra and Washington,” Morcos said.

France’s unusually blunt reaction to the deal suggests that it could have longer-term implications for President Biden’s pledge to reset transatlantic relations after four tumultuous years under President Donald Trump.

Within the European Union, the fallout could play into the hands of those calling for the bloc to boost its defense capabilities and to be less reliant on the United States. Such demands had already gained momentum over the past weeks amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen endorsed calls for a 5,000-person rapid-deployment force and announced two new measures: a forthcoming declaration from the E.U. and NATO, and a summit focused on European defense with French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been one of the most persistent proponents of “strategic autonomy” for the bloc. 

Of course, the big winner in all of this diplomatic mess is China, who is licking its chops and looking right across the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan is a "sea fortress" blocking China's expansion into the Pacific and is willing to share with other democracies its knowledge of countering Beijing's efforts to undermine it, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told a U.S. audience on Wednesday.

The United States, like most countries, does not have formal diplomatic ties with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, but is the democratically ruled island's most important international backer and arms supplier.

China has stepped up military and diplomatic pressure against Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen first won office in 2016, seeking to force Taipei to accept Beijing's sovereignty claims, to the alarm of both Taipei and Washington.

Addressing an online forum organised by the Global Taiwan Institute on Taiwan-U.S. relations and attended by several former senior U.S. officials, Wu said Taiwan played a "significant role" in ensuring freedom of navigation in the strategically important Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

"Both of them are critical to peace and stability in the Indo Pacific region," he said. "Most importantly, a democratic Taiwan serves as a sea fortress to block China's expansionism into the wider Pacific."

China claims Taiwan as its territory to legitimise its aggression and expansionism, Wu said, adding: "Isn't this irredentism precisely what gave rise to the Second World War?"

Taiwan faces not only military threats from China, but also cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and other "grey zone" tactics, he added.

"Taiwan has learned valuable lessons and developed various means to tackle the threat to democracy, and we are more than willing to share this knowledge with fellow democracies."

There was no immediate response to his comments from China.

Earlier on Wednesday, China's Taiwan Affairs Office repeated warnings for Taipei's government not to try and seek formal independence for the island, saying such "wanton provocations and evil acts" would only threaten peace and stability.

 

France is throwing a fit, but the country's time of being a major naval power has been over for basically all of my life. The only folks who didn't know it were, well, Paris.

We'll see how Biden handles this. It seems like amazing Gallic pique, but okay then.

Conflagration Nation, Con't

Australia is still burning like thermite, into its fifth straight month of deadly bushfires as PM Scott Morrison's support is dropping like a rock.

Strong winds that have changed direction are hampering efforts by firefighters to contain bushfires in Australia's south-east.

A southerly change with powerful gusts up to 80mph (128km/h) threatened to spread huge fires raging in New South Wales (NSW), officials said.

In the neighbouring state of Victoria, army helicopters have been deployed to evacuate people trapped by the flames.

Since September, fires in Australia have killed at least 23 people.

More than 1,200 homes have been destroyed and millions of hectares of land scorched. Although much attention has centred on worst-hit NSW, every state and territory has been affected.

On Saturday, NSW fire commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons warned of "volatile" conditions to come.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has been harshly criticised for his handling of the emergency, has announced the deployment of 3,000 reserve troops to help the fire-fighting effort.

On Saturday he came under fire again for posting an advert on Twitter showing how the government was responding to the crisis, accompanied by an upbeat backing track.

Australia is about the same size as the mainland US.  Imagine wildfires burning on the West Coast, East Coast, Gulf Coast, the Texas border with Mexico, and the northern border with Canada all at the same time and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on in Oz right now.

The bigger issue is of course Morrison is a virulent climate-change denier like the rest of Australia's Liberal Party, and when Tasmanian bushfires rocked the state in 2016, a proposal to expand a national air tanker firefighting fleet was scrapped by Morrison's predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull.

The nation's aerial firefighting centre called four years ago for a "national large air-tanker" fleet to confront a growing bushfire threat but was turned down in a federal government ruling that the task was one for the states.

The National Aerial Firefighting Centre, which oversees a fleet of 145 aircraft, warned of hotter and more extended bushfire seasons in a call on governments in May 2016 to establish the major new capability.

The rejected proposal intensifies the debate over the response to bushfires that are spreading across all six states and have destroyed about 1500 homes and burnt more than 5 million hectares.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison will convene the national security committee of federal cabinet in a phone hook-up on Saturday morning to consider the federal response to the crisis, including "options available to us to source other aircraft" to douse fires.

But the government has resisted the idea of a national water-bombing fleet for years in an argument over federal and state responsibilities and funding, raising questions over whether a bigger fleet could have slowed this summer's wildfires.

"Given suitable funding, there is an opportunity to develop, in future years, a sophisticated national large air-tanker capability for Australia," the centre told a Senate inquiry into Tasmanian bushfires.

"Firefighters are likely to face extended, hotter fire seasons in the future, with more days of extreme fire danger. Along with changing demographics and land use pattern, this is likely to increase demand for aerial firefighting resources.

"A shared, national large fixed-wing air-tanker capability is logical and is an attractive strategy."

The Senate inquiry backed the proposal but the government dismissed it in September 2017, saying it would continue its $15 million annual support for the National Aerial Firefighting Centre without expanding the national capability.

Suddenly, Morrison is really interested in funding this proposal now that there's been far more than the cost of funding done in damage this year, and there's zero end in sight to these fires.

But here's the killer.  Australia's wildfires may be the political trigger here for Republicans to use climate change as impetus for their white nationalist takeover, what Jon Katz writes about as the next stage of disaster capitalism: disaster fascism, demonstrated by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Congressman Gaetz is an obvious candidate to help lead the charge to the armed lifeboats. He represents a district in Florida where climate reality is undeniable. He is also an unabashed xenophobe, who rushed to Trump’s defense—and added to the racist pile-on—when the president called Haiti a “shithole.”

In 2019, Gaetz unveiled a climate change proposal he dubbed the “Green Real Deal.” It was an obvious trolling job, a sort of regulation-killing, tax-cutting parody of Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. The resolution was filled with signaling language about “unilateral disarmament,” and the U.S. becoming the “world’s patsy” by taking on polluting industries at home. He focused on military adaptation and expansion into the Arctic.

(In a preview of Republican messaging to come, Gaetz also shifted blame away from the climate-denier-in-chief, Donald Trump. Instead he vaguely he cited “some in our government” as the source of denial and quipped nonsensically that the military does not have “the luxury of an academic debate about climate change”—as if academia is where that debate has been happening. As they did with the Iraq War, we can expect the right to shift blame for their decades of global destruction to liberals, and get much of the media to go along.)

Australia has a lot in common with the United States: a diverse, former British settler colony with a tradition of (white) individualism, corporate capitalism, and mass media owned by Rupert Murdoch, who was born in Melbourne. Its prime minister, Scott Morrison, is also a buffoonish climate denier, whose party’s fossil fuel cronyism is similarly papered over with clumsy appeals to white nationalism. Like Trump, he ran on a promise to bar the door to refugees. In office, he has threatened an authoritarian crackdown on protests and boycotts against companies that injure the environment.

Lurking behind them are deadlier forces. The white Australian who slaughtered 51 people at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, declared himself an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist,” bent on killing immigrants who he said “colonize other peoples lands.” The gunman who murdered 22 people, mostly Latinos, at an El Paso Walmart in August, framed his massacre in terms of environmental necessity: “The average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience … So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources.”

“Ecofascism” is a misnomer. This is old-school fascism. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler both feared the exhaustion of resources, and authorized violence in the name of garnering more productive “living space” (spazio vitale in Italian; Lebensraum in German). In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that “we have to face the fact that the general standard of living is rising more quickly than even the birth rate,” and that the “right of self-preservation” meant Germans could take the resources they needed by force.

Taking the resources one needs from the unwashed horde remains a staple of right-wing messaging. As the ultimate elite panicker, Tucker Carlson opined in November: “Isn't crowding your country the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it, to make it a place you wouldn't want to live?”

And suddenly it all makes sense, doesn't it?  The xenophobia, Trump's screeches of "No more room!" in America, the projection that Democrats will use climate change as justification for government crackdowns, Stephen Miller's rush to deport as many brown faces as possible, the rage against the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, all of it.

The "good Christians" are shutting the doors of the American ark.

That's what this always has been about.  Looting the palatial ocean liner before it sinks and heading to the lifeboats, firing into the crowds to keep them away from the ropes.

Australia is where we're heading, and very soon, under a second Trump term.

Holidaze: Immolation Nation

Australia now enters month three of the worst wildfires in the country's recorded history, and there's no end in sight to temperatures over 110 degrees, massive destruction of homes and wildlife, devastating drought, and pictures that look like the mouth of Hell itself.

As the fire stalked the east coast of Australia on Tuesday, the daytime sky turned inky black, then blood red. Emergency sirens wailed, followed by the thunder of gas explosions. Thousands of residents fled their homes and huddled near the shore. There was nowhere else to go.

Apocalyptic scenes like these in Mallacoota, a vacation destination between Sydney and Melbourne, came on the last day of the warmest decade on record in Australia. The country is in the grip of a devastating fire season, with months of summer still to go, as record-breaking temperatures, strong winds and prolonged drought have ignited huge blazes across the country.

The government prepared to deploy navy vessels and military helicopters to help fight the fires and evacuate people.

The devastation is immense. In the state of New South Wales, which includes Sydney, more than 900 homes have been destroyed and nine million acres have burned since November. About 90 fires were still raging in the state on Tuesday, with about three dozen more across the border in Victoria. At least 12 people have died.

Australia is normally hot and dry in summer, but climate change, which brings more frequent and longer periods of extreme heat, worsens these conditions and makes vegetation drier and more likely to burn. The country recently concluded its driest spring on record. That was followed in mid-December by the hottest day on record, with average highs across the country of 41.9 degrees Celsius (107.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Polls show a large majority of Australians view climate change as an urgent threat and want stronger government action to combat it. The catastrophic fire conditions have put an intense focus on the Australian government’s failure to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which traps heat when released into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a conservative, has made it clear that Australia’s economic prosperity comes first. Even as his country burned, he has said repeatedly that it is not the time to discuss climate policy.

“We have stood up to these terrible disasters before, and we have come through the other side,” he said in his New Year’s Eve address. “We will rebuild and we will stay strong.”

The Morrison government won't lift a finger to change anything, and Australia will continue to burn every summer.  The thing about climate change, and people who refuse to do anything about it, is that eventually the destruction will become so awful that people will revolt.

When that happens, I'm not sure what will become of humanity.  But I foresee bloody conflict ahead for a lot of places as people fleeing the ravages of climate change run into realpolitik and the people with the rifles and tanks.

Get used to scenes like this over the decades ahead.  Not all of us are going to make it.

Last Call For Climate of Disaster, Con't

Australia's record-setting bushfires, stoked by climate change and unprecedented drought, have all but wiped out the habitat for the island's koalas.

As Australia experiences record-breaking drought and bushfires, koala populations have dwindled along with their habitat, leaving them “functionally extinct.”

The chairman of the Australian Koala Foundation, Deborah Tabart, estimates that over 1,000 koalas have been killed from the fires and that 80 percent of their habitat has been destroyed.

Recent bushfires, along with prolonged drought and deforestation has led to koalas becoming “functionally extinct” according to experts.

Functional extinction is when a population becomes so limited that they no longer play a significant role in their ecosystem and the population becomes no longer viable. While some individuals could produce, the limited number of koalas makes the long-term viability of the species unlikely and highly susceptible to disease.

Deforestation and bushfires destroy the main nutrient source of koalas, the eucalyptus tree. An adult koala will eat up to 2 pounds of eucalyptus leaves per day as it’s main staple of nutrients. While eucalyptus plants will grow back after a fire, it will take months, leaving no suitable food source for koalas and starvation a likely scenario for many.

Many are urging the Australian government to enact the Koala Protection Act, written in 2016 but never passed into law and molded after the Bald Eagle Protection Act in the U.S. The Koala Protection Act would work to protect habitats and trees vital to koalas as well as protect koalas from hunting.

Recent viral videos of Australians rescuing koalas has led to increased donation to support hospitalization and help for burned koalas.

The Port Macquarie Koala Hospital setup a Go Fund Me page seeking donations to help the hospital treat injured koalas. To date, they have raised $1.33 million, well over their $25,000 goal. This comes from over 30,000 donors.

Expect this to continue for the rest of your lifetime, and for the systematic obliteration of wildlife habitats to continue across the globe.  THousands of species are going to go extince in the next decade or so, and it's only a matter of time before humans end up on that endangered list.

Well, the poor members of our species, at any rate.  The rich ones will be fine.

Australia...In The Membrane?

Yep, as widely expected, it wasn't just Ukraine's leader that Trump sought help in winning the 2020 election from, but Australian PM Scott Morrison as well on a different call, and this time it was to investigate the Mueller probe.

President Donald Trump sought help from the Australian prime minister to investigate the origins of former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

A Department of Justice spokesperson Monday evening confirmed the conversation, which an administration official described to NBC News as a routine call that occurs when a head of state seeks the assistance of another country’s law enforcement agencies. It was "asking his law enforcement to work with ours," the official said.

The call to Scott Morrison, the Australian leader, came recently after Attorney General William Barr in May asked John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to lead an inquiry into whether the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign was properly predicated. The Justice Department spokesperson said Barr asked Trump to make the call to seek Australia’s help.

"As the Department of Justice has previously announced, a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins of the U.S. counterintelligence probe of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign," spokesperson Keri Kupec said in a statement. "Mr. Durham is gathering information from numerous sources, including a number of foreign countries. At Attorney General Barr’s request, the President has contacted other countries to ask them to introduce the Attorney General and Mr. Durham to appropriate officials."

The New York Times first reported this story, later confirmed by NBC News. The news comes amid an ongoing impeachment inquiry stemming from allegations that Trump pushed the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

So it's on, apparently it's open season to see which foreign government can come up with something that will help Bill Barr discredit the Mueller probe first to justify sending Justice Department investigators to jail for daring to look at Donald Trump's crimes.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine call ropes in another major player who was 100% aware of it as he was on the call listening: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the July phone call where President Donald Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Joe Biden and his son, a senior State Department official told NBC News. 

The July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and a related whistleblower complaint are now at the center of House Democrats' impeachment inquiry.

Pompeo's involvement in the call — during which Trump told Zelenskiy that Biden's conduct sounded "horrible" to him — was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. It's not unusual for the nation's top diplomat to be on a president's call with a foreign leader, but Pompeo has not acknowledged his involvement.

Pompeo dodged questions about the phone call and the complaint during an interview with ABC's "This Week" on Sept. 22, days before the White House released a summary of the call which showed Trump asking about the Bidens' dealings in Ukraine.

Pompeo had argued against releasing the transcript, saying it would set a bad precedent — never acknowledging he knew exactly what was in the call.
Asked about reports of the substance of the conversation, Pompeo said he wasn't familiar with them and couldn't comment on them. "You just gave me information about a [intelligence community] report, none of which we've seen," he said.

Pompeo went on the Sunday shows and lied through his teeth about the Ukraine call.  Not exactly the actions of an innocent person, huh?

All of these guys are guilty of aiding and abetting, and its starting to look like a race to get Trump out before he can trigger the mass purge of the Justice Department and start rounding up Obama officials.

The Trumpian Wonder Down Under

Australia's conservative Liberal party coalition has won national elections Saturday despite all the polls pointing towards a Labor party sweep, and PM Kevin Morrison will keep his office by running on the Trump platform: tax cuts for the rich, forget climate change, and it's all immigrants' fault.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison led his conservative government to a surprise victory in Australia’s election, seeing off a challenge from the left-leaning Labor opposition with his pledge to safeguard the slowing economy.

“I have always believed in miracles,” Morrison, 51, told cheering supporters in Sydney, flanked by his wife and two daughters. “Tonight we’ve been delivered another one.”

Labor leader Bill Shorten, 52, earlier phoned Morrison to concede defeat, saying it was clear he could not form government even as millions of votes remained uncounted. He wished Morrison “good fortune and good courage in the service of our great nation” and said he would step down as opposition leader.

With 70% of the vote counted, the Liberal-National coalition is expected to win 74 seats in the 151-member lower house, with Labor on 65, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. The broadcaster said it remained unclear whether the coalition would gain the 76 seats needed to form a majority.

It is a remarkable win for the conservative government, which has been plagued by factional infighting during its six years in office that hobbled its ability to craft policy. Morrison, who took the helm in August and is the Liberals’ third leader in four years, spent much of the campaign relentlessly attacking Labor’s detailed policy platform that included boosting the minimum wage and taking tougher action against climate change.
He urged voters not to risk a change of government just when the economy -- in its 28th year of uninterrupted growth -- appears to be running out of steam.

“The economic story, the economic message, the economic choice was what differentiated the parties at this election,’’ Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said.

Morrison faces a drawn-out battle to legislate planned income tax cuts that could provide much-needed fiscal stimulus for the economy. His ability to do so will hinge on the makeup of the Senate, where populists and independents could hold the balance of power. Vote counting for the upper house will likely continue for days.

Morrison must also navigate the intensifying trade war between the U.S., Australia’s most important ally, and China, its biggest trading partner. The government must shore up ties with Beijing, which have been strained since the coalition last year introduced laws aimed at ending Chinese interference in national affairs, and barred telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co. from participating in its 5G network on security grounds.

Morrison closed down Labor’s lead during the five-week campaign, and a Newspoll published Saturday put the opposition just three points ahead. With the contest so tight, it was vital for both parties to hold or pick up seats held by a thin margin. 

And it was rural voters out in Queensland and Tasmania who won it for the conservatives.  If there seems like there's a lot of similarities to Clinton vs Trump in 2016, that's because there is, and Australia's Trump has won.  Despite deadly wildfires and record summer heat in the country last year, voters turned against climate change and wage increases in order to stop those people and keep Australia for...well, certainly not its aboriginal population, that's for damn sure.

The Trumpification of Alerica's allies continues.

Last Call For Face The Face on Facebook, Con't

Not that the current US government cares, but apparently New Zealand's "fix this or else" conversation with Facebook over the white supremacist who shot up two mosques earlier this month while splashing live video of the massacre all over Facebook and Instagram was finally what it took to get the company to start removing these assholes from its social media services.

In a major policy shift for the world’s biggest social media network, Facebook banned white nationalism and white separatism on its platform Tuesday. Facebook will also begin directing users who try to post content associated with those ideologies to a nonprofit that helps people leave hate groups, Motherboard has learned.

The new policy, which will be officially implemented next week, highlights the malleable nature of Facebook’s policies, which govern the speech of more than 2 billion users worldwide. And Facebook still has to effectively enforce the policies if it is really going to diminish hate speech on its platform. The policy will apply to both Facebook and Instagram.

Last year, a Motherboard investigation found that, though Facebook banned “white supremacy” on its platform, it explicitly allowed “white nationalism” and “white separatism.” After backlash from civil rights groups and historians who say there is no difference between the ideologies, Facebook has decided to ban all three, two members of Facebook’s content policy team said.

“We’ve had conversations with more than 20 members of civil society, academics, in some cases these were civil rights organizations, experts in race relations from around the world,” Brian Fishman, policy director of counterterrorism at Facebook, told us in a phone call. “We decided that the overlap between white nationalism, [white] separatism, and white supremacy is so extensive we really can’t make a meaningful distinction between them. And that’s because the language and the rhetoric that is used and the ideology that it represents overlaps to a degree that it is not a meaningful distinction.”

Specifically, Facebook will now ban content that includes explicit praise, support, or representation of white nationalism or separatism. Phrases such as “I am a proud white nationalist” and “Immigration is tearing this country apart; white separatism is the only answer” will now be banned, according to the company. Implicit and coded white nationalism and white separatism will not be banned immediately, in part because the company said it’s harder to detect and remove.

The decision was formally made at Facebook’s Content Standards Forum on Tuesday, a meeting that includes representatives from a range of different Facebook departments in which content moderation policies are discussed and ultimately adopted. Fishman told Motherboard that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was involved in the formulation of the new policy, though roughly three dozen Facebook employees worked on it.

Civil rights organizations have been after Facebook for years on this and given that the Obama administration looked the other way on Silicon Valley way too often and the Trump regime could not care less about policing white supremacists when they are the world's leading white supremacist group, you will never convince me that Facebook gave a damn until Australia threatened to start putting social media executives in prison earlier this week.

Following the livestreamed New Zealand mosque shooting that left 50 dead in Christchurch, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is looking to crack down on extremist content on social media.

Morrison will on Tuesday meet with Australian executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google to discuss extremist content legislation that would punish these companies' executives with jail time, the Australian Financial Review reports. Local internet service providers will also be present at the meeting.

"If social media companies fail to demonstrate a willingness to immediately institute changes to prevent the use of their platforms, like what was filmed and shared by the perpetrators of the terrible offences in Christchurch, we will take action," said Morrison.

"We are considering all options to keep Australians safe."

And lo and behold 48 hours later we get this policy.

Amazing how that works.  Australia helping New Zealand do yeoman's work, when we surely won't here.

The Pendejo Beanfield War, Con't

It took less than six months for Trump's Chinese tariff idiocy to obliterate US soybean exports, as November brought the amount of American soybeans bought by Beijing to a whopping total of zero.

China's soybean imports from the United States plunged to zero in November, marking the first time since the trade war between the world's two largest economies started that China, the world's largest soybean buyer, has imported no U.S. supplies.

Instead, China has leaned on Brazilian imports to replace the U.S. cargoes, customs data showed on Monday.

China brought in 5.07 million metric tons of soybeans from Brazil in November, up more than 80 percent from 2.76 million metric tons a year ago, data from the General Administration of Customs showed.

Meanwhile, U.S. imports plunged from 4.7 million metric tons in November 2017 and were down from 67,000 metric tons in October.

China, the world's top soybean buyer, usually gets most of its oilseed imports from the United States in last quarter of the year as the U.S. harvest comes to market. The U.S. was the second-largest supplier of soybeans to China and the trade was worth $12 billion in 2017.

But, purchases have plunged since Beijing placed an additional 25 percent tariff on U.S. imports on July 6, in response to tariffs enacted by the U.S. on Chinese goods. The country has stepped up its Brazilian purchases to fill the gap.

So game over for US soybean farmers.  They have no market now, and Brazil is reaping the awards.  Meanwhile, Trump killed America's involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and that trade deal goes into effect this weekend, meaning US farmers are about to get shut out of dozens of other markets too.

American farmers are facing the "imminent collapse" of key markets and fear uneven trade playing fields as Australian, Canadian and other rival nations take advantage of the soon-to-be implemented Trans-Pacific Partnership.

After President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the TPP on just his third day in the White House in 2017, the States will be left on the sidelines when the re-shaped TPP-11 comes into effect 12am on Sunday AEDT.

Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Singapore were the first nations to ratify the agreement, formally titled the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement. Vietnam, Chile, Brunei, Peru and Malaysia are set to follow in coming months

US farmers, already hit hard by Trump's tariff battle with China and the lack of a free trade agreement with Japan, are bracing to immediately lose market share.

American wheat and beef producers have been particularly vocal.

They expect Australian farmers to use their TPP advantage to sell more to Japan.

"Japan is generally a market where we seek to maintain our strong 53 per cent market share, but today we face an imminent collapse," US Wheat Associates President Vince Peterson told a public hearing held by the US Trade Representative earlier this month.

"Frankly, this is because of provisions negotiated by (former US president Barack Obama's administration) for our benefit under the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"Our competitors in Australia and Canada will now benefit from those provisions, as US farmers watch helplessly."

2019 is going to be a dismal year for the US farmer, for the US economy...and for the GOP.

But this is what you voted for, rural America.

Never forget that.

Abbott, Tossed Fellow

Well, things certainly escalated quickly today.  Australia's right-wing dipstick of a Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has lost his party's vote to remain leader and is no longer the country's PM.  The new boss is hopefully less of a jackass, but it doesn't look like by much.

Australia's 29th prime minister is Malcolm Turnbull, who ousted Abbott with the help of the Abbott's deputy, Julie Bishop, 54-44 in a vote of the parliamentary members of the governing Liberal Party, Monday night Australian time. In a late-night press conference, Turnbull, also a member of Australia's conservative party, said he came to power "seeking to persuade, rather than to lecture"—highlighting one of the chief criticisms of Abbott as an inflexible scold who failed to explain complicated policies to the Australian people. 

For those even remotely familiar with Australian politics, you'll know the last few years have been a bloodbath in the corridors of power, with fierce factional divides in both parties, Labor and Liberal, making the prime ministerial office the most treacherous room to occupy in the country. Three sitting prime ministers have now been toppled and replaced by their own parties, partly due to disagreements over climate change, terrible polling, and the management of Australia's resource-dependent economy. But Abbott's fall—in power for less than two years—is extraordinary: for a man who said he would bring stability back to the top job, he served in the position for a shorter time than the two previous prime ministers that he helped topple, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd (both members of the opposition Labor party). Pressure on Abbott had been building for months. 

Turnbull used to be a proponent of a cap-and-trade program, and he once called Tony Abbott's position on climate change "bullshit" because he Abbott was vehemently opposed to a market-based solution. Abbott himself has previously doubted the science behind climate change, then ran a brutal scare campaign against a carbon tax, arguing it would trash the economy. But it's unlikely, at least in the short-term before another election, that climate will be back on the agenda anytime soon: carbon pricing has cut to the quick of Aussie politics and become a symbol for deep ideological divides, something Turnbull is likely loathe to stir up, early in a new prime ministership. Commentators in Australia say Turnbull madeprivate undertakings not to rock the boat too much, as he locked up the votes to contest the leadership. 

Sure enough, Turnbull said at his first press conference that the government's position on climate change will stay the same for the moment. The current policy of government investments in carbon abatement (called "Direct Action"), rather than a market-based system "is one that I supported as a minister in the Abbott government, and it's one I support today," he said, describing it as "very well designed," and a "very, very good piece of work." Still, he did leave the door open to tweak the policy as he begins discussions with his new ministers.

We'll see where Turnbull ends up on the question of climate change, but four PMs in the space of less than three years makes me think that Australia's in a lot worse shape than a lot of people are aware of. Getting Canberra back at the forefront of the climate change fight is going to be vital in the years ahead.

Last Call For Drowning Down Under

A right-wing government budget that plans to all but eliminate climate change research and renewable energy and dump that money into subsidies for Big Energy?  America isn't the only country with anti-science conservatives beholden to coal, oil, and natural gas.  Our friends in Australia have taken a sharp right turn since the government of PM Tony Abbott came to power, and now they're paying the price.

Tony Abbott is the true "inter-generational thief" for boosting fossil fuels at the expense of renewable energy, increasing the likelihood of Australians paying a big price from climate change, Greens leader Christine Milne said.

Both the Prime Minister and Treasurer Joe Hockey have based their budget sales pitch on the need to raise taxes and slash spending to rein-in future debt that had been projected to balloon above $600 billion without policy changes.

"We could not go on running up massive debts for our children and grandchildren to pay," Mr Abbott told ABC's Insiders on Sunday. "That would be a form of inter-generational theft."

Senator Milne, though, said the increases in subsidies for big miners – which rise by $720 million to almost $14 billion over the forward estimates – and efforts to promote more coal seam gas, coal mines and coal ports were the real form of "future theft".

"Not only is it bad for the environment but these will be stranded assets which the next generation will have to pay for," Senator Milne told media in Sydney. "Tony Abbott is the one selling-out future generations."

The budget is extremely unpopular, with nearly three-quarters of Australians saying they would be worse off, and it seems the voters may be ready to do something about Abbott.

The Greens would welcome a double dissolution election, if the Coalition called one. 

"I say bring that on," Senator Milne said. "The Australian community has been betrayed by the Prime Minister. Nobody signed up for this budget. Nobody knew who the PM was before the election. 

"People are well and truly ready to show him what a trust deficit looks like."

Will the Abbott government come apart over climate change denial?  If there's any country that is dealing with major effects of climate, it's Australia.  Stay tuned...