Monocell’s problem child. The portcullis is down. Iran’s matching pair.
Wry & Dry: a cynical and irreverent review of the week in politics, economics and life. For intelligent Readers who disdain the trivial.
Investment Matters
Craig provides some introductory comments on international diversification and also deep dives on:
- Inghams
- Paragon Care
- Amcor
For the more complete picture, read this week’s Investment Matters here.
Wry & Dry’s ponderings…
Monocell didn’t vet her star Victorian candidate; or he didn’t fess up; or both. The moat at Victorian Labor HQ has been topped up and the portcullis is down. Soon Iran will have a matching set of bottled-up choke points. Farmer Taylor won’t say yes or no; the fence is too comfortable. East of the wall. [BTW: all references to $ are to US$, unless otherwise stated].
Mono Nation’s Victorian problem child
Monocell Pauline Hanson had vetted Mono Nation’s Victorian leader with the same care a hormoned-up teenager would vet a Tinder date after three wines: enthusiastically, optimistically and with uncaring due diligence.
As for Mr. Pickering, who grew up on a farm, the chooks have come home to roost. A decade-plus of traffic offences, two stints of imprisonment-in-lieu, an unpaid first-homeowner grant and a former partner with handwritten letters evidencing a history of ‘sexual deviance’ and of heavy drug use have come to light.
Of course, given the way that some Victorians view drug use, some voters will find such a history deserves their vote. Equally, a person wouldn’t consider standing for parliament representing Mono Nation without the use of drugs.
As for smoking ice? Pickering will now come out and say that he didn’t inhale.1
Monocell’s response, “this is a personal matter,” is absurdly but predictably naïve. Expecting privacy in Australian politics is like expecting privacy in a nudist colony; technically possible, wildly unrealistic. This is not a skeleton in the closet; it’s a skeleton with a future, all the way to the election.
Monocell’s deputy, Beetroot Barnaby, nodded alongside Monocell, like a man who’s had personal matters of his own. Which he has.
But it’s ironic that a party built on scrutinising everyone else somehow wants to dodge scrutiny itself. Pickering, for his part, two weeks ago promised “swift legal action” against character assassination, which is a bold strategy for a man whose own character assassinated itself.
1 Former US President Bill Clinton said that he had smoked cannabis when a student,but didn’t inhale.”
The moat’s been topped up
Newbie Victorian premier Ben Carroll wants you to know these are “the biggest reforms to integrity in Victoria in a generation.” Err, no.
His promise was to beef up the powers of IBAC (Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission) to investigate corruption and criminal infiltration on Victoria’s ‘Big Build’ sites.
And all was going well. Until someone deep in bowels of Labor HQ saw a problem. A problem that had to be fixed. And so was solved, buried in an amendment delivered at 6pm on Monday. That amendment is that IBAC can’t touch anything it’s already touched, which happens to include the small matter of $15 billion cost overruns and the Big Build.
Readers will remember that Ben Carroll was Deputy Premier for the entire time the Big Build’s $15 billion was allegedly being funneled into criminal pockets, held the roads and public transport portfolios during it, and was Jacinta Allan’s most loyal understudy right up until he replaced her.
He insists retrospective investigations remain possible, provided there’s a “new referral,” which he then declines to promise, before gesturing vaguely at a royal commission as though outsourcing scrutiny counts as delivering it.
Victorian Labor HQ: where the moat’s been topped up, the drawbridge raised, and the portcullis lowered. The only thing genuinely under investigation is how long can he maintain a straight face while saying “transparency.”
It’s getting nasty out there
Overnight news that Iran-backed Houthi rebels have seized the Yemeni Red Sea port of Mocha2 is not good news. In the same way that Trumpster didn’t know what or where is the Strait of Hormoz, he will now be inanely asking about Mocha and the nearby Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
Y’see, the latter is a throat of water that separates the Suez Canal and the Red Sea from, effectively, the Indian Ocean. It’s so narrow it could be threatened with bows and arrows, no missiles required.
And thus, threatening the massive sea trade between the Far East and Europe that transits the Suez Canal.
Map source: Bingmaps
Readers know that Houthis is a Shia Islamist political and military terrorist group that now controls the eastern part of Yemen (the balance of the population of Yemen is Sunni). It aims to control all of Yemen and it supports external ‘movements’ against the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia (mostly Sunni). It is essentially financed by Iran (Shia), and receives military aid from not only Iran, but also North Korea and China.
The problem is two-fold. For Saudi Arabia: its Yanbu port, further north in the Red Sea, is a crucial alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. Over four million barrels of oil were being shipped from its three terminals. For anyone else wanting to ship anything through the Suez Canal: the prospect of going “via the Cape” is alarming.
So, Iran has already bottled-up Hormuz. Bag Bab el-Mandeb too and there’s a matching set. The world’s oil supply pinched at both ends by the same sponsor, like a very expensive Christmas cracker nobody wants to pull.
The world watches as Trumpster’s “limited war” doing what limited wars always do: grow. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
2 The port city gave its name to Mocha coffee. The coffee itself did not grow in Mocha, but was transported from Ethiopia and inland Yemen to the port in Mocha, from whence it was shipped abroad.
Another Mono Nation single cell policy
Ah, wonderful. History’s policy rerun button, pressed by Mono Nation’s Monocell Hanson herself. Readers will remember Miracle Morrison’s early-release superannuation scheme (during covid), where Treasury predicted 1.5 million people would withdraw $27bn from their superannuation accounts.
We-the-people, all 2.6 million of us, helped ourselves to $40bn, a third of which went straight to gambling. Nothing says “cost of living relief” like a $13bn stimulus package for the gambling industry.
Monocell’s early-release superannuation plan announced on Monday is Miracle Morrison’s covid policy’s spiritual sequel, minus the pandemic excuse.
The simple stupidity of Monocell’s plan is shown by her saying that it’s all about giving Australians more money to spend (to relieve cost-of-living pressure). Had she thought a little, she would know that RBA’s Michele Bullock is deliberately trying to make Australians spend less. This to reduce inflation.
But, undaunted, here comes Monocell, offering everyone a fresh withdrawal button. Nothing undermines monetary policy quite like handing out permission slips to raid your own retirement fund.
And Farmer Taylor’s Coalition? Not exactly the sound of crickets, but close. They just haven’t found the courage to say no. Or even yes. Like true farmer, Farmer Taylor is sitting on the fence, worrying about the price of fences.
But the toothsome Chalmers is not silent. He cries “they’re after your super.” A bit rich, from a man who’s been quietly fattening investment taxes. Everyone’s after something.
To win a by-election, the UK government tosses Israel under a bus
The statement of the UK’s latest Foreign Secretary, Ed Milibrand (six weeks on the tools), on illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank (imposing a trade ban) took most people by surprise. But his lame cliché “Securing the two-state solution in its fullest form…is this government’s policy” didn’t.
Good luck with your projects, sir. On two counts.
Firstly, the trade ban: the UK Foreign Office had advised the government that there was no clear way to separate Israeli and settler economies. That is, the trade-ban won’t work.
Secondly, the two-state solution: neither Israel nor the mooted Palestinian government is seriously committed to a two-state solution.
Of course, it’s just coincidence that Milibrand’s statement is just weeks before the upcoming UK by-election in the seat vacated by Sir Kier Starmer, and against the Green Party leader and anti-Zionist Zack Polanski. Just sayin’.
This is confirmed by the UK government telling the US via diplomatic back channels that the trade ban is largely symbolic and will affect relatively little trade. Read that again.
Milibrand’s actions, approved by new PM Burnham, will achieve nothing other than to inflame anti-semitism in an increasingly disparate England. Moreover, Milibrand has chosen to ignore the unintended consequences. He has:
- Strengthened Binyamin Netanyahu’s position for Israeli’s parliamentary elections next month;
- Seriously deteriorated UK-Israel regional security ties: co-operation with Israel intersects with the UK’s relationships with Jordan, Egypt and other regional partners on intelligence, counterterrorism, border security; and
- Reduced UK-Israeli intelligence sharing, which is almost always to UK’s benefit, especially against Iranian interference.
By the way, Readers will know that Palestinians have repeatedly rejected statehood offers; in 2000-01 and again in 2008. Palestinians have been destroying the two-state solution by showing Israel that any territory it relinquishes will be used to launch wars and pogroms. Israel removed every settlement from Gaza in 2005, which allowed Hamas to launch attacks rather than build peace.
Milbrand has fallen for the trap of seeming to present a solution to an intractable problem that requires considerable nuance.
Meanwhile, east of the wall that was…
Well, that went about as well as everyone pretended it wouldn’t.
Saxony-Anhalt is a state of 2.2 million people (2.5% of Germany), a once Soviet client state whose post-unification economy turned out to have nothing anyone wanted to buy. It just handed the Alternative for Germany (AfD, a very far-right party) 44% of the vote in its state election, three seats shy of an outright majority.
Cue the Tsar Vlad, cheering from the sidelines like a proud parent, and Trumpster, doing much the same thing while insisting it’s about “civilisational” concerns rather than, say, an enthusiasm for watching the EU wobble.
Tsar Vlad’s interest is easy enough to parse: an AfD government means less aid to Ukraine and a cosier relationship with Moscow, which is precisely the kind of thing you’d expect him to want.
Trumpster’s interest is murkier and, frankly, more noteworthy. A fractured, nationalist-leaning Europe is one less obstacle to unilateral American dealmaking in Europe. JD Vance’s habit of meeting the Afd’s co-chairwoman, Alice Weidel, while snubbing the actual German chancellor wasn’t subtlety, it was a preview.4
Former German Chancellor Merkel’s 2015 refugee decision gets the credit for planting the far-right wing seed. Whether Washington or Moscow watered it more enthusiastically is really just a matter of taste.
4She’s no dunce. She holds a PhD, worked for Goldman Sachs and fluently speaks Mandarin and English.
PISA – weaker students
The average 15-year-old student across the OECD in 2025 was performing more than a year behind where their counterparts sat in 2018, according to the latest PISA results. This decline, the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, linked directly to “digital distraction” from AI and social media.
Reading scores fell 25 points and maths 22 points since 2018, meaning most 15-year-olds are now performing at a level typically expected of 14-year-olds. Schleicher noted students now “read faster but less accurately,” and that heavy AI use correlated with weaker summarising and drafting skills, alongside a worrying tendency, seen in 37% of students, to favour “common sense” over scientific reasoning.
Australia mirrors the trend: maths fell nine points and reading seven points over three years. Alarmingly, only 49% of students met national numeracy standards. Low-performers rose to 29%. Public schools trailed independent schools by more than 50 points across all subjects. Despite the declines, Australia still climbed the international rankings as other nations fell further.
In the OECD rankings, Australia comes 6th in Reading, 7th in Maths, and 6th in Science. Not surprisingly, China, Singapore and Japan led each category.
And, at last, some good news coming from Victoria. In each of Reading, Maths and Science, Victorian students were the second best in Australia, behind only the children of the mandarins in the ACT.
Spot the outlier
Snippets from all over
Queensland credit rating downgrade
Ratings agency S&P Global downgraded the Queensland government’s credit rating to AA from AA+ on Friday, citing the state’s weak budgetary performance, the federal government’s property tax changes, and concerns over its infrastructure program, including for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics (Australian Financial Review 11 September).
Wry & Dry comments: The first domino to fall. Which state will be next?
Trumpster brings out the pork barrel
Trumpster vowed a $5,000 “dividend” payment to every American adult citizen if Republicans retain control of the House and the Senate in the November midterms. (Wall Street Journal 10 September)
Wry & Dry comments: 200,000,000 voters x $5,000 = $1,000,000,000,000. What a personal sacrifice for his Congressional colleagues.
iPhone now > $2,000
John Ternus, Apple’s new boss, unveiled “Duo”, the company’s first foldable iPhone. It costs $1,999 and goes on sale next month. (The Economist 10 September)
Wry & Dry comments: Price hikes were also announced on new iPhone 18 models, clearly driven by the war in [insert a country here].
Oil now > $100
Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time since July, as traders reacted to strikes between America and Iran. (Financial Times, 10 September)
Wry & Dry comments: Trumpster claimed the war would end “immediately after” America’s midterm elections in November. He also said in October 2024 that the war in Ukraine would end 24 hours after he was inaugurated as president, 21 months ago. On that unmathematical basis, the Iran war has at least 23 months to go.
French wine production down
French wine production for 2026 is expected to be around 6% below last year’s, and champagne production 48% lower, according to France’s agriculture ministry. (Financial Times 9 September)
Wry & Dry comments: It’s all about the unusually hot weather.
Canada v. USA
Canada was set to impose new tariffs on around 700 American products, including steel, dairy and home appliances. Donald Trump has warned of further levies in response. On Monday he said he would bar Bombardier from selling its planes in America unless the Canadian manufacturer builds them there. (The Times 8 Septmber)
Wry & Dry comments: Where are the men in white coats?
It figures
- -1: Australia. NAB business conditions index. The lowest since 2020.
- +0.25% point. ECB (Eurozone’s central bank) raises interest rates to 2.5% from 2.25%. The US and UK’s equivalents are at 3.75%. Australia’s is 4.35%.
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“I have asymmetric information. I am the house now.”
Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary (and former hedge fund manager), before announcing a bond buy-back to lower US bond rates.
Wry & Dry comments: Instead, 10-year bond rates went up, to 4.957%. Will Mr Bessent learn that the bond market rules?
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
Cheers!