Copyright 2026 First Samuel Limited
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 is at an overseas conference this week. Investment Matters will return next week. Read last week’s Investment Matters here.
1. Wry & Dry’s ponderings…
Dan Andrews’ RDS. A costless revolution says Mono Nation. Greens’ dream. Is Grim Jim wearing budgie smugglers? Another day in infamy to remember. Global innovation: where is Australia? UK Greens go the full fascism.
2. Nothing to see here; lockdown pending
In Russia, the surest sign of a catastrophe is an official insisting there isn’t one. A technician at an anti-plague institute dies two days after a test tube shatters, and the verdict is “pneumonia of unknown origin.” This is Tsar Vlad’s medical cousin of “fell from a window.”
Everything is under control, Moscow says. That’s why 200 people were quarantined, FSB officers rode in the ambulances, men in chemical masks sprayed the deceased’s apartment block, and the national health chief flew to Siberia for just one routine pneumonia. A travel warning appeared and then vanished, along with every mention in state media.
It’s a proud tradition: anthrax blamed on bad meat, Chernobyl followed by a May Day parade, Covid deaths filed under ‘heart failure’.
Kazakhstan and Mongolia are tightening their borders. Trump says it isn’t a bioweapon, which settles that. The plague may yet be contained. The truth, as ever, is already.
And in Victoria, a demented, lonely man is on a clifftop on the Mornington Peninsula, a new but as yet unused set of golf clubs nearby. He is waving what appears to be a copy of Pravda. His arms are flailing. His eyes are as large as hubcaps. He is screaming to anyone who might listen: “Lockdown! Lockdown! Everyone must lockdown!”
Two men in white coats are approaching…
3. Revolutions cost nothing, according to Mono Nation
Last weekend, Mono Hanson launched Mono Nation’s Victorian election campaign at Crown Casino, which is fitting. A casino is the natural home of a party that bets the house without counting the chips.
Its 63-page manifesto is a wish list bound in outrage: gas reservation, native logging revived, potholes filled, tougher sentences, sunset reviews for every agency, and the Suburban Rail Loop and the Traditional Owners Treaty both binned. The price tag isn’t included.
Costings, it seems, are an Australia-wide Mono Nation anathema. Federally, Beetroot Barnaby has declared Australians are tired of economists, and the federal party insists everything will be funded by cutting $90bn a year in “waste.”
That figure has the precision of a pub raffle and roughly the same audit trail. In Mono Nation’s accounting, waste is a magic pudding: slice it as often as you like and it grows back. At $90bn a year, just cutting ‘waste’ will eliminate almost all of the federal government’s debt in a decade. And the federal government itself in the following decade.
Why didn’t someone earlier think of this?
Back in Victoria, Mono Nation candidate Mark Nicholson’s unblushing pledge to jail Andrews and Allan “by Christmas” had a delightful Trumpster let-it-be-written-let-it-be-done ring about it, rather like Trumpster’s pledge to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
4. Aisle be damned
The Victorian Greens’ big environmental election policy is, naturally, groceries: $350 million for ten public supermarkets selling food 30% cheaper.
The Greens think-tank (perhaps an oxymoron), the cleverly named Green Institute, has found the savings by scrapping the supermarkets’ security guards and CCTV. That’s bold in the state that accounts for nearly a third of the nation’s recorded shoplifting.
Prices will indeed fall, to zero, for anyone near the exit.
Further efficiencies beckon. Perhaps replacing checkouts with an honour system. Or refrigeration with good intentions and stocktakes with vibes. Empty shelves, after all, are very low-emission.
At last, a self-funding Greens policy: the customers simply help themselves.
5. Fiscal nakedness
On Monday, Treasurer Grim Jim toothily released Australia’s Final Budget Outcome for FY-26. It was typical of any Treasurer’s release: highlight the successes – real or imagined; and blame others for the failures, if any could be found.
Firstly, he wanted thanks from the nation for the success: a $22.3bn deficit, trumpeted as half the one he inherited. He failed to point out that the one he inherited was Covid compromised. And think about describing as a success halving a hole you could have easily filled.
Then he wanted sympathy. “Oh, woe is upon me.” Inflation, Ukraine, Trumpster’s tariffs, a closed Strait of Hormuz. Has any treasurer suffered so much? “Oh, Death, where is thy sting?”1
Certainly, none has been luckier. Windfall gains from commodity prices handed him $400.8bn. All of which he cheerfully spent. And then some.
Spending has hit 26.9% of GDP, its highest in 40 years outside Covid. Smart people are saying that Australia should be running sizeable surpluses.
Every “saving” is re-spent before the ink on media release dries. Whilst Grim Jim has enjoyed only good fiscal fortune, households have endured 16 interest rate rises on Labor’s watch.
That investment guru Warren Buffet famously said, “You don’t find out who’s been swimming naked until the tide goes out.” Australia’s tide is receding. Uncle Albo’s and Grim Jim’s fiscal nakedness is progressively being revealed. And Readers will not be able to, err, unsee that which emerges.
1 1 Corinthians 15:55-57
6. Another day that will live in infamy
The seventh of December 1941 was “a day that will live in infamy,”2 when Japanese forces bombed the United States, to bring the US into the Second World War.
For many across the world, so too will the seventh of October 2023 live in infamy. More than 1,163 Jews in Israel were massacred. Armed men also took 251 Israeli hostages, of whom more than 80 were returned in coffins.
On Wednesday, protesters in many cities across the world used the anniversary to celebrate the killing of Jews. Many have been celebrating the massacre openly since the afternoon it happened.
Perhaps an ABC, BBC or CNN reporter might have asked one of the protesters what Zionism is. Probably the response would be a rant. Or a vacant look. None will say it was a liberation movement, exactly the kind they cheer when it’s Palestinian.
And genocide? Plenty of the demonstrators can read English, no doubt. But they’ve swapped reading history for reading social media. Out you go, Jews – your genocide is, well, history; there are worthier victims now.
But genocide is not a death toll in a cruel war in Gaza. Genocide is a people hounded from every country, herded onto trains and marked for erasure from history. But the protesters will not understand that.
How about the irony? Protesters denouncing what they see as a Gazan genocide alongside placards urging someone to finish the job that the Nazis commenced.
2 Then US president Roosevelt addressed Congress: ”Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
7. Global Innovation Rankings – spot the missing country
This week, Uncle Albo and Grim Jim continued their Quixotic quest to improve Australia’s productivity. By talking about it.
Perhaps they might review the Global Innovation Index, published in each year by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). It ranks 139 economies based on 79 indicators, from R&D spending to school test scores. In the 2026 report, the top 15 were…
Chart source: The Economist 2-Oct-26
Australia is ranked 22nd. Uncle Albo tilting at windmills, perhaps?3
3 The phrase comes from Don Quixote (1604/1605) by Miguel de Cervantes, where Quixote mistakes windmills for giants and charges at them, symbolising his delusion.
8. UK Greens go the full Fascism
The Greens once worried about the ozone layer; in the UK, they now fret about synagogue attendance.
Y’see, at last Sunday’s ‘annual conference’ of the UK Greens, “Zionism is racism” topped the agenda, more important than mere planetary survival. The policy motion passed 1,022 votes to 813. And this after members rejected an amendment that would have spared Jewish Green members being disciplined for going to shul.
And Greens leader Zack Polanski? In February he said he’d “absolutely” vote for the motion. By September, it was an “unhelpful distraction”. On the day, he was MIA, cowardly avoiding the vote by canvassing for himself in yesterday’s by-election in London’s East End, where he was conveniently a candidate in Kier Starmer’s former seat.
In a field of 15 candidates (not only the usual suspects, but also: Communist League, Christian Peoples Alliance, and Rejoin EU), Polanski delightfully lost [TBC: result expected around noon, Friday].
Boycotting your own party’s defining vote on such an issue was less about self-interest (i.e. a full-time job in the heart of London) and more about want of conviction.
Still, credit where it’s due. This is efficiency in action: A party that kept suspending candidates for antisemitic posts has now saved itself the vetting problem by writing antisemitism into policy.
9. And, whilst Wry & Dry was away…
… some vignettes from the past two weeks to remind Readers what they missed about Trumpster, and others:
10. 25 September: Red Carpet, Red Flag
Republicans warn that a Democratic Congress would bring socialism to America. Fortunately, the Trumpster got in first, rolling out the red carpet for the world’s #1 socialist: Emperor Eleven, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Readers might recall that US personnel crawled across the red carpet, on hands and knees smoothing the creases. Kowtowing, it seems, is now a well-practised expertise in Trumpster’s administration.
Trumpster greeted Emperor Eleven at the airport, a courtesy Emperor Eleven never returned in Beijing. He pronounced the Emperor to be ‘strong, vibrant and fit’, a review usually reserved for a gym membership.
The substance? A trade truce extended by two months, not a word about China helping Iran, and two pandas for Atlanta. America got the pandas; Beijing got the photos.
Emperor Eleven came in a Mao suit and was offered a tour of Trumpster’s unfinished ballroom. He laughed only once in the White House tour, at Sleepy Joe’s autopen.
Next date: Miami, December. G-20. Trumpster has invited Tsar Vlad. Hoping to make it a threesome of caudillos.
11. 24 September: Hitting the G-20 Spot
Nothing says “peace through strength” like hosting a war criminal at your own golf club. Trumpster has invited Tsar Vlad to December’s G-20, profitably to be held at Trumpster’s Trump National Doral. After years of fumbling, he believes he has finally located the Kremlin’s correct G-spot: not sanctions, not artillery, but a seat at the top table. And a camera crew to polish Tsar Vlad’s image back home.
Tsar Vlad, a man unmoved by hundreds of thousands of dead,4 is expected to respond with the enthusiasm of someone who has faked it before. In Alaska last year, he pocketed the red carpet and the presidential warmth, then went home and changed precisely nothing. Trumpster, as ever, mistook politeness for climax.
Meanwhile, Europe keeps finding Russian drones over airports and suspicious ships loitering over severed undersea cables, and Danish intelligence warns a “limited” attack on NATO may be coming.
Still, credit the business model: satisfaction for Tsar Vlad, bookings for Trumpster’s gold club, and a peace deal that never quite arrives. Everyone gets off, except Ukraine.
4 “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Attributed to Joseph Stalin, but probably derived from “One Murder made a Villain, Millions a Hero” written by Beilby Porteus, later a Bishop of the Church of England, in 1759.
12. 24 September: Trumpster’s deal about…nothing
Trumpster has triumphantly announced that he has secured rights to Greenland that Washington already had. This courtesy of a 1951 treaty Denmark signed while Eisenhower was still finding his desk.
Free rein to roam “everywhere in Greenland,” build bases at will; the US had a dozen there during the Cold War without needing a single gold-plated photo op of the President. His “we are stopping Russia and China” line is theatre for an audience that never asked whether either was actually trying.
Then the real prize according to Trumpster: critical minerals, or rather the announcement of critical minerals, which sent one Australian-run rare earth stock5 up 21% on vibes alone. Never mind that the project predates Trumpster entirely, sits under permafrost at minus 40 degrees with zero infrastructure, and that China’s advantage was never the rock. It’s the processing, a decade-long moat America hasn’t started digging.
So: a treaty renewed, a mine unchanged, a market briefly fooled. Deal of the century, apparently.
5 Eclipse Metals Ltd (EPM) is listed on the ASX, and is primarily engaged in the exploration and development of a significant rare earth deposit in Greenland. The company’s flagship project is the Ivigtût mine, which historically was the world’s largest cryolite mine and now shows promising potential for rare earth elements. It is, err, a small company, market cap $50m.
13. 22 September: Grim Jim has seen the future
Treasurer Grim Jim has seen the future, and – miracle of miracles – it’s the exact future his assumptions produce.
The Intergenerational Report, released the week before the AFL Grand Final, imagines productivity growth exploding from zero to 1.2% p.a., half of it courtesy of AI, a technology whose measurable economy-wide productivity dividend so far is, charitably, “still booting up.”
Meanwhile Australian businesses, facing capital gains tax rule changes that punish exactly the risk-taking productivity requires, have every reason to sit on their hands rather than invest in it. And the fastest-growing part of the workforce isn’t exporters or manufacturers; it’s the “non-tradeable” sector, otherwise known as people paid, directly or indirectly, by government. Productivity miracles rarely emerge from org charts that reproduce themselves.
Then there’s immigration, propping up growth the way a drip feed props up a patient rather than curing them. And iron ore, still treated as an eternal cash cow despite (a) China’s construction sector visibly running out of puff and (b) the massive and higher-graded mine in Simandou, Guinea.
None of this is prediction. It’s the answer the model was told to find. As for whether the treasurer regrets the wasted spending on his watch… regret implies acknowledgment, and acknowledgment implies the numbers were never really the point.
14. 21 September: Flashbulb memory
Charles Edward Maurice Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, was smart enough to inherit an earldom and a fortune, notwithstanding three older sisters. Ah, the benefits of primogeniture.
He is also the brother of the very late Diana, Princess of Wales. And he desperately wants you to know he remembers exactly what King Charles said to him in a phone call almost thirty years ago. Indeed, word for word. Or, perhaps, hiss for hiss.
“I promise that to you now,” he told the BBC, with the swagger of a man who has never once misremembered where he left the keys to his Land Rover.
Conveniently, psychology disagrees. A landmark Duke University study6 tracked so-called “flashbulb memories.” These are the vivid, this-I’ll-never-forget recollections people form around shocking events like 9/11 or the assassination of President Kennedy.
The finding were not flattering for his Lordship: the research shows that his memories are no more accurate over time than mundane ones. They just feel more accurate. Confidence and correctness, it turns out, are barely on speaking terms.
So, when his Lordship insists that His Majesty Charles sounded “giddily elated, like a lottery winner” during the most chaotic week of both their lives, Readers should remember: certainty is not evidence.
It’s just what wrong memories wear to look respectable.
6 Confidence, Not Consistency, Characterizes Flashbulb Memories, Talarico and Rubin, Psychological Science, Vol. 14, No. 5 (Sep., 2003) pp. 455-461.
15. 19 September: Post hoc ergo prompter hoc?7
Or is it ‘correlation isn’t causation?
Choose Trumpster’s poison as Readers might, the way they-the-people of the USA intend to vote in the mid-term elections seems weirdly related to the price of petrol.
Chart source: The Economist
The consequence is that the Democrats have 93% chance of ‘flipping’ the House and a 59% chance of flipping the Senate. But there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.
7 Latin: ‘after it therefore because of it’.
Snippets from all over
Oil tanker attack deep inside Persian Gulf
An attack on an oil tanker near Qatar, deep inside the Persian Gulf, has raised fears among traders that a surge in strikes on shipping is spreading beyond the Strait of Hormuz, threatening the tanker operations that have helped keep oil flowing despite the conflict. (Wall Street Journal 9 October)
Wry & Dry comments: Brent crude oil price leapt 4% this morning..
Plague
The World Health Organisation is seeking information from Russia following reports of a second suspected case of pneumonic plague in Irkutsk, a city in Siberia. (The Economist 8 October)
Wry & Dry comments: Quick, lockdown all of Victoria for two years.
S&P Ratings pans government spending
The world’s premier ratings agency says government spending is “complicating” the Reserve Bank’s fight against inflation and that record spending could create “potential problems” for Australia’s credit rating in the future. (The Australian, 7 October)
Wry & Dry comments: S&P also expects a potential “$8bn to $10bn hole” in states’ stamp duties over the next year due to the property market slump brought on, in part, by the federal government’s changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax.
Turkey and Pakistan help Saudi Arabia
Turkey and Pakistan agreed to a “rapid deployment” of military forces inSaudi Arabia. (Economist 6 October)
Wry & Dry comments: This is all about Iran-backed Houthi rebels messing up Yemen.
Tsar Vlad puppet wins in Bosnian regional election
Pro-Russia strongman Milorad Dodik claimed victory in elections in Bosnia, as he extended his influence in the troubled Balkan country despite recent efforts by the international community to sideline him. (Financial Times 5 October)
Wry & Dry comments: Dodik’s party favours one of Bosnia’s entities, Republika Srpska, seceding. Dodik was supported at Trumpster.
It figures
- 67.2 points: Australia. Westpac-Melbourne Institute consumer confidence index, the lowest since 1991.
- 65%: Australia. Increase in companies declared insolvent in August, a record high.
Chat source: AFR
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“…I want to be clear: the appetite to take on Coles and Woolies, a rapacious duopoly getting record profits while millions of Australians can’t afford to fill their shopping trolley, that appetite is real.”
David Shoebridge, new federal Greens leader, on the Victorian Greens proposal to own and operate 10 supermarkets, offering 30% price discounts.
Wry & Dry comments: The only thing he made clear was that the Greens remain in the bottom decile of economic literacy.
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
Cheers!