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Wry & Dry: a cynical and irreverent review of the week in politics, economics and life. For intelligent Readers who disdain the trivial.
Investment Matters…
…will not be published this week. Craig Shepherd has been travelling.
Wry & Dry’s musings
Albo comes back with an album full of happy snaps, and to a dream week. The moral-police become even more self-empowered. And is Trumpster’s halo slipping to around his ankles?
1. Barnaby’s back!
No sooner had new Opposition Leader Sussan Ley worked out the location of the opposition toilets than the first hand grenade landed. And it wasn’t tossed by the Greens, Teals or loose-cannon independents. But by her coalition partner, the lunar-occupying Gnats.
Former Gnat leader Michael McCormack and serial pest Barnaby Joyce (both deputy prime ministers under Croesus Turnbull) want the government to repeal the so-called Net Zero By 2050 policy. McCormack had supported the Net Zero thingy that Top Gun Pete took to the last election. As only Gnats and Greens can do, he has turned his coat.
No mistake, like the Victorian Liberals, these Gnats don’t want to win government. They just want to win internal battles. The Two Amigos will table a private members bill to achieve their goal. Which will be lost. But they will have embarrassed their own leader, David Littleproud. Tick.
The smart thing the Amigos could have done was present an alternative to show that they had actually thought about both the issue itself and the consequences of the behaviour on the future employment opportunities for the seven remaining suburban federal Liberals.
But the smart parts of their respective brains remain in the middle of a prolonged drought.
Albo was seen doing cartwheels across the floor of the House.
2. Bradmanesque
Speaking of whom, Albo returned from his 6 Days’ China Highlights tour to the best possible news. The people of Australia have assessed that the Liberals are much worse than Labor.
Monday’s Newspoll had Labor’s primary vote falling a little to 36%. But Albo, “he don’t care”. The Coalition’s polling went down like a barrel over Niagara Falls to crash on the rocks below; to a 40-year low of 29%. The TPP poll outcome was 57-43, a Bradmanesque score for Labor.
But wait, there’s more. On Tuesday, the bell rang for the opening of the new parliament. And on the government benches it was like a Collins Street tram in peak hour – only standing room left. As many as 94 seats fully booked. And a pathetic 43 seats opposite. With a handful of totally uninfluential crossbenchers in between.
Like Bradman, Albo will be seen as invincible. But the bad news is that Albo has a problem. His opponent, a Coalition divided by two parties themselves internally divided, is probably worse than the bowling that Bradman faced when he scored 452 not out. Just before the election, the Coalition was leading Labor 54/46. Albo and his minnow crew were not popular. And then Top Gun Pete self-destructed like an adulterer at a Coldplay concert, taking the Coalition and 19 seats with him.
The good news for Albo is that it will take the Coalition until the first nuclear power submarine arrives before it gets its act together.
By then, there will be unrealised CGT on all investments, including the family home for values greater than Albo’s.
3. Coldplay: moralistic schadenfreude
It’s more than a little worse than being locked in stocks at the village square with children throwing tomatoes at you.
Public shaming by social media is now a global hobby. The shaming event might be anything that the wielder of the camera considers shame-worthy. And then shared with exponential magnification by the miracle of social media, where gossip needy viewers/readers hungrily gorge themselves on a fat carcass meal of moralistic schadenfreude.
Being caught out having an affair seems an easy justification for the public lynching of the guilty. But Wry & Dry wonders when, at an extreme, there is a case of either mistaken identity or misunderstood circumstances? And the innocent has already been hung. It’s been over 2,000 years since the last resurrection.
Get a life outside your bubble; internet moralisers: “it’s none of your damned business.”
4. Trumpster in the middle of 5th Avenue
At the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, Trumpster said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
Well, that’s a maybe. But being closely associated with the world’s most notorious paedophile might lose a few voters.
Readers know that last week’s decision not to release the Epstein files is now out control. And then yesterday, according to the New York Times, “Attorney General Pam Bondi informed President Trump in the spring that his name appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files…”
Expect Trumpster to seek serious diversions. So, he is going to Scotland this weekend. It’s a private trip, of course. A golf course trip. He will meet UK PM Starmer on Monday, which will provide the business-expense tax deduction needed.
5. Lower voting age?
News last week the UK government announced that it will lower the voting age to 16. It caused a phoenix to rise from the ashes of the now irrelevant Teals. Well, one Teal in particular.
Monique Ryan, the Teal member for the former blue riband seat of Kooyong, took no more than a nano second after UK PM Starmer’s announcement to announce the same should happen in Australia.
Was this an example of early onset Relevance Deprivation Syndrome (RDS) for Ms. Ryan? With Albo bestriding the parliamentary world like a Colossus, the independent crossbenchers in the House (and also the Senate) are now even more irrelevant. What will Ms. Ryan (and her fellow Teals) do for the next three if not six years?
No. Wry & Dry considers that Ms. Ryan’s idea is both a good one, and in fact, doesn’t go far enough. The voting age should be lowered to 14.
Most of the crime recently committed in Melbourne is by adolescents aged between 14 and 17. Lowering the voting age to 14 would mean the Victorian government would correspondingly drop the age of legal ownership of property, and the driving and drinking age. These juveniles then would not need to steal cars to get around those suburbs with inadequate public transport. They could buy their own cars.
Okay, they would have to steal the money to afford to buy the cars. But doubtless a Victorian government scheme could be established to provide each of them with a car. Electric, of course.
Ms. Ryan’s policy would solve the juvenile crime problem in Victoria. And give her something to do.
6. Every man has his price…
…but for Sleepy Joe, it’s not so much.
He has sold his memoirs for an advance of “in the range of $10m.” Of course, the trouble with all of this is that Sleepy Joe will have trouble remembering what he did for those four years. And for the eight years that he was vice-president. That’s $0.8m per year for each of the two senior roles.
Wry & Dry expects an easy to read picture book, of perhaps 100 pages.
Not to make an unfavourable comparison. Well, yes, actually to make one. Barack O’Bama got some $60m for his opus. Some 10 times more per year than which Sleepy Joe will get.
Readers can draw their own conclusions.
7. Greens go the full transition
If it were not already obvious, it is now. The Greens are no longer primarily a party of the environment.
Drew Hutton founded the Greens in 1992 with Bob Brown. Mr. Hutton has repeatedly questioned the primacy of the Greens’ pro-transgender platform over that of the environment. Bob Brown and former Greens leader Christine Milne spoke up for Mr Hutton and the rights of members to hold a view different from Greens’ policy.
The Greens have now given him the DCM for prioritising “his perceived right of free speech over the safety of others.”
It is a pity that the Greens have confirmed it has strayed from the primacy of environmental concern to support, for example, anti-Semitism and ‘the fringes of economic quackery’.
8. Be careful what you guarantee
Ah, the problems of giving a personal a guarantee to a lender, especially if the guarantee is for $187m.
And so, the 138-acre French home and vineyard of Charles Cohen, a New York real-estate mogul, has lost its high-priced artworks, furniture and Cohen’s collection of fine wines. Twenty-five luxury automobiles including two Ferraris are also at risk.
Y’see, last year, Cohen’s business defaulted on its debt of $535m. Its lender is seeking to seize all of the collateralised property, including a Manhattan office tower, the Le Méridien Dania Beach hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, four other properties, a super-yacht ($50m) and five other yachts. But the value of those assets fell far short of the debt.
Wry & Dry’s question is not about the ‘recourse’ debt, as interesting as it is. Even Trumpster climbed the real estate ladder using the strategy. It’s how any one person could use and enjoy all of those personal assets.
Snippets from all over
1. AI demand drives up electricity supply costs
The cost of providing electricity in America’s largest power market will hit a record high due to soaring demand from artificial intelligence data centres and delays in building new power plants, raising energy prices for consumers. (Financial Times)
Wry & Dry comments: So said PJM, a regional transmission organisation. It manages the wholesale electricity market and the reliability of the grid. It includes “data centre alley”, a region in Virginia which hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centres, making it a test case for how the growth of the sector will affect power prices.
2. France to recognise Palestine
President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that he will formalize the decision [for France to recognise Palestine] at the UN General Assembly in September, noting that the most ‘urgent’ issue ‘is that the war in Gaza stops and the civilian population is saved.’ (Le Monde)
Wry & Dry comments: M. Macron did not explain how France recognising Palestine as a state would stop the war. The other 140 other countries that recognise Palestine haven’t been able to stop it.
3. Transgender president’s wife?
French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have filed a US defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens, a right wing influencer and podcaster who has said France’s first lady “is in fact a man”. (Financial Times)
Wry & Dry comments: Ms Owens has also said that Emmanuel Macron was a product of a CIA human experiment or “a similar government mind control programme.”
4. Diminished estate
The High Court in London ruled that the estate of Mike Lynch, a British entrepreneur who died when his yacht sank off Sicily last year, and his former business partner, Sushovan Hussain, owe Hewlett Packard about £740m ($1bn). (The Economist)
Wry & Dry comments: Lynch was celebrating his acquittal on criminal charges with a cruise on his superyacht, when it sank in a storm. Lynch, his daughter and five others died.
5. The Biden blame game
Hunter Biden has blamed sleeping pills for his father’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate against Donald Trump last year. (The Times)
Wry & Dry comments: It gets worse. He went on, “We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party.”
It figures
- 2.0%: EU. The ECB left interest rates unchanged.
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“My Poll Numbers within the Republican Party, and MAGA, have gone up, significantly, since the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax was exposed by the Radical Left Democrats and, just plain ‘troublemakers.”
President Trump, in a post on Sunday.
Wry & Dry comments: As Readers might expect, his poll numbers have actually fallen on migration, the economy, and cost of living.
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
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