Premier’s DCM. Wilson’s flat tyre. Boeing’s costly Trumpster deal.
Wry & Dry: a cynical and irreverent review of the week in politics, economics and life. For intelligent Readers who disdain the trivial.
Investment Matters
This week Craig focuses on long-term questions that are now moving market prices.
Investment Matters will scratch the surface on a few this week:
- Inconsistent market moves in July as risks rise and war resumes
- The normalisation of long-term interest rates
- Coming to terms with lower Chinese growth
- Creating value from AI innovation: who wins and who loses
It is a little dry but potentially therapeutic.
Read this week’s Investment Matters here.
Wry & Dry’s ponderings…
It took a lot to persuade Premier Allan to jump – but she did, eventually, in a noteworthy manner. Liberal Jess Wilson’s tyres were let down by Allan’s self-DCM. Trumpster’s fixed price Boeing deal is costing Boeing plenty. FIFA despot was surprised by opposition to his money-grubbing plan, which says more about him than the deal itself. Trumpster’s popularity craters.
Premier’s DCM, chameleons emerge
Most Victorians were hoping that Premier Jacinta Allan would not be knifed by her colleagues at Tuesday’s caucus meeting. This hope was not out of tenderness, merely a preference for watching 4.6 million voters administer the coup de grâce themselves at November’s election.
Alas, 4.6m Victorian voters’ hopes were dashed on the rocks of reality: Labor-Faction-Ruthlessness 101. Doubtless, on Monday night Allan took calls from Uncle Albo and even Dan Andrews urging her to jump before she was surely pushed. So, Allan gave herself the DCM hours before a spill she was certain to lose, sparing her party the indignity of actually voting to give a premier the DCM.
This was not a Murder on the Orient Express,1 where the execution of a deserved victim was done quietly by a dozen well organised assassins. Nor a knifing of Julius Caesar by about 20 conspirators, where at least the victim was a man of immense talent, albeit with an ego to match.2 Nor an assassin of JFK, a charismatic leader whose path to presidential power was well-planned (and financed) by his wealthy father,3 where the mystery of conspiracy lingers to this day.
No, Allan was dispatched by the ordinary arithmetic of self-preservation, 40% of the Labor caucus doing the sums on their post-election Centrelink emoluments’ possibilities. Already two of Allan’s acolytes have pre-empted the election outcome.
Wry & Dry, connoisseur of Victorian mediocrity, places Allan in the pantheon of the worst premiers since 1855; alongside the bent (Thomas Bent, appropriately), the hapless (John Bowser) and the outright larcenous (Duncan Gillies). She somehow synthesised all three in an epitome of incompetence that itself deserves a statue.
But the onus for the fetid stench of corruption, fiscal rubble and wanton waste that is now Victoria does not lie at her feet alone. Both her cabinet and the independents in the upper house, who waved through legislated idiocy, are complicit.
How many will now, chameleon-like, change their policy colours, as Carroll has already done?
Allan’s last attempt at political bastardry, after her bitter and self-aggrandising valedictory speech, was her blackmailing of caucus for two hours to install a loyalist as leader, having earlier promised to support the ordained Carroll. The caucus caved in to her threat of delay and added another Allan-loyalist to cabinet.
Nothing better defined her character as premier than the manner in which she left it.
1 Probably Agatha Christie’s most famous mystery novel, based on the kidnapping and murder of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh’s son and made into two movies (the 1974 version was outstanding).
2 Julius Caesar’s greatness went well beyond his military genius. He implemented key social reforms, including the Julian calendar (which corrected the Roman calendar and was the timekeeper until the Gregorian calendar (1582), restructuring the Roman government, expanding citizenship and rebuilding Capua, Carthage and Corinth as part of a strategy to resettle discharged soldiers. It was he who crossed the Rubicon. who said “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”, of his victory on Pontus). The month of July is named for him.
3 Self-confident and fiercely ambitious, Joseph Kennedy Jnr was the eldest child of Joseph Kenndy Snr (a formidable financier who had built a vast fortune through banking, stock market speculation and the film industry) was long marked out as the family standard-bearer: the son who would fulfil his father’s frustrated political dreams and one day become president himself.
Statue of limitations
Spare a thought for the Victorian Liberals, who must now shelve their crusade against a statue of Dan Andrews. This is because nothing derails a culture war quite like your own side first collapsing.
Y’see, Jacinta Allan’s swift DCM and the coronation of Ben Carroll, an apparently house-trained right-winger, have flattened the election winning chances of Jess Wilson’s tyres. Carroll will get his obligatory honeymoon poll bounce; a divided Liberal Party will watch nervously, while Pauline Hanson’s monocultural outfit lurks to make everyone’s polling maths’ homework harder.
Wilson, meanwhile, is finally shot of much-to-the-right-of the-soup-spoon Moira Deeming, the Abbott-Credlin protégée whose pre-selection saga featured a phantom headlock, a police shrug, and enough melodrama to sustain a Netflix miniseries.
Deeming’s exit to the crossbench was billed as ‘closure’. Nuh. Readers should treat that word with the suspicion it deserves—an unexploded ordnance doesn’t become safe just because someone’s stopped looking at it.
Presidential library in the sky
Boeing, the massive aircraft manufacturer, is bleeding millions for the programme to build some aircraft. In fact, some $260m in the June quarter. But the cost overrun is not, for a change, Boeing’s fault. Y’see, the aircraft are two ‘Air Force One’ aeroplanes.
Readers will know that ‘Air Force One’ is the call sign for any aircraft in which the US president is conveyed. And is generally regarded as one of two Boeing 747-200s that have been flown since 1991. In 2015, the USAF announced that the 747-200s were, perhaps, a bit outdated. So, they would be replaced with 747-800s. Total cost is already north of $3.1 billion for a planned 2024 delivery.
New delivery target is now 2028, a full four years late, which in Boeing-years counts as ahead of schedule.
The cost-culprit is the fixed-price deal into which Trumpster personally talked Boeing during his first term. This is the kind of negotiation where one side realises, years later, that they lost on the deal. In this case, it was Boeing, thereby giving Trumpster his only ‘deal’ whilst in the White House. Well so far. Dave Calhoun, the Boeing CEO unlucky enough to have signed it, admitted in 2022 the whole thing was a deal that Boeing “probably shouldn’t have taken.”
Boeing shareholders get to enjoy the cost-blowout sequel. Hence the $260m Air Force One loss in the June quarter.
Trumpster, meanwhile, isn’t waiting around: he’s already flying a $400m 747-800 gifted by Qatar’s Emir, destined, if Readers can believe it, for Trumpster’s ‘presidential library’. As Trumpster has yet to set foot in a library, it is understandable that he confuses an aircraft with a building full of books. So, the reality is that he will keep it flying for himself, indefinitely, under a different name.
Boeing shareholders pay overs for the plane he doesn’t want. Qatar supplies the one he does.
No sooner than the World Cup finished…
FIFA’s despot Gianni Infantino just cannot keep his name out of the news. Or, it seems, his fingers out of the pie.
The time it is because FIFA has announced plans to sell roughly 20% of a new entity, FIFA Forward Enterprise, valuing the World Cup’s commercial rights at $20bn. Leading the charge is Thrive Eternal, a fund run by Joshua Kushner. Josh is brother of Jared. Jared is married to Trumpster’s daughter. Readers can join all of those dots without help from Wry & Dry.
UEFA4 and fan groups are furious, on the entirely reasonable theory that the World Cup was never FIFA’s personal ATM to franchise out. Fifty-five delegates of UEFA met last night and unanimously voted to boycott all Fifa events if Infantino’s plan proceeds.
Amazingly, Russia and Ukraine voted on the same side. And Readers will know that six of the eight quarter-finalists at the recent World Cup were from Europe.
Infantino disagrees with the push back, a stance presumably decided between visits to Mar-a-Lago.
This is not Infantino’s first tribute to the Trumpster family. In December, Readers will recall that, acting alone, he invented a “Fifa Peace Prize” and awarded it, the inaugural edition, to Trumpster himself. Trumpster promptly who called it “one of the great honours” of his life, having presumably given up on the Nobel one.
Fifa also rents office space in Trump Tower, reportedly so underused that the doorman doesn’t know football administrators work there. Someone might ask what is the rent that FIFA is paying to Trumpster?
Football, the world’s game. Increasingly, also the world’s landlord’s game.
4 UEFA is the governing body of football (i.e. soccer) in Europe. It consists of 55 national associations, some of which are not countries or not in Europe. For example, England falls into the former category and Israel in the latter.
Made in China, driven in Carlton
New industry-commissioned research released this week suggests Chinese-made vehicles will claim 58% of Australia’s car imports by 2035; up from last July’s already-alarming forecast of 43%. At this rate of upward revision, the final number by publication date will simply be “all of them.”
The shift makes sense once you use the All The President’s Men theory: follow the money,4 or lack of it: China’s domestic car market is shrinking, its factories carry roughly 20 million vehicles of unwanted annual capacity, and exporting the surplus is cheaper than admitting the problem.
In February, China dethroned Japan as Australia’s top vehicle supplier after a 28-year reign; the automotive equivalent of a long-serving monarch quietly replaced mid-speech. In June, Chinese vehicle behemoth BYD came within 243 sales of toppling Toyota outright, a brand that has ruled Australian driveways since 2003.
Nissan, Mitsubishi and Volkswagen are watching their market share evaporate to Chery, Great Wall and Geely, aided by an Iran-driven petrol price spike nudging buyers toward EVs — now 23% of sales, 80% of which are Chinese-built.
Even the luxury end isn’t safe: Hongqi, chauffeur of choice for Xi Jinping, is coming to a showroom near you. Sovereignty, it turns out, stops at the driveway.
4 Woodward and Bernstein, the journalists from the Washington Post had an insider in the Watergate scandal (that caused Nixon’s downfall) whose advice in finding incriminating evidence was “follow the money.”
Uncle Albo stuck on the Hamas fence
Labor’s triennial national conference (the 50th if Readers can manage the maths of 50 events every three years since 1902) ran with the smooth, frictionless choreography of a party of tribal factions that resolved everything before anyone got a microphone. Compare and contrast the Liberals, the factional structure of which amounts to loosely federated cocktail parties that couldn’t organise a chook raffle in tradies pub on a Friday.
Labor, by contrast, is disciplined. Democratic centralism, if Readers will, minus the democratic bit.
Buried in that discipline: delegates quietly deleted the Labor Party’s platform’s explicit demand that Hamas disarm and stay out of any Palestinian government. This was a demand that Uncle Albo and Foreign Minister Wong had both restated days earlier. Uncle Albo’s post-conference retrospective justification was: “the platform has got the balance right.”
Balance, evidently, meaning a terrorist organisation proscribed under Australian law, responsible for mass murder and sexual violence, no longer needs to give up its weapons to participate in a Palestinian government. Well, according to the new Labor policy.
Just an aside, consider Labor’s policy on, for example, trade unions, women’s rights, democracy and LGBT rights. Now consider Hamas’: which forbids free trade unions, suppresses women, rejects democracy and executes homosexuals. It is openly genocidal, and rejects a two-state solution. Go figure.
A lone dissenting MP was reportedly muzzled by factional heavies for the crime of having a view. Nothing says “the most transparent conference in the country” quite like a debate that never happened.
Wry & Dry draws one conclusion: Labor found the balance it wanted; just not the kind of which anyone should be proud.
Trumpster’s popularity craters
The Economist now has Trumpster’s net approval at a record −25, with just 35% of Americans still willing to admit it in public. His strongest demographic, white men over 65 without a university degree, approves of him at a net −17, which is less “solid base support” than “the last holdouts of a retreating army.”
Americans have opinions on him, none of which is flattering. On the economy: cost-of-living pessimism is at its highest since 2023, and Trumpster’s own economic approval sits at a grim −22; extraordinary for a man who actually campaigned on grocery prices. On Iran: the public is tired of a war with no visible end and an increasingly dim view of the whole adventure. Trumpster’s deal is as remote as the dark side of the moon.
Meanwhile, the one metric moving in the right direction. Well, for the Trumpsters, at least, is the family balance sheet. Crypto ventures, sons included, have helped roughly triple the President’s net worth to $6.5 billion in two years, aided by a UAE sovereign fund’s $2 billion stablecoin investment, conveniently followed by looser chip-export rules. Retail investors, less fortunate, are down billions on the same tokens.
Some things, at least, remain reliably on-brand.
Pauline’s all expenses paid
Pauline Hanson, a woman whose sartorial signature has long been “sensible blazer, Senate chamber,” recently turned up at a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show in Taormina, Sicily; reportedly on Gina Rinehart’s dime, which at least explains the passport stamp.
Wry & Dry’s mind boggled: the world’s least fashion-literate senator, sitting front row at a fashion house whose idea of change is “only slightly more crystal than last season.” And bankrolled by Australia’s richest woman.
The venue was the Ancient Theatre of Taormina — Greek-built, Roman-remodelled, now doing double duty as a couture backdrop between the sea and Mount Etna. Fitting, really: the Romans knew a thing or two about arena spectacles, a role for which Hanson has spent three decades perfecting.
Whether either woman absorbed anything about Sicilian craftsmanship, or just enjoyed being driven about, is unclear. The patronage, at least, was never in doubt. And, if media reports are correct, nor was the long-term succession plan: Rinehart has reportedly been talking up the political prospects of former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s grandson.
This presumably on the theory that if one folksy Queensland dynasty worked once, lightning might strike twice.
Snippets from all over
Thousands of Moroccans surge into Spain
Thousands of migrants climbed over a border fence or swam onto the shores of Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta on Thursday, prompting a mobilization of the Spanish military and fuelling political tensions on the Spanish mainland. (New York Times 31 July)
Wry & Dry comments: Ceuta is an autonomous city on a 10 kilometre long peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast that Spain has governed since 1668.
Harry’s legal bill
Prince Harry and other celebrities are being pursued for legal costs in their failed privacy claim against the Daily Mail, which far exceed the amount covered by their insurance.
The celebrities have legal insurance covering £16.2 million, the court was told, which would leave them more than £18 million short. (The Times 30 July)
Wry & Dry comments: Harry could sell to Netflix the rights to the inside scoop on the legal case.
Ferrari’s innovative EV hits sales target
Ferrari has hit this year’s sales target for its first electric vehicle model on the back of strong demand from China despite a polarising design that drew a backlash from investors and enthusiasts. (Financial Times 30 July)
Wry & Dry comments: The ‘Luce’ is priced from just €550,000.
Burnham supports Zelensky
[New UK PM] Andy Burnham said his government would “honour every commitment” Britain had made to Ukraine in full, during a visit by Volodymyr Zelensky. (The Times 27 July)
Wry & Dry comments: As he should. The commitments were made on behalf of a country, not of a former leader.
Amazon to shoot into space
Amazon asked American regulators for permission to launch more than 5,000 satellites to provide mobile-phone services including voice calls and messaging. (The Economist 28 July)
Wry & Dry comments: Elon Musk’s Starlink controls more than 10,000 satellites.
It figures
- -15%: NAB. Change in new home loan applications in June quarter.
- 1.5%: USA. GDP growth in year to end June, down from 2.1% in the year to end March.
- 0.0%: USA. Change in official interest rates. But three of 12 Fed members voted for an increase.
- 14%: Meta. Profit fall in the June quarter. Its share price fell 10% on the news of higher AI costs.
- 31%: Microsoft. Profit increase in the June quarter. Its share price rose 4%.
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“Court orders are not like the traffic lights in Palermo. They are not there merely to be observed when it is thought convenient to do so.”
Justice Michael Lee, Federal Court Judge,excoriating Maurice Blackburn, lawyers representing workers illegally sacked by Qantas. Maurice Blackburn had breached the court order about arranging the timely payment of the compensation.
Wry & Dry comments: Justice Lee’s predilection for colourful expressions had its peak (so far) in another civil case. Political adviser Bruce Lehrmann was charged with raping his colleague Brittany Higgins, but was acquitted. He then sued Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson for defamation. Justice Lee found that on the balance of probabilities, he had raped Higgins. Justice Lee described Lehrmann’s civil action as, “ Having escaped the lions’ den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat.”
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
Cheers!