Melongate (inevitably). JD Vance’s favour to Big Oil. Decoy.
Wry & Dry: a cynical and irreverent review of the week in politics, economics and life. For intelligent Readers who disdain the trivial.
Investment Matters
Company profit season is now in its second week. Craig reviews:
- Cleanaway: takeover offer for our largest holding
- CBA: an information-rich result (but we do not own it)
- Integral Diagnostics: promising set-up, ready to launch
- Life360: on the fundamentals, we were pleased
- SGH Group: market disappointed by FY27 guidance
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Wry & Dry’s ponderings…
Has Melongate hit DEFCON 2? JD Vance confuses a corporate favour with America’s foreign policy. It was Trumpster’s undetectable hairpiece that caused the decoy flight. Croesus Turnbull’s RDS returns, again. And the Monoculture Party has a mono country foreign policy.
1. Melongate: DEFCON 2?
Every political party, like every large company, has a disaster scenario. What to do if…the Trumpster cancels AUKUS, or a backbencher biffs a public servant, or an RAF plane crashes on take-off. All these would be in the Disaster Handbook.
But if Uncle Albo makes an off-colour gesture about melons gifted by Japanese PM Takaichi… “Err, [referring to the Handbook] on what page is that?” It’s at DEFCON 5 already.1
Uncle Albo then took the disaster to DEFCON 4 by doing what he does best: being stubborn and refusing to apologise. “I reject the assertion in the question,” he told parliament, the political equivalent of doubling a bad bet.
The disaster soon lifted to DEFCON 3 by Labor Caucus Central Casting calling up four senior Labor women to rush to Uncle Albo’s defence. Penny Wong called the backlash “misinformation.” Tanya Plibersek went one step further and called it “a complete misinterpretation.” Katy Gallagher declared there’s “no greater supporter of women than this Prime Minister.” Julie Collins simply declined to accept a crude joke had occurred. It’s less a defence than a group hug performed entirely for the cameras.
Melongate has now hit DEFCON 2: the Greens and the Coalition, united like Tsar Vlad and Zelensky co-habitating, in the Senate have demanded documents on leaked diplomatic cables. Katy Gallagher, not the best person to argue about other people’s behaviour, called it “entirely inappropriate” to score points off Japanese relations. She might also have mentioned: Uncle Albo could’ve fixed this on day one with four words.
Instead, the melon has become a watermelon, and it’s landed squarely on his own head. What will be his DEFCON 1?
By the way, Uncle Albo has a heavy travel schedule between now and Christmas. Japan is not on the list. China is.
1 Defense (sic) Readiness condition (DEFCON) is an alert state used by the US armed forces. It prescribes five graduated levels of readiness (or states of alert) for the U.S. military. It increases in severity from DEFCON 5 (least severe) to DEFCON 1 (most severe) to match varying military situations.
2. The business of America is business2
In a glorious example of the priorities, or is it confusion, of the US government, Vice-President JD Vance rang Ukraine’s Zelensky with an urgent request. Could Ukraine please stop blowing up oil tankers in the Russian port of Novorossiysk, because it’s affecting America’s interests and upsetting the oil market?
Whaaat? Well, it so happens that the tankers in question carry Kazakh crude from a Kazakh oil field in which US oil major Chevron owns 50% and US oil major ExxonMobil 25%. Funny how quickly “defending democracy” becomes “please stop denting Big Oil’s profits.”
The further irony writes itself: Washington bombs Iran and rattles global oil markets without a second thought, but a Ukrainian drone near a Chevron pipeline apparently crosses a r ed line. Vance, evidently, has run the numbers and concluded that Chevron + ExxonMobil matter more than Kherson (a major Ukrainian city, temporarily occupied by Tsar Vlad).
It’s a neat trick: dress up a corporate favour as a foreign policy concern, and hope nobody notices Ukraine’s actual war effort just got vetoed by shareholders in Houston.
2 Calvin Coolidge, US president, in an address to American newspaper editors in 1925.
3. Trumpster’s undetectable hairpiece
Readers will now be aware that Trumpster escaped Ankara (post-NATO meeting) via a food truck. This is proof that the leader of the free world’s exit strategy from an assassination plot involves the same vehicle usually reserved for delivering rubbery airline chicken.
Trumpster climbed the stairs, waved to cameras, and then Air Force One served as a $2bn decoy. Also as decoys were the 15 journalists, some 20 aides and 26 crew. Will a medal be struck? But consolation was at hand: the press pool received sweets bearing the presidential seal; the diplomatic equivalent of a chocolate on a hotel pillow, minus the honesty of who’s actually not on board.
Meanwhile, while the actual president rode across the runway in a catering truck, bound for an unmarked 28 year-old 757-200ER. The plane would fly incognito presumably because “Melania’s Not Aboard Either” wouldn’t fit on the transponder.
The White House insists Iranian assassins were the cause of the ruse. Wry & Dry posits that the wind at Ankara airport, notorious enemy of carefully managed undetectable hairpieces, had deranged the presidential coiffure. A Turkish hairdresser was engaged to undertake urgent repairs on the presidential locks onboard the 757-200ER. The usual in-flight press conference was delayed until after the stopover in the UK.
The White House calls it all “distraction and misdirection.” Had the Iranian assassins been successful in sending the decoy Air Force One and its some 60 passengers rapidly to earth, history might call the lives of the lost 60 an unworthy sacrifice.
Either way, next time Trump waves from the top of Air Force One, ask yourself: is that the president, or just a very convincing dummy? Hard to tell the difference.
4. He’s baaaack
Croesus Turnbull has once again emerged from the political retirement home to declare AUKUS “a colossal mistake” — a diagnosis best delivered by the man whose own signature infrastructure project, Snowy 2.0, quietly morphed from a $2bn battery into a $12bn hole under the ground, with credible cost estimates now pushing $20bn. And Pauline Hanson, one very well acquainted with matters mathematical, and who understands equations, both the simple and quadratical,3 muttering “$40 billion.”
Turnbull’s RDS (Relevance Deprivation Syndrome) is chronic and, by now, untreatable — he simply cannot resist reappearing to tell Australia it’s doing everything wrong, provided the microphone is available and the subject isn’t his own record.
British shipbuilding, he warns, is “in disarray.” Rich testimony from a man whose signature engineering triumph got a tunnel-boring machine named Florence stuck in a sinkhole for eleven months.
AUKUS may well have problems worth scrutinising. But when the loudest voice warning about a multi-decade defence project going catastrophically over budget is also the architect of Australia’s most catastrophically over-budget infrastructure gamble, the word “colossal” starts to feel less like an assessment and more like a confession.
Where are the men in white coats?
3 With apologies to Messrs. Gilbert & Sullivan.
5. American tourists
In 1990, barely 5% of Americans owned a passport; now, the Wall Street Journal says, over 50% do,4 unleashed by a post-pandemic travel binge and a newfound belief that Liechtenstein is a place you visit for the afternoon, not a country with actual history.
“Liechtenstein for a day just to say we’ve been there” is the whole philosophy in one sentence. Travel as inventory management. The Louvre, the Colosseum, the entire Habsburg dynasty, all reduced to a checkbox between breakfast and the airport.
In 1984, an economy JFK/LHR/JFK ticket cost $2,150 (in today’s dollars). Today, it’s about $1,200. Which means it’s now more affordable than ever for Americans to see nothing, faster than ever, in more countries they’d never heard of, taking more selfies than anyone thought possible. And ticking every box.
4 Many just to travel to Canada. 56% of Australians have passports, well behind Iceland (95%), Germany (86%), Ireland (85%), Israel (83%) and seven other countries.
6. A mono country foreign policy.
Pauline Hanson, leader of the One Culture party and aspiring Prime Minister, cannot name the leaders of Indonesia or Japan. These are two of Australia’s three closest Asian partners. And the PM of Japan has recently been in the news (‘melongate’) about whom she has spoken.
But she nailed Emperor Eleven without hesitation, which tells you she sees Australia’s foreign policy as a mono-country policy: China, forget the rest.
Asked if she’d rush to Jakarta as PM, she offered a shrug worthy of someone being asked to visit a cousin she doesn’t particularly like: “I don’t know if I’d say I want to.”
This is, remarkably, an improvement on 1996, when she responded “please explain” when asked if she were “xenophobic.” At least back then, ignorance came with plausible deniability. Well, sort of; then she was a newbie politician.
Three decades later and a wannabe PM, she’s had ample time to learn a name or two of important people. She simply hadn’t thought about it.
She offers diplomacy as effortlessly as “no problem,” and seems to have mistaken foreign policy for small talk at a barbecue: confident, blokey, and entirely uninformed.
7. Victorian government abandons CBD
The Victorian government is set to abandon 100,000 square metres of office space next year — five MCG playing fields’ worth, or roughly one Ben Carroll u-turn per square metre. It’s the crowning achievement of a public service that has quietly downgraded “one desk per worker” to 60 desks per 100, presumably on the logic that empty chairs don’t unionise.
Business groups, gathered at the BCA’s Melbourne HQ like a support group for people who miss commuting, want Carroll to scrap the government’s own work-from-home laws.
Property Council chief Mike Zorbas warned the bill would “bomb business back into the Stone Age.” Melbourne’s 18.9% CBD vacancy rate, much higher than Sydney and Brisbane, suggests the Stone Age already has a foothold.
Snippets from all over
Anthropic’s upcoming IPO
Anthropic investors expect the AI start-up to float at a valuation of $2tn or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest ever initial public offering. (Financial Times 14 August)
Wry & Dry comments: Anthropic is the owner of a large-language AI model called Claude. SpaceX listed at a $1.77tn valuation in June.
Seoul tops Dubai
Seoul’s Incheon airport said it has overtaken Dubai to become the world’s busiest airport for international passengers this year, after the number of people travelling to the Gulf hub declined due to the war in Iran. (Financial Times 14 August)
Wry & Dry comments: In the same period, Melbourne Airport had about 6 million international passengers.
Panama Canal costs more
Prices for the busiest shipping lanes in the Panama Canal have hit a new record, as falling water levels linked to an intensifying El Niño and strong demand driven by the Iran war constrain traffic. (Financial Times 12 August)
Wry & Dry comments: Daily auctions for a transit slot in August through the canal’s commonly used locks have averaged about $1.1mn so far this month, more than sixteen times the average price for the same period last year.
Weight-loss pill for life, for Brits
The UK has become the first country in Europe to approve a daily weight-loss pill that can act as a “treatment for life” to stay slim and reverse type 2 diabetes. (The Times 10 August)
Wry & Dry comments: Orforglipron is not currently available in Australia. Its manufacturer, Eli Lilly submitted its TGA application in 2025. The US FDA approved the pill in April 2026.
Trumpster’s media company reports losses
Donald Trump’s media company reported deep losses in the second quarter as it dropped crypto deals, pushed plans to sell fast access to his Truth Social posts, and focused on a pivot into commercially unproven nuclear fusion. (Financial Times 11 August)
Wry & Dry comments: Its net loss for the first half of 2026 rose to $644mn, compared to $52mn last year.
It figures
- 0.0%: Australia. Change in official interest rates. But the RBA discussed increasing rates.
- 3.4%: USA. Inflation in year to July, down from 3.5% in June.
- -28%: CBA. Fall in mortgage applications since the federal budget.
- -20%: Westpac. Fall in mortgage applications since the federal budget.
- 5%: SMSF borrowing loans as a per cent of all home loans, up from 2.5%. Increase since Limited Recourse Borrowing Arrangements were proscribed in June.
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“I don’t know if I’d say I want to.”
Pauline Hanson, wannabe Australian prime minister, when asked if she would visit Jakarta fairly quickly after becoming PM.
Wry & Dry comments: Spoken like true bogun.
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
Cheers!