World Business Report Are US tariffs driving stock market highs?
Rare earths have been a flashpoint in US–China trade talks, with Beijing restricting global supply earlier this year. Could a project in Australia quell further disruption?
And while some countries have eased back on investment in Africa, the UAE has become the continent's largest state investor. Our correspondent in Dubai explains more.
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Times
42 minutes ago
- Times
Who is Gareth Sheridan, the ‘pharma-bro' hoping to be Ireland's president?
G areth Sheridan arrives at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Stillorgan just a few minutes late, without his wife Heidi, who has attended all his other media commitments. It is a glorious Friday afternoon and the sun is splitting the summer skies, but he seems just a little preoccupied. It has been a bruising few days for Ireland's youngest aspiring presidential candidate, who has been forced to answer questions on everything from his own business dealings, to social housing planning objections lodged by his mother, to a business partner's reported links to Russian oligarchs. His interview with The Sunday Times was originally due to take place in his home, with his family around him. But there is a last-minute change of location to a hotel, and he arrives on his own.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Dump it, or we'll dump you': secretive consultancy group sends Liberal MPs barrage of emails over net zero policy
Liberal MPs have been sent a barrage of emails demanding they drop net zero targets or 'risk losing our support' by a group connected to conservative right-wing lobby group Advance. The mass emails, seen by Guardian Australia, have been sent to multiple Liberals by Whitestone Strategic, a secretive political consultancy group and come as the Coalition reviews its energy policy. Coalition MPs began receiving the emails – which one described as looking as if they were sent by AI bots – on Monday night. Some MPs received more than 100 within 48 hours from the same address. Sign up: AU Breaking News email One of the emails reads: 'A message to the Liberal Party and Nationals: Net Zero is causing irreversible damage to our nation. Our economic health is declining … immediate action is required. Dump Net Zero policies now, or we will stop supporting your agenda.' Another reads: 'Net Zero is a dangerous joke. It's time to dump it, or we'll dump you.' The email sender appears to be Whitestone Strategic but the email address is listed as CiviClick – a US-based platform that describes itself as AI-Powered grassroots advocacy software, that allows users to 'reach elected officials with powerful policy messages'. A Guardian Australia investigation in October revealed Whitestone Strategic's close ties to Advance, the rightwing advocacy group behind the main organisation promoting a no vote in the Indigenous voice referendum, Fair Australia. A separate investigation also found Whitestone Strategic billed taxpayers almost $135,000 over two years for work providing media messaging for conservative politicians during the voice to parliament campaign. Whitestone Strategic's work for Coalition members has extended beyond the voice campaign. None of the emails, sent since Monday, are addressed directly to the politician, or signed off by a member of the public. Many of the dozens of emails received by MPs contain the same message and some contain what appears to be coding left in unintentionally. Advance announced on 8 August it would launch a campaign targeting 'weakling' Liberals, by pressuring them to drop their support for net zero by 2050. On 15 August, it said its supporters had sent 19,897 emails to coalition MPs and senators. Several members who received the emails expressed frustration over the tactic. One Liberal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they received at least 50 emails in 24 hours, none directly addressed to them. 'The policy review process is important, we must take the time to do it right,' they said. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'We cannot be distracted by external groups with their own agendas.' Another Liberal, who asked not to be named, derided the emails and said they looked like they had been sent by 'AI bots', due to multiple of the same message being sent. This MP, who said they were previously supportive of Whitestone's work, said 'Why can't Whitestone get this stuff right?'. Liberal Senator for South Australia, Andrew McLachlan, a vocal supporter of net zero and climate action, confirmed he'd received dozens of emails from Whitestone Strategic over the last 48 hours. He said maintaining emissions reduction targets is critical and said he would continue to advocate for the target. 'It is not 'weakness' to support targets to reduce pollution. You are not a 'weakling' to be committed to exploring every possible solution to respond to our changing climate,' he said. The Liberal party is reviewing its energy policies, led by the shadow energy minister, Dan Tehan. The opposition leader, Sussan Ley, hasn't committed to keeping net zero, but some vocal members of the Coalition – including Barnaby Joyce, Michael McCormack, Matt Canavan and Tony Pasin – have been publicly and privately lobbying against the target. In response to questions from Guardian Australia, Advance said they wouldn't comment on individual emails from supporters, but that 'it is no secret that we are campaigning against net zero and have asked our supporters to contact MPs to voice their opposition'.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
As the economy slows and productivity flatlines, is Australia having another banana republic moment?
When Paul Keating stepped into a noisy kitchen in a Melbourne function centre for an interview with John Laws, he didn't mince his words. It was 14 May 1986 when the then Labor treasurer told Laws that without some serious changes, a collapse in export prices meant our trade-dependent country was living beyond its means and fast on its way to becoming 'a banana republic'. 'If this government cannot get the adjustment, get manufacturing going again and keep moderate wage outcomes and a sensible economic policy, then Australia is basically done for,' Keating told Laws. Sign up: AU Breaking News email It was that sense of urgency – the threat of a 'banana republic' – that helped blow away the cobwebs of complacency and drive the massive reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Australia in the decades since has prospered. Yet once again we are having similar conversations. The economy doesn't seem to be functioning as it should, and may only be capable of growing at a fraction of the rate it used to. The budget is in structural deficit. The population is ageing, and our demand for government services grows and grows, even as our capacity to fund that extra spending goes the other way. Younger Australians are increasingly resentful about their lot, homes are too expensive and the world outside our shores looks more dangerous than it has in decades. Used to being a standout on the global stage, we are being relegated to the back of the pack. Living standards across the rich world climbed by an average of 22% over the past decade. In comparison, our living standards are up just 1.5%, according to analysis by Chris Richardson, an independent economist. Analysts place a lot of the blame for this on a slowdown on one thing: productivity growth. They point to the fact that our economy is no more productive now than it was in 2016. Over the longer term, productivity growth is the ingredient that delivers higher real wages, generates better-quality goods and helps pay for government services. Technological change can explain a lot of productivity growth over the decades. The promise of artificial intelligence is that it ignites an explosion of new growth as AI embeds itself deeper into the economy and our lives. With so much apparently at stake, Chalmers in a recent interview was asked if flatlining national productivity was a 'crisis'. 'No,' the treasurer said, 'but it's a big challenge'. Australia and Australians have a lot of 'big challenges', and some are regularly referred to as 'crises'. Yet not all are worthy of a three-day economic reform roundtable with 900 submissions and 40 ministerial mini-roundtables leading up to it. At the National Press Club on 18 June, Chalmers declared that the government has 'a responsibility to rebuild confidence in liberal democratic politics and economic institutions – by lifting living standards for working people in particular'. Days out from the start of the roundtable, Chalmers has been at pains to play down the very reform fervour that he fanned. Anthony Albanese appears to have little appetite for spending political capital in pushing through tough economic reforms. The PM has made it clear that there will be – read his lips – no new taxes this term. The treasurer has obediently narrowed the scope of the potential 'deliverables' to regulatory reform to get more homes built, with a side promise of some progress on longstanding policy ideas, like a road user charge. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion The lack of a 'crisis' in productivity may make it hard to understand why we have spent nearly six weeks leading up to this talkfest in Canberra. But it does help explain the apparent lack of urgency to solve the issue. So what do economists reckon: do we have a productivity crisis? The answer, Richardson quips, 'depends whether you like rising living standards or not'. Are we a commodity price collapse away from becoming a 21st-century version of Keating's 'banana republic'? Saul Eslake, another independent economist, says no – the economy now is totally transformed. Rather than crisis, Eslake volunteers the word 'malaise'. 'I don't think it would help the debate to call it a productivity crisis,' he adds – that could lead to rushed and short-term measures that might just goose the economy for a year or two. 'There are no magic bullets, no short-term solutions. Nothing that can be done, even with the greatest amount of political will, to lift productivity growth in 12 months' time,' Eslake says. John Hawkins, an economics professor at the University of Canberra, says productivity is not a crisis because it's 'not something that is making people worse off'. Instead: 'It's a lost opportunity to make us better off'. 'We got used to the idea that incomes go up over time. Over the long run most of that increase has come from productivity,' Hawkins says. 'More recently we got away with low productivity growth because commodities were strong, but we need to do something if we want real income growth going forward.' Shadows of the 1980s, then, from which we can expect echoes of that era's reforms.
