Down to three from seven over a decade. Via Yahoo: BP Plc will cease fuel production at its 65-year-old Kwinana refinery in Western Australia, citing low margins and tough competition from Asia, and will transition the facility into an import terminal. The U.K. company’s move will leave Australia with just three remaining refineries, with the
Sir Fomo McSpruikerson is an expatriate billionaire and proud proprietor of The Strayan, a vanity media project designed to boost his assets. AFP raid Alan Kohler’s house after airing critical opinion of mass immigration on ABC The Australian Federal Police have raided the home of ABC economist Alan Kohler, citing national security concerns over a
Australians offshore There are thousands of Australian citizens currently trapped outside Australia. The Australian press is currently touting figures around 30 thousand, based on the numbers of people registered with DFAT as requiring help. However, sources within DFAT are also canvassing the possibility that the numbers may be higher than 50 thousand in both Europe
Via News: Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has ruled out expanding international arrivals to include students, saying it would put too much strain on the hotel quarantine system. She said the hotel quarantine was coping adequately with the arrival of 115o passengers a month and there was no need to increase that number at a time when
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has grown sick and tired of carrying the nation’s hotel quarantine load for returning Australians while NSW residents are simultaneously shut out of travel to other states. Accordingly, Berejiklian has demanded the Queensland and WA Governments pay for their returned travelers processed through NSW’s hotel quarantine facilities: A fed-up Ms Berejiklian,
Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) has heard further evidence about the use of cash payments in the state’s rail industry. Metro Trains executive Peter Bollas told the hearing that he had been paid between $8,000 and $10,000 a month by Transclean CEO George Haritos over several years. The firm has had a contract to
Victoria’s hotel quarantine inquiry will be extended by six weeks and won’t report until 21 December after receiving new evidence from key players: Inquiry chair Jennifer Coate said an interim report would be handed down on November 6 containing recommendations for a proposed quarantine program, based on evidence and information currently available to the board.
This is so mad that I’m not sure where to look, at the AFR: Individual corporations could lease entire hotels, and universities could commandeer campus accommodation to quarantine foreign students, under plans being devised to safely and dramatically expand international travel and get the economy rolling. And with Victoria on top of its coronavirus outbreak
Via Daily Mail: A pro-Beijing Liberal candidate has taken out ads in a Chinese-language newspaper urging voters with the same ethnic background to elect ‘one of their own people’. Peter Zhuang, a 51-year-old property developer and company director, is representing the Liberal National Party at this Saturday’s Queensland state election in the southern Brisbane seat of Stretton,
Our wonderful leadership reverts to mean so fast: Scott Morrison is setting his sights on bringing international students and workers into Australia as more states ease coronavirus restrictions and manage outbreaks. Mr Morrison has reflected on publicly pushing to reopen the whole country by Christmas a few months ago. His next priority is attracting university
Via Domain: A former NSW auditor-general has warned that the shredding of documents related to $250 million in council grants was likely to be unlawful and should end Gladys Berejiklian’s leadership. Tony Harris, who has also served as a senior Commonwealth public servant, said he was confident the Premier’s office breached the State Records Act
By STEPHEN S. ROACH at Project Syndicate: US President Donald Trump wears his recent experience with COVID-19 infection as some perverse badge of courage, rather than as a warning of what may lie ahead. And the adverse economic consequences of his administration’s approach to the pandemic could not contrast more sharply with the robust recovery
Last week, Labor leader Anthony Albanese urged the federal government to press ahead with its proposed national integrity commission in the wake of the controversial land deal at Badgerys Creek in New South Wales, which saw the government pay $30 million for land at the site of Sydney’s new airport that was subsequently valued at
What happens when a commodity-poor nation that consumes huge qualities of commodities blocks external supply. Amusing stuff from Platts: Seaborne metallurgical coal prices have fallen sharply since China moved to temporarily halt Australian coal imports in early October as the implied surplus weighing on the global market in the fourth quarter is priced in. Chinese
Kiss the ring of Virgin Premier Gladys, at Domain: The Premier’s popularity is high on the back of her competent handling of the pandemic. She is seen as having skilfully steered NSW through the stormy waters of COVID-19, with the only real blip the Ruby Princess cruise ship debacle which ultimately did not damage her
A terrific piece at Domain on the weekend describes the state of China ties within the ALP: In mid-May, a small sticker appeared on a Labor senator’s office door in Parliament House. To an untrained eye it was innocuous – four wolf’s claw marks on a clear background. But it was a symbol of what
Via The Australian comes the brawling of Neo-Nazis: In a submission to the senate inquiry into Scott Morrison’s Foreign Relations Bill — which aims to give Canberra a veto over state government and university deals with overseas powers — ambassdor Cheng Jingye also accused other Beijing critics of having “minds of malice”. Addressing the senator
Sir Fomo McSpruikerson is an expatriate billionaire and proud proprietor of The Strayan, a vanity media project designed to boost his assets. Melbourne wins 2020 World’s Most Leaveable City Award Melbourne has been awarded the prestigious “World’s Most Leaveable City” Award for the first time since the early 1990’s. Melbourne shocked a tightly contested field
During his daily press conferences on Victoria’s COVID-19 infections, Premier Daniel Andrews regularly tells us that he is just “following the science” and the “super computer” with regards to the state’s draconian lockdowns. This “science” saw blunt measures like nightly curfews, 5km travel limits, one hour exercise limits, playground bans, golf bans, and tennis bans
Sky News’ Peta Credlin has again forensically unpicked inconsistencies, lies and obfuscation from the Victorian Government during the Hotel Quarantine Inquiry. In the video above, Credlin explicitly calls for Inquiry chair, Jennifer Coate, to call back witnesses for oral testimony instead of relying on signed affidavits written by lawyers and worded in ways to obfuscate:
Labor leader Anthony Albanese has urged the federal government to press ahead with its proposed national integrity commission in the wake of revelations about a controversial land deal at Badgerys Creek in New South Wales. The government paid $30 million for land at the site of Sydney’s new airport that was subsequently valued at just
News has a nice Swedish panic feature today: Coronavirus cases have exploded in Sweden as authorities try to keep hold of twin battles – containing the virus and controlling the narrative. The breakaway Nordic nation divided experts by refusing to lock down its citizens when the virus swept through the country earlier this year. But
Lawyers say that Victoria’s Chief Health Officer (CHO) Brett Sutton is among several government officials who could potentially face criminal charges over their evidence to the inquiry into the state’s hotel quarantine program. Sutton recently came under scrutiny over revelations that he had instructed Health Department lawyers to withhold an email from the inquiry which
Via CNBC: AstraZeneca shares turned negative Wednesday after a Brazilian health authority said a volunteer in its coronavirus vaccine study died. The Federal University of Sao Paulo, which is helping coordinate late-stage trials in Brazil, separately said that the volunteer was Brazilian, according to Reuters. Shares of AstraZeneca, a front-runner in the Covid-19 vaccine race, gave
A few more charts today on the waning hope of the great vaccine cure for COVID-19. Availability is inexorably being pushed out: Take-up is going to be abysmal: But the US had better give it out to the elderly! I remain of the view that treatments and lightning-fast tests offer greater hope for economic recovery.
Hopes for a Queensland holiday before Christmas have been dealt a blow with new Roy Morgan polling showing the majority of Queenslanders want the border with NSW to remain shut: A majority of 53% of Queensland electors say they don’t want the NSW border opened now compared to 47% that do want the border opened
Yesterday, the Hotel Quarantine Inquiry held an extraordinary meeting to discuss contradictory and omitted evidence that has come to light after witness testimony finished earlier this month. You can watch short videos of the extraordinary meeting here and here. Following the meeting, Daniel Andrews’ former right hand man, DPC secretary Chris Eccles, Victoria’s ex-top cop
Via Crikey’s Janine Perret yesterday: Any lingering doubts about Gladys Berejiklian’s judgment were put to rest yesterday after a sleazy interview with shock jock Kyle Sandilands. She obviously has none. Forget her political acumen over corruption allegations, or even her personal life choices — she’s now appears to be lacking even basic common sense as
Via the AFR: If Mathias Cormann is elected the next secretary-general of the OECD, he will have to get his head around one of the most complicated and important policy issues facing the global economy – the taxation of global technology giants. A lot of water has to flow under the bridge before Cormann is
What to do if suddenly some amateur is doing your job much better than you are? Should you take a long, hard look at yourself? Nah. Commission a mate to write up an op-ed defence of your own failure. At Domain comes Denis Muller, who is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing
