The leasing of Darwin’s Port to the Chinese.

Discussion in 'Australia, NZ, Pacific' started by Dissily Mordentroge, Jun 26, 2019.

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  1. Dissily Mordentroge

    Dissily Mordentroge Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Last edited: Jun 26, 2019
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  2. Bowerbird

    Bowerbird Well-Known Member

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    Listen. The Chinese have for years been buying up Australia

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10...nese-foreign-investment-in-australia/10344148

    They own Cubby station which has a major impact on the Murray darling........
     
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  3. Dissily Mordentroge

    Dissily Mordentroge Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Having spent most of my 73 years in Australia I have some awarness they’ve been buying up the farm.
    Darwin, because of it’s profound strategic sifnificance, is another story. A story demonstrating idiocy of a frightening degree.
     
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  4. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    What do you think happens when you run long-term trade deficits?
    What do you think the other country does with all that money?
    They buy up assets in your country.
     
    Last edited: Jun 27, 2019
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  5. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The Northern Territory is poorer than other parts of Australia, so they probably wanted the money and were looking for anything that might help add to their economy.

    The Chinese don't need to invade, they'll just buy you all up.

    But don't forget about U.S. policy in Latin America, the U.S. were perfectly willing to militarily intervene to protect U.S. business interests and assets in Latin America that were owned by U.S. companies.
    So once a big powerful foreign company has a lot of investment in your country, it could have pretext to invade if they felt those assets were ever threatened.

    And also don't forget that typically resource-rich countries don't become rich. We have a long history in Africa to see that. Those resources tend to be owned by a select few, so the money doesn't trickle down to most of the people in the population. It's the manufacturing exporting countries that grow a strong middle class.
     
    Last edited: Jun 27, 2019
  6. Steady Pie

    Steady Pie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This is true because when your economy is concentrated in one area it is easy for leaders to secure the keys to the kingdom and centralise government in their hands.

    Australia by contrast is a robust representative democracy with high transparency and accountability. Our resource sector is a big source of tax revenue and jobs. We have a strong social safety net and high wages. We have pretty low taxes, 5th lowest in the OECD.

    The resources sector is a component of why we were able to navigate the GFC without a recession.

    [​IMG]

    I think we have it pretty damn good and are lucky to have the resources we do.

    I also like that this is not restricted to large corporations with government licenses - I paid $20 for a miner's right that allows me in perpituity to prospect for gold on crown land. I have found 2.4 ounces to date. Tax is not payable on hobbyist prospecting.
     
    Last edited: Aug 6, 2019
  7. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    Andrew Hastie is a much needed voice of authority re the Chinese.

    The chair of parliament's powerful security and intelligence committee has warned Australia against underestimating China, pointing to the experience of Europe in the face of an aggressive Nazi Germany.

    Federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie says Australia will face its biggest democratic, economic and security test over the next decade as China and the US compete for global dominance.

    The West once believed economic liberalisation would naturally lead to China becoming a democracy, just as the French believed "steel and concrete forts" would guard against Germany in 1940, he said.


    "But their thinking failed catastrophically. The French had failed to appreciate the evolution of mobile warfare," Mr Hastie wrote in an opinion piece published on Thursday in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

    "Like the French, Australia has failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become."

    The former SAS captain said Australia had ignored the role of ideology in communist China's push for influence in the Indo-Pacific region.


    "We keep using our own categories to understand its actions, such as its motivations for building ports and roads, rather than those used by the Chinese Communist Party," he said.

    Mr Hastie noted western commentators once believed Josef Stalin's Soviet Russia was the "rational actions of a realist great power".

    "We must be intellectually honest and take the Chinese leadership at its word," he wrote of President Xi Jinping's speeches referencing Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

    Australia faces a delicate diplomatic balancing act with the US, the nation's closest strategic ally, and major trade partner China, going toe-to-toe in a trade war.

    Mr Hastie said it was impossible to forsake America or disengage from China.

    He said almost every strategic and economic question facing Australia in coming decades would be viewed through competition between the two superpowers.


    "The next decade will test our democratic values, our economy, our alliances and our security like no other time in Australian history," the Liberal backbencher wrote.

    After debate over a Chinese company having a 99-year lease on Darwin's port reignited during the week, Mr Hastie said there were broader issues to consider.

    "Right now, our greatest vulnerability lies not in our infrastructure, but in our thinking," he said.

    "That intellectual failure makes us institutionally weak.

    "If we don't understand the challenge ahead for our civil society, in our parliaments, in our universities, in our private enterprises, in our charities - our little platoons - then choices will be made for us. Our sovereignty, our freedoms, will be diminished."

    https://www.sbs.com.au/news/like-no...an-warned-it-faces-unprecedented-china-threat
     
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  8. a better world

    a better world Well-Known Member

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    Here are some of the errors in Hastie's own thinking:

    1. He speaks as if our western liberal democracies are the paragon of virtue, but:

    (a) note the current extreme political dysfunction in the western democracies.
    (b) the current neoliberal economic orthodoxy ("trickle down" economics) is increasingly questioned and despised among a growing proportion of the population, because of entrenched poverty, stagnant wages with rising costs, high under-employment, increasing job insecurity, and increasing homelessness and mortgage stress, despite 23 years of (so-called) continuous growth in Australia.
    (c) consequently (as might be expected), some recent polls show around half of young people are questioning the superiority of democracy over socialism.

    So when I hear this line: "our fathers fought to preserve our way of life" from comfortable conservatives like Hastie, I cringe. There's too much in "our way of life" that absolutely needs displacement by something better.
    [eg, a recognition that the "invisible hand" guiding competitive profit seeking markets - as a means of achieving the best allocation of resources - is a fiction; obviously government intervention to enable public policy choices like zero underemployment (see MMT) is an absolute necessity.

    OK, now let's look at China.

    The adoption of free-market capitalism (in the early 80's) in "Communist" china, within the framework of overall State control, has obviously been remarkably successful in the last three decades, for China.

    ...so much so that the paranoid Right are beginning to hyperventilate everywhere. I heard Bolton (or was it Pompeo) say recently on radio: "if we can keep them at bay for another 5 years they will never catch up".

    Now, assuming the Chinese are as clever as Americans (who haven't yet worked out how to avoid mass killings via gun control), it seems likely this attempt to maintain economic superiority over China will fail eventually…..provided the US doesn't initiate a war to pre-empt any possibility of Chinese economic superiority. [For my part I will be watching ideologues like Hastie, Bolton and Pompeo - and the media devoted to pushing their world view, in the near and medium term].

    Back to China: yes the Communist ideologues in China are currently denying the citizens a degree of openness and
    free speech, and are enforcing a type of "group think", yet God knows there is plenty of this "groupthink" (eg 'free' market ideology) in the West also.

    Remove your ideological blinkers. The Chinese government will have to deal with its citizens' same desires for 'freedom' (as China grows its prosperity)
    as other governments do - bringing me back to my first point about failing western democracies. Let's get our own houses in order.




     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2019
  9. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    I don’t think he made that claim here. We have our problems in the West , yes.
    What do you suggest we replace it with?

    The Communist ideologues have always denied the Chinese a degree of openness- as we saw in Queensland at the University demo last week and in Hong Kong over the last few weeks. No surprise there.
    His point was that we need to think like Chinese to understand how they are expanding their influence through the world. OBOR, long lease of Port of Darwin, covert surveillance of Chinese citizens outside China, repatriation and imprisonment of naughty Chinese, etc, before we find that decisions are being made for us.
     
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  10. a better world

    a better world Well-Known Member

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    His claim: "we must defend our way of life".

    Well...no, we have to change our way of life.

    A different economic system: allowing a combination of wealth creation in the private sector (as at present, in our neoliberal economic system), AND wealth (money) creation in the public sector, to allow sustainable utilisation of all available resources including all available labour (see MMT); at present c. 10% of people are trapped in poverty, un+underemployment is >10%, and another 30% live from pay packet to pay packet, with the smallest adverse event likely to send them into poverty and homelessness.

    "It's the economy stupid"...…. that's why the liberal democracies, with entrenched poverty and growing inequality, are imploding.

    Is Confucianism itself, or Chinese culture (not communist party ideology) a threat?

    Hastie's insulting and inflammatory remarks conflating China and Nazi Germany, clearly nonsensical, are worse than undiplomatic. We need diplomacy to 'contain' Chinese economic growth, not insults, trade wars and shrieks from the paranoid spooks industry. OBOR is a legitimate trade and development scheme supplying much needed capital eg, New Guinea has asked for Chinese development funds - guess why...

    Meanwhile we have enough of our own fascists, including those who applauded the persecution of Julian Assange for the 'crime' of revealing the lies and criminality of war. .. and when did China launch a war on another nation (ie outside its borders)?
    btw look at the disgraceful treatment of 'witness K' - state illegality personified.

    As for Hongkong, opinions there are by no means united (as in any democracy).
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2019
  11. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    Why should we?
    We do have issues yes, but the Chinese system doesn’t benefit every Chinese.
    Under those stats, it’s easy to forget that 30.46 million Chinese live in what their government classifies as poverty, more if you go with non-government calculations.

    Portrait of the poor

    Most of the poor in China live in the countryside. Their farmland may be semi-desert and homes carved into a mountainside instead of along city streets. Farming is about the only occupation. A household registration system allows internal migration to the margins of big cities, which are rich in jobs, rather than full legal residency that in some cases would let them send children to school. Some live in suburban slums.

    “China is polarized by its advancing technologies and a large number of people that remain impoverished,” U.S.-based anti-poverty nonprofit the Borgen Project says on its blog. “Tall glass-and-steel skyscrapers loom over gritty, crumbling slums.”
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphj...ina-despite-fast-growing-wealth/#50911d9c7e9e
    Tibet. Hong Kong, Vietnam,
    Chinese “investment” is not a string free gift.
     
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  12. ThirdTerm

    ThirdTerm Well-Known Member

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    A 99-year Chinese lease on Darwin Port is quite similar to what happened to Hong Kong in 1898, when the ailing Qing Dynasty leased it to Britain for 99 years. In 2015, Chinese company Landbridge had been awarded a 99-year lease of Darwin Port as part of a $500 million deal. Beijing holds some pretty powerful economic levers against Australia and the Opium War was unnecessary to force Australia to cede the port.
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2019
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  13. a better world

    a better world Well-Known Member

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    Loss of faith in institutions....political dysfunction...…entrenched poverty...….

    Of course; China started from a low base (in say,1980).

    A higher percentage of Americans live in poverty - c.40 million people. Inequality in the US is as high as that in China. But more significantly::

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usa-china-income-inequality-economic-research/

    "Meanwhile, economic growth in China has been so strong that -- despite widening inequality -- the incomes of the bottom 50 percent have also “grown markedly,” the economists wrote. Their analysis found that the poorest half of Chinese workers saw their average income grow more than 400 percent from 1978 to 20015. For their American counterparts, income decreased 1 percent."

    “This is likely to make rising inequality much more acceptable” in China, they noted. “In contrast, in the U.S.. there was no growth left at all for the bottom 50 percent (-1 percent).”


    Population of China: c.1.2 billion. The true potential of the Chinese economic system has yet to be realised, meanwhile it seems to be raising more people out of poverty than the US system (see above). Trump of course is doing what he can to slow the impressive Chinese growth rates of the last three decades.

    China has historical claims on the first two places. As for Vietnam...….(never mind, my number didn't come up, fortunately...)
    Investment never is, but hopefully development will follow.
     
  14. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    The fact that China was willing to wait one hundred years to reclaim Hong Kong is an object lesson. Payback for the Opium wars is a bitch!
    China develops as an amoeba does.
    Whataboutery.
    Who knows what will happen? Will the Politburo realise that they can’t let the whole country get rich because the populace won’t accept the old methods of control. Will they continue to censor the internet?
     
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  15. Robert Urbanek

    Robert Urbanek Active Member

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    A story from 2015. A bit dated, ya think?
     
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  16. LeftRightLeft

    LeftRightLeft Well-Known Member

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    This attitude alone has caused, is causing and will cause more problems than anything else.

    We can either go backwards, regress, join the Tony Abbott mindset. If we want things as they were in the 50's with some things, we have to have everything the way it was in the 50's. You want lower health costs, OK get rid of the cutting edge medicine and medical technology we have.
    This is called regression.

    If we want it to stay the same, join up with Dick Smith and his mob.
    This is called stagnation.

    If you want us to grow, as people, as a society and as a nation. If you want the world to look at us as a "fair go" nation.

    Progress causes change, time causes change, we can accept it, use it to our advantage and change with it, or we can resist and be changed by it.
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2019
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  17. LeftRightLeft

    LeftRightLeft Well-Known Member

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    When I was an undergraduate, I will always remember the very first biochemistry lecture. We were told that we would over the coming years learn thousands of pathways and cycles. We would learn chemical formulas and reactions by the hundreds.

    What we are actually looking at however, is our way of rationalising what we see and predicting what should statistically happen.

    In reality we are a bag of chemicals all seeking a state of equilibrium.

    In society we can generalise about this group and that, liberals this and conservatives that. Unemployed this and the rich that.

    What we have however are individual people. Each with as much right as anyone else to basic human rights.
     
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  18. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    I have lost faith in our country as being a fair go nation.
    We have become money hungry and selfish.

    I’m not anti progress. My point was in response to a response that we have to change our way of life rather than change our ways of thinking.
    Andrew Hastie said that we have to think differently in order to deal
    with the changes raised by a more mobile China.
    He was excessive comparing China with Nazi Germany and that was offensive.
    I don’t know how diplomacy is the way to deal with China- they think differently from us and have a longer term view of things and they don’t understand the way we think.
     
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  19. a better world

    a better world Well-Known Member

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    Hastie, like all ignorant, comfortable conservatives, made no mention of our own short-comings; in his view only China needs to change.
    I'm sure China has already got the message from Bolton, Pompeo, Trump and all the other cultural supremacists about what the West thinks about China. The Chinese ambassador yesterday said (in response to Hastie's Nazi slur) that the West can't assume cultural/economic superiority forever.

    [Of course the correct solution for a changing world lies in the UN, but the UN project remains incomplete ('Doc' Evatt wanted a UNSC without veto. He lost that battle - because ……(long story short), human civilisation is still rather primitive, driven by tribal instinct rather than rule of international law)].

    But something China can teach us, about running an economy:

    https://ellenbrown.com/2019/08/09/neoliberalism-has-met-its-match-in-china/

    "Spross quoted former bank CEO Richard Vague, chair of The Governor’s Woods Foundation, who explained, “China has committed itself to a high level of growth. And growth, very simply, is contingent on financing.” Beijing will “come in and fix the profitability, fix the capital, fix the bad debt, of the state-owned banks … by any number of means that you and I would not see happen in the United States.” ...(or Australia, so poor Philp Lowe is tearing his hair out...because highly indebted Australians won't spend even if he lowers interest rates to zero, in today's economic climate).


    IOW, China's state-sponsored capitalist model is much more able to produce growth than the (private) free market neoliberal model of the West.

    The whole Ellen Brown article is worth a read.

    "It's the economy, stupid".​
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2019
  20. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    He said "we need to think differently" Do you really think that Andrew Hastie is an ignorant, comfortable conservative?
    He is no mug but he is conservative.

    Chinas growth relies on two book book keeping. China has debt of its own.
    The International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis[6] and other sources, such as the Article IV Consultation Reports,[7][note 2] state that, at the end of 2014, the "general government gross debt"-to-GDP ratio for China was 41.54 percent.[8] With China's 2014 GDP being US$ 10,356.508 billion,[8][9] this makes the government debt of China approximately US$ 4.3 trillion.

    The foreign debt of China, by June 2015, stood at around US$ 1.68 trillion, according to data from the country's State Administration of Foreign Exchange as quoted by the State Council.[10] The figure excludes the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau.[10] Chinese foreign debt denominated in the U.S. dollar was 80 percent of the total, euros 6 percent, and Japanese yen 4 percent.[10]

    In July 2019, Institute of International Finance reported that China's economy reached over US$40 trillion (more than 300% of its economy), accounting for around 15% of world total.[11]"[12]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_China

    I don't agree that the UN has the answer. The UN is a pathetic farce as well as not becoming what Doc Evatt dreamed of.
     
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  21. jay runner

    jay runner Banned

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    It's easier than a shooting war.

    The US is no different than Australia -- let us live well for the moment and the eventual future be damned -- just let ME the elite draw out my 401K and draw down all of my investments in complete comfort and luxury.
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2019
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  22. a better world

    a better world Well-Known Member

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    We certainly do, but not in the manner Hastie has in mind (see below).

    Yes.
    One can be intelligent and ignorant at the same time....
    Even in the highest levels of academia; eg, we have Doctors of Theology pontificating on God, based on the erroneous concept of scriptural inerrancy.

    Re the Chinese economy: I will comment on your points re Chinese growth and GDP in a separate post.

    Typical Conservative view of the UN.
    And why, pray, do you suppose the UN did not become the agency Doc Evatt dreamed of.

    Your Conservatism* itself is part of the reason ( a hard lesson I know, but like those theologians I mentioned above, Conservatives will have to face up to it).

    Explanation: The UN was created at a time, with 40 million (mostly civilians) killed, when much of the world was laying in ruins, much of the finest Christian heritage in Europe was destroyed, and the image of that mushroom cloud over Hiroshima was still etched in everyone's brains....time to de-legitimise war as a means of dispute settlement? Men of vision like Evatt (former High Court judge, and former attorney general in various ALP governments), sought to bring rationality to international affairs.

    But the UN project was derailed by great power rivalry, as a competition between two economic systems had yet to be played out in the Cold War.

    *Conservatism: based on the belief in individual agency, as opposed to Marxist community agency.

    Note: Classical liberalism is based on a misconception of the natural world, and is no doubt a reaction to the "divine Right of kings" from which people of the 'enlightenment' were seeking to escape.

    But …..."imprescriptible natural rights" do not exist in nature, rather they are inventions of the human 'cortex' brain, seat of self-awareness, reason and 'justice'. Nature is a (pre and post 'cortex') instinctive system of survival of individuals in a predatory competition for scarce resources. IOW, "Rights" do not exist outside of human conception.

    Rule of law itself is a community outcome project , not an individual outcome project... and if we want an international rules based system - a necessity obviously, to cope with a universal desire for economic prosperity (Article 25 of the UNUDHR), then we need UN machinery capable of dealing with international law.

    So....are you willing to "change your thinking", from Hastie's unaware (self-interested) conception of management of international affairs between nations with different cultural heritages, all of which carry historical cultural baggage that must change, and adapt to achieve a better world?
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2019
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  23. LeftRightLeft

    LeftRightLeft Well-Known Member

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    Great reply
     
  24. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    You are probably quite right.
     
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  25. LeftRightLeft

    LeftRightLeft Well-Known Member

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    Great reply
     
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