Property Investors Federation’s Richard Woodd and Tim Horsbrugh on how runaway house prices hit a brick wall. Or have they?
On the day that the roof fell in on New Zealand’s landlords the president of the Taranaki Property Investors Association Richard Woodd (pictured) delivered a speech on the technicalities of moving houses. Actually of transporting the house itself from one location to another.
Moving house, as in putting them on a truck and then installing them somewhere else, is a peculiarity of the residential side of the New Zealand property sector. Another peculiarity is how in an agrarian nation in which no more than 0.4 percent of the terrain is built on, why even modest residences can now attract buyers happy to pay $1 million or more.
On the day Mr Woodd was scheduled to talk on the technicalities of house moving, the trucking version, the government announced a series of what Mr Woodd described as “disincentives” to ensure that if house prices didn’t actually fall, then they at least hit a brick wall.
Specifically the government announced the end of expensing deductions on bank interest payments incurred by mortgages on rental properties. “We are seeing a capital gains tax,” said Mr Woodd, “and it is arriving by stealth.”
Tim Horsbrugh, president of the Wairarapa branch of the Property Investors Federation, was equally blunt. The government, he declared, was determined to “scare people away from property.”
In terms of leverage Mr Woodd said the government was putting into reverse the traditional gearing of rental residential property acquisition.
He noted however, that in recent times the “mom and pop” class of investor buying a second house to rent out in order to save for retirement or to leave something for their children had tended to be subsumed in the minds of politicians by large-scale professional investors seeking to take advantage of tax concessions originally designed for family home acquirers.
Tim Horsbrugh noted that there was a vacuum in the government’s campaign for getting first-home buyers under their own roof. There was still no solution, he insisted, to the central issue of increasing the supply of houses in order to meet first home acquirer demand.
So the question remains. Why are New Zealand houses so expensive and in a sparsely populated country which has within its borders an amplitude of the raw materials required to build them including timber, cement, steel and quarried stone?
Why, for example, does a subdivision house in the United States or Canada with an in-ground basement, stone paved ground floor, a storey above this, and a dormer storey in addition cost the same as its New Zealand counterpart? This will be a bungalow on supporting piles and a foot or so above terra firma, and with no basement or additional storeys.
Everyone blames everyone else for this anomaly. The building supplies market is said to be in cartel control. Local authorities are said to be impossibly stringent. Lenders are said to be impossibly mean and demanding to first home buyers.
In the background lurks the unspoken fact (by the entire politico-media class) that an emphasis encouraged by all political parties on an abstract university-nurtured education has deprived the nation of the applied productive skills needed to actually build the required houses. People such as carpenters, plumbers, electricians….
The mainstream media is financed in terms of advertising by the property sector. The result is the constant announcement of the latest house price peak plateaux attained delivered in the triumphant terms and tone usually reserved for victorious national sports teams.
Richard Woodd meanwhile traces this new government tax tourniquet-tightening on residential rental property owners to a much earlier determination by the government to empower the tenant side of the landlord/tenant relationship. This resulted in the rental accommodation “Warrant of Fitness.”
Then, he notes, interest rates continued to fall with the cheap money pouring into the obvious destination of property and the consequent frenzied bidding for the limited amount of houses available.
It was now, he notes, that the government switched from the bureaucratic emphasis characterised by strengthened tenancy rights via tribunals and now instead concentrated on legislation.
A feature of the new tax “disincentives” remains that officials concede that they are uncertain of the outcome, he notes.
This in turn translates into the culpability or otherwise of the landlord/property investor aka speculator being revealed as a burden or a blessing. Will the elimination of rental property mortgage tax deduction deter the “mom and pop” rental provider and thus open the way to professional corporate-style investors armed with their tax lawyers and accountants?
When the dust settles will there still be remaining what Richard Woodd describes as an engrained national impression that residential property is a one-way bet, a can’t lose proposition? Is there as Tim Horsbrugh indicates something on the supply side that is the true foundation of the accommodation problem?
Does the supply bottleneck truly reside in town planning regulations, absence of craftspeople, artificially high materials costs, or even in something as abstract as a deliberately choreographed climate of inflationary expectation? Or in some element that nobody has yet considered?
Royal Family, New Zealand, Coronation Street populated by strong women and biddable blokes
New Zealand was cited during the Oprah show as a refuge for the expatriate branch of the royal family. “We had suggested New Zealand, South Africa, Canada,” said Meghan to Winfrey, detailing her proposal for establishing possible residency in the commonwealth.
In court circles Harry remains viewed as being a bit of a chump. How then could this simple soul have been instrumental in igniting the most embarrassing episode to be endured by the Royal Family since the Abdication in 1936 of Harry’s great great uncle King Edward V111?
The reason for the success of Britain’s television saga Coronation Street is that it portrays a reality, a “truth,” as Oprah would say. It portrays strong women and feckless, pliant men.
So it is with the Royal Family. Women run the show. With the exception of the Duke of Edinburgh, the royal menfolk would at some stage simply let bygones be bygones for Harry and Meghan.
There will be no forgive-and-forget from Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, target directly and indirectly of so much of the Harry and Meghan venom. Or, for example, from Princess Anne with her low tolerance of deliberate silliness and pretence, let alone that of premeditated treachery.
In New Zealand women similarly run the show with females as governor general, prime minister, and in most of the power points below.
The Sussexes are a progressive couple. Harry adjusts himself to Meghan’s career which is in films. New Zealand has a film colony in its capital, Wellington, and an equally well defined mogul hierarchy.
New Zealand, and this is still not grasped in the Anglosphere, has its own hereditary royalty, the Maori royal family, a reassuring presence for the diversity-conscious couple.
In the Winfrey show there was much reference to the linkage of titles with the need of the duo for protection, security.
Meghan somehow led to believe or picking up the impression that in marrying a prince she would become a princess chimes with the Oprah topic that Palace courtiers had kept Meghan in the dark about procedures and protocols from precedence to curtseying. An office-bound Harry seemingly had neither the time nor the inclination to bring his bride up to speed.
It was the failure of the Palace to accord the Duchess of Windsor the title of Her Royal Highness that rankled most of all with the exiled Duchess and the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward V111.
Those who wished to remain in the good books of David, as the Duke was known to his family, or even wish to see again the Duke and Duchess were careful to introduce the Duchess as HRH.
Royalty had its ancient beginnings in tribal warrior chiefs who successfully led their people in battle. Harry who served in Afghanistan with the British forces is in this valiant tradition.
It is also the most compelling reason why only remote New Zealand with its non-porous sea-girt border is the only Commonwealth country, indeed, only country anywhere, that can offer the physical security that the couple told Oprah that is their priority.
The royal family treats everyone the same way regardless of their birth or station. A continuation however of the campaign to destabilise the monarchy could see the rebel royals frozen out of a commonwealth country officially or unofficially.
Diana hovered like a wraith over this most recent and bizarre episode of the renegade royals with their determination to vindicate Harry’s mother by embarrassing the Palace. This rules out as a refuge France, a republic in which breathed their last the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Princess Diana (pictured with her sons.) History, Harry reminded Oprah, repeats itself.
New Zealand South Seas Switzerland revisited role needs selective electronic niche selling
A global specialist in niche marketing has described focused selling as the most overlooked area in New Zealand climate preparedness. Mathew Collins said that with the era of bulk commodity exporting fading now looming in its place is a new epoch of selective, high process and high value product selling.
This new specialised premium era of exporting is imminent as a direct result of the New Zealand government’s determination to include food production restrictions in a rigidly-enforced regime of conformity to international climate change standards.
Mathew Collins founder of DigitalXMarketing said that in New Zealand he was surprised to find climate change enforcement the centrepiece of political and academic conversation and conducted as if New Zealand was a service economy instead of a primary one.
Why was there so little planning of the marketing techniques required to make up the difference for lost revenues? He asked
The topic he discovered was instead treated as one of ethical righteousness rather than as a three-dimensional commercial threat reality. The commercial priority now was to set in place alternatives to lost revenues through the reduced pastoral grazing capacity.
Mr Collins said he had gathered an “unsettling” impression that planning for the era of regulated climate change and thus lost productivity was what he described as “faith-based.”
This “other worldly” treatment of the nation’s self-imposed export income shrinkage contrasted with the last era in which New Zealand had faced a seismic scale shift in its export pattern when Britain announced it was joining the EU.
Confronted with the EU, he said, in this externally-imposed export shift in contrast New Zealand officials had “grasped the nettle.”
Planners then had adopted the notion of New Zealand becoming the “Switzerland of the South Pacific” in gearing the nation to use premium niche marketing to “get more from less.” In the event the nation had discovered alternative markets for bulk exports in the Middle East and Far East.
Farmers, according to Mr Collins, sought collectively to soothe themselves by believing that climate impediments and restrictions on output in the form of stock number reductions were in the category of “it can’t happen here.”
Agriculture in this ostrich-like attitude he said had collectively absorbed an impression from the oil and gas industries.
There was though a big difference in that the oil and gas sector was international and could cap its wells, tow away its rigs, re-deploy staff, and simply re-assemble somewhere else.
Farming though was tied to the land by its very definition. Therefore for farming there was no escape from the productivity restrictions imposed in the name of climate.
Discussing the replacement of grazing pasture by pine trees Mr Collins said that there would here also be a need for digitally-driven niche marketing for timber products and thus training which should be started now.
Timber exports in order to compensate for lost pastoral income also needed to be streamlined with a digitally-driven emphasis on by-products.
He cited pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, disinfectant and cleaning products, along with hospital-grade disposables such as latex gloves as among the standard by-products of the pine tree.
Pine by-products should be a much-evaluated response to the loss of jobs caused by the “officially-desired” closure of the coal and oil and gas sector.
Ignoring this timber output diversity opportunity is another example of the failure to face the reality of the climate movement, insisted Mr Collins pictured (above) at a conference in Dubai.
Sino Sting Robbed New Zealand of home grown computer base
Forty years ago New Zealand’s Hutt Valley was a mini Silicon Valley as a world research and development focus for information technology.
This was not realised in New Zealand, but it was grasped in China which sought to transfer ground-breaking technology to China, and do so without paying for it.
The computer technology developed in the Hutt Valley (pictured) was a breakthrough in that it speeded up computing to the point at which it seemed to behave like the human brain.
For many years there was a coordinated operation centred on Beijing to lift the technology without being seen to do so and at the same time to avoid paying for it.
The scheme involved Chinese governmental organisations presenting themselves as bona fide buyers and requiring more and more and still more insights into the technology in order to make the hoped for decision about an eventual purchase.
In order to give this verisimilitude the operation was surrounded by demonstrable very high level involvement of the Chinese governing elite.
The technology so sought after by the Chinese was capable of smashing through what at the time was known as the von Neumann bottleneck, the constriction through which must stream the digital symbolic instructions which the machine, the computer, understands.
In the Hutt Valley there had been developed an accelerator device to push through this stream of machine language symbols at an ever faster rate in order for the computer to do the heavy lifting required by increasingly complex demands.
The Chinese had correctly perceived that that the Hutt Valley developers had identified an early solution to revving up computer capacity and thus capability, and which could be copied given enough access to the prototypes and systems.
This whole technique was based on computer programmes compiling other computer programmes which in turn created other programmes and in this compounding power bestowing the human effect on the project at hand.
This is the accelerator process that underlies today’s artificial intelligence which among other things recognises peoples’ faces.
The Hutt Valley pioneering work was taken very seriously by the Chinese.
Their active interest in it started in the late 70s and continued through to the share market and financial collapse of the late 1980s when the by now New Zealand government -sponsored funders of the technology were themselves bailed out.
In the intervening years there had been much toing and froing with among other actors state-controlled Chinese banks lending their name as somehow standing behind the project.
This finance had been talked about. But never appeared in liquid form. There had at one stage even been floated a counter trade, bartering, scheme one of which involved importing Chinese bicycles.
Why didn’t the Chinese simply pay for the programme automation technology at the outset?
The short answer is that this would have run counter to parting with cash for technology and management processes acquirable by stealth.
How did those concerned within New Zealand become party to this?
Never before and certainly not in New Zealand had there been encountered any kind of deal in anything at all in which a central government, China’s, was in fact the potential acquirer and which controlled the potential transaction at every step of its process.
A subsidiary reason is that by dragging out the sale for so long the Chinese ensured that the Hutt Valley software engineers constantly improved the technology and especially so in customising it, adapting it to Chinese requirements which included diverse applications in coal mines to hospitals.
For China it was an early and outstanding example of their win-win principal. They won twice. They got the technology. They got it for next to nothing.
Target Marketeers take advantage of Atonement Cult
In today’s age of the apology proliferating atonements are encouraging another fast-growth fashion in which commercial interests seek opportunities to publicly demonstrate cohesion with diversity and equality.
Advertisers are now on the look-out for mainstream media transgressions that allow them to mass signal their own virtue by withdrawing their patronage from selective broadcast programmes and even from print titles.
Their target demographic is composed of a university-catchment in its later teens and on the verge of entering middle age, the advertising agency prime target sector.
In order to reach this cherished segment the Wellington daily the Dominion Post for example devoted an issue to apologising for itself
It ardently excoriated itself for its value judgements throughout its history that transgressed contemporary diversity/equality criteria.
This contrived atonement edition was ridiculed at the time by the demographic that it was not in fact aimed at.
But it struck a spectacular chord with its intended target market, the graduate one, the cultural elite, the segment with disposable income, money to spare.
In media terms an apology until a few years ago was a quasi-legal device used to stave off a legal action or to mitigate, soften one.
The old please-forgive-us apologies were handled gingerly because they were deemed to call into question the reliability, integrity, of the media operation as a whole.
Now, and in their promotional manifestation the apology is embraced with the same enthusiasm with which in its legal context it had once been shunned.
The now-routine institutional apology trend technique blinds editorialists to the danger that it poses for them.
This is because advertisers now use it to reach the impressionable much-desired younger graduate segment of the purchasing population.
Advertisers actively seek programmes where someone is likely to put their foot in it, just so they are seen to withdraw from backing this same programme and in doing so acquire the resulting plaudits from this same high-minded premium purchasing segment.
In the official and governmental realm meanwhile the apology proclamation has become the standard public relations marketing tool allowing politicians and their departments to quit something from the past and thus unencumbered to market the new replacement policy and approach.
Brisk and perfunctory it nonetheless has the effect of conveying the required level of hand-wringing to those who hitherto had troublesomely and noisily believed themselves to have been wronged.
The mainstream media collectively and uncritically supports the officially approved diversity and equality doctrines
The demonstrable enthusiasm of this community of interest fuels the fervour which now marketing agencies take advantage of.
Now and in its politico-media usage the apology means to “cave-in” on something, the opposite of its original Latin meaning in which it meant quite the opposite, to “defend” this or that.
Thus the slogan Apologia Pro Vita Sua once meant defending ones past actions, and certainly not regretting them, the current interpretation.
Target marketeers grasped the ecclesiastical implications of the word as a technique of signalling to the high-earning and younger impressionable buying classes the corresponding righteous intentions of their clients, and thus of their products.
The journalistic community is only now waking up to the distant rumbling of the apology avalanche which threatens practitioners who go off-piste, off the beaten path of conformity either accidentally or deliberately.
Orchestrated Litany of Half-Truths Gags Watchdogs
Eliminating natural gas will cripple a hospitality industry already reeling from the absence of foreign tourists.
Restaurants and hotels rely on natural gas to provide low cost power. Especially in kitchens.
But the value to the hospitality industry of natural gas is being tossed aside as the New Zealand Labour government sacrifices small businesses in the rush to accelerate man-made climate anxiety.
The Labour government is determined to be Best In Show internationally in the climate alarmism stakes.
The ACT party in Parliament has been silenced, and even bends a climate knee because it wants to be persuaded that unless New Zealand conforms to climatism it will somehow become a trade “pariah.”
The National Party Opposition is effectively gagged because it believes that it will lose a large slice of its high end professional vote if it is viewed as being overtly hostile to the climate beliefs that have filled the vacuum left by the established churches.
The energy industry lobby has allowed itself to be treated like dirt by the Labour government which at the outset announced to a group of students its ban on energy exploration.
Federated Farmers the agricultural lobby sits on its hands while unknown interests blot out immense swathes of grazing country with trees.
Nobody dare warn, even whisper, that if the globe is in fact heating up that these same quick growing and thus volatile resinous forest plantations present a colossal fire risk.
Nobody dare say that the clamp down on domestic oil and gas can only result in imports and from countries not exactly aligned with the government’s oft-stated human rights imperatives. Saudi Arabia is one example here.
The government’s one-word call sign is “kindness.”
How “kind” is it for a government to deliberately propagate the notion that in Taranaki there is no need to worry about the departure of the energy industry when enterprises like bakeries will take up the employment slack.
This when the same government knows that these same bakeries will not be able to use their ovens because there will be no gas to fire them.
The Labour government and its side kick Green Party promote “green” industries replacing the primary sector while knowing that these green industries are mobile in that they can readily be located offshore and to countries not too fussy about their workforce conditions.
The government and the Greens know too that words such as net zero, carbon, and renewables along with acronyms such as IPCC exercise a curiously paralysing effect on institutions such as ACT, Federated Farmers, and the National Party.
These loaded words leads them if not to “pivot” a knee then to go weak at the knees when they should be stridently indicating the dangers to jobs of the orchestrated litany of half-truths that drives the climate political project.
From the government’s climate bureaucracy we learn that farming is the “whaling” industry of today.
Farming was last proclaimed a relic from a bygone industrial era quite recently, 30 or so years ago.
The financial services sector supposed to fill this farming gap then promptly utterly disappeared leaving New Zealand without even its own trading bank, and with the resulting torrential outpouring of funds that should have stayed in New Zealand.
The New Zealand-based global insurance sector similarly and simultaneously disappeared as a direct result of this “whaling” fallacy syndrome about farming.
The National Party lets the Labour government glibly proclaim unchallenged its climate political project as its overriding priority. Labour routinely trumpets it as a far greater cause than the economy or even the housing crisis, a real crisis this time instead of a rallying one that keeps its faithful from straying
Mysterious Balkan War operative traced to renowned private school in England
A soldier who in three armies participated in at least four wars and changed the face of United Nations has been identified as a pupil of Hill Brow Preparatory School in Somerset recognised as epitomising the high noon of private schools in the 1950s when Bill Foxton was there.
The bizarre disclosure came when the young Foxton was identified in a school photo as the near-mythical soldier of fortune by the mother of his daughter Billie. The mother is Sally Becker aka the Angel of Mostar who teamed up with Foxton in the Balkans during Europe’s biggest conflict since World War 2.
The pair effectively forced attention on the inability of United Nations as a bureaucracy to deal with the fratricidal conflict and Sally Becker also identified the way in which United Nations holds in its thrall media elements, notably the BBC.
The photograph of Bill (see below) featured in the official history of the school compiled by Christopher Newman who was there at the same time as Foxton.
The Hill Brow History shows that Bill Foxton won the school shooting cup two years running and also a swimming cup.
Exactly why Major Bill Foxton was so determined to disguise this background remains unexplained.
His contemporaries included grandees such as jurist Sir Richard Gibbs, educationalist Sir John Dunford and applied ecology pioneer Sir John Lister-Kaye the Laird of Aigas.
Another fellow pupil of the young Foxton was Gordon Strong the authority on the pre-history of England’s West Country.
He believes that Foxton fell under the Influence of the school’s deputy head George Rory O’Brien Newbery who was also the history teacher.
Major Newbery’s great regret was being too young for the First World War. But he caught up in World War 2.
Another fellow pupil at the boarding school at the time recalls Foxton as being exceptionally neat and tidy, of quiet manner and displaying none of the Stalky & Co daring identifying him as the future frontier swashbuckler. A curious observation was that masters and boys alike always referred to him as Bill Foxton instead of just Foxton, the custom.
Still, the real mystery about Foxton remains why he wove a mystery around a schooling that would hardly have been a disadvantage in his transition from the ranks into becoming a commissioned officer. He was similarly obscure about other origins.
His father appears to have come from New Zealand and served with the RNZN, posted to Southampton. Bill was born in 1943. Thus Bill would have qualified for a New Zealand passport, as well as the French one to which he was entitled after his tour in the Foreign Legion.
In the event Foxton’s Buchanesque career took a Hemingway turn in the Balkans when as European monitor he encountered Sally Becker (pictured with Bill above) to whom he soon after applied his paramedic training after a would be assassin shot her through the leg.
The episode is recounted in her book Sunflowers and Snipers – Saving Children in the Balkan War (The History Press.)
United Nations after Africa and then after the Balkans exchanged peace keeping for preaching.
It now substituted for engagement in risky interventions the projection of high-mindedness in issues cherished by the Anglosphere’s politico media sector.
Major Bill Foxton late of Hill Brow Preparatory School for Boys at Brent Knoll personified in operational peacekeeping the end of one era, the soldierly one, in which undertakings were backed up by deeds, and the following era in which covenants are backed by exalted diversions and diplomatic stroking and evasions.
Meanwhile school contemporary Gordon Strong insists that Major Newbery was Bill Foxton’s guiding light inspiring the boy with the shock of red hair to become a participant over the ensuing half century in commotions in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
“Rory Newbery taught Bill and did so by example that words always had to be followed through by actions; that contemplation by itself was never enough, and that it was what you caused to happen that counted.”
Dismissal of Prime Minister in 1975 proves impeachment only legal if former President holds office
Because only a serving public official can be impeached the former president’s accusers will have to discover hitherto hidden constitutional prerogatives in order to legitimise their case against him.
Capitol Hill impeachers must first somehow identify the former president as a current public or federal official. Only then does he become impeachable, stoppable. The notion of a retrospective impeachment has no precedent.
Impeachment crossed the Atlantic with the Pilgrim Fathers. It is derived from the old Norman English word meaning to stop or otherwise impede. “Empechement” still means in French to impede, hinder, obstruct. To be impeachable a person must be engaged at that time in the service of the public, be an official.
The element of intent could arise. Trump anticipated this in his farewell declaration that he intended to return only “in some form.” When questioned about his plans he responds vaguely about doing “something.”
As matters stand Donald Trump’s accusers seek to stop a public official who is no longer a public official and someone who in their joblessness has still to declare that they intend to return to an official post.
The Capitol Hill case against Trump is a narrow one even baseless in that the former president’s accusers seek to disqualify, evict him from an official post that he no longer holds.
At some stage the army of Capitol Hill attorneys will discover the most astonishing impeachment in modern times which occurred in Australia when in 1975 governor general Sir John Kerr exercised reserve constitutional powers in the abrupt dismissal of the nation’s prime minister Gough Whitlam (pictured above.)
It is in this constitutional dismissal, stopping, impeachment, the one of Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam, in which lies the only federal precedent tied to these reserve powers that can be remotely applied to Donald Trump.
The connection is that the Australian impeachment of a sitting prime minister, a successful one as it turned out, shares with the process against Donald Trump a derived root in English common law.
Gough Whitlam’s and Australia’s shock was, and indeed still is, that the monarchy had somehow retained the power to fire one of its sitting prime ministers.
Gough Whitlam’s Labour (i.e.Democrat) government had enjoyed a thin majority in the legislature and this combined with several highly publicised scandals gave the opposition sufficient grounds for choking off the supply to the Whitlam government of the funds it needed to carry out its governmental duties.
This logjam, impasse, duly ended up at the door of the Queen’s representative in Australia, governor general Sir John Kerr. He advised Whitlam to call a general election, which Whitlam refused to do. Whitlam was then summarily sacked along with his government. Malcolm Fraser and his opposition party now took over as caretaker prime minister and government pending a general election which in the event Fraser won.
In the light of the Whitlam Affair and the present Trump Affair those cross-referencing the two cases will find themselves pre-occupied with one element constantly overlooked in the shared blind partisan fury of both cases. It is this.
Sir John Kerr drew on the prerogative of the reserve powers at his disposal in sacking Gough Whitlam only after Whitlam declined to call a general election and in doing so made clear his intention of continuing as a public, a federal official, in his office as prime minister. It was only Whitlam’s stated intent to continue in office that made him impeachable, stoppable.
If Gough Whitlam had accepted the governor general’s urging to call a general election he would have had to relinquish his official and thus impeachable position as prime minister just because he was going to the people in this same general election.
Regardless of the numerous accusations of misdemeanours then being directed at he and his Labour government and regardless of the gravity or truth of these charges Gough Whitlam at the moment of his resignation would have rendered himself unimpeachable simply because at that instant he had ceased to be a serving federal official.
Australia’s collective absorption with the Whitlam Affair always halts abruptly at two sets of gates, the ones at Buckingham Palace and the ones at Royal Lodge, the official residence of the governor general.
A reason is that the Dismissal, as it is became known, favoured incoming and replacement prime minister Malcolm Fraser then and now viewed by Australians as a haughty, austere conservative known at the time as “the Prefect,” and whose enduring saying was that “life was never meant to be easy.”
Fraser simply had not at that time, 1975, come out on the monarchy issue. It turned out that such was Fraser’s true personal anti royalist fervour that in later life he lent his weight to the Green party with its own militant anti-monarchism.
The suspicion in the Whitlam Affair is therefore this: if the Palace had had an inkling of Malcolm Fraser’s own republicanism would Palace courtiers still have caused to be sacked or otherwise be impeached Gough Whitlam?
At this time, in 1975, the monarchy was still under full power and Prince Charles’ assumed passion for Australia was routinely touted. Royal visits still attracted immense crowds. Therefore Palace management in the form of its officials would have been conscious of who supported them, or seemed to be for them, and who had demonstrably declared themselves against the monarchy, as had Gough.
Malcolm Fraser’s subsequently revealed disdain for the monarchy, means that it is no coincidence that a successor as Liberal party (actually the equivalent of US Republican Party) leader and prime minister Malcolm Turnbull should have built his entire political career as a foe of the monarchy.
It is this royal involvement that means that the successful and cataclysmic levelling of reserve powers against Gough Whitlam remains such an unresolved running sore in Australia and one that remains raw even after the recent release of the Dismissal correspondence in the form of the Palace Papers as they are known. The Palace Papers show that Her Majesty was shielded from any decision about Gough Whitlam and his accident-prone government by a firewall.
This firewall was represented by the Queen’s principal private secretary Martin Charteris, a dry, clipped figure who has attained a kind of popular posthumous celebrity in the Crown series of television docudramas.
The real shock of the Whitlam Affair remains that nobody including Whitlam, a seasoned lawyer himself, knew that there resided in Australia or Great Britain the power, the prerogative, of any official or group of officials to expel from office a sitting Australian prime minister.
The real shock of the Trump impeachment will be that there is no constitutional legality in proceedings until such time as Donald Trump becomes a serving official.
Converged social and broadcast mix formula will challenge shared orthodoxy
In a welter of claims and counter claims centred on social media the fadeout of the Trump presidency brings it full circle to its point of departure just because President Trump detonated a press rage by dealing directly with the public through social media.
At the outset of his campaign Donald Trump by-passed the conventional media by using social media to communicate with anyone and everyone anywhere.
Everyday people however remote from Washington now enjoyed the same access to Donald Trump’s confidences as members of the White House press corps, a coterie that takes itself ultra seriously.
In disintermediating the conventional media Trump struck at a hitherto professional elite which was to maintain its rage throughout his tenure.
This surly resentment crossed the Atlantic where the British press could never bring itself for example to note that President Trump’s mother was born in the UK, and emigrated to the United States as a young woman.
This contrasts with the much reported, and much more remote Irish ancestry of presidents Kennedy and Reagan.
From the outset the conventional media convinced itself that Donald Trump could never win the presidential election just because he was insensitive to the tribal nature of their identitarian politics. The Trump campaign in the event understood quota considerations rather well and to the point of realising that those at the bottom of the heap now understood that the burden of the media-encouraged orthodoxy was falling on them.
It is in this context of unfinished business that the inauguration of President Biden fails to represent the new era, the turning of the page, that is inherent in changing of the guard inauguration symbolism.
The outcome is that United States is now looking at what is known in the Westminster realm as a “shadow” government in the form of a Presidency-in-Exile.
The real actual government the one centred on the White House is now presented with the immediate problem of isolating this rogue presidency and doing so before it embeds itself as an alternate policy source.
This can only be done by blocking its communication channels, a process well underway with the cooperation of an only too willing Silicon Valley which at the outset of the Trump regime united with Hollywood in its antipathy to the insurgent hotelier.
A sure-fire blackout of the ex president? Not if you consider the impermanence of Silicon Valley, something shared with Hollywood.
Point-to-multipoint texting is an evolving sector with no shortage of new entrants and outfits with names such as Gab and Parler are already snapping at the heels of Twitter.
Twitter is now in the same position as IBM was when it controlled the information technology business with its all-encompassing market dominance.
Donald Trump quietened the Middle East, appointed the judiciary, eased the tax burden on lower incomes, revised incarceration, consolidated US energy independence, re-industrialised while reducing coal consumption, curbed vaping, and introduced warp speed vaccine…..
In his presidency-in-exile role Donald Trump has indicated a priority in confronting the coastal enclave-based orthodox media with, well, Trump Broadcasting.
The narrowness of his election loss in the biggest election turnout in US history indicates an audience-in-waiting.
Orthodox media is most of all pre-occupied with news about itself. This is an underpinning reason who so much of it moves in lockstep especially in sharing voguish ideologies in which during the Trump years the mainstream demonstrated the shared devotion of the converted.
Fractionated audiences, displacement of the predictable with the unpredictable, coverage of let’s-all-forget topics such as police defunding, even a further split in national advertising…..
Conventional media described Donald Trump as dangerous in the White House. They might find him even more lethal outside it.
Canberra and Wellington Awkward exhibitions of Righteousness generate only contempt
China does not change. But the perceptions of it do. In recent weeks attempts by liberal democracies in Australia and New Zealand to influence China via governmental morality signalling mechanisms have had diametrically the opposite effect of the virtuously-anticipated outcomes.
In Australia the government instituted charges against its soldiers for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan and in doing so ensured that pictorial evidence of several supposed incidents was made publicly available to support these accusations.
The result? Chinese media quickly responded with conflated images designed to portray Australia’s soldiers in Afghanistan as jihadists.
In case there were any remaining doubts in anyone’s mind about the sinew of the Australian military the Australian media was now officially and enthusiastically supplied with the contact details of help desks and the like for members of the Australian military needing counselling after all these revelations.
While this display of frailty was going on the New Zealand Parliament declared an official “Climate Emergency,” on the grounds of its mathematically barely definable contribution to what it believes is the imminent end of the world. Proudly proclaimed was the imminence also of various productivity handicapping measures in order for the nation to be seen to be coping with this dogma, as it is viewed in Beijing.
Australasia’s craving for globalist applause is received in Beijing as a weakness
Where there is a weakness the Chinese are taught there is but one response which is to exploit it.
In academic life in Australasia there has been enacted a singularly visible application of the law of diminishing returns in that the greater the investment in China studies the greater has been the misunderstanding of the Chinese ruling mindset.
Lessons in the real world have been costly.
A recent example in New Zealand was the Fonterra dairy company dispensing with its usual exchange trading procedures with the Chinese and instead embarking on a western business culture investment in a Chinese dairy company.
The result? An only partially explained loss to the New Zealand dairy cooperative of approaching a billion dollars.
When Australia’s Morrison government boldly took part in a wider move to bring the Chinese government to account for the origin and subsequent spread of the Coronavirus the most surprising outcome was the surprise of the same Morrison government over the harsh trade retaliations by the same Chinese government.
The Chinese are taught their own equivalent of the expression which adds up to if someone throws a pebble at you, then you must retaliate with boulders.
The Chinese know how reticent are the purity proclaiming political leaders when they learn that they have been finessed by the Chinese. An example remains Melbourne’s proven vulnerability via its once eagerly sought status as a terminus of Belt and Road.
Nations scourging themselves for the sake of global approval and in doing so strangling their economies simply bemuses Beijing which has no intention of interrupting its own forced march to resuming to its historical position as the Middle Kingdom which means, and this is little understood, the commanding nation that all others turn to.
As they pose and strut their moral stuff Australasian politicians play to an empty audience as far as Beijing is concerned.
The trade dependence on China of nations such as Australia and New Zealand is most definitely not regarded in Beijing as representing the noble ties of economic brotherhood or sisterhood.
Beijing merely regards the trade overweighting as another example of the haphazard planning that opens the way to China’s resuming what it sees as its role in the middle of absolutely everything.
Chinese language schools abound. Yet comprehension of Chinese is given low priority in the host countries even though Chinese shares a number of characteristics with English as an analytical language based on word positioning.
The Chinese are still recovering from the shock of losing their ancient position as the world’s most civilised and advanced nation and worse still losing this position and eventually becoming colonised through their own internal chaos.
When they see western leaders such as the ones in Australia and New Zealand exhibiting raptures of righteousness in attacking their own institutions such as the military or the wealth generating economy the impression received is one of dithering and uncertainty, and of unreliability that could lead anywhere.
As Australasian leaders expound their ethical superiority for the benefit of the international community there is one member of this same community which interprets these performances as symptoms of lack of resolve which at best represent short term diversions used to paper over internal divisions which Beijing has every intention of taking advantage of.
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242