Yesterday’s news about AMP brought out plenty of justified rage about accountability in the finance sector — an ongoing theme over the past month! But here’s a quick rundown on some of the other discussions you made have missed.

 

Re: William Bowe’s “Poll Bludger: shining a light on the dark corners of opinion polling”

Kyle Hargraves writes: “However, a prerogative for pollsters to keep their mix of herbs and spices secret is problematic”. Yes and no. Yes because their predictions are only as good as the herbs and spices (and of course the cook), and no because the prediction that may come to influence the electorate could be founded upon shonky stats or at least ad-hoc modelling…

The reality is that the talk-back hosts (Jones, Bolt, Sandilands) are not without influence (hence their salaries) and the average person will listen to them in preference to reading a PDF on sampling methodology. In this regard, the standard media is of no help.

 

Re: Michael Sainsbury’s “Turnbull’s allegiance to the US creates regional tension with China”

David Nicholas writes: Essentially Michael, from where I sit, Australian foreign policy has been pretty much an illusion of the foolish. I have scoffed at this notion of us being a “middle power” and that we can balance our dependence on our trade with China with US hegemony in the Pacific.

When this “balance” notion was widely touted in in 2010-2011 — that we possessed the capability to be deft doing what would be a clearly a delicate dance, to please everyone at the same time — I thought it was just plain stupidity. We cannot serve two masters and we should not have tried as subtlety is not one of our educated talents. We should have tried to find our way through the maze independently. But we came up short.

This dance needed foreign ministers who could see the consequences of playing this game as it played out five, ten, 20 years down the road. This means knowing when we uttered policy at a presser in 2010 how that would immediately be seen by both Beijing and Washington as it related to their policies into the long term…

Essentially, the Chinese tolerate us for the essential commodities we have and can provide to them, but there is no friendly quid pro quo from them to us beyond our usefulness. Every time China extended the hand of friendship to us in the last 10 years that I’ve seen we either bit it or we accepted their largesse with a white Anglo-Saxon smugness and air of superiority. Julie Bishop is excessive in using this behaviour. This is having ramifications. So much so that when we will need China’s economic largesse in the future in an emergency they will take their time in deciding.

The US in the last ten years has become less flexible toward our “balancing” in that they demand our obedience on all major policy positions on issues most of which are none of our immediate business. They insist that we must consider and get involved with policies such as Syria, Myanmar, Egypt, Libya; and follow willy-nilly the stupidity of Trump on North Korea and the South China Sea. To do this without so much as a question is just mind-boggling.

That it is our strategic policy to follow the US and keep China at bay by excluding it from trading freely in the Pacific — the TPP — and that we snub the invitation to sign on to the Chinese Belt-Road Initiative four years ago now, in order to do America’s imperial bidding are decisions that defy credulity and which will no doubt will come back to haunt us.

Blindly, we have made an enemy of China with little or no effort, but an enemy we couldn’t afford to make. I just shake my head in disbelieve at such stupidity. So it goes.

 

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