Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is only the second leader to receive a state dinner under President Trump. What does this visit have in store for the Aussies?
James Glenday from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation explains all you need to know.
Edited by Chloe Kim
Australia is in the midst of a battle over whether to cull "man-eating" sharks on the Great Barrier Reef as one of its states argues for a change in federal law so that it can continue the practice.
In a win for wildlife campaigners, the government of the state of Queensland—located in the northeast of the country—lost a federal court appeal Wednesday in which it was fighting for the right to continue implementing a controversial shark management program, The Guardian reported.
This program involved the deployment of nets and drum lines—a type of unmanned aquatic trap—to catch and kill sharks representing 19 different species, in an attempt to protect swimmers.
Critics of the program say there is no scientific evidence that the "lethal component" of the program reduces the risk of unprovoked shark attacks on humans. Furthermore, they say these methods lead to the unnecessary deaths of large numbers of sharks, harming the marine ecosystem.
Earlier this year, animal rights group the Humane Society won a case against the Queensland government which forced it to make several changes to the program.
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal said that euthanasia would only be allowed as a last resort in certain circumstances, "specifically when a shark is unlikely to survive release due to its condition or an injury, or which cannot be safely removed alive due to weather conditions or hooking location."
"We are satisfied that the euthanasia of any species of sharks... caught on drum lines should be a last resort and not occur as a matter of practice," the tribunal said, according to The Brisbane Times.
The Queensland government appealed the verdict of the tribunal, but it has now lost its appeal meaning it can only continue the program in a manner that avoids the killing of sharks "to the greatest extent possible," the Australian Associated Press reported.
However, on Thursday, the state government demanded that the law be changed so that the culling of sharks could continue in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
"We fought this in the courts because we simply believe that human life must be prioritised over the lives of sharks," Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told the Australian parliament today. "The decision effectively means that the program would become a catch and release program within the marine park."
Mark Furner, the state's agriculture minister, also urged the government to allow the culling of "man-eating" sharks to continue.
The state tourism minister, Kate Jones, called on Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to intervene in the case.
"I'm sure the prime minister does not want to have blood on his hands through this decision in relation to the federal act," Jones told reporters on Wednesday.
SYDNEY, Australia — It was an extraordinary question for a member of Australia’s Parliament to be asked on live television: Are you a spokeswoman for the Chinese Communist Party?
“The simple answer,” the lawmaker, Gladys Liu, responded, “is no.”
But little else was simple about the interview that Ms. Liu — Australia’s first Chinese-born member of Parliament — gave last week to respond to reports of her not-long-ago membership in groups linked to the Communist Party.
Her fumbled answers, and the outcry that followed, have exposed the country’s struggle to integrate a growing community of immigrants from China who have tended to be overlooked by the political system except as a source of cash.
Two forces are now colliding: Australia’s ethnic Chinese community is increasing in size and power just as the country is becoming more skeptical of its economic dependence on China and raising alarms about Chinese influence in Australian institutions.
Countries around the world are grappling with how to handle China’s sweeping ambitions, but the challenges are especially pronounced in Australia.
“The Gladys Liu controversy is a warning that Australia, like many nations, needs more maturity in its China debate,” said Rory Medcalf, the head of the National Security College at the Australian National University.
“The real fault lies in the long complacency of Australia’s political class,” he said, adding that as the country’s “major political parties saw nothing wrong with treating Chinese communities as cash cows,” the Chinese Communist Party’s “pervasive intelligence and interference apparatus saw Australia as a place of great opportunity.”
The tensions are particularly acute in Australia, where there are more than one million people of Chinese descent. Chinese have been coming to Australia for two centuries, but significant numbers of ethnic Chinese migrants began arriving after the end of the White Australia Policy in the early 1970s. While most were once migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan, the number of immigrants from mainland China has been soaring for more than a decade.
In a reflection of the sheer heft and reach of China, many Chinese-Australians straddle two worlds, with financial success sometimes dependent on ties to the mainland. Given this reality, and the nationalist pressure Beijing exerts on what it calls “overseas Chinese,” a question is increasingly being imposed on the country’s Chinese immigrants: Can you prove your loyalty to this country? Or, put another way: How close to China is too close?
That was the backdrop to the interview that Ms. Liu, who rose in politics on the strength of her fund-raising and networking in the Chinese community, gave on Sky News to Andrew Bolt, a conservative commentator.
It was seen almost universally as disastrous. Ms. Liu said she could not recall her long membership in local Chinese organizations connected to the Communist Party’s foreign influence efforts. She had difficulty articulating a position on Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea, or even on the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, where she was born. Critics said she appeared to weigh her words so as not to offend Beijing.
Her political opponents called on her to declare her allegiance to Australia, where she has lived since the 1980s, and asked intelligence agencies to look closer at any links she might have to the Chinese government. The leader of her conservative party, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, branded these demands racist — a claim echoed by the Chinese government.
Public opinion is also divided. Some Australians worry that the country is casting suspicion on an entire ethnic group and demonizing a first-term lawmaker whose association with Chinese organizations may have had less to do with ideology than with the potential for wealth and power. Others believe that Ms. Liu’s case raises legitimate worries over sovereignty and national security.
Many experts say these are the kinds of questions Australia has spent far too long avoiding as China’s hunger for natural resources and university degrees helped fuel a generation of uninterrupted Australian economic growth.
“It’s only in the last two years that Australia has spoken about the downside of China’s rise. The last 15 years we spoke only of the upside,” said John Lee, a onetime adviser to the former foreign minister Julie Bishop, who is now at the United States Studies Center in Sydney.
Last year, Australia passed laws against foreign interference that require anyone lobbying on behalf of another country to enroll in a national register. Two years ago, Sam Dastyari, a politician in the left-leaning Labor Party, quit the Senate amid allegations that a Chinese billionaire paid his legal bills, and that he pushed his party to change its position on the disputed waters of the South China Sea to match China’s posture.
The Australian federal government has also taken some steps to distance itself from Beijing, like declining to sign on to China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, turning away Chinese bids to build national electricity or gas pipeline grids, and banning Chinese tech giants from installing 5G wireless networks.
But after years of vocal China boosterism, Australia’s leaders have said little to the public about why they have taken these steps. They have instead issued vague statements, for instance accusing “sophisticated state actors” of carrying out intrusions like the cyberattack on Parliament this year.
On Monday, Reuters reported that the country’s intelligence agencies had concluded that China was behind that attack, but that government officials had recommended keeping the finding secret to avoid hurting trade ties.
The government’s ambivalence and lack of transparency has discouraged open public debate, experts say, leading to oversimplified arguments and conspiratorial rumors.
“I think the intelligence agencies should release more information about what they know, because unless they do that, it’s up to the imagination of the population what the Chinese do and don’t do,” Mr. Lee said. “Having been in government, I know what the Chinese do, but I think it should be released so the public can be critical and not overreact.”
But until that happens, Mr. Lee said, the debate about China will continue to falter, and the impact on Chinese-Australians, especially those with political aspirations, will only grow.
“It could go the way we fear, which is Chinese-Australians feel that everything they do is under suspicion, purely because they hang around Chinese groups or are part of Chinese organizations,” he said.
Clive Hamilton, whose book on Chinese Communist Party interference in Australia was published after three other publishers pulled out over fears of angering Beijing, said that work over decades by the party to infiltrate Chinese organizations in Australia had now “poisoned the well” for future politicians of Chinese origin.
“Almost all Chinese organizations and Chinese media are now dominated by people sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. “That means that the candidates of Chinese ethnicity who are put forward in the political process and work their way up through the system are likely to be those trusted by Beijing.”
Damien Cave contributed reporting.
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Executive compensation is an especially contentious topic in the US, though it seems we’re not alone.
There’s now widespread coverage around compensation for executives in Australia during the 2018 fiscal year, with Australia’s highest paid executive being Qantas CEO Alan Joyce.
He took home nearly 24 million AUD, making him the highest paid ASX100 CEO. His 23,876,351 AUD in compensation just barely beat out Macquarie Group’s CEO earning 23,855,580 AUD.
To me that’s pretty remarkable. While airline CEOs are generally well paid, I can’t think of another situation where an airline executive was the top paid executive in the entire country.
As a point of comparison, the previous year Joyce earned “only” ~11.2 million AUD, making him the eighth best paid executive in the country.
So, how did he earn so much, and how did his pay jump that much? His base pay was just over 2 million AUD, and a large part of that compensation came in the form of the increased stock value.
It’s pointed out that Qantas’ value increased from 2.5 billion AUD to 10 billion AUD during that period, so the share price increased by about 350%.
While there will be strong opinions on both sides for executive compensation, we can all agree that’s a period during which Qantas did really well. To what extent the CEO should be rewarded for that (rather than employees) is something that’s up for debate.
In my opinion what’s much worse is when CEOs at airlines get compensated well for poor performance. I’m not thinking of any airline in particular, but theoretically:
Like I said, this is all theoretical. 😉
What do you guys think — is Alan Joyce’ nearly 24 million AUD in compensation well deserved, or excessive?
Executive compensation is an especially contentious topic in the US, though it seems we’re not alone.
There’s now widespread coverage around compensation for executives in Australia during the 2018 fiscal year, with Australia’s highest paid executive being Qantas CEO Alan Joyce.
He took home nearly 24 million AUD, making him the highest paid ASX100 CEO. His 23,876,351 AUD in compensation just barely beat out Macquarie Group’s CEO earning 23,855,580 AUD.
To me that’s pretty remarkable. While airline CEOs are generally well paid, I can’t think of another situation where an airline executive was the top paid executive in the entire country.
As a point of comparison, the previous year Joyce earned “only” ~11.2 million AUD, making him the eighth best paid executive in the country.
So, how did he earn so much, and how did his pay jump that much? His base pay was just over 2 million AUD, and a large part of that compensation came in the form of the increased stock value.
It’s pointed out that Qantas’ value increased from 2.5 billion AUD to 10 billion AUD during that period, and the share price increased by about 350%.
While there will be strong opinions on both sides for executive compensation, we can all agree that’s a period during which Qantas did really well. To what extent the CEO should be rewarded for that (rather than employees) is something that’s up for debate.
In my opinion what’s much worse is when CEOs at airlines get compensated well for poor performance. I’m not thinking of any airline in particular, but theoretically:
Like I said, this is all theoretical. 😉
What do you guys think — is Alan Joyce’ nearly 24 million AUD in compensation well deserved, or excessive?
MELBOURNE, Australia – The Australian government has selected Hanwha and Rheinmetall to participate in the next phase of its A$15 billion (U.S. $10.3 billion) infantry fighting vehicle program, being delivered under Project Land 400 Phase 3.
Hanwha’s AS21 Redback IFV, a variant of the South Korean Army’s K21 vehicle, and Rheinmetall’s Lynx KF41 will now progress to a 12-month risk mitigation activity program later this year, which will test the vehicles under operational conditions.
Land 400 Phase 3 (Mounted Close Combat Capability) will acquire up to 450 tracked IFVs to replace the Australian Army’s ageing M113AS4 armoured personnel carriers. A decision on which tenderer will progress to the acquisition phase of the program will be presented to government for consideration in 2022.
“The two companies have been assessed as offering vehicles that are best able to meet the requirements of the Army while offering value for money for defense,” Minister for Defence Industry Melissa Price said at the Sept. 16 announcement.
The announcement reduces the field from four to two, with BAE Systems (CV90) and General Dynamics Land Systems (Ajax) now eliminated from the competition.
Phase 3 of the overarching Land 400 program follows on from the A$5.2 billion (U.S. $3.6 billion) Phase 2, under which Rheinmetall is delivering 211 Boxer wheeled 8x8 combat reconnaissance vehicles to replace the Australian Army’s light armored vehicles.
Rheinmetall is assembling all but the first 25 Boxers at its recently established Military Vehicle Centre of Excellence at Ipswich, west of Brisbane. Local industry participation will be a key requirement for Land 400 Phase 3.
“Australian industry involvement and Australian workers are vital to this project,” Price said. “Phase 3 is another important opportunity for Australian industry to deliver leading edge technology for the ADF.”
Rheinmetall has indicated it will assemble the Lynx in its Ipswich facility and Hanwha announced on May 23 that it had teamed with EOS Group and Elbit Systems to develop the AS21 and build it in Geelong, south of Melbourne.
Hanwha and Rheinmetall are also the prime contenders for the Australian Army’s recently revitalized Land 8116 program, which will acquire 30 self-propelled howitzers, together with support vehicles and systems.
Hanwha is proposing a local version of its K9 Thunder 155mm SPH, dubbed Aussie Thunder, which the company said in May would be assembled in Geelong irrespective of the Land 400 Phase 3 outcome. Rheinmetall is expected to offer a solution based on its PzH 2000 vehicle.
