'You will pay': Beijing ups threat to Australia
- Thread starter themickey
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Except that the People’s Bank of China pegs the RMB to the USD. Been doing it since 1994. The RMB doesn’t float on international markets like a legit reserve status currency.
In World War II, Japan attacked Australia 97 times, peripherally. if WWIII were to occur, China would take on and occupy Australia for its natural resources (a small country in terms of population (25M vs 40M (California), yet Australia's GDP ranks 13th in the world). it makes sense, Australia forms alliance with the Western-leaning countries to guard against China's ambition.
What a very strange analysis so full of contradictions and biases. Let me just bring up 3 of them:
1. Viewing the world it terms of wars is not even realist, it's paranoid.
2. In WWII Japan was the enemy. Today, Japan is the ally. It speaks tons of leaders ability to manipulate populations to fight and die for questionable reasons.
3. Australia as a white Anglo Irish country is an anomaly, a vestige of England's strength 200 years ago, a minute in Chinese timeline. China was never expansionist like Euro nations, too busy fighting one another for control of the kingdoms. Yet, Chinese control the economies of all of Southeast Asia, including Australia's which depends on its exports to China to maintain their high lifestyle. China doesn't need a war to grow and expand. Its people are the world's hardest workers who sacrifice for the next generation to be better, wherever they immigrate, in whatever the circumstances they encounter.
The world is always in a state of war. In recent times, it has been cold wars but sometimes it is kinetic.
The last 50 years is probably the most peaceful in world history. And, China's long history is fraught with civil war. Keeping itself together has always been its biggest problem thus the iron fist of Communism.
Australia will bow down and turn down its rhetoric until a pro-military American president gets elected again. In the mean time, the ASEAN countries are lost.
The last 50 years is probably the most peaceful in world history. And, China's long history is fraught with civil war. Keeping itself together has always been its biggest problem thus the iron fist of Communism.
Australia will bow down and turn down its rhetoric until a pro-military American president gets elected again. In the mean time, the ASEAN countries are lost.
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OMG!!! Sell low buy high, the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do in trading. Poor Australia!!
But then again when you have it as good as the Australians, I wouldn't be surprised that you guys want to take it a little easy. Australia is a paradise. Thanks for letting me know where I want to live when I retire.
Seriously if Australia's got everything in the world, everything you need to live, WHY is Australia opening itself up to the world in the first place? Globalization isn't for everyone and it affects every country differently. Not all countries benefit and benefit equally from globalization. If your country is able to grow everything that can totally sustain your local population at its growth rate, you don't really need globalization or immigration or anything. You would be perfectly fine as a closed economy or just participating in very limited trading like tourism and etc. Why would you want to open it up for grabs? See this is the problem with everybody with globalization. Everybody thinks it's so great it's the best thing that's ever happened to the world and dived head over heels into it without even knowing what it is and its impact on its own economy. Globalization is only good for countries that are at the top of the food chain that are making the stuff that can fetch the highest value in the world. For those countries, in order for them to make their goods, they need cheap inputs, cheap labour and cheap raw material that they put into their manufacturing process to make something that they can sell more. So instead of going around waging wars and colonizing countries around the world to force them to "contribute" cheap inputs for free like the old times, they now use this concept of globalization to bind the colonized countries with "trade agreements" and pay them something for the cheap inputs. So if you are one of the countries that are providing the cheap inputs whether it's cheap labour and/or cheap raw material, you are really no different from those countries that were being colonized before only this time not by weapon but by $$ and even though you are getting paid for what you bring, you are still losing out comparatively UNLESS you do like what China did. China started out as a "colonized" country in the globalization process providing cheap labour (still is in some way) but it's able to use the money that it earned by providing cheap labour to develop (with a bit of "borrowing" along the way) high and bio-technology that allows them to now be at the top of the food chain now producing stuff with high value and in turn now become one of the colonizers, an "imperialist", the very same type of the countries that it has always despised and condemned (I guess it's not so bad now that you are the imperialist sticking it to others. LOL). But if you are going to just keep being the cheap inputs provider then eventually you are going to lose your ability to control the narrative. It's whoever has the bigger muscle that wins.
So having said all those, there are three options that Australia can take:
1) Close the economy. Get rid of the population in excess of what Australia's agriculture can provide in a sustainable manner. I mean if all you want to do is enjoy your life at the end of the day, all you need is get your stomach filled from the stuff that you grow from the ground. If there is enough to feed your local population, what do you care if you are not able to make some extra $$'s? It's not like you would have those extra mouths to feed once you get rid of all of the excess population. Think of the time before the massive immigration and globalization, were you better before? If you were, then why not go back? If something was not broken in the first place, you shouldn't fix it.
2) If Australia feels it needs to feed those extra mouths, you just simply can't go back to how things were before. Then you need to do like what China does. Take the money that it's earned so far and invest in new technology, new biotechnology, robotics. Put away the surfboard and be prepared to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week while developing the new technology, do the research, invest in human talent. If you want to keep your sovereignty, if you want to have a say in what you want to believe in, then you need to be at the top of the food chain producing the most expensive stuff that people will have to pay an arm & a leg otherwise you will always have the problem of what you are having now, living at the whims of another country.
3) If Australia feels it can't close its border but it still wants enjoy life a bit then it needs to ally with a country at the top of the food chain but with the value that Australia actually believes in. Right now Australia is allied with two countries with strong economy but with conflicting values and beliefs and that's not going to work. Australia is going to have to choose and in the end can only one "sugar daddy" or with multiple "sugar daddies" but all of their values and beliefs will have to align.
Australia's got some tough decisions to make. All in all something's gotta give. Amidst sovereignty, quality of life and standard of living, you can only have a maximum of two out of the three; you can't have all three.
The RMB floats a bit now but it's a managed float and is not pegged to the USD but floats to a basket of currencies that includes the EURO and etc. But China needs to watch out that that it doesn't peg too tightly now that it's an importer of inputs that it needs for its production of value-added goods. You don't want to cheapen the currency too much that it becomes more expensive to import raw materials and in turns increases its production cost.
Australia unlike Canada has a freshwater problem. The whole frigging continent is a desert with little freshwater.
That's what the Australian government keeps saying whenever there's an immigration pressure to allow more people in to further develop their economy. Except they continue to promote immigration from the UK.
The fact is, Australia can invest in desalinization plants (it has one recently entered in service) and implement strict water conservation measures at the same time. Australia's agricultural sector includes rice, alfalfa and wheat, all high water consumption crops.