Category Archives: Resources

WTO Whimpers

This weekend’s WTO Min­is­te­r­ial meet­ing in Geneva was unable to agree on how to keep goods and ser­vices mar­kets open to trade and com­pe­ti­tion. That’s no sur­prise, after ten years of repeated fail­ure to agree. Nor is it a cat­a­stro­phe given that for­mal bar­ri­ers are being held in check (more or less), for now, despite …

December 19, 2011 – 9:21 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

The mildness of global warming

I don’t doubt any more than you do that the aver­age atmos­pheric tem­per­a­ture has jumped around a lot but over­all has risen a few tenths of a degree in the past cen­tury or so. But when you see the change in con­text there’s just no basis for alarm, or for Aus­tralia to endorse the IPCC’s …

December 15, 2011 – 8:27 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

Black calls the kettle Rupert

It is dif­fi­cult to think of any­one less likely to offer an objec­tive assess­ment. Con­rad Black on why Rupert Mur­doch is a “great bad man”. “Although his per­son­al­ity is gen­er­ally quite agree­able, Mr Mur­doch has no loy­alty to any­one or any­thing except his com­pany. He has dif­fi­culty keep­ing friend­ships; rarely keeps his word for long; is …

July 14, 2011 – 3:07 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged | Comments (0)

De Lacy on the Carbon Tax

“Keith De Lacy, chair­man of takeover tar­get Macarthur Coal, said yes­ter­day the absence of a viable alter­na­tive to coal to fuel Asia’s eco­nomic growth would main­tain high prices world­wide and pro­tect min­ers against the lat­est “attack” by the Labor gov­ern­ment on the indus­try.” Extract from The Aus­tralian Read the rest of the inter­view. De Lacy, …

July 13, 2011 – 9:16 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Tax cuts the price of MacArthur Coal

The Prime Min­is­ter is say­ing that today’s Peabody bid for Macarthur Coal demon­strates that the Gillard/Brown “coal tax” has not hurt the prospects of the Aus­tralian coal indus­try. But today’s Finan­cial TImes reveals that the Labor government’s taxes are hav­ing an impact on the value of Aus­tralian resource assets. Peabody has cut its offer price …

July 12, 2011 – 8:14 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Flying bind

Qantas—the air­line that will soon call Sin­ga­pore home (?)—says con­sumers will foot the entire bill for the un-compensated tax on avi­a­tion fuel. The air­line has a bet­ter chance to off­set the other threat it faces from a Euro­pean air­lines tax. The Euro­pean emis­sions per­mit mar­ket is today offer­ing a tonne of car­bon at a lit­tle more …

July 11, 2011 – 3:54 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Prices to grow 20 percent faster

Among the slo­gans that the Labor/Greens alliance will pound out over the next few weeks is that their coal tax is “low cost.” They don’t seem to under­stand the mean­ing of the CPI increase revealed by their own mod­els. But worse, as far as I can see they don’t under­stand even basic house­hold bud­get­ing. The …

July 11, 2011 – 9:53 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , | Comments (0)