Prediction 1.
“Israel wins its war but loses the peace”.
UN-ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-IRAN-CONFLICT
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan looks at notes as he delivers remarks during a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East.
Prediction 2.
“No matter which party wins the next election Australians are in for hard times”.
Prediction 3.
“Trump will fail to end the Russian-Ukraine war within a year, yet alone (as boasted) on the first day of his second term as US President”.
Agence France-Presse
Prediction 4.
“If you expect currently high, inflationary prices are going to retreat to what they were a few years ago, you’re in for a big disappointment”.
Prediction 5.
“There are few signs the many tribes of our human family are getting any better at living together over time. We are always in conflict with each other. All of us should turning our minds to thinking why this is so ….before it’s too late .
If you’re interested … read on.
| Author’s note. Having written the above, and reread all five predictions I too was depressed. Surely I exaggerate. In hope of relief I reminded myself of the Doomsday Clock reading of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Their reading announced on 23rd January 2024 was 90 seconds to midnight. Their announcement for this year will be given at the end of January. I hope for a better reading but see no reason to expect it. Nobody likes being a Cassandra but the only alternative is to ignore the dire nature of the warning and walk toward Armageddon in blissful ignorance, Poof! |
PREDICTIONS FOR 2025
Prediction 1.
“Israel wins its war but loses the peace”.
Apartheid within Israel and the continued oppression, marginalisation and dispossession of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank prompts never ending resistance and retaliatory violence which Israel puts down by overwhelming military force. Rapprochement with Arab States (Saudi Arabia et al. under the Abrahams Accord) collapses.
Western support for Israel (America aside) retreats at an accelerating rate. Israel becomes ever more isolated to the point of becoming a pariah state. Anti – Semitism spreads in diasporas throughout the world, including Australia.
Lesson. The price of ignoring the Golden Rule (a core principle of nearly all religions, -including the Old Testament on which justification for a Jewish State resides) is high.
The exultation to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ (Leviticus 19:34) is universal. Israel’s repeated and conscious violation of this principle shows the hypocrisy of its ‘moral’ stance. Ignoring the rights of others deprives you of the right to insist on those rights for yourself.
Prediction certainty: 90%
Prediction 2.
“No matter which party wins the next election Australians are in for
hard times”.
It doesn’t matter very much which major Party wins or hobbles together government in 2025.
There are three reasons why this is likely to be so.
First, the difference between major party policies will be more cosmetic than real – they’ll have spent all their cunning and mental energy crafting manifestos (ie. their ‘showbags’ and sales pitches) to win the election. To do that they’ll have offered just enough carrot (and but the softest of stick) to ‘buy’ enough votes. Unkept ‘big promise’ strategies (eg. Turnbull – Snowy 2: Morrison – AUKUS: Albanese -The Voice and Cost of Living Relief) proved ineffective in terms of securing real change. But the power of spin over performance will again be in evidence at election time. We voters never seem to learn that lesson
After all the big promises of the past decade what have we got?
Defence? -going backwards.
Health, NDIS and Aged Care? – all still near breaking point:
Closing the Gap? – glacial progress at best.
Affordable housing and affordable energy – ha.
Tax reform? – corporates still win, wage earners (because of bracket creep) still lose.
What reason is there to believe our timid political class will act as statesman-like leaders this time around and make the hard decisions that need to be made? None
Second, the winds of change aren’t blowing in Australia’s favour.
Our economy and standard of living are dependent on our exports to China – and fossil fuel exports. China holds the whip hand here and we’ll have to tread carefully not to upset this irascible dragon. We’ll also need be careful not to upset allies like Japan and South Korea whose economies are heavily reliant on gas imports. Our room to move is severely limited when it comes to exports.
Domestically, our economy produces little beyond services. Most of everything we take for granted comes from overseas (cars, commercial aircraft, white goods, electronics, fuel, medicines, industrial machinery … even GPs, nurses and fee-paying university students). Economically we are no longer the Lucky Country. And we’ll remain a vulnerable one if our political class doesn’t lift its game.
Unfortunately, our economic vulnerability is matched by that of our military. Our Navy doesn’t have the wherewithal to protect the sea lanes on which the everyday running of the Country depends.
Our political class has been aware of all these structural weaknesses for decades but has done little beyond applying band-aids to cover the growing decay beneath. These problems are not self-correcting. Band-aids aren’t cures.
Third, voters seem convinced they can punish the major Parties, and get better results from governments, by voting for Independents such as the Teals.
These candidates appeal because they speak virtuously and passionately about the need to remedy the many injustices that blemish our society, injustices of the gender, economic and racial inequalities kind. Independents talk about eliminating the blights of misogyny, racism, domestic violence and paternalism: they advocate worthwhile goals to achieve equal female representation in politics, support working women (and latterly men) via paid paternity leave, call for better mental health services, (especially for children and young adults) and they vehemently press home the necessity for stronger action on climate change and protection of the environment.
That’s a huge list. It ignores the reality that not all worthwhile ideas can be implemented immediately and simultaneously. Politics is the art of the possible.
Independents position themselves as being free of the constraints imposed by major Party ideologies and factional power plays. They pose as politicians of conscience.
And at least some of the many reforms they fight for are theoretically achievable when independents hold the balance of power in Parliament. When they don’t they are virtually powerles. Independents can talk to and make grand demands of, but be ignored by, majority governments.
Minority governments, on the other hand need secure votes from smaller parties and independents to build the numbers to pass legislation. Then some independents, but not all, will have some power to influence legislation in ways that favour their preferred causes.
Voters are increasingly voting for independents because they also believe doing so makes for more ‘representative’ government than does a strong two-party system. Before doing so they’d be advised to remember two things.
Independents rarely hold real power, most of the time they sit on the fringe of things feeling free to make policy demands without ever having to take responsibility for the real-world implementation (success or failure) of their demands. They can and do therefore tend to exaggerate the virtuosity of their ideas rather than their practicality or priority.
A second thing to be aware of is the unimpressive history of multi-party-coalition governments in Europe. Their main achievement has been to produce dysfunctionality of the kind that first leads to instability, then chaos and sometimes paralysis. We’d be wise to avoid accelerating our parliaments further devolvement into such Towers of Babel. There’s too much talk and too little action.
Our political class already talks too much – and takes too little effective action
Prediction certainty: 75%
Prediction 3.
“Trump will fail to end the Russian-Ukraine war within a year, yet alone (as boasted) on the first day of his second term as US President”.
Agence France-Presse
Trump is a quixotic character. He frequently changes his mind without much explanation – or apparent reason. Some say his opinion on complex issues are those of the last person he spoke to. He certainly likes simple, ready-made solutions to multi-facetted problems. In his first term we saw Trump crow that he had curbed North Korea (‘little rocket man’), found a unique buddy-bond with Putin, put NATO in its place – and, in relation to China’s President Xi, confessed ‘we love each other’.
There was little hint of sarcasm in his remarks. Trump’s ego is such that he believes the Pope runs a poor second to him in terms of infallibility. He certainly believes he’s smarter than those who have spent their whole lives working in international affairs. Add to this the fact that Trump has shown little prior interest in anything outside America (except hotel developments) and we can see why we can expect no miracles from the 47th President. Rest assured, this President is no Wilson, FDR, Reagan or Lincoln.
On matters domestic, Trump’s record is hardy more inspiring. In his first term he advised injecting disinfectant to ward off Covid – and the building of a wall to solve the illegal immigration problem (by keeping undesirables out of America) proved no more successful than Khrushchev/ Ulbricht’s Berlin Wall (designed to keep East Germans inside the Soviet sphere of influence). Walls rarely prove a long-term solution to anything. The walls of Jericho fell to the sound of a trumpet, even the much-lauded Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall in England failed. Bigger and better walls aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Ask Netanyahu .
The whole world is in for a rough ride while Trump runs America. He’s capable of anything. He’ll do anything to be seen as the deal maker who saved Ukraine. Ukrainians will be the ones who pay for his ‘success’. Their future will be but collateral damage in his quest for stardom.
Prediction certainty: 75%
Prediction 4.
“If you expect currently high, inflationary prices are going to retreat to what they were a few years ago, you’re in for a big disappointment”.
Will basic prices fall if and when ‘we’ get inflation under control?
The price of bread, cheese, eggs and other food staples have gone up by around 20% over the past two years or so. The price of home insurance, car insurance and rent by closer to 30% over the same period …..electricity prices are up even more. As for mortgage rates? Well we all know the story there.
When the Inflation rate is pulled back into the ideal 2%to 3% range will there be respite by way of price reductions? Unfortunately the answer to that question is almost certainly no.
Yes, mortgagees will cheer each 0.25 point cut in interest rates, but those interest rates are not (bar a calamity) going back to anywhere near their record low of 2.63% in 2022. And maybe there’ll be a few ‘small green shoot’ price reductions in various segments of the economy for a brief period until initial manufacturer, retailer and consumer euphoria, born of relief, evaporates. House prices may go down a while, but the long-term trend in growing economies is up wherever demand exceeds supply.
Prices move in a ratchet like way – up, up, up then down a little, then up again. The steepness of that forever upward price curve will depend, in part, on government fiscal policies.
When demand exceeds supply, where nominal wage growth rates exceed the rate of inflation, if the overseas purchasing power of the AU $ continues to drop, the upward price curve will steepen.
When train drivers demand an annual wage of $198,000, year 12 school leavers (17 year olds) are offered $120,000 to train as sub-mariners, Education Department graduate teachers starting on a salary of $87,550 it’s reasonable to conclude that hundreds of thousands of other workers will press for higher wages – and that can only translate into higher inflation and higher (not lower) prices.
A low Australian dollar (currently around the 63c US cent level) adds further upward price pressures. The cost of all imports (bar, perhaps, EVs from China being ‘dumped’ here because of the international car wars) will be rising, not falling.
Our business and political classes threw petrol, not water, on the inflationary fire by paying themselves very well. The flimsy rationale they proffered to justify such largesse triggered a ‘if it’s good enough for the goose, it’s good enough for the gander’ response from wage earners.
Our top politicians seem more than willing – and capable – of looking after their own pay packets. Although it’s difficult to accurately assess what PMs and Presidents of different countries actually get paid (because there are so many differences in responsibilities, entitlements, pensions etc) it’s possible to make some reasonable, albeit rough, estimates.
Our PM scores an ‘all up’ package that’s a little (at a guess around 15%) less than the President of the USA, about the same as paid to the German and Japanese PMs. That’s well ahead of what the UK, Swedish or Danish PMs earn. The Indian PM takes home a paltry, official salary of $100,000 (Australian PM $587,000). President Xi of China, $90,000. Our business and political classes are not shy in putting a high price on their services.
Lesson. Over the next few years, contrary to what a lot of people will be hoping for (and barring an international trade war/recession), wage demands will be up, import prices up, government spending up, the number of public servants, up.
By contrast export incomes from everything (bar fossil fuels) are likely to be down. Income earned from foreign students will likely be down. Productivity? Stagnant at best, down at worst.
This is not a formula for a more benign, yet alone burgeoning, economy blessed with ever growing real living standards. All we will see is that the high prices we complain about now will rise slower than they have over the last four years. Cold comfort.
Prediction certainty: 80%
Prediction 5.
“There are few signs the many tribes of our human family are getting any better at living together. We are always in conflict with each other. All of us should turning our minds to thinking why this is so ….before it’s too late”.
In spite of the many and outstanding achievements of Homo Sapiens in agriculture, medicine, literacy, education, art, science and technology over the past 5,000 years; in spite of all the ‘wokeness’, religious sermonising and wise words from a long line of philosophers and gurus, we’ve advanced little in terms of living in harmony with each other…..or Mother Nature.
Up until very recently our numbers were so tiny that humans didn’t matter much.
At its peak the Great Roman Empire’s population was under 80 million. In 1700 the world’s population, in total, was under 500,000,000. In times past what happened on one side of the world had little impact on what happened elsewhere. Until 1800 our First Nations people knew nothing of the rest of the world. Isolation, not, connectivity, was the norm.
Now there are roughly 8,000,000,000 of us – and we’re connected (via the WWW, travel, trade and viruses). This comparatively new connectivity has led to an explosion of expectations that’s matched the population explosion both in size and impact.
Not only have our numbers exploded so too have our ‘footprints’. In hunter gatherer and pre-industrial agricultural times, an individual’s footprint (ecological + resource use) was small. In the modern West (the lifestyles most people aspire to share) they are huge.
Individuals and families in developed economies assume ‘rights’ to a home ,a car or two, a plethora of white goods and electronic appliances, overseas travel, medical care, fresh water, food, affordable energy, a welfare safety net etc, etc .
Multiply 8 billion by those bigger footprints and it becomes obvious that unless we learn to live in harmony with each other – and nature – we will bring about our own demise. We are at the limits of sustainability. If we don’t change our ways we may well join the dinosaurs.
If God (ie. the God of your choice) made humankind in his/her image we can’t expect much help from such divine sources. One of mankind’s most persistent characteristics is that we’ve never been able to live in peace with each other for very long. We seem hard wired to want the green grass our neighbours live on for ourselves. We always have and still do. It’s an old cliche that we’re always keeping an eye on what the Joneses are doing….and striving to keep up with or bettering them. We do that as tribes and states, not just as friends and neighbours. We simply can’t seem to help ourselves.
Look at where we (on the international front) stand at the beginning of 2025.
Xi is determined to assert China as the world’s number 1 superpower and woe-betide any less muscular state who stands in the way of him achieving that ambition. Putin has convinced Russians they are at threat from an independent Ukraine (a proxy for the West). Israel sees no irony in the fact that they, the people who suffered the Holocaust, are now consciously ignoring Palestinians the rights they demand for themselves. These are only the big games we hear of. There are plenty more deadly struggles going on in the Middle East, Africa and South America.
We say we love peace and hate war, prefer harmony to division, freedom to oppression….but our actions say otherwise.
It was just over a hundred years ago that the ‘war to end all wars’ ended. Eighty years ago another fifty million died in World War II….and yet we seem to have learnt little. We seemed destined to relentlessly and pointlessly go to war. Our allies in 1945 (Russia and China) are now our enemies. Our enemies (Japan and Italy) are now our allies. We can’t resist playing musical chairs with ever more deadly weapons and, therefore, more deadly consequences.
The more things change (in ambition, weaponry, trade warfare, cyber warfare et al) the more they remain the same. That doesn’t augur well for the future of mankind, we self-congratulatory, intelligent, conscious mutated gorillas.
Nature has given us fair warning that we are going to have to change our ways if we are to survive. An auctioneer gives three ‘fair warnings’ before bringing down the hammer. You’ve just heard that third warning.
John Donne (the 17th century English poet), William Shakespeare and Ernest Hemingway (in 1940) expressed themselves more eloquently when they each wrote variants of the line ‘for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’. The literary world listened to those words but the world of power, as usual, did not.
We ordinary voters must force our politicians to listen. That’s the only real game in town. Worrying about gender etiquette, marginal tax rates, education subsidies and all the other things we and our political class never-endingly squabble about won’t matter a tinker’s cuss if we fail that primary task.
Time to stop spending our energies arguing about how to arrange the deck chairs while the good ship Titanic steams ahead toward disaster.
Prediction certainty: 100% (It’s ninety seconds to midnight)