Calvin

@AngelicaOung If you think regime change was the goal, it’s not achieved but if you think the goal was to eliminate the Iranian threat to the region then it’s ongoing. I would argue without its navy, airforce and degradation of its missile force it’s been 80% eliminated.

Terrible. Both sides thinks they’re winning.

@bowtiedstocks Not recent but still relevant anecdote, at the start of the year Bunnings put up prices 2%, in march straight after the Iran conflict they raised prices by a further 7%. This kind of stuff filters through the economy.

They tell us inflation is only 4.6% But my haircut place just went from $45 to $52 overnight For a basic men’s cut in the ‘burbs I’m not going to Oscar Oscar either 😂 15% inflation probably closer to the actual mark

@Dr_M_Davis @DavidSantoro1 My favourite was flying from NY to Hawaii, it’s only after seeing the landscape change soo much from east coast, Ohio Valley, mid-west to the west coast do you truly understand the size and strength of that country.

It's quite sad actually. People have become so blase about air travel they forget the amazing experience of looking down on the Earth. I'll never forget a flight from Singapore to London, flying over Afghanistan, looking down and seeing incredibly rugged terrain. Or flying over India at night, and seeing the lights of cities below. Or Seattle to London and looking down on the Arctic below. Now, we are denied that opportunity by the ignorance of others.

Since when have people on planes decided that they must close the window shades during daytime flights? This is so dumb.

@DavidPocock @DavidPocock Why 25%? Why that number? Is there any math to this number?

I ran for the Senate because I wanted to help make politics about people again - not multinationals, vested interests or party donors. And that's why our campaign to get a 25% gas tax matters. Public pressure has made politicians pay attention and we have to keep it up because it can help make sure in one of the wealthiest counties on earth (and biggest gas exporters in the world), more Australians actually feel the benefit of our gas exports. Head to ourgas.com.au to make your voice heard. thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2…

@mattjcan So they’re basically Ho Chi Min

Last night, the One Nation candidate in Farrer said that the current number of migrants is "probably not" too many. Will One Nation really make our border stronger then? It has been revealed in the past week that the One Nation candidate tried to run for Labor and Anthony Albanese in 2022 and donated to a teal backed candidate last year. What are you really going to get if you vote for One Nation?

@sydney_ev If it works so well, why does it need a subsidy?

The home battery rebate just changed from today (1 May 2026). Smaller batteries (under 14kWh) still get a solid subsidy, but the discount drops for bigger systems. Most households only need 6-7kWh anyway. Still worth it? YES. abc.net.au/news/2026-05-0…

@AngelicaOung @BonnieGlaser That’s pure entitlement!

@calvin21987 @BonnieGlaser Well the Taiwanese are expecting Americans to come to our rescue for democracy so

The way I think about this the American position vis a vis Taiwan is only becoming more untenable. With every year, the gap between Chinese and US capabilities diverge. And as status quo increasingly fragilizes, the possibility looms of getting cleared out of Asia in a hot war looms. If Trump can think clearly, he will see the value in Cheng's proposition.

@AngelicaOung @BonnieGlaser @BonnieGlaser is spot on, for a country with a clear and obvious threat, Taiwans preparations are criminal and looks as if they only purchase items for PR. Why would anyone sacrifice their men if you won’t at minimum fund a credible defence.

@BonnieGlaser Lol sure. He wants to squeeze us one last time. If he really wanted Taiwan to be safe, he won’t call for us to buy more weapons he would make sure the weapons we already bought are delivered!

@MarkoMatvikov @MarkoMatvikov I’d be curious to hear your experience getting staff & contractors for jobs competing against govt infrastructure jobs. While I’m in property, not construction, my industry is also seeing a brain drain to the govt.

Tony Burke was on a podcast to argue that immigration is the answer – specifically, to construction and healthcare workers shortages. Our immigration system as we know it today was broadly designed 30 years ago – and since then: Our population has since grown by over 50% Construction job vacancies have grown by over 500% Healthcare job vacancies have grown by about 700% We have a resource allocation problem. We have an economic management problem. We have a productivity problem. We don’t have a population problem.

@lylegoldstein Aren’t laser weapons by virtue of their line of sight trajectory short range? Actually rather useless when it comes to shore bombardment.

Chinese strategists talk battleships on Chinese mil TV channel. CCTV7, Guofang Junshi, 29Apr. I don't really think battleships make sense for any Navy at this point, but it could make more sense for China than for the US given Chinese proficiency in bending steel and their rather significant interest in amphibious warfare. And, yes, I do think it's quite possible that PLAN will be first to field electromagnetic main gun on their surface combatants. If the success of the catapults on CNS Fujian carrier is any indicator, that future seems decently likely. The last pic -- also from this episode -- is test of US railgun experiment.

@Dr_M_Davis @MarkSchweikert1 I would also add Rapid Dragon is essentially a standoff weapons delivery system, it would require a huge number of standoff weapons which as we have just learned are limited and expensive. Enlarged MQ-28 could suit a variety of roles.

I still am 'pro B-21', and in an ideal world, if the defence spending were significantly and immediately lifted, I'd say looking at B-21 is a good move - but I'd now argue it would have to be part of a 'system of systems' - not a unitary platform on its own. So investing in autonomous systems now gets us part of the way there, and the 'crewed element' might take a different format to just B-21s. Hence my point about sixth generation fighters. And all the indications are that the defence budget won't be lifted sufficiently to cover the cost of B-21s and AUKUS. We'd have to sacrifice other capabilities to get B-21s, and that's unacceptable IMO. AUKUS is too important to sacrifice, but neither can we afford to hollow out other critical ADF capabilities, just to get 12 B-21s. Finally, there is no guarantee the US would sell them to us either. I do think the 2023 DSR should not have dismissed the option, but I don't think a B-21 necessarily meets all our requirements. I think B-21 is something to keep in the back of our minds for the future, but lets prioritise other options first, with distributed and resilient autonomous systems being an obvious choice. Re Rapid Dragon / C-130 / C-17 - my main issue is that this is not usable in contested airspace. But it should be an option that can back up a forward focused long-range strike capability based around autonomous systems.

On the 'B-21s and Australia' debate which is taking off again, I think a better investment would be to focus on increasing long-range strike through distributed networks of advanced uncrewed systems, rather than spending a lot of money to get a small number of very expensive and complex B-21s as a proverbial 'silver bullet' solution. The MQ-28A Ghost Bat is in its early years, but it opens the door for a lot of evolution into a range of different types of uncrewed semi-autonomous systems. One variant that could be developed might be a long-range, high payload, high performance strike system, to be acquired in significant numbers. So, something between where the Ghost Bat is now - a small collaborative combat aircraft - and a larger bomber like the B-21. The goal should be to keep unit and sustainment costs down in comparison to crewed platforms, so we can afford a significant number of Ghost Bats of varying types. Can we evolve Ghost Bat into something akin to an F-111 without a crew on board, and which can carry a range of advanced long-range strike weapons? And do so at comparatively less unit and sustainment cost versus a small number of B-21s? Combining this type of capability with investment into acquiring next-generation crewed air combat systems, for example, GCAP, possibly F/A-XX or even F-47 to replace the F/A-18F and E/A-18G from 2040 seems a better path to me. 🤔

@MarkoMatvikov A lot of people criticise the US economy from its historical volatility, however the mechanism of the economy to flush out those non performing assets/businesses or sectors is what makes it great. Our housing industry has so many safeguards it’s gone the opposite direction.

We often debate if house prices should fall. And it's natural for those who've benefitted from rising house prices to want it to continue. But what we don't talk about enough is what a society without ever-increasing house prices could look like. We've created an economy where it isn't just easy to make money by owning homes - it's the least risky and most lucrative. What we should create is an economy where effort alone can make you rich, small businesses are more profitable and productive investments deliver higher returns. Until then, we'll continue to see poor productivity, rising intergenerational inequality and strong political resistance to affordable housing

@AirPowerNEW1 Judging by the demand on Australia’s E-7 in Europe and now the Middle East, it must be pretty good and more likely to be a cost problem which the Australian govt is not shy of.

The US DOD (OSD) decided to abandon plans to purchase the E-7 AEW&C aircraft and essentially not recapitalize the E-3 AWACS fleet (slated for retirement by/before 2030) at all barring a handful of interim E-2D's. This OSD led plan has been opposed by most Air Power experts in the US including dozens of former Generals, CSAF's and senior officers. The uncertainty made NATO re-evaluate its plans to buy its own fleet of E-7's which is what it is currently doing. While the USAF will most likely be asked to restore E-7 AEWC buys by Congress (and future administrations), program stability matters for foreign sales and it is unlikely that any FMS customer would consider an E-7 buy until the fog lifts.

@matt_barrie @RizviAbul People on the right don’t have problems with paying nurses, police or military good wages, it’s when people like @RizviAbul want to bloat the system with paper shufflers and bureaucrats. 👏 @matt_barrie

@RizviAbul One thing I know is you’re not on Team Australia

According to this framing, public hospital nurses are unproductive, as are postees, teachers, train drivers, tax officers, police, ambulance, firemen, air traffic controllers, military, etc. It is the height of ignorance.

@tobyeggleston @EnergyWrapAU @TheAusInstitute This is so confusing, as Japan is taxing itself with an import tax while ours is an export tax, it’s not Japan reselling and then getting an export tax. And they don’t know the PRRT gas companies pay.

@EnergyWrapAU Their own 'research' estimates that Japan's import tax on Australian LNG is $710m, which you can assume has been tweaked to the upside. It is impossible to reconcile the last 2 sentences other than @TheAusInstitute thinks $710m is a bigger number than on $1.4bn

I don’t actually believe this statement. Has anybody checked?

@r0ck3t23 Captain Big Balls reporting for duty 🫡

Elon Musk just described the most sophisticated theft operation in American history. Not a heist. A system. Your tax dollars leave Washington. They enter a non-governmental organization. The government. With different letterhead. Musk: “Obviously if it’s a government-funded non-governmental organization, it’s just the government.” They cross a border. American law stops following them. They pass through three more entities in three more countries. They come home. Different pocket. Clean hands. Perfect crime. Musk: “The government can send money to an NGO that is then no longer governed by the laws of the United States.” Now run the math. Congressional salary. $200,000. Average net worth of a longtime member of Congress. North of $20 million. Musk: “There are a lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress. I just can’t connect the dots of how they got $20 million earning $200,000 a year. Nobody can explain that.” Nobody is supposed to. This machine ran untouched for decades for one reason. Human limitation. A forensic team cannot trace ten thousand wire transfers across fifty global jurisdictions at once. The corruption does not hide in darkness. It hides in volume. They built a labyrinth so deliberately complex that the sheer weight of it collapses every investigation before it starts. Paper buries paper. Bureaucracy absorbs inquiry. The entire architecture was engineered to exhaust you. Then artificial intelligence arrived. AI does not get tired. It cannot be bought. It does not lose the thread at wire transfer 4,000. You give it the entire global ledger. It maps every node, every transfer, every shell entity, every offshore NGO across every jurisdiction. Not in weeks. In hours. It finds the signal inside the noise. It flags the pattern. It traces a dollar from a D.C. appropriation to a Cayman shell to a congressional portfolio in the time it takes a human auditor to find his parking spot. The labyrinth was built to defeat human eyes. It is defenseless against a machine that reads the entire maze at once. This is why the establishment is not just annoyed by DOGE. They are terrified. Musk: “We’re going to try to figure it out and stop it.” He did not arrive in Washington to trim budgets. He arrived with supercomputing, AI audit systems, and a mandate to map the full financial architecture of the federal government. For the first time in history, the complexity that protected the corruption is the very thing that will expose it. Every shell entity is a signature. Every routing pattern is a fingerprint. Every congressman who walked in earning $200,000 and walked out worth $20 million is now a variable in an equation that will be solved. The swamp was never impenetrable. It was just too big for human hands. It was never built for this.

@BrookeHodgman @mentallyworld Our society cannot afford to just pay for everyone, that’s pure entitlement. The NDIS does not provide any utility to anyone not on the program or employed in it, so it’s not for everyone.

@calvin21987 @mentallyworld Social security nets are for everyone. You're going to be disabled one day too. Our society should help you when that happens. That's what actual defence of decency looks like.

1. We still need subs. 2. NDIS costs over 50 billion dollars a year. Come on man, be serious.

@austdef Australia would benefit from adopting Japan’s production model, 20 year life, if required extend during uncertain times, but always maintain that 20 yr life cycle and replacement model. Keeps the industry busy and no gaps.

Largely because we try to life-extend ships rather than replace them at or around the 25-year mark. Ignoring the physics and the chemistry. When replacing ships on time is almost always cheaper and more operationally effective in the long run. Ships rust, hulls get fatigued by sea keeping in difficult conditions (especially in the Southern Ocean) over 25 years, and technology evolves. The problem is chiefly due to our three-year electoral cycles, our four-year budgetary ones (including the forward estimates), and because no government will spend more money now to save future-government spending over the long run. Hence the long periods when no or few new ships are ordered. Examples include the whole six years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, and long periods under the early Howard government. Another example is our super-extended delays in replacing the 1995-2006 Collins Class submarines, which was due to have the first of the new submarines in the water this year.

@peter_tulip @peter_tulip So you’re saying Sydney house prices has in elastic demand, as demonstrated by 3 decades of both increased supply and prices.

300 angry NIMBYs protested about new housing in Canada Bay last night. Especially annoying was the frequency with which speakers, from both the stage and floor, said “These new apartments won’t improve affordability. They will sell for over $2 million.” 1/5