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Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

independent.co.uk

61–70 of 206 posts

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#61

I'm guessing Canada and Australia would go for an EFTA 'lite' type deal. As EFTA doesn't require a customs union it's probably the easiest to implement and build up from. I think they amended EFTA to require free movement which was a no-op as all the EFTA countries had free movement with the EU. I could see the EU agreeing to a NAFTA style workers visa if they really wanted push the freedom of movement side hence the…

If .ca and .au did arrange free movement in and out of the EU (and with each other?), that would really be the cherry on the Brexit cake.

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#62

The current government seems to be quite determined to pretend our British heritage isn't a large and important part of us. I don't understand it.

As an Australian, I don't think our 'heritage' is of much consequence. Current constituency and overall stability matter more, to me.

If you mean 'our British heritage' as in, the percentage of the Australian population with British backgrounds, then that counts towards 'current constituency' in my definition.

This is unfair to the aboriginals, however, and that's a circle I believe is impossible to square.

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#63
post #35
post #12

As an Australian, I have noticed a shift personally in feeling like I identify more with "European" culture, compared to 10 years ago I felt like we were the 51st state and I felt very close with the US. This seems to be shared by others, I remember reading there was a survey that asked Australians who they felt our closest international friend was. The US was the top answer for over a decade, having stolen the crown…

[flagged]

Talking to Americans

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from the "Crocodile Dundee" and "Men at Work" phenomena in the late 80s, there is no real cultural pollination between Australia and the US, as far as I can tell. It's too far away and there are no real reasons for Americans to visit, nor are there enough internationally notable Australian music brands, films, or products that give visibility to the country, which is one price of being a commodity producing nat…

Haven’t Australians just moved to US - Keith Urban, Chris Hemsworth, Russel Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie and the list goes on … it’s not the same way as Japanese’s or Korean output, because English as the native language makes the transition seamless and doesn’t stand out. Oh! I forgot JIRA and Atlassian are Australian too :D Now you really can’t deny you haven’t felt the Australian influence in your life. Lol

That's a good point, the US might just be sucking all the culturally relevant output out of the country.

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#66

The current government seems to be quite determined to pretend our British heritage isn't a large and important part of us. I don't understand it.

It's because the British heritage involved committing huge crimes against the indigenous folks that we haven't really acknowledged and haven't dealt with. We can't move on until we do. So we're kinda stuck.

I think it's fairly well acknowledged, but there is no 'dealt with' that fits into any kind of reality I'm familiar with.

My purely observational understanding is that there are fundamental incompatibilities between aboriginal and 'western/British' culture. "Ownership" of land as probably the primary example. I don't know how that gets 'dealt with'.

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of what makes Australia a better performing economy is maintaining high population growth rate of 1.5%, mostly through immigration. Has had implications on housing affordability, but it's great for GDP statistics. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/aus/aus...

>Has had implications on housing affordability, but it's great for GDP statistics. Which high performing economy DOESN'T struggle with housing affordability? >mostly through immigration *SKILLED immigration

The high performing economies that didn't make it illegal to build are high performing because of that.

This is why the highest standard of living on the planet, with the highest GDP over the largest population... is in Texas.

The fact the people there aren't pathologically conservative/authoritarian in the "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything" sense is the precise reason why that is.

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#68
post #12

As an Australian, I have noticed a shift personally in feeling like I identify more with "European" culture, compared to 10 years ago I felt like we were the 51st state and I felt very close with the US. This seems to be shared by others, I remember reading there was a survey that asked Australians who they felt our closest international friend was. The US was the top answer for over a decade, having stolen the crown…

From the American side it felt like we had more cross-pollination with Australia in the 90s than in the decades following. Disney even had a studio out there that animated some of the TV shows it aired in the US (and presumably in Australia too). Not sure what changed.

There was a really great writeup by someone who worked in that Disney animation shop on a blog I once stumbled on - he wrote about how he took on the 'job of a lifetime' as a teenager while his mother was terminally ill and how that impacts your priorities.

Incredibly moving read that I unfortunately can't find now, but it covered how the Sydney office ended, from memory it was a combination of CGI changing the industry, and cost - Australian wages weren't cheap and the studio was mostly used for producing direct-to-video sequels which was a market that dried up.

The actual big influence on the Australian-American cross pollination though, I suspect, was Rupert Murdoch's expansion into the American film and TV industry. For all his faults, he was a big champion of talent from his homeland in both his movies and Fox TV network. Even the infamous Simpsons Australia episode was likely influenced by the big influence of Australians at Fox at that time.

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#69
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What money? Their economic growth is half of the US and with strong headwinds. EU GDP is also smaller than the US by far.

US GDP is mostly imaginary and not tangible. It's dependent on both international respect for intellectual property laws (reason for the anger toward China), and the natural resources of other lands (that have had their governments blamed by the current administration actively misleading US citizens about provenance of what is needed to sustain American life) Intellectual property laws being recognized, US fiat curre…

GDP is not "imaginary" or "not tangible" anymore than an accounting statement of profit and loss is imaginary. It is a very real thing but you have some subtle approaches about how you measure things like depreciation or what accounting rules you follow. The fact that a lot of people don't understand this stuff doesn't mean it is arbitrary or has no meaning. There are also huge teams of accountants that spend tens of thousands of hours getting these statistics, and their work is much maligned by the smarmy internet posters who think they know better at how to determine profit and loss.

GDP is just national value added, and was developed in the early 20th century and broadly used during the Great Depression to measure economic activity. It is good at what it does. People have taken it to measure military power, wealth, success, happiness, capability to build a specific thing, fertility, etc. That is the fault of people not understanding what GDP is or what it was meant to measure, it's not the fault of the metric itself, or the carefully developed system of accounting conventions that were developed over a hundred years of refinement.

I really think there should be mandatory accountancy training in universal education to get people to understand this stuff. The millions of hours saved in online arguments alone would make this a good investment.

Having said that, the valuation of tech companies is based on market sentiment, not accountancy rules. I don't pretend to understand how many of the companies on the equities exchanges are valued, they all seem to be too pricey for me. That, too, has nothing to do with GDP.

Re: Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from the "Crocodile Dundee" and "Men at Work" phenomena in the late 80s, there is no real cultural pollination between Australia and the US, as far as I can tell. It's too far away and there are no real reasons for Americans to visit, nor are there enough internationally notable Australian music brands, films, or products that give visibility to the country, which is one price of being a commodity producing nat…

Haven’t Australians just moved to US - Keith Urban, Chris Hemsworth, Russel Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie and the list goes on … it’s not the same way as Japanese’s or Korean output, because English as the native language makes the transition seamless and doesn’t stand out. Oh! I forgot JIRA and Atlassian are Australian too :D Now you really can’t deny you haven’t felt the Australian influence in your life. Lol

That is a relatively recent change.

In the 80-90's, the most popular destination for Australians was the UK: Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Lisa Gerrard (of Dead Can Dance fame) and many others moved up there.

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