Australia's Current-Account balance slipped to deficit in Q4'22 - partly due to Aldi transferring profits back to Germany which as usual remains solidly in surplus on net money inflow!

And when we stop mining coal and all of those other nasty things its only going to get worse. Germany has education standards unlike here.

Years ago in Germany in the case of engineering alone, you could get qualifications, however you did an apprenticeship, the same as many other jobs. If you could not put what you learnt into practice you worked for a boss.

I you ran the business side of something the size of Mercedes Benz you had a doctorate. If you ran Engineering you had a doctorate. If yo opened a business you needed business management and if you went broke more than once you could end up gaol and you would never be allowed to open a business again.

That's why they win & we lose as we do not educate with the right skills base if any.

This makes me think of the times some people pay out on companies like BHP, Harvey Norman and Westfield - all are majority Australian companies, albeit with some foreign-held stock but most of any profit stays here, All these companies, and even the one I work for, have large off-shore interests and as such they bring money into the country and help to make us internationally competitive. It's hard to imagine that they get attacked by a fringe of people who cannot stand capitalism, but the bottom line is, with world trade, if a country doesn't at least break even, they are just coughing up their money to other nations.

As for coal, we should not only sell more (note: the Commonwealth Government refused approval to Clive Palmer to build a coal mine in QLD recently) but we should be burning more. In around eight weeks, Liddell Power Station, in the Hunter Valley, will close down, leaving a 2,000MW deficit in the electricity grid. Governments of both political flavours have failed us on electricity. A 750MW gas-fired power station and a 700MW battery are hardly a suitable replacement for a 2,000MW baseload generating facility.

Expect blackouts in the near future. They will be with us.

PocketNEM is a great App for people with iPhones. It gives the live status of the National Energy Market. What states are propping others. The live wholesale price in each state and what generators are online and power they are producing. Very interesting watching the power status on hot days when demand is high.