Farmers shut out by Nats. Barnaby Joyce was out spruiking his agricultural white paper yesterday on ABC1 Insiders (and talking right-wing nonsense about how same-sex marriage might make us seem decadent in Asian markets), but back home in parts of the farming community in NSW, he, Prime Minister Tony Abbott and the Coalition in NSW, are being seen as very “fair-weather friends”. It’s all to do with the BHP Billiton plan for a massive coal mine on the Liverpool Plains, north-west of Newcastle. Barnaby has already sold out farmers in the area (as has his leader, Warren Truss) by not standing up and blocking the huge Shenhua Watermark mine next door to the proposed BHP operation. Shenhua’s final approval was paused in May to allow more environmental work to be done on the impact on the area’s water supplies, a central concern about the proposed BHP mine at Caroona. Now farmers in the area are preparing to sell their properties to BHP after learning that the mine will go ahead. As late as a month ago, they were confident it would be knocked back by a combination of decisions from Canberra and the NSW government.

Joyce, Abbott and the Mike Baird government have ignored advice that this will damage the best farming land in NSW in their pursuit of fat royalty income. BHP could still change its mind if investors question its spending a couple of billion dollars on buying the properties, setting up the mine and the associated railway, especially as China, the mooted market for the thermal coal to be produced, is slashing its imports of that type of coal from Australia and Indonesia as part of a campaign to reduce pollution. A suggested alternate market is India — for both BHP and Shenhua. But don’t tell anyone. Readers of the white paper noticed there was a lot of talk about helping farmers, but nothing mentioned about saving prime farming land from miners (from foreigners, yes, but not foreign miners). A problem for the NSW government is that if blocked, deposits of more than $500 million would have to be repaid to Shenhua and BHP — and possibly damages and costs. — Glenn Dyer

So Greece voted “no”. The Greeks know all about Pyrrhic victories — or they should. After the phrase is from Greek’s amazing past and of course refers to a victory where the cost is so high as to render the win meaningless. That act of defiance in yesterday’s referendum is one of those — and perhaps the most dangerous for Greece in decades, if not longer. The decisive “no” won’t save the banks or the economy from collapse, nor the Greeks more generally from a lot more pain and austerity — and this time it will be of their own making. The Greeks still need Europe, or rather, those parts of Europe that can give them money without anything being repaid. We don’t know what the European Central Bank (ECB) is going to do with its near 89 billion euros in emergency loans to Greek banks, but the Greek central bank has asked the ECB for more aid (and that decision will come this afternoon, Sydney time), and it won’t be enough. If that is not granted, it could spark a financial crisis larger than what we now have. Reuters reported yesterday that some bank machines were running short of money in Greece over the weekend, even with the limit of just 60 euros a day. — Glenn Dyer

China loads the bazooka. China has blinked and will resort to following the lead of the US Fed and the European Central Bank in using the big bazooka to stop the multitrillion-dollar run on its sharemarkets from deepening this week. In an announcement late last night, the country’s Securities Regulatory Commission said the central bank would lend money to China Securities Finance, the state-owned group that makes margin loan finance to brokers. Quantitative easing, Chinese style? Margin lending is the major driver of the market rout that has had the market plunge 30% in three weeks from its peak on June 12. As the falls have accelerated (13.3% the first week, 6.4% the second and more than 12% last week), the margin calls have forced tens of millions of investors to sell their shares to make the call. That, in turn, has threatened the viability of some brokers and sparked fears of a collapse.  — Glenn Dyer

Rubbish about the dollar. According to some of the more fanciful media reports on Friday and over the weekend, the Aussie dollar’s sharp fall on Friday was due to “weak” retail sales of 0.3% in May, which fell short of the market forecast of 0.5%. As an explanation, that was as wrongheaded as you can get, especially when every report of the dollar’s fall missed the sharp rise in car sales in June, up 6.4% in the month to more than 125,000 (one of the highest monthly totals for some time). In the US, which includes car and petrol sales in its retail sales reports, that would make  for a solid month’s increase. CommSec chief economist Craig James also exposed the bullshit involved in the reporting about the retail sales report when he pointed out that retail sales were up 5.7% over the year so far, “far above the five year average of 3.6%”. And he also said that the “data shows that the larger retailers are doing well, with sales up 5.3% over the year”.  — Glenn Dyer