How to bring down a prime minister.

Ever wondered what commodity prices can do?  

First of all, what is a commodity?  Well traditionally a commodity was a thing like Precious Metals, a raw material product that can be bought and sold, such as copper.  Then there is Energy.

But other products joined the raft.  Agriculture Commodities. Coffee.  Ok, we don’t all drink coffee.  But then you find that foodstuffs become commodities.   Corn.  Wheat. Cocoa, Cotton, Live Cattle, fats.  You will find today's trading prices at  Bloomberg.    Will water become a commodity one day?  In this bull market thinking some would argue, why not. 

But there are consequences of having life sustaining things as commodities.  When Greed Becomes Hunger was a two part drama on radio 4 earlier this year, surely an award winner somewhere.  It just simply showed the power of the commodity market.  In this case, famine and hunger were the outcomes.  You can listen here. Part One: The Pit  and Part Two: The Pen.

So next time you wander the aisles of your supermarket, don’t think that this is all about Asda doing it cheaper than Tesco .  This is all about global traders buying and selling other people products, doing “short selling” on them (the practice of selling securities or other financial instruments that are not currently owned, and subsequently repurchasing them ("covering")).  Is that gambling by another name?

Yes, our whole food chain is now part of this global gambling arena.  Farm to the Fork sounds idealist.  But today’s farm to the fork involves a lot of people making a lot of money out of trading these commodities.  These traders of course don’t do any of the back breaking work.  Oh no, that’s the poor people who do that.  For a pittance of a wage.

So where do prime ministers come into this?

We will never know what Tony Abbott, the PM of Australia, could have achieved if commodity prices hadn’t collapsed.  That was what did it for him.  He lost the confidence of the “market”.  Not the electors you note, the market.  The very people who are the ones who gamble with your food prices.

Political leaders can ride high if the economy is working or if there is a common enemy to overcome (reactionary or greedy unions or a perceived terrorist threat, for example). They can even weather media gaffes.  But if the economy goes wrong and they stay on the wrong side of the culture wars they risk all.

The commodities boom, which a succession of Australian PMs had the benefit of with the apparently insatiable Chinese appetite for everything Australia could unearth, suddenly collapsed earlier this summer.  It threatened to turn the high-riding Lucky Country into the new Greece.

So we will see how the very confident Malcolm Turnbull, the new Australian PM, will now deal with the economy.  Or how it will deal with him.  Because if the gamblers in the commodity market don’t do him any favours or don't like what he is doing, the knife will be stuck in him just as he stuck it into Abbot.