loon pond

In which the bromancer and Dame Groan feature in the pond's placeholder ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:41:20 +0000

A few housekeeping notes.

The pond regrets it can't keep the comments section open in the immediate future, and so the moderation bar will kick in after a few more days. That's because the pond has to take steps to moderate the content, or risk upsetting the google bot.

Unfortunately the pond will be offline in every way bar the phone, and won't be able to moderate the moderation in the near future.

Blogger wasn't really set up with mobile phones in mind (huzzah) and the pond never bothered configuring it as an operating system.

The pond will try to extend the moderation curfew with the odd post, but that will be tricky until the pond has made the shift and set up online shop in its new location.

Hopefully the pond will be back (the pond has been told some intruders are shot on sight at its new southern location), though if so, it'll likely be in modified form.

The pond's hours derived from the need to do the blog, then get on with work, but in the pond's new iteration work isn't an issue, so maybe the pond will set a more genteel and leisurely schedule.

Given the way that most correspondents seem to access the site, no one's that keen to get up early in the morning to enjoy freshly baked, piping hot reptiles served up for breakfast.

The pond might also limit exposure to the reptiles ... there are any number of wastrels and time wasters at the lizard Oz, and one reptile can be as amusing as three can, especially if the intermittent archive is available to offer samples of the others.

The pond would like to thank all the cartoonists for being unwittingly dragooned into the pond. The pond never attempted to score revenue out of the blog, and one of the reasons is that it didn't wish to trade off on the hard work of others. Rather the pond wanted to draw attention to the glories of local cartoonists plying their trade for the enjoyment of all.

And lastly the pond would like to thank all the pond's correspondents, a small, but trusty, hardy band who long ago graduated as doctors of herpetology studies, and who kept the pond slogging on simply to read the comments section.

Hopefully we'll all resume play, but for the moment, it's time for the last placeholder for a while.

Unfortunately, as expected, the lizard Oz didn't deliver a dream team of reptiles as the placeholder.

There's no Our Henry ... there's just this motley crue ... and yes, the budget jihad, the mother of lizard Oz jihads, was still in full swing.

In no particular order ...

COMMENTARY by Dennis Shanahan
Labor falls into tax trap in the valley of death
The desperation and vehemence of the denials and claims from the PM and Treasurer about scare campaigns are proof in themselves that the death tax debate is getting away from Labor.

The bouffant one took a trip back in time ...

Ye ancient cats and hounds, the reptiles are running really hard on the death and taxes routine, and there's a 'toon for that ...

The canny Cranston lined up for a crack ...

EXCLUSIVE
Surprise stamp duty bill looms after trust crackdown
Labor’s trust issues extend to a looming fight on stamp duty
As businesses and families across the country face the prospect of a tax bill if they are forced to restructure their trusts, the states prepare for a multi-billion-dollar fight over the revenue.
By Matthew Cranston

There was much wailing and quailing ..

BUDGET 2026
Why Labor’s capital gains overhaul became an internet meme
‘Albo owns 47 per cent of my business’: Why Labor’s CGT overhaul became an internet meme
Small business owners are venting anger over reforms they say could deter investment and hit start-ups hard.
By Jack Quail

Rosie and Julie-Anne were suffused with fear, and happy to spread the fear mongering wide ...

FEARS FOR VULNERABLE
Strike at wealthy hits low-income families
Jim Chalmers has defended Labor’s trust tax raid as targeting wealthy tax avoiders, but estate planners warn everyday families will suffer most.
By Rosie Lewis and Julie-Anne Sprague

Even Ancient Troy chimed in over on the extreme far right ...

A taxing problem: major parties fail test of our future
The real intergenerational problem ALP, Libs missed: paying off debt bomb
Labor and the Coalition have condemned future generations to pay for record spending and debt.
By Troy Bramston
Senior Writer

What a pity none of them tackled the alternative ... a brave, bold back to the future ...

To be fair the reptiles also found space for an essential contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News... with Frank top of the world ma over on the extreme far right ...

ROYAL COMMISSION
‘Change can happen’: Lowy’s soccer blueprint to tackle antisemitism
Frank Lowy’s powerful antisemitism submission: we changed soccer, and we can also extinguish smouldering racism
In a powerful submission to the antisemitism royal commission, Frank Lowy says change will require the same cultural shifts that saw ethnic divisions in soccer transformed into loyalty.
By Frank Lowy

Frank was also top of the "news" with a "love it or leave it" angle ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘If you don’t like Australia, leave,’ says Lowy
Frank Lowy tells Bondi inquiry his soccer fix could help cure hate
Sir Frank Lowy says the same approach that ended ethnic conflict in Australian soccer could solve the antisemitism crisis – but those who won’t accept our values should face deportation.
By Stephen Rice

But what if soccer bores you senseless?

What if you've seen endless, inane stories of fans feuding and rioting in the streets?

What if you think that the only way to respond to the astonishing grift at work in the World Cup is to participate in a boycott?

Forget it Jake, that grift, that form of madness, is going to go on forever.

The reptiles did gratify the pond by featuring one of the pond's favourites.

It's lesser, minor bromancer, but the pond would have settled for any reptile writing about anything other than the budget, so this'll do reptiles, this'll do:

The header: Can anyone govern UK effectively – a question also for similar democracies, especially Australia; The UK faces having six prime ministers in seven years as Keir Starmer’s leadership crumbles amid a crisis that mirrors Australia’s own policy failures.

The caption: Protesters at a rally organised by Tommy Robinson pose in front of a banner featuring Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Picture: Carl Court/Getty Images

The bromancer spent a bigly four minutes diagnosing Britain's ills, beginning with a cornball joke that says a lot about his sensa huma ...

When I first visited Britain way back in the 1970s, before Margaret Thatcher transformed the place, it was a terrible mess, its economy notoriously the sick man of Europe. (It was nonetheless fun to be there – the Brits made great jokes out of their misfortunes and an Australian with even a few dollars in his pocket felt rich). Britain’s economic performance was dismal and it was riven by strikes and bitter ideological division.
I remember in a country pub one fellow wanting a smoke and having trouble getting his match to light. In exasperation, he declared: “This match is the only thing in Britain that doesn’t strike!”
Britain’s problems are a bit different today but essentially they throw up the same questions as the 1970s. Can anyone govern Britain effectively?
This question, acute in Britain, can be asked with increasing pertinence about similar democracies, and especially Australia.
Long term, I remain a solid optimist about the Brits – their institutional and cultural inheritance is so great, although modern culture is trying to cut them off from their own legacy. Keir Starmer, in office less than two years, is a very poor prime minister. It now seems he has little chance of surviving more than a month or two.

The reptiles flung in snaps of Keir's rivals, Andy Burnham. Picture: Getty Images; Wes Streeting. Picture: AFP

The bromancer was in his element, dissing Labour ...

The campaign to push him out is a mixture of light opera and musical farce, with a strong dash of Dynasty/Dallas-style soap opera centred on sibling hatreds that have no logical explanation. The two main challengers are Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, and Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester. They and Starmer all appear to share rich mutual detestation while always speaking publicly of each other with saccharine emollience.
Streeting notionally comes from the Labour right, though that’s a long way left of normal voters. Burnham has no ideological fixed address. The joke is: a Blairite, a Brownite (follower of Gordon Brown) and a Corbynista (admirer of loony left Jeremy Corbyn) walk into a pub together and the barman asks: Mr Burnham, what would you like to drink?
To return to parliament, Burnham had to get a Labour MP to resign so he could stand at a by-election. The seat in question is Makerfield. In recent local elections, Nigel Farage’s Reform swept to victory there. Ten years ago, the electorate voted overwhelmingly for Brexit.
So Streeting declared Labour must seek to rejoin the EU. This is the conventional view among Labour lefties but the public hates the idea, even those people who think successive governments have made a mess of Brexit.
It’s also, mutedly, more or less official Labour policy.

There came an AV distraction ...

UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has dismissed speculation about a potential leadership challenge against Prime Minister Keir Starmer as "froth and nonsense." Political tensions within the Labour Party have continued following significant losses in local elections nearly two weeks ago. The issue of Brexit may become significant in any future leadership contest, as UK MP Wes Streeting and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham have both expressed support for Britain rejoining the European Union.

The bromancer finally turned his keen mind to what ails Britain ...

Burnham thus can’t really denounce it, but having it front of mind increases the chance Burnham loses the by-election. One up to Streeting. But the party rank and file don’t like Streeting. So, sans Burnham, the left would have to put someone else up.
It’s even barely conceivable Starmer could hang on for more tortured months of paralysis if Burnham loses in Makerfield.
Burnham is the only national Labour politician with a positive approval rating. That’s partly because as mayor he doesn’t have to take tough decisions and has no responsibility for issues ripping Britain apart, and for which he has offered no solutions.
Assuming Starmer goes, Britain will have had six PMs in seven years – Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Starmer and Starmer’s replacement. Add in David Cameron before May and it’s seven in 10 years. That’s a sign of deeply dysfunctional politics, of a political system, and a society that can’t resolve its public policy contradictions.
People talk, justifiably, of the crisis on the centre right in many democracies. There’s an equal crisis on the centre left. Only three EU governments are left of centre, and they’re in trouble.
Britain’s problems are not mysterious.
They include: massive public debt; uncontrolled welfare spending; the desperate need to increase defence spending; massive disguised unemployment through huge welfare rolls; a loss of social morale and self-confidence; persistent Islamist violence; an education system dedicated to the idea that Britain is evil; a complete loss of trust in institutions, including the mainstream political parties; wildly expensive energy prices arising from net-zero commitments; and the separate but related problems of uncontrolled mass immigration and illegal immigration.

Strange, no mention of Brexit?

Could it be that the bromancer was all in on that ruinous strategy?

Is it true that the bromancer was something of a Boris and Brexit man?

Indeed he was, and the pond felt the need to send this to the intermittent archive, just for the fun of it...

Brexiteers fighting for liberty and the people’s will

Here you go, a little teaser trailer ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were featuring a riot ... Anti-migration protesters riot outside Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, South Yorkshire, 2024.

And then the bromancer seamlessly shifted from Labour bashing to Labor bashing, so he too could join in the lizard Oz budget jihad, the mother of all reptile jihads ...

Australia has similar problems. Although the Albanese government is politically dominant, its policy responses are essentially the same as Starmer’s and equally ineffective, indeed destructive in the medium and long term. But we start richer, so will take longer to bankrupt.
A columnist in The Times argued recently that the British people were at fault because they wanted a vast welfare state but didn’t want to pay the taxes to fund it. That seems wise but is actually quite mistaken. Britain, like Australia, is already a very high-tax society. The problem is that putting on even more taxes, especially at the level that would be needed to wipe out deficit spending, is just about impossible because it cripples the economy.
None of the new Albanese/Chalmers taxes will help the economy in any way. They just hinder growth. Britain is at an even worse point in this continuum. Governments have gone down the road of electoral bribery so far they have reached a dead end, where a flimsy but important safety sign warns there is no road ahead, only a cliff.
The Makerfield by-election has quickly become a two-horse race, Labour versus Reform. That’s bad news for the Conservative Party, whose leader, Kemi Badenoch, is immensely likeable and plainly doing a good job, but not yet registering big gains in the polls.
Have the voters deserted the Conservatives forever? Farage has welcomed a number of senior Tory defectors into Reform, and this has slightly reduced his outsider appeal and greatly increased the credibility of Reform as potentially a party of government.
Barnaby Joyce joining One Nation is a similar, though weaker, manifestation of the same dynamic.
Britain will muddle through, but what a mess. Mind you, the 1970s did give us Fawlty Towers.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor

Please, a little 'toon balance...

The pond suspects that in a month or a year's time the reptiles will still be in the throes of their budget jihad, and the pond is pleased to be shod of it...

And so to the mother of all budget bashers, the old biddy herself ...

The header: Effects of budget shemozzle likely to get worse for Labor; It’s one thing to break a promise delivered 50 times; it’s another thing altogether to deliver a set of policies that can best be described as bungled.

The caption? None, and no credit for the crappy collage, because the graphic is as familiar and as aged as a pair of lizard Oz slippers.

Dame Groan spent a bigly four minutes ranting and railing in a way designed to produce a warm glow in her cult following:

It’s one thing to break a promise delivered 50 times; it’s another thing altogether to deliver a set of policies that can best be described as bungled.
Replete with high compliance costs and unintended consequences, the budget announcements demonstrate both the ineffectiveness and naivety of Treasury to provide advice of an adequate standard. It’s already a shemozzle and it’s likely to get worse in the coming weeks as the flaws and inconsistencies of the announced policy changes emerge.
Rather than representing some sort of gift to the younger generation, the way in which the changes will be grandfathered confers an ongoing gift on anyone who has negatively geared property or a testamentary trust, to give two examples, that will not be available to newcomers.
This facet of the policy may create a lock-in effect whereby those with negatively geared properties simply hold on to them and re-leverage over time. But because of the new capital gains tax arrangements, there will be a strong disincentive to improve the property lest the gains be eaten up in tax. While both Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers talk about improving the rate of home ownership for young people – “getting a fair crack” and all that – the CGT changes apply to all asset classes. You can just imagine the Treasury officials warning about uneven treatment of asset classes.
This is notwithstanding the acknowledgment by the Treasurer that the simple 50 per cent discount method being replaced favours property over shares. But by lumping them into the same method going forward, clear biases remain – particularly against high-growth assets held over relatively short periods of time. Let’s be clear here: what is being proposed is not a return to the Keating system of indexation. Under that arrangement, there was no 30 per cent minimum tax. Moreover, capital gains could be averaged over five years. What was announced in the budget is another beast altogether. It will also be costly to administer.

Of course there had to be a snap of the chief villain: Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/Courier Mail

It was classic "we'll all be rooned, and well before Xmas" territory for the old groaner, as she contemplated the dire suffering of the rich:

The impact of the CGT changes on start-ups was quickly identified as a major issue because the new system will impose punitive rates of tax on owners and the staff who generally forgo years of income to achieve success. It is common overseas for there to be specific carve-outs for start-ups – in the US and the UK, for example – but Chalmers’ lame response is that he will consult more on the topic. And what’s with the bizarre proposal of roping in pre-1985 assets that have been CGT-exempt? Surely, this is just a desperate tax grab, reneging on a promise made a long time ago and kept – until now. Again, the compliance costs are substantial.
The fact neither the Treasurer nor Treasury understand the role trusts play in the commercial world has been on full display. Many small businesses are set up as trusts, often in association with bucket companies, because this is the most effective and least costly arrangement for them. There are several reasons for this choice, including asset protection as well as managing tax. But evidently Treasury thinks it knows better.
There is a section in the budget papers that comes close to providing commercial advice to business owners, telling them companies are better than trusts. There is no acknowledgment of the hefty costs associated with restructuring, including the payment of stamp duty to state governments. This impost alone will deter many business owners from considering any change.
There is also the complication of franking credits, which arguably was the issue that determined the outcome of the 2019 election. Where a bucket company is attached to a discretionary trust, the franking credits will not be transferable, implying very high rates of effective tax. This may become an issue the government has to deal with. And why would Chalmers opt to include discretionary testamentary trusts within the scope of the new taxation arrangements for trusts? Again, this is completely bizarre.
These trusts are incorporated in wills often to protect young children in the unhappy event of both parents dying at the same time. They are also a form of asset protection to ensure disgruntled creditors or ex-partners cannot access the proceeds of an estate. As for noting that fixed testamentary trusts will not be affected, this advice is again naive in the extreme. Fixed trusts are, by definition, inflexible and unable to accommodate changing circumstances, and are rarely used.

Trust the pond, the pond's trust is suffering almighty.

Is there a timetable for things to get better?

The pond can't imagine Dame Groan following that prescription, not when there's groaning to be done:

The government is also on thin ground when it comes to the carve-out for new properties from the ban on negative gearing. Again, this is coming close to offering uninformed and slipshod advice to investors.
The reality is that investment in new apartments in Melbourne and Sydney over recent years have been complete duds. The capital gains have been minimal – 10 times less than the capital growth of stand-alone houses – and many new apartments have defects that must be remedied, often at the expense of the owner. There are also significant problems with the body corporate arrangements a new owner has to deal with.
Of course, anyone who understands basic economics could have predicted this outcome.
A great deal of the gains from investment in property is the return on the land on which it is built. In the case of apartments, there is very little land and there are often few restrictions on new apartment buildings being built close by. It’s a case of buyer beware when it comes to buying new housing stock, something not being mentioned by the government. Evidently, negatively geared owners of new residential real estate will feel a warm inner glow because they are doing something for the nation. It just won’t show up in personal bank statements.
The government is also on thin ground when it boasts about the uptick in home ownership predicted to result from the tax changes – 75,000 over a decade. That’s a mere 7500 a year, which hardly shifts the dial for what is a major shake-up of tax arrangements.
There is also only one direction for rents – and that’s up. The fact is universal negative gearing effectively subsidises renters by shifting some of the costs on to the taxpayer. This impact will be largely lost with the changes, save for new properties and grandfathered investments. There is a lot of water to go under the bridge. The fiasco of the 2014 budget played out over time; this is likely to be repeated in this case. The government will have to tweak several of the settings in response to the information it is given and the likely perverse outcomes.
In the meantime, the only sure winners are accountants, lawyers and valuers.

Is there any upside?

Well for once Dame Groan identified some winners, though surely she should have included herself and the rest of the reptile jihadists and the lizard Oz as a sure winner.

Endless columns are now guaranteed, much shrieking, moaning and whining and groaning about budget chaos, and well beyond Xmas, with Dame Groan's "we'll all be rooned" taken up by the rest of the reptile jihadists, her gracious legacy to all...

And that, preserved in gelatinous aspic and the dubious functioning of the intermittent archive, is the reptiles this day, and it will have to serve as a placeholder for anyone turning up to marvel at this weird blog... and the even weirder world of the lizard Oz hive mind.

All that remains to do is to wish everyone well, and turn to the immortal Rowe - alas too early in the week for the infallible Pope to join him - for a farewell 'toon ...

Why they can play that game up until Halloween ...

In which the pond has nothing but Lord Downer, the floodwaters in quarries whisperer and Major Mitchell as placeholders ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:48:39 +0000

A correspondent reminded the pond of one last thing to do while still online - make sure that there's not a single mention of CBS and Paramount in any of the pond's subscription lists (though mentioning the genuinely funny Colbert in the same breath as the pond was way more than too much).

This is the penultimate pond post before the great darkness descends, though some cynics might suggest that the pond has spent its time full of reptile darkness, and at last there'll be a light glowing on the hill.

Off but mainly on, the pond has been online since way back in the late 1980s - the pond can still remember the pond's son, at thirty bucks an hour access, running up a very big bill to see very little.

How the pond descended into the reptile abyss after that must remain a solemn and sad mystery.

This will be the pond's longest outage, and given its druthers, the pond would like to have left a placeholder featuring some all time pond favourites - say the bromancer brooding about mad King Donald selling out Taiwan, Our Henry doing over the Thucydides trap, and Dame Groan announcing for the zillionth time that the end of the world is nigh. What a wrap that would be.

But the reptiles are rarely congenial in their programming, and the pond is likely to end up tomorrow with the sort of dross that littered the lizard Oz hive mind this morning.

First up comes Lord Downer, like a Colonel Blimp straight from the Adelaide Hills.

The header: Political malaise in UK a warning to our major parties; The Conservative and Labour parties have lost the trust of the public. There have been the scandals, but the real problems are deeper.

The caption for the snap of the chief UK villain (Kemi who?): Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Picture: Peter Nicholls/Pool/AFP

Being a dedicated member of empire, Lord Downer spent a bigly four minutes on the comforting illusion that the UK and Australia remain peas in the colonial pod, and as usual, his analysis revealed more about the dear old sod than anything about the two countries:

Given the affinity between the UK and Australia, events in Britain might help us better understand our own political challenges.
Ten days ago, Britons went to the polls in local government elections. Overall, the insurgent Reform party won 30 per cent of the vote, Labour 20 per cent and the Conservatives 15 per cent. So poorly did the Labour Party perform that the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is now under serious challenge from within his own party.
We can speculate on whether Sir Keir will survive or, if he doesn’t, who will replace him. What is more interesting is why the two major parties that have dominated British politics since the 1920s have lost the support and confidence of the public.
Above all, the Conservative and Labour parties have lost the trust of the public. There have, of course, been the scandals, such as the Partygate controversy when Boris Johnson was prime minister and the Mandelson scandal under Starmer. Certainly, these events have upset the public, but the real problems are deeper.
First, there is the issue of immigration. This has several facets. Illegal immigration seems to be out of control. In the two years Labour has been in office, 200,000 illegal migrants have crossed the Channel into England. These illegal migrants are accommodated in hotels at great public expense.

Just to make sure the hive mind knew who could help, the reptiles slipped in a snap of Nigel making plans ... Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the House of Commons chamber during the State Opening of Parliament on May 13. Picture: Toby Melville/Pool/AFP

It turns out that Lord Downer is deeply sympathetic to Nige's cause ...

This grisly trade began under the Conservatives, and it has only accelerated under Labour. Yet both parties swore black and blue they’d bring to an end illegal immigration. Neither of them did.
Legal immigration has also been controversial. Huge numbers of migrants have been coming into the UK over the past few years, in particular, to fill poorly paid job vacancies.
The perception of the public is that these migrants have changed the face of the country. Voters feel they have contributed to the increase in house prices and waiting lists for the National Health Service. They have also caused civil unrest, particularly over foreign policy issues such as wars in the Middle East. Migrants are also associated with the rise of antisemitism. Now, a lot of these perceptions may be partial truths or totally unfair. It is noteworthy that they are widely held views in the UK, and both the Conservatives and Labour are blamed for allowing all this to happen.

Then just to terrify the hive mind, a terrifying snap... Migrants wade into the sea to board a dinghy to cross the English Channel on August 25, 2025, in Gravelines, France. Picture: Getty

Lord Downer is also a Brexit devotee ...

Then there’s the economy. Unemployment is low, but living standards have flatlined for years.
Taxes have increased, and government debt has spiralled to levels not seen since the Second World War. Both the Conservatives and Labour have tried to persuade the public they have brilliant plans to increase economic growth and the prosperity of the country. In both cases, their plans have been found wanting.
Some commentators will point to the Brexit referendum in 2016 as the cause of these woes. I doubt that that is remotely true. Certainly, Brexit contributed to an escalation in the political temperature from 2016 through until around 2022, but the deleterious impact on the British economy has been nothing like as great as Remainers claim.
For example, over the past 10 years the UK economy has grown by around 15 per cent, France by around 13 per cent, and Germany’s a mere 8 per cent. While none of these records is impressive, the UK’s economy has grown post-Brexit slightly faster than France’s, and at almost twice the pace of Germany’s.

Strange, this from December 2025 ... Brexit's impact on the UK economy ...

There's damned statistics, and then there's damned Lord Downer, as the reptiles slipped in an ancient snap, though they could have dug up a much more recent one, as featured in the Graudian report on a couple of recent marches... An anti-illegal immigration demonstration in August 2025 in Bournemouth, England. Picture: Getty

It being Lord Downer, a true member of the climate science denying hive mind, inevitably any hint of renewables produced a reaction equivalent to an attack of the hives ...

Having said that, the British public are upset about two familiar things. First, the persistent and unrelenting increase in the cost of living. Energy prices have increased alarmingly. For the average British household, electricity prices have doubled since 2016.
In Australia, we’ll be familiar with the reasons why. There has been a massive investment in windmills, in particular, and a reduction in the use of gas. All coal-fired power stations have now been closed. That means intermittent wind power has to be backed up with the remaining gas-fired power stations, as well as nuclear power. As in Australia, there has been a substantial decline in the productivity of electricity generation, and that inevitably makes electricity very expensive.
The British public were promised by both the Conservative Party and Labour that wind power was the cheapest form of power, and that by moving away from coal and gas, electricity would get cheaper. Well, exactly the reverse has been the case.
The public were also told it would help control the climate, but given the UK contributes only 1 per cent of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions, not surprisingly the sacrifices have achieved absolutely nothing.
One consequence of the climate policies of the UK government has been to transfer much of industrial production outside the UK. There’s only one steel blast furnace left in the UK, and much of the country’s steel is imported.
This is a familiar theme to any Australian. We stop industrial production because it emits CO2 as we try to reach improbable targets such as net zero by 2050. As a result, we have to import industrial goods, which are, of course, produced emitting CO2 but in another country. So, in terms of net CO2 emissions, it achieves nothing, but within the borders of an individual country the statistics look good. It’s just politics.
There are other pressures on prices, in particular caused by huge levels of government expenditure. In the UK, government debt is close to 100 per cent of GDP.
The government spends twice as much on servicing its debt than it spends on defence. Think about this. In the last financial year, the Labour government borrowed £130bn ($242bn) and spent £110bn just servicing debt!
This massive level of government expenditure, which has now reached record levels, has not surprisingly been accompanied by ever-growing taxation. British government expenditure is now 45 per cent of GDP.
Under the Tories the tax burden continued to rise, but that was nothing compared to the Starmer government. It increased capital gains tax, increased the equivalent of payroll tax and imposed a 78 per cent additional tax on profits from North Sea oil and gas. The results were obvious.
Fewer people sold assets and so revenue from the capital gains tax actually went down. Fewer employers took on staff so revenue from payroll tax declined. And extraction from the North Sea declined because of the huge supertax.
This is an abridged version of many UK policy failures but the moral of the story is brutal reality: if you don’t do a good job, don’t expect people to vote for you. So instead votes are atomising at the expense of the two major parties.

There's one moment of truth, one moment of insight in all that gibberish, and likely derived from Lord Downer's own experiences.

If you don't do a good job, you'll score the royal order of the high heeled kick to the groin ...

And so to a survey of the rest of the reptile scene, and the pond regrets that the budget jihad is still going strong in the lizard Oz.

The pond has no idea how the the hive mind readership tolerates this monomania.

The best the pond can do is link to the intermittent archive, where correspondents can romp to their hearts' content (an actually working archive permitting) ...

WeChat: A canary in the coal mine on Labor’s tax changes?
The sentiment across Chinese media and social platforms has been demonstrably more negative to the budget than mainstream English-language coverage.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

It turned out that the billionaires and tradies and the Chinese community were being short changed by boomers ...

BUDGET MISCALCULATION
Ironically, Baby Boomers may quietly benefit the most

Budget risks alienating voters with three key wealth miscalculations
Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ fifth budget may ultimately be remembered for three political miscalculations.
By Chris Brycki

The indefatigable but generally unreadable Geoff was on hand to chamber his usual rounds ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Jim Chalmers gives Paul Keating a run for his money with unpopular budget
Jim Chalmers’ unpopular budget has helped Angus Taylor get back into the game.

That was just double dipping - they might be renewables cynics, but the reptiles love to recyle:

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: historic rejection of Labor’s big-taxing budget
Newspoll: Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese’s budget flops with every generation of voters
A special post-budget Newspoll reveals Jim Chalmers has handed down the most unpopular budget since 1993 and eclipsed the visceral reaction to Joe Hockey’s austerity budget of 2014.
By Geoff Chambers

A whole gaggle of reptiles, or at least a triptych re-enacted the Spanish Inquisition and made Comrade Albo confess ...

PM trips, then confesses
It’s a tax on trusts but not a death tax: PM
Anthony Albanese confirms tax on discretionary trusts set up for people’s last wills, but rebuffs it is a death tax
Anthony Albanese has admitted future inheritance trusts will face higher taxes after initially claiming all testamentary trusts were exempt from the policy changes.
By Greg Brown, Noah Yim and Lachlan Leeming

This was all pretty standard nattering negativity by the nabobs of the Murdoch press, but it was when the quarry whisperer arrived with an attempt at a positive spin that the wheels truly fell off ...

The header: Taylor channels Reagan with bold plan for reform; Angus Taylor’s inspiration is Ronald Reagan, who indexed income tax thresholds in 1985 as part of a program of tax cuts.

The caption for the cornball artwork credited Frank, when really to help his career, it might have been a better career option for Frank to credit AI or Alan Smithee ... Opposition Leader Angus Taylor. Artwork: Frank Ling.

Reagan?

Oh yes, he's back in the game of wild-eyed comparisons.

So preposterous was this idea that the quarry whisperer could only manage three minutes, and that felt like an interminable stretch ...

Angus Taylor’s conservative critics have been urging him to release his inner mongrel. Well, now he has, by unleashing the boldest economic reform since the introduction of the GST.
By committing to index thresholds, Taylor has drawn attention to bracket creep: a scam that has reaped countless billions of dollars over the years by creaming off cost-of-living pay rises.
The stage is set for a fight between collectivists and classical liberals. In one corner are socialists such as Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers, who believe governments were put on Earth to raise money and then spend it. They believe the state has a moral claim over private income. In the other corner is the party of Robert Menzies, under a leader who passionately believes individuals should receive the fullest possible reward for their labour and investment.
Chalmers’ confusion is evident from his claim that Taylor’s automatic annual tax cuts would “cost” $35bn over four years. Cost who exactly? Not taxpayers, obviously, who’ll have tens of billions of dollars more disposable income. The greatest cost will be borne by politicians forced to expend political capital by cutting spending or adding to debt.
On Thursday, Nationals leader Matt Canavan delighted Coalition supporters at a post-speech dinner by describing the indexing of income thresholds as the Ozempic of fiscal policy. It will reduce the appetite for big government by forcing politicians to take a bill to parliament to increase taxes, rather than relying on inflation-linked revenue-raising on the sly.
Taylor has been working through the challenges of reducing the public sector burden for years. His strategy to reduce government spending to the pre-Covid level of 24 per cent of GDP is to grow the private sector rather than leaning heavily on expenditure cuts, as Malcolm Fraser tried to do half a century ago.
Fraser at least tried, going to the 1975 election promising “an end to Labor’s tax rip-off” by fully indexing personal income tax for three years. Yet persistent inflation broke his resolve and, by the end of his term, indexation had effectively been dropped.

The pond has been disturbed for some time now by the reptile desire to live in ancient times, and this didn't help ... US President Ronald Reagan in 1988.

Just to make sure everyone caught the full absurdity of this burst of hagiography directed at the beefy boofhead, the floodwaters in quarries whisperer doubled down ...

Taylor’s inspiration is not Fraser, but Ronald Reagan, who indexed income tax thresholds in 1985 as part of a program of tax cuts. Far from reducing revenue and increasing deficits, as critics predicted, Reagan’s tax cuts had the opposite effect, stimulating economic growth and instilling optimism that actually increased revenue. Monica Prasad’s account of that period in her 2018 book, Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution, shows Reagan faced circumstances not unlike those faced by the Liberal Party today. Republican support was in the low 20s after Watergate. An editor at the Los Angeles Times mused: “Who can even imagine a Republican congress being elected in our lifetime or perhaps in our children’s lifetime?” Polls showed inflation was the No.1 concern. Bracket creep was sapping the confidence of workers and businesses.

The reptiles seem haunted by the head prefect, the squatter from Nareen, though he's long been gone ...Malcolm Fraser in 1977. Picture: Getty

And that was pretty much that, with the Caterist working hard to do a puff job on his prime serve of Angus beef ...

In his first televised speech as president, Reagan outlined his plan to constrain government expansion. “We can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath,” he said. “Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance.”
Unlike Reagan, Taylor will limit tax cuts to bracket creep, initially at least. Yet he is strongly persuaded by the supply-side arguments of economists who inspired Reagan, notably Arthur B. Laffer, whose thoughts were distilled on a paper napkin during lunch with Donald Rumsfeld in 1974, now on display at the National Museum of American History.
“If you tax a product, less results,” Laffer wrote, a phrase Taylor is fond of repeating. “If you subsidise a product, more results.”
The truth of Laffer’s observation was reinforced by Chalmers’ decision to remove concessions on capital gains, negative gearing and trusts. It is effectively a tax on entrepreneurial investment and, as Laffer predicted, we’re about to get less of it. On Sunday Chalmers painted himself further into a corner, claiming Taylor’s proposal was irresponsible and inflationary. Allowing workers to keep more of their income would “pump the most money into the economy when inflation is already at its highest”.
Yet tax cuts do not increase the amount of money in circulation. They merely change who gets to spend it. Chalmers’ logic is that if the government spends money, it isn’t inflationary, but if citizens spend their own money, it is. Experience persuades us the opposite is true: individuals tend to spend their money in the productive side of the economy, stimulating investment, increasing output and building confidence. Governments are inclined to spend money on unproductive pet projects, siphoning scarce capital to low-return or loss-making projects.
Which, ironically, helps Taylor enormously. Four years of lavish Labor spending have created a bucketful of projects few taxpayers would miss. Taylor listed some of them: climate change bureaucracies, sweetheart deals between governments and corporations, notably in the energy sector, transmission lines, electric vehicle subsidies. Cutting welfare for non-citizens, including subsidies for first-home buyers, will deliver a not insubstantial fiscal dividend. Plus, the government has pledged to cut $37.8bn from the NDIS over four years, enough to pay for Taylor’s tax cuts on its own. Not that Taylor should hold his breath on that one but, hey, you never know.

Desperate, desperate times.

Of all the angles offered by the reptiles - the suffering of billionaires was a particular pond favourite - this surely must be the most wretched and desperate of them all.

The Major was also to hand to offer more of the lizard Oz budget jihad, done in his usual manner by berating anyone who didn't share the Major's vision ... (that's why they never could find the Order of Lenin medal the Major proved was worn by Manning Clark).

The header: Jim Chalmers pulled the wool over the eyes of a gullible press; More than failing on its self-defined central task, the budget lacks any growth plan for the nation’s future.

The caption for the fully wired villain Jimbo: Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: Getty Images

The Major's piece ran for an exceptionally tedious five minutes, but then when it comes to a murmuration of reptiles, the Major is always a reliable voice.

You see, he's a world-weary trooper, ready to explain things to younglings lacking the Major's infinite, hard-won, boots-on-the-ground, shop-soiled experience ...

Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ budget last week pulled the wool over some young journalists’ eyes with talk of intergenerational equity.
Many lapped up Jim’s crumbs about the wealthy elderly, but the budget will do almost nothing to boost housing supply for the young and will almost certainly push up rents and interest rates. It also leaves the young with a total federal deficit about to pass $1 trillion. Not much intergenerational equity in any of that.
Chalmers inadvertently highlighted why more thoughtful journalists are disappointed when he answered a question at the National Press Club on Wednesday afternoon with a jaundiced reflection about aspiration.
His political opponents always had aspirations for a shrinking number of older Australians while ignoring the legitimate aspirations of the young, he said. In other words: it’s just politics.
So what’s missing from what Chalmers claims is bold reform? Today’s older Australians were young when reforming Labor treasurer Paul Keating and Coalition treasurer Peter Costello made tough decisions that grew the national pie.
Keating, in The Australian on Thursday, reflected on the 40th anniversary of his 1986 “banana republic” statement and the tough budget decisions he had to make then in the face of plunging terms of trade.
Journalist Troy Bramston quoted him saying excessive spending to maintain living standards and running up debt that burdens future generations was “Australia’s great policy lie” in the post-war period. He was not aiming that at Chalmers but the point holds.

Hard, hard yakka.

Desperate, desperate stuff.

The pond ran that ancient Troy piece, and correspondents will remember that there was nary a word from the Swiss clock man about the current budget or Jimbo, and so the Major is forced into blather of the "but the point holds" kind... Paul Keating. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

No, the point doesn't hold and any youngling trying that trick of the trade - introducing the notion of a banana republic by nefarious means - should be hounded out of journalism school.

It's down there with the Major's next opening flourish:

Keating didn't say it ...

If Keating didn't say it, why is Keating's name in the sentence?

Keating didn’t say it but today’s young Australians will also get much more benefit from compulsory superannuation than the Baby Boomers who were middle-aged when he introduced the national system in 1996.
The Australian Financial Review on Thursday spoke to two former Treasury secretaries, John Fraser and Ken Henry, who thought the budget was too expansionary and should be in surplus. Yet Chalmers continues to deny government spending is affecting inflation.
To be fair, Tuesday night’s budget was better than Chalmers’ previous four, but it was not the bold reform The Guardian, Nine newspapers’ economics editor Ross Gittins and some journalists at the ABC claimed.
In fact, the budget’s “intergenerational equity” narrative is just a lazy way of taking money from one group, the elderly, to make another group, the growing youth vote, appear better off.
Chalmers and Albanese had hoped this equity spin would provide cover for ditching their pre-election promises not to change the capital gains tax treatment of investments or alter negative gearing. At least former opposition leader Bill Shorten had the courage to take the same policies to the 2019 election, where they were defeated.
Many older Australians live on welfare and don’t own a home. And while home ownership is harder today than in the Keating-Costello reform era, not all of that is driven by concessional investment taxes or negative gearing. Much is down to state governments’ development imposts.
Budget numbers show the latest housing changes won’t fix the problem. House prices will grow but by 2 per cent less than otherwise. Only 75,000 extra first-home buyers will benefit over the next decade but 110,000 will be trying to get into the market each year.
Chalmers’ “tough reform” is a far cry from Keating cutting the top marginal tax rate from 60 to 49 per cent in 1988, or the company tax rate from 49 to 39 per cent the same year, and again to 33 per cent in 1993.
Nor have Chalmers and Albanese shown the courage of Costello and then PM John Howard, who went to an election in 1998 to win support for junking their “never, ever” GST promise before the 1996 election.

And here we go again, with the Major, just like all the other reptiles, living in the past, celebrating past glories ... John Howard and Peter Costello in 2004.

It's almost as if the reptiles didn't have any faith in the beefy boofhead and his current mob, and so must direct the hive mind readership to ancient times, and by association, imagine the beefy boofhead has somehow been exalted and risen to Valhalla ...

This column argued on February 22 that there were reasons to alter the tax treatment of investment homes and to focus negative gearing on new homes. But it said neither would raise much money or solve housing affordability for the young. Tuesday’s documents confirm those judgments.
But more than failing on its self-defined central task, the budget lacks any growth plan for the nation’s future. There are rats and mice on productivity but nothing to give the young the sort of crack at prosperity Keating and Costello gave their parents.
Instead, the young will face decades of national debt plus limits to the sorts of tax and property arrangements their parents, and Albanese and Chalmers, benefited from. They’ll also get falling per capita GDP, papered over by very high immigration.
Chalmers and Albanese are selling this highly political generational equity line because for the first time the Boomer generation is outnumbered by young voters who don’t vote Coalition.
So how did the media’s budget coverage go? As usual, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review had the best political and economic analysis, even though they are criticised as conservative by the left cheer squad at The Guardian Australian and the ABC, who have never seen a tax increase they don’t support.
The most credulous pieces were by Annabel Crabb on the ABC website and Guardian Australia’s Greg Jericho and Tom McIlroy. All thought Chalmers had done the really big stuff, even though the intergenerational changes raise little revenue in the early years and the main road to budget repair is through a very dubious NDIS repair plan.
They conveniently gloss over likely rent and interest rate rises that will follow this budget.

The Major really decided to test the pond, but given a choice, the pond would rather listen to Crabb than the Major ... Annabel Crabb. Picture: ABC

Okay, in an ideal world, the pond would have to endure neither ... as the Major powerfully suggested that the pond really should be tuning back into the ABC so that an alternative reality might be observed ...

The worst media performance was by ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson, who talked over Opposition Leader Angus Taylor all through their Thursday night interview.
Ferguson clearly disapproves of Taylor’s plans to cut immigration, even though the government proposes to do likewise. And she was sceptical of his promise to index PAYE tax thresholds to return bracket creep, something economists have supported for decades.

That reminded the pond of this ...

And so to the Major parading his choice of reptiles, from Pearls of wisdom, to of all people, that tired old hack Shanners ...

Like clockwork, Keating’s reform-era ally, former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty, in Friday morning’s Daily Telegraph, called for the top PAYE tax rate to be cut to 39 per cent from its present 45 per cent plus 2 per cent Medicare levy.
This column thought the most incisive analyses of the Chalmers budget’s economic underpinnings were delivered by former Treasury assistant secretary David Pearl in The Australian and AFR economics editor John Kehoe.
Picking up early on the banana republic anniversary, Pearl said Chalmers had failed his first real test at his equivalent of Keating’s big moment.
“Jim Chalmers had one job and one job only in this budget. The fiscal lever had to be pulled hard to take demand out of the economy,” Pearl wrote.
Kehoe said: “This is the budget Chalmers has dreamt about delivering for more than a decade since Labor’s 2016 election manifesto for higher taxes on assets.”
In The Australian on Thursday, journalist Elizabeth Pike reported on the 20 Labor cabinet members who maintained investment properties that can still be negatively geared under the budget’s grandfathering arrangements. Albanese and Chalmers are pulling up the drawbridge to prosperity.
Dennis Shanahan, The Australian’s national political editor, called out the hypocrisy on budget night: Albo himself has risen up the ladder from meagre beginnings and is now a very wealthy man with multiple homes. Millennials will find it much harder but that won’t be the fault of their parents.

Oh go moan to the Emeritus Chairman, who has done as much to protect the status of billionaires as any story in the lizard Oz about their suffering ...

And so to the immortal Rowe revealing what's really fuelling the reptile nightmares and hysteria ...

In which Polonial prattle has pride of place again, the pond ignores standard Zionist serves, and tries to cope with the never ending lizard Oz budget jihad ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 May 2026 22:00:00 +0000

For old times' sake, the pond decided to restore prattling Polonius to the top for the pond's last Sunday meditation, in what might be for some fair time ...

It was also a little bit self-serving, because Polonius decided not to be involved in the current lizard Oz budget jihad, and instead went looking for rats in the Liberal ranks, and the pond loves a good rat hunt:

The header: ‘Miserable ghosts’ should stop their anti-Lib moaning; From Robert Menzies to Malcolm Turnbull, disillusioned ex-leaders have repeatedly lashed the Liberals - often after losing power or influence.

The caption for Ming the merciless (and assorted nobodies the reptiles clearly had trouble identifying): Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies, second from right, became disillusioned with some of his successors in the 1970s.

This sort of navel-gazing and fluff-gathering has its own kind of charm.

First up Polonius has to redeem Ming the Merciless, casting him not as socialist Labor but as tyke socialist Labor, though only tykes will appreciate the difference:

It says something about the Liberal Party of Australia that 40 per cent of former leaders in the past 50 years have quit or become publicly disillusioned with the organisation that made it possible for them to play a prominent role in public life.
Robert Menzies, the Liberal Party founder and Australia’s longest serving prime minister, let it be known to the anti-communist activist BA Santamaria in the early 1970s that he no longer voted Liberal. This is sometimes interpreted as Menzies voting Labor.
Not so. What it meant was that Menzies had voted for the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party and then preferenced Liberal ahead of Labor.
Menzies had become disappointed in his successors as Liberal leader, particularly William McMahon and Billy Snedden. But when Malcolm Fraser replaced Snedden in March 1975, Menzies went back to voting Liberal. The DLP wound up in 1976.

That mention of Fraser introduced a real sore point for Polonius, the bloody head prefect, the treacherous squatter of Nareen, the man who turned more bloody socialist than the bloody socialists...

In the error-ridden Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs (MUP, 2010), which he co-wrote with left-of-centre academic Margaret Simons, Fraser presented himself as a small-L liberal. However, that is not how he was regarded before becoming prime minister in December 1975. Fraser was then depicted as a political conservative along the lines of Menzies, who supported him.
It was not long after Fraser was defeated by Labor’s Bob Hawke in March 1983 that he publicly turned on his old party. Fraser supported Andrew Peacock over John Howard to become his successor and was relatively quiet. But when Howard replaced Peacock in September 1985, Fraser began criticising the Liberal Party leadership. He let it be known in 2010 that he had resigned from the party.
Without the Liberal Party, Fraser would have been a successful grazier and businessman. But he turned on the organisation that made it possible for him to become Australia’s fourth longest serving prime minister, who had a significant impact on both national politics and international affairs.

The selfish cad.

Time then to contemplate a bunch of dropkicks and losers... with the GST cake man just as bad as Fraser, and Malware just as bad as the lot of them...

Peacock was Liberal leader on two occasions and failed to win the 1987 election. He competed with Howard for the leadership for several years. But when Howard prevailed, Peacock remained loyal to the Liberal Party. Howard appointed him Australia’s ambassador to the US. The same is true of two other Liberal leaders, Alexander Downer and Brendan Nelson. Neither took out their frustrations on being replaced as Liberal leader on their party.
But not John Hewson, who led the Liberals to defeat in what was classified as the unlosable election against Labor’s Paul Keating in 1993. Hewson followed in Fraser’s footsteps in becoming a vehement critic of the Liberal Party in general and Howard in particular.
A lot of the criticism made by Fraser and Hewson of Howard (Australia’s second longest serving prime minister) turned on personal dislike. Fraser and Hewson were also critical of Tony Abbott, who narrowly lost the 2010 election due to rural independents supporting the Julia Gillard-led Labor government.
But Abbott, who replaced Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader in 2009, went on to achieve a landslide victory in 2013. He was overthrown by Turnbull in 2015. Abbott’s attitude at the time was that he did not intend to let one event ruin his life. Despite disappointment, Abbott did not campaign against Turnbull in the 2016 election, in which his successor lost 14 seats to Labor.
The Liberal Party has never recovered from Turnbull’s disastrous campaign in 2016. Perhaps overshadowed only by Peter Dutton’s campaign in 2025. But, unlike Dutton, Turnbull had the advantage of incumbency. Moreover, Scott Morrison achieved an unexpected win in 2019 without Turnbull’s support.
Despite his disappointment, Dutton accepted defeat graciously and attended the recent Liberal Party celebration of Howard’s victory in 1996.
Former Liberal Party deputy leader Peter Costello spoke at the occasion, despite his disappointment that Howard did not step down in his favour before the 2007 election.
For his part, Morrison has a life outside the Lodge and has not criticised the party that made it possible for him to be prime minister.
And then there is Turnbull and, perhaps now, Sussan Ley. Turnbull’s criticism of the Liberal Party since he ceased being prime minister has been relentless, despite having declared, soon after leaving office, that he would not become a “miserable ghost” intervening in politics from out of office.
Turnbull has played this role for close to a decade, partly in his Malcolm Turnbull: A Bigger Picture (Hardie Grant, 2020). Unlike Fraser and Hewson, Turnbull has not resigned from the Liberal Party, possibly because he is much likelier to get a run on the ABC if he is criticising the Liberal Party as a Liberal.
Turnbull’s main targets have been Abbott, Morrison and Dutton, all of whom were involved in his replacement as Liberal leader in 2009 or 2018.
Turnbull was reported in The Nightly on May 11 as addressing a recent conference in London at which he stated that the Liberal Party had been in decline “pretty much since (he) was defenestrated in 2018”. Others would put the time back to 2015.

So many rats, so little time, and so eventually and at last to possible rat Susssan.

The pond never gave Susssan an easy time, but nor did her colleagues.

Indeed, the treatment of women in the Liberal party by the beefy bunch of boofheads who assume an eternal right to male power is frequently astonishing.

Naturally Polonius was keen to fit into that patriarchal traditions ...

And now Ley seems to have entered the miserable ghosts club to make up a gang of four. After the Liberal Party’s defeat to One Nation in the Farrer by-election on May 9, Ley issued a statement that concluded: “The day the leadership spilled in February, the new leader said the Liberal Party needed to ‘change or die’. Three months later, the result in Farrer demonstrates that statement to be far truer today than it ever was.”
This was an ungracious statement.

Ungracious? That's what they're calling a statement of the bleeding obvious these days?

Polonius sank in his velvet slipper, and then called for silence from the alleged rats in the ranks, because none dare speak without it being called treason of the first water:

I never publicly criticised Ley. But she had been in politics for more than two decades without stating any significant policy positions. Journalist Niki Savva is no fan of the contemporary Liberal Party but she said no politician, male or female, could have survived Ley’s numbers. Once Ley resigned her seat, it was evident that the Liberal Party could not win the resultant by-election.
New Liberal leader Angus Taylor has an extremely difficult job to restore support for the Liberals. But the likes of Hewson and Turnbull and perhaps now Ley along with members of the Fraser fan club could at least lay off the criticism. Most former Labor Party leaders have refrained from publicly criticising the party that made them.

Roll that one around on your tongue again and savour the flavour:

Most former Labor Party leaders have refrained from publicly criticising the party that made them.

The pond would love to be able to live in the alternative bizarro universe that Polonius seems to inhabit.

Was he referring to former Chairman Rudd?

And after that is where the pond came unstuck.

All that was to hand were typical offerings from the Australian Daily Zionist News, with the dog botherer leading the way:

ABC reporting on Gaza war failed nation, feeding into demonisation of Israel, fuelling antisemitism
The public broadcaster’s distorted reporting contributed to a climate of hostility to Jews.
By Chris Kenny

The pond can't stand that sort of simple-minded abuse and simpleton analysis of cause and effect, and so it was off to the intermittent archive with him, with this as a teaser trailer:

The pond didn't even bother with a teaser trailer for the next bit of Zionism ...

Jew hate dressed in a progressive cloak
Israel and Jews of the diaspora are being held to a different standard to anyone else.
By Julie Bindel

Julie wrapped up her offering this way ...

...Use of the term Zionist (Zio for short) as a pejorative byword for fascist has lately become everyday leftist language. I have been called this for railing against the rape denialism of those (including some hard-left “feminists”) who do not accept the truth of what happened on October 7, 2023. Holocaust denial is creeping back in, too, with some leftists screaming that Jews basically drag up the Shoah to garner sympathy and thus divert attention from their “complicity” in what’s happening in Gaza. There has always been antisemitism on the left, but this is a new level.
I doubt these same leftists would hold ordinary Muslims accountable for events such as 9/11 or to answer for Islamist extremism.
What is happening to Jews today may be dressed in a progressive cloak, but that doesn’t hide what it really is.
Julie Bindel is a feminist campaigner against sexual violence based in the UK. She is co-host of The Lesbian Project podcast.

Uh oh, she went there, so the pond thought it might offer a bit of counter-programming to both of them, as featured in the both siderist NY Times ...

The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians (*intermittent archive link)

And so on - there's more - and inevitably that led to a typical response from the government of Israel, always intent on silencing any alternative versions, as noted in the Graudian (with links to the Graudian's own reporting on the abuse of Palestinians).

Israel says it will sue New York Times over article on sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners
Media law experts cast doubt on viability of a defamation lawsuit promised by Netanyahu over Nicholas Kristof essay

And then the day fell into a complete heap.

The pond had done its best yesterday with the reptiles' endless budget jihad. Surely the Ughmann and "Ned" had said more than enough already?

But what to do with the rest of the parade of clowns?

In best Arthur Miller tradition, attention had to be paid.

The pond decided all it could do was note down the reptiles, offer a teaser, and send them off to the intermittent archive, where correspondents could graze at their leisure (even though the archive is sometimes tough on grazing, a bit like a Nareen squatter)

The reptiles stayed big on the 'death tax' angle ...

EXCLUSIVE
After death we do tax: breach of trust
Labor has defended controversial budget changes targeting 100,000 investors using estate planning trusts, despite critics warning grandparents and parents will be caught in the crackdown.
By James Kirby and Sarah Ison

A 100, 000 investors! Out of a country of some 28.4 million.

The reptiles know their demographics!

This Jimbo maintained the rage elsewhere ...

COMMENTARY by James Kirby
The bittersweet irony of Jim Chalmers’ budget
Investors need to review all strategies following a dramatic budget. There will be more losers than winners.

Tradies joined long suffering billionaires as victims:

FEDERAL BUDGET
Tax shock for owners of small businesses
Tradies forced to ‘hit the handbrake’ on investment after tax changes
Young business owners have abandoned expansion plans after federal budget tax changes forced a 24-year-old electrician to ‘hit the handbrake’ on his multimillion-dollar investment strategy.
By Paige Fryer and Will Seitam

The canny Cranston also had a go, by dragging some weird dropkick into the fray:

EXCLUSIVE
‘Millions’ line up for tax grab fight
Geoff Wilson has declared war on Labor’s tax changes, promising a ‘vicious’ campaign involving ‘millions of Australians’.
By Matthew Cranston

The Battle of Long Tan?

Deeply weird.

Others, whom the pond confesses never to have noticed, and to care even less about, joined in the nit-picking...

TAXATION
Less than 40pc of CGT is from property: data
The government’s claim that CGT changes will help young homebuyers have been contradicted by tax data showing most capital gains come from shares and trusts.
Joseph Carbone and Perry Williams

Snappy Tom was also on hand to woo the cats of Australia and warn young voters ...

Jim launches mission to woo young voters and destroy enemies
Budget mission to woo young voters and destroy enemies cuts deep
Anthony Albanese has stirred up a war between the ages and picked the side that is not dying off.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

Exhausting...

... but there you have it.

The pond doesn't like to be reduced to doing surveys - who knows when the intermittent archive might clap out? - but it's the only way to handle this sort of jihad.

Those who want to can plunge in, those who don't will realise they're missing nothing but a minor crusade ...and at least everybody can understand that it could be worse...

There's no way in the world that the pond would usually pay attention to the ABC, but just because the dog botherer carried on like a pork chop, here's The fascism expert at the heart of Palantir

Amen to that...

In which the pond ducks a few reptiles, but gets stuck with the bromancer brooding about mad King Donald, the Ughmann going full tyke, and nattering "Ned" offering "the judgement" ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:09:24 +0000

Sheesh, the reptiles are still waging a budget jihad, and with yet another wretched uncredited (AI?) collage as the centrepiece...

That's just the "top of the digital edition world, ma" stuff.

There were seemingly endless reams more down the page, oodles of jihad, and the pond felt a deep weariness settle in like a yellow London fog in an Eliot poem.

A budget's just a bunch of assumptions and projections, and who knows what black swan will flutter in to change the given circumstances down the line, and yet the reptiles continue in their jihad to treat it as some kind of apocalypse.

Perhaps it was the pond being made to spend time with Sir Lewis Namier in the name of economic history (don't mention Poland or Zionism) that gave the pond a jaundiced introduction to the dismal "science", but the pond immediately turned to the bromancer to be rescued from the budget jihad ... as he wrestled for the umpteenth time with the legacy of his kissing American cousins ... mad King Donald ...

The header: Xi Jinping outplays weakened Donald Trump in Beijing; While Trump hunts for a PR win to save his midterms, Xi soaks up the flattery but ruthlessly pursues Beijing’s strategic interests.

There's no caption for the uncredited collage (AI?) which is just as well, because any human responsible for that surreal image should be shot out of hand.

Second thoughts, it's weirdly on song, as weird as the demented Donald himself, space walking through the decline and fall of the American empire.

As for the poor bromancer's mood, not helped by his war with China receding ever more, he was sounding decidedly jaundiced ...

The visit by Donald Trump and the leading figures in his cabinet to Beijing involves, notionally, a giant political and strategic play by the US President.
Trump could be attempting a complex double play with China, and especially its baleful President, Xi Jinping. Trump wants to weaken China by removing its access to Venezuelan and Iranian oil.
At the same time, Trump’s trying to reset relations with Beijing, to recruit China to the project of Making America Great Again, and to co-operating with Washington in reviving the US economy, and getting a deal Trump can live with in Iran. To that end, Trump engages in quite nauseating flattery of Xi, repeatedly describing him as “a great leader”, someone Trump is privileged to call a friend.
That’s the highfalutin’ interpretation. Is it real?
Here’s a more plausible interpretation: Trump has got himself into a mess in Iran and desperately needs a good news international story. Trump’s China foray is thus similar to Anthony Albanese’s “stabilisation” of relations with Beijing, as Albanese’s major foreign policy achievement.

The pond has just the cartoon for that ...

The reptiles preferred this snap ... Donald Trump walks with Xi Jinping at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. Picture: AP

The bromancer is definitely on the turn; clearly mad King Donald isn't meeting his expectations ...

From Xi’s point of view, the summit represented Trump coming to heel. Trump said, preposterously, that Xi told him: “If I can be of any help at all (regarding Iran), I’d like to help.” Trump further said: “He (Xi) said he’s not going to provide Iran any military equipment.” Trump declared repeatedly that China has been overall “very good” on Iran.
This flies in the face of reality and simply doesn’t make sense. It seems to be Trump simply describing whatever reality suits his momentary rhetorical purpose.
Beijing not only provides Iran with continuing diplomatic cover at the UN, before the conflict it provided Iran with weapons. During the conflict it has furnished Iran dual-use technology that can be used as weapons. It has given Iran targeting information enabling strikes on US bases and Gulf Arab energy infrastructure. Beijing continues to buy Iranian oil. Days ago Beijing’s Commerce Ministry invoked a Chinese law compelling Chinese entities to flout US sanctions on Iran. To serve his domestic purposes, Trump, for the moment, ignores all this.

Lest the hive mind get too despondent at this turn in the bromancer's analysis, the reptiles flung in a "Victory" sign up there with that infamous one featuring George W. Bush: Xi Jinping offered China’s help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz during high-stakes talks with Donald Trump in Beijing. Trump said Xi signalled strong support for keeping the vital shipping route open amid the Iran crisis. The breakthrough marks a major diplomatic moment as Washington pushes global powers to pressure Tehran. China is one of the world’s biggest buyers of Iranian oil and holds major leverage over the regime. Trump has repeatedly warned Iran it cannot be allowed to choke off one of the world’s key energy routes.

If there's a Hormuz victory, it must not have made the bromancer's nuze:

China is inconvenienced by the interruption of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. But it’s much more a coal economy than an oil economy. It’s delighted to see Washington bogged down in Iran, thrilled to witness the depletion of US weapons stocks. It can see Trump’s historical low approval ratings, can see the Republicans facing devastation in November’s midterm congressional elections, and that the Iran war is immensely unpopular in America.
Beijing is happy to face a weakened president. It is still scared of America, scared of the American system. It’s no longer scared of Trump, who doesn’t carry out his threats, just as most deals he makes are only temporary.
In any event, Xi’s priority was Taiwan. Xi told Trump that Taiwan is the single most important issue in US-China relations. If it’s not managed well, by which Xi means the US moving towards Beijing’s policy that it will ultimately take control of Taiwan, it could lead to conflict and clashes between the two superpowers.
Trump secured some trade deals – China buying more Boeing jets etc. That’s why he brought such a senior delegation of chief executives, representing trillions of dollars of wealth. These deals are meant to reassure Americans of a bright economic future.
Some will amount to something. But the trade deals Trump announced with China, with great fanfare, in his first term, were never implemented.
The Chinese have internalised a key lesson in managing Trump. What he craves, what he gives concessions to receive, is the big, PR, announceable moment when he can be feted as delivering a uniquely fabulous deal. Implementation is unimportant. Trump’s messaging caravan moves on quickly.

Truth to tell, the gloomier the bromancer sounds, the more light-hearted the world seems to the pond, the more the pond could start the day with a cheery "hello world", as the reptiles flung in another AV distraction, with one of those astonishing framings that only reptile AI can manage: Yoni Bashan wraps up a busy day in Beijing where Trump is making his first state visit since 2017.

Belatedly, the bromancer got around to that Thucydides trap reference which had been studiously ignored by the reptiles when it mattered ...

Xi notably called on Beijing and Washington to avoid the Thucydides trap. This refers to ancient Sparta’s concern at the rise of Athens that led, according to historian Thucydides, to unnecessary and devastating war. Xi loves this formulation as it casts China as the rising power – the Athens of its day – and the US as the paranoid, declining Sparta.
Trump even praised this, saying that Xi’s “elegant” reference to US decline referred only to the years when Joe Biden was president and was completely accurate.
For Trump to say China has been very good over Iran is frankly bizarre, especially given Beijing’s order that its companies must not comply with US sanctions.
That’s the substance, not the show. If Trump was in the anti-Beijing mood of his first term, this would be exhibit No.1 of Beijing’s perfidy. His rusted-on supporters would argue that Trump then had every justification to respond aggressively. But the Chinese increasingly feel they have Trump’s measure.
They will go to some trouble to keep the surface niceties nice. Trump and Xi are slated to meet four times this year. Apart from Beijing, they will meet at G7 and APEC summits, and Trump has invited Xi to visit the White House in September.
All this involves, from Trump at least, a seeming radical reversal of US strategic policy. In 2017 Trump issued a National Defence Strategy that elevated long-term strategic competition with China to the centrepiece of US policy.
This didn’t emanate from gratuitous nastiness in Washington. Beijing was engaged in the biggest military build-up since World War II, was expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal (now more than 600) at prodigious speed.

The reptiles flung in a final distraction, fortunately only a screen cap here ...

The bromancer then went into litany mode, outlining all his grievances, all the reasons there should have been a war with China by Xmas ...

It illegally occupied and militarised the South China Sea, conducted the biggest and most sustained cyber intrusions into US government and corporations, greatly strengthened a slew of US adversaries including Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Through cyber and other espionage, it stole hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property from US government and corporations; it savagely repressed human rights internally, including a comprehensive elimination of religious freedom; it intimidated Chinese diaspora communities; mobilised other nations to oppose US interests; had historically been involved in nuclear weapons proliferation; routinely cheated international trade rules; and constantly threatened the use of force against Taiwan.

And how did King Donald do when confronted by this litany? Not well...

Trump wanted to cut the US trade deficit with China, outmatch it militarily, restore manufacturing in strategic industries to the US, eliminate China from sensitive US and Western supply chains. Early in his second term Trump looked to be accelerating this approach. Last year, amid fiery rhetoric, he imposed tariffs of more than 100 per cent on China.
But Beijing discovered the perfect response. It stopped the export of rare earths and critical minerals to the US. This brought Washington to heel. Trump quickly organised a trade truce with Beijing and has never repeated his old threats. The 2026 US National Defence Strategy radically de-escalated strategic competition and focused instead on US supremacy in Latin America.
This was all designed, Washington sources suggest, to produce for Trump a glittering summit with Xi. At its face, it seems to be a huge strategic pivot.
But in fact Trump’s power is already ebbing. The next presidential election is less than 2½ years away. There’s no sign of any change in the hawkish US consensus, across congress and the public, on China, except in Trump’s own head.
Of course while in office he’s powerful. But Trump now perversely sits outside the strategic framework he himself helped create. Secretary of State Marco Rubio constantly reaffirms the continuity of US strategic policy.
It’s also the case that Trump has got exactly nothing from his serial infatuations with Stalinist dictators – nothing from Vladimir Putin, nothing from Kim Jong-un and nothing of substance from Xi. Naturally it’s good that US and Chinese presidents talk to each other. But this strange summit may turn out to have been one of the great diplomatic nothing burgers of our time. Of course, it could have been much worse.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

A nothing burger with the only upside that it could have been much worse?

Take it easy bromancer, mad King Donald is busy preparing a fleet which will easily win your war with China ...

As for the rest of the reptile rabble, the pond immediately passed over Dame Slap...

...and consigned her to the intermittent archive ...

‘I was one of the lucky ones’: why being adopted was the greatest gift of my life
Our child welfare system has turned adoption into something unfashionable and rare, but as the chosen child of Danish migrants, my life is proof of the boundless love adoption can create.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

That outing might have some interest for those with a morbid interest in why Dame Slap has turned out the way she is, but the pond had been triggered earlier in the week when it came across this in The Atlantic ...

The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet; A virulent form of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right. (*intermittent archive link)
By Helen Lewis

This was what set the pond to brooding ...

A refrain I kept hearing over the past few years was that boys were being made to feel ashamed of themselves, as if they were stained by some kind of original sin. These years have seen a counterreaction, with the total abandonment of the #MeToo movement, conservative gloating over the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the return of straightforwardly sexist put-downs—“Quiet, piggy”—to public life.

The header should really be "the women who want women to be quiet" to fit Dame Slap, what with her incessant bashing of women who stick their heads above the parapet, not to mention her meddling in court matters or he routine bashing of difficult, uppity blacks ...

...Yenor’s suggestion that feminism—with its attendant horrors of work outside the home, birth control, and financial independence—has made women neurotic and dependent on pharmaceuticals is now an article of faith on the right. Anonymous online posters frequently bring up data suggesting that liberal women are most likely to report suffering from anxiety. But to attribute female unhappiness to feminism seems wildly ahistorical. Have these people never read, say, The Feminine Mystique, which exhaustively cataloged the despair of mid-century stay-at-home mothers? (“Many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizers like cough drops,” the author, Betty Friedan, wrote.) Across the manosphere, however, young people are told that before feminism ruined everything, women used to be cherished and pampered by their husbands. Now women are supposedly subsidized by government handouts or earning six figures in pointless “email jobs.” In the masculinist paradigm, every woman does HR for cats and every man is a plumber or merchant seaman.

While ostensibly it's about the manosphere, it happens to fit Dame Slap to a T.

She's never really been able to reconcile her donning of mad King Donald's cap with her attempts at sounding human, and she's never attempted to reconcile her desire to shut other women up, while refusing herself to retreat into the silence of being a domestic homebody supporting her man.

While the pond was at it, there was another reptile best left on the intermittent archive shelf this day ... cackling Claire, also busy on the personal reminiscences front ...

I grew up Labor. Now I see the real inequity. It’s not intergenerational
Claire Lehmann saw first-hand a bloated bureaucracy that ‘throws money down the toilet’. The budget confirmed productive workers continue to feed an uncontrollable public service beast.
By Claire Lehmann
Contributor

Why do all these reptiles sound so traumatised?

Sheesh, all these personal reveals, and the cries of "oh, the humanity", as if the private sector is anything to write home about ...

But cackling Claire was small fry up against the Ughmann's offering ...

The header: From monks to ministers, the politics of broken promises; The PM’s backflip on pledges on negative gearing and capital gains tax are exactly what he pilloried Tony Abbott for in 2014. It’s a fresh blow in the politics of broken promises.

Again no credit (AI?) for the truly pathetic collage with wrecking ball, an image that suggests the lizard Oz graphics department has been handed over to the bots, and is the worse for it ...

The Ughmann offered a full furious seven minutes of fulminations, and the pond couldn't go past it, because while it was ostensibly about the budget, it was actually deeply weird.

Those who never experienced Catholicism growing up can't really understand exactly how deeply it can fry impressionable brains.

The unreformed seminarian gives a terrifying insight into the consequences...

It was a sweltering February in 1981 and a group of students from a variety of Catholic religious communities was wrestling with the bewildering matrix of various schools of Christian morality.
The topic of the moral theology tutorial that day was the book Honest to God, written by Church of England bishop and New Testament scholar John Robinson. The book had caused something of a sensation when it was first published in 1963 and went on to sell more than a million copies, as the faithful warmed to Robinson’s recasting of Christianity for the modern world.
But, as Catholics studying to be priests, brothers and sisters/nuns (there is a difference but it’s complex), we knew our task that day would be brutally analytical. Our professor, a diminutive priest with a towering intellect, would expect us to pick the carcass of these flaccid Protestant arguments clean to the bone.
There was one problem. A few of the students really liked the book.
Thinking of that classroom now is to step into a different century and an all but vanished world. The Catholic Theological Union where we were students was part of the Marist Fathers seminary in Sydney’s Hunters Hill. Sandstone buildings are sprayed across 3ha surrounding the neo-gothic church of Villa Maria. The church was consecrated in 1871 but the site has been the Australian headquarters of the French-born society of priests for 179 years. The remnant is still there today.
Gathered in one of the sandstone buildings that morning were young men and women dressed in garb drawn from a collision of centuries. We had two of the three varieties of Franciscans, the Capuchins and the Conventuals. This order began to fracture 700 years ago in a furious feud over how strictly to interpret the teaching of their founder, St Francis. The Capuchins were hardcore on poverty. The Conventuals were less inclined to sleep in the wilderness and talk to animals.
Their contrasting charisms were etched in their habits. The Capuchin vibe is easy for a modern audience to conjure because it screams central casting monk and was plagiarised by George Lucas to add a spiritual veneer to his Jedi knight costume. It is a single piece of rough, dun brown wool with a distinctive pointed hood that hangs down the back when not worn over the head. It is cinched at the waist with a white cord bearing three knots representing the wearer’s vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. All the Capuchins wore sandals and we speculated that underwear was probably optional. Or maybe seasonal.

That should immediately rule out the Ughmann commenting on the budget or pretty much anything else.

Clearly he was driven insane at an early age, and never recovered, and yet he insists on revealing even more ...

The rocket nuns and the Star Wars bar
The Conventuals sported an ash-grey habit that looked as if it had been tailored by Giorgio Armani. The two groups of monks still viewed each other with suspicion.
There were a handful of sisters from various congregations in the class. One was the rare breed of black Josephite, another a Dominican. Both communities had moved with the times and updated their traditional austere and elaborate habits to a simple tunic and the Dominican had ditched the veil. There were two other women from an obscure society that clung to the old-world gear, which covered them from head to toe. The only exposed flesh was an oval of their face, framed like a portrait bordered by a stark white wimple. Their community’s name now eludes me but we called them rocket nuns and imagined them being launched like missiles into heaven.
The only uniform the Marist students wore was black pants and a white shirt, so we looked pretty much like waiters in the Star Wars bar scene. Anyway, I digress.
Before the tutorial on Honest to God, one of the Conventual Franciscans confessed he found Robinson’s update on Christian morality pretty compelling. The bishop had embraced situation ethics, which argued that deciding what’s right or wrong depends on the circumstances of each situation. Rather than following fixed rules, the goal was to choose the most loving or beneficial action for everyone.
Malleable morality
“Actions once considered wrong or sinful (such as sex before marriage) are not necessarily so once love becomes the standard that renders moral laws irrelevant,” Robinson wrote.
Here I began to appreciate why the Capuchins had a centuries-long beef with their lax Conventual cousins. While agreeing with the idea that just about all Christian denominations were too hung up on sex, it struck me then, as now, that this malleable morality could be used to justify just about anything. And is it any surprise that, as these ideas took hold, droves of the Anglican faithful found they had no use for the Church of England any more and walked out the door to join the serried ranks of godless Protestants that preach in today’s public square?
In the class that day students were reminded that traditional Catholic morality holds right and wrong are objective truths set by God, knowable through reason and revelation and not negotiable based on circumstances or personal judgment. And you should do the right thing for the right reason.

Eventually the Ughmann has to get to some sort of point, but having established how deeply weird his upbringing was, the attempt only compounds the weirdness ...

But in a secular society, no moral code binds everyone. So, in trying to assess the actions of politicians this column follows a simple rule: in a subjective world, the only objective test of conduct is whether politicians live by their own words and the standards they impose on others.
What a politician says should bind them, but it is an imperfect world, people make honest mistakes and circumstances change. If a course correction is needed politicians should admit they were wrong and explain why. If they propose radical revisions to policies with far-reaching effects then they should take the plan to an election, argue their case and let the people decide.

Of all the people to drag into this tyke morality tale ... Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey arrives at the dispatch box flanked by Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Minister for Education Christopher Pyne, far right to deliver the 2015-16 Federal Budget. Picture: AAP

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti ...Peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione

Working for the ABC in 2014, I was scathing of the Coalition’s first budget because, I believed, it breached Tony Abbott’s election pledge: “No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.”
How Abbott’s words were weaponised
That article speculated Abbott and his treasurer, Joe Hockey, would have a tough job persuading the public it shouldn’t dwell “on the awkward disconnect between today’s blunt prose and the election campaign’s poetic licence”.
Ministers argued “the most solemn promise we made was to fix the budget”. But this glossed over something Abbott had identified as the defining sin of the Rudd-Gillard era. In his campaign launch speech, he said: “The worst deficit is not the budget deficit but the trust deficit. This election is about trust.”
That column pointed out that, having set that standard, the Coalition would face a war on two fronts: defending the budget’s tough choices; and dealing with a sharp rise in the trust deficit.
The 2014 budget did Abbott permanent damage because his own words were weaponised by the opposition.
In a fiery speech to parliament in the wake of that budget, Labor’s Anthony Albanese listed the breaches of faith and added: “Rubbing salt into the wounds, (Abbott) has since insulted the electorate’s intelligence with Monty Python-esque claims that he hasn’t broken any promises.”

At this point the reptiles introduced the chief villains yet again ... Jim Chalemrs, left, (sic) and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have cloaked their backflip as justified for the greater good. Picture: New Corp

And this is where the Ughmann gets truly weird.

The pond almost began to expect a learned treatise on the differences between venial and mortal sins (venial sins don't cut the soul's connection to a tyke's imaginary overlord, but if not repented, might lead to more serious sins).

Yes, we're in that sort of weird turf ...distilled essence of tyke humbug ...

A decade on, how are we to judge the chasm between the words and deeds of Prime Minister Albanese and his Treasurer, Jim Chalmers?
Before the election, Albanese promised no changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax. He grew irritated at having to repeat his rote denials. The 2025 budget breaks faith on both. The justification? It’s for the greater good: more housing, more affordable homes, a better future for the young.
This claim comes laced with the language of morality. There is no lie, no breach of faith, because the circumstances have changed and the common good demands it. This is a textbook application of situation ethics. The right action is whatever produces the most loving outcome, regardless of the promises broken along the way.
Lying dressed as virtue
When lying comes dressed as virtue we stand on dangerous ground. But virtue and vice in politics are now measured only by which side you back and whose lies you excuse.
The government clearly believes it will sail through this debate because it faces a dysfunctional opposition. The real risks lie in how the public views the policy shift and the movable feast of political morality.
What if young people don’t buy the core argument that the changes will deliver intergenerational equity? The Prime Minister and 19 of his cabinet ministers built their own wealth on property portfolios. They now have slammed the door behind them. They could end up looking less like Robin Hood than the Sheriff of Nottingham in a progressive habit.
What if rents rise, property prices fail to fall and investment evaporates? There is plenty of time between now and the next election for these things to be judged against outcomes. What will the excuse be then?
And even Robinson would take issue with the government’s moral argument if its motivations were not pure. What if Labor is simply wagering that the optics of taking from older property owners and giving to the young will bear electoral fruit?
What if the sum total is simply this: another brick removed from the foundation of trust, another reason to believe our political institutions care more about power than people, more about winning than truth?
The church I grew up in suffered profound damage when its priests and bishops betrayed the trust of the faithful. The throngs that once filled pews have gone. That loss of faith now extends to all institutions. In politics it can be measured in the collapse of the primary vote of the major parties.
Politicians, it seems, learn as slowly as bishops. Both major parties have now discovered the easy virtue of situation ethics. And the electorate, in turn, has grown weary of elastic moralising.

Oh FFS, what an epic waste of time ...won't someone give the ponce a dollop or two of Machiavelli ...

Could it get any worse?

Of course it could ...

The header: Labor and Coalition policy divergence signals the most decisive tax battle for decades; Labor abandons its promises, with sweeping tax reform targeting assets, while the Coalition fights back with radical policy changes.

The caption for the uncredited (AI?) collage, though why the reptiles bothered with labelling the visual inanity is anyone's guess: Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have made an equity pitch to win younger voters while opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson and leader Angus Taylor lay the foundations for a new centre-right political agenda.

The pond simply couldn't escape the budget, what with "Ned" nattering for a bigly ten minutes, thereby making this one of the dullest, most tedious Everest climbs the pond has encountered in recent times.

There was nothing for it but to set out from base camp, hoping not to pass out from an oxygen shortage too early.

"Ned" cranked the apocalyptic tone into top gear from the get go:

A revolution is coming to our national politics – a battle over conviction. That is the real meaning of a transforming budget week. The trajectory is set for the next election, dominated by a policy, philosophical and aspirational contest over taxation, the result guaranteed to shape Australian values and life.
In his Thursday budget reply, Angus Taylor acted on the irresistible logic of his party’s existential crisis – he went bold, offering a sustained alternative to Labor’s tax, economic, migration and intergenerational policies.

Perhaps realising the way that "Ned" sounded in an incredibly silly apocalyptic mood, up there with the worst of his Chicken Little carry-ons, the reptiles immediately offered a couple of predictable visual distractions: Angus Taylor opposes Labor’s centrepiece of increased taxes on assets. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman;Jim Chalmers’ budget offered a better-targeted method for income tax relief. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Then "Ned" went into full ponderous, portentous mode ...

This followed what Jim Chalmers called his most important and ambitious budget. Take the Treasurer at his word. He brought down a budget that increased taxes on assets, rebalanced tax between income and assets, and offered a better-targeted method for income tax relief – enshrined with a generational impulse in favour of the 25 to 45 years voting cohort.
This looms as the most decisive tax battle for decades. Taylor opposes Labor’s centrepiece of increased taxes on assets while exceeding Labor with higher gains for income earners by indexation of personal income tax rate scale over four years, a reform to eliminate the tax “steal” and protect income earners from inflation. Chalmers, in turn, spurns tax indexation as a remedy.
The era of Labor and Coalition duplicating each other is finished. Ideological conflict and disputes over values are returning to our politics. They will dominate for the rest of this term leading to the election. That’s a good thing – bringing sharp policy disputes to the table between parties that seek to govern the country.
Both sides are marching to this showdown with conviction, sure of the electoral pull of their offerings. Yet their positions are vastly different. Anthony Albanese and Chalmers operate from strength, ready to repudiate past election promises, confident they will prevail and resetting Labor policies for the 2028 election with a heavy emphasis on equity.

Those familiar with "Ned" will already know where this climb is heading ... a pompous judgment on the chief villain, caught in a pose beloved by the reptiles ... Anthony Albanese during question time on Wednesday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

"Ned"tries to start off in classic "both siderist" vein, but it's easy to spot the thumb's on the scales already ...

The Opposition Leader, by contrast, engages in a high-risk effort to lay the foundations for a new centre-right political agenda, going with a blend of radical policy and populist appeal, striving to win back One Nation voters, challenging Labor on core beliefs and, above all, aspiring to see the Coalition resume command of the centre-right of politics – the only hope for Liberal Party revival.
This is a Labor-Coalition fight over many issues – equity, personal tax, investments, assets, generational support, housing and energy. Chalmers has defined his mantra: “We’ve delivering a fairer tax system for workers – this will help rebalance a system which is more generous to assets than it is to labour.” In reply Taylor identified his core goals: “Just as I want more investment in Australia, I want Australians to keep more of their income.”
Two decisive events occurred this week. Albanese and Chalmers abandoned their mask of caution, invoked Labor’s faiths and embraced tax redistribution in a partial resurrection of Bill Shorten’s losing agenda from 2019 – while Taylor, confronting a survival crisis for himself and his party, pledged genuine tax reform, structural changes to immigration leading to a much lower intake, radical surgery on energy policy, an assault on welfare to non-citizens, and a series of pro-investment reforms.
The policy contest over tax is focused on three areas – a sharp conflict over the tax treatment of all assets, a dispute over the best method of income tax relief, and differences over how to deliver intergenerational fairness.
In the related conflict over the housing market, Taylor breaks from history to tie migration to housing construction, a solution repudiated by Labor that continues to overshoot its net overseas migration numbers.
The philosophical contest is sharp – while Labor seeks to rebalance taxes between assets and income in the cause of equity, the Coalition prioritises lower taxes on the investment class in the cause of higher productivity and economic growth.
Taylor has given Labor plenty of targets to hit. Albanese and Chalmers will oblige, but Taylor had no choice. Playing safe is no option in this crisis. Both Taylor and Nationals leader Matt Canavan know this. The real significance of Taylor’s speech lies elsewhere – it shows the extent of poor policy and political vulnerabilities embedded in the utterly dominant Albanese government, the paradox of our age.
Whether the centre-right of politics is capable of uniting behind the Taylor agenda looms as the decisive issue. It may be too much to expect. If the Pauline Hanson brigade of influencers and media backers dump on Taylor and persist with the fabrications that he lacks conviction or is too close to Labor, then the Liberals are probably doomed as a party and Albanese will remain politically ascendant.

Ah, so it's all the fault of Pauline ...

The reptiles preferred a different visual distraction, one of those meaningless stock images of nothing much ... The return to surplus in a decade depends almost entirely on NDIS savings. Picture: NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

At this point, the real "Ned" emerges to parrot the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

Taylor’s pitch is to household affordability, business activity and cultural tradition. He accuses Labor of dividing the country and the generations but Taylor has his own method of division – between citizens and non-citizens.
He pledges to repeal Labor’s asset tax rises, warns against big government, offers a $50,000 annual instant write-off for small business, promises a Future Generations Fund and signals a sustained attack on net-zero policies and subsidies.
But Taylor’s attack on Labor for “funding welfare for non-citizens as soon as they arrive” in the country is a double-edged political sword. He pledges to reserve the National Disability Insurance Scheme and 17 welfare programs – including JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and Family Tax Benefit – for Australians. While saving “taxpayer billions”, this stand will provoke a backlash and send more traumas through migrant communities. What are the full consequences of this pledge in financial and electoral terms?
Taylor’s centrepiece, the Tax Back Guarantee, involves indexing the bottom two tax thresholds from 2028-29, thereby protecting 85 per cent of income earners with relief of $250 in year one growing to more than $1000 in year four. From 2031-32 the top two tax brackets will be indexed.
This is a $22bn pledge across four years to trump Chalmers’ budget initiative, the $250 annual Working Australians Tax Offset, a new method of offering personal tax relief that goes only to working income earners. Chalmers signalled he intends to offer more tax support to combat bracket creep, presumably before the 2028 election, using this method.

Just to ram "Ned's" point home, note the tone of the caption for the next AV distraction, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor outlines a vision for a “freer and fairer” Australia for all in his budget reply speech.

On and on "Ned" channeled the beefy boofhead, while souring on Jimbo ...

“It will force government to respect your money,” Taylor said of indexation. Yet it is expensive for the budget and before the next election Taylor will need to demonstrate how he finances the commitment. But indexation has another huge consequence – it puts a brake on government spending and imposes a tight discipline on governments because it denies them the hidden gift of automatic extra revenue via bracket creep. But here’s another warning – it needs to be marketed effectively, otherwise people miss the point.
The immediate hip-pocket advantage Taylor enjoys is that bracket creep eats up much of Labor’s tax offset.
While Chalmers in his National Press Club speech pledged to “to return more of this bracket creep” in future, Taylor’s policy does this job in advance. At this point it is obviously far superior.
With this budget Chalmers has put a defining stamp on Labor’s economic policy. In many ways it is the budget he has longed to deliver; just witness his remarks on its ambition. It is a clarion call to Labor’s True Believers and it reveals Labor’s vision for the nation, both what it has done and failed to do.
The budget remakes negative gearing, limits the concession to new builds from July 2027 but existing investors will be protected. The Howard government 50 per cent discount on capital gains for individuals, partnerships and trusts will be abolished from July 2027, replaced by an inflation indexation system, the aim being to tax “real capital gains”. There will be partial grandfathering for asset holders. Investors as individuals, trusts and partnerships will face a minimum 30 per cent tax on real capital gains. There is a strong economic rationalist and equity justification for these reforms. Treasury offers a long analysis that the current model contributes to higher house prices, favours the top 10 per cent of earners and doesn’t tax “real capital gains”.

Then came another snap illustrating three fifths of nothing ... Treasury expects its reforms will have a major impact on the 10-year decline in home ownership. Picture: John Appleyard

"Ned" carried on in Chicken Little apocalypse mode ...

But the philosophical heart of the tax changes lies in Chalmers’ declaration that the purpose is to “rebalance a system which is more generous to assets than it is to labour”. What comes next in this rebalancing ideology? Albanese praised the budget, saying the result was a system “fairer in the way it treats income from assets and income from labour”.
Taylor and opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson will launch a political campaign around this philosophy. They will promote the alternative Liberal model – saying that ordinary Australians aspire to gain assets as well as income, that investment must be taxed more lightly than income because investment is the engine of innovation, entrepreneurship, aspiration and productivity.
The Liberals see the impact of the changes – making Australia one of the highest capital gains tax regimes in the world – as a negative, not a desirable outcome. They will exploit the fact that the budget resembles Bill Shorten’s 2019 election policy, apart from the franking credits issue, that cost Labor the election. Albanese and Chalmers believe the nation has moved on and is more receptive to this type of tax package but wisely shun Shorten’s class warfare selling pitch from seven years ago.
For Chalmers there is no escape from the medium-term narrative in the budget – over 10 years it raises extra taxes of $77bn, an irrefutable judgment on Labor’s values. At the same time Labor engages in one of the great fiscal gambles in our history by investing the NDIS with an entirely extra purpose – it has become the mainstay of Labor’s budget savings across the decade.
Indeed, on these numbers the return to surplus in a decade depends almost entirely on NDIS savings. These savings are gigantic, reaching $184.9bn out to 2036-37 (yes, there’re savings) with NDIS growth estimated to average only 2 per cent across the forward estimates. This task verges on the improbable. If the savings aren’t delivered, fiscal policy doesn’t work.
Chalmers is correctly proud that the budget shows the return to surplus involves savings from spending restraint running three times as much as savings from higher tax. All good, but wait on – again that’s because of NDIS savings with their sheer improbability.

Another snap of the leading villains... Anthony Albanese flanked by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher at Parliament House in Canberra on Monday. Picture: Martin Ollman / NewsWire

"Ned" was, pace the Ughmann, gathering himself in a way that would allow him to pass judgment like an Old Testament prophet ... with talk of hubris as one of many sins ...

An outstanding feature of the week was the way Albanese and Chalmers readily agreed, indeed boasted, they had changed their policies (though never conceding their broken promises) not to impose new taxes on capital gains and negative gearing.
Their hubris is unmistakeable. Past election promises are in ruins. But no matter because, as Albanese told ABC 7.30, “we couldn’t sit back and continue to watch young people being frozen out of the housing market”. The Prime Minister poses as champion of “the Australian dream of home ownership”, especially for younger people. Chalmers said Labor couldn’t “leave a broken status quo in place”. But Labor has incurred a trust deficit. In the first term it broke its promise about not changing the stage three personal income tax cuts inherited from the Coalition; now in the second term it breaks its promises about not changing the CGT and negative gearing.
Albanese already faces the problem of denying further tax changes next term, for example, on death duties. It is unlikely Labor would act on this front, but Albanese’s credibility on denials is all but shot. The opposition, however, has already identified a potential death duty in the new taxes on trusts, with Taylor saying post-budget we “keep finding new taxes”.
Labor, of course, had good reason for confidence in its budget decision-making: it faced a near broken Coalition, a housing market biased against first-home buyers and an apparently winning pitch on intergenerational fairness with Millennials and Gen Z now outnumbering older generation Baby Boomers.
What could go wrong?
Two things. Labor has created two vulnerabilities for itself. It has tied its tax changes to improvement in the housing market for young people. This is the repeated justification coming from Albanese and Chalmers. “We’d thrown everything at housing,” Albanese said. Now it was time to throw a lot more, the electoral purpose being to achieve a seismic event with Millennials and Gen Z. (Don’t believe for a moment Labor’s insufferable claims the budget was not shaped by politics.)

How could the reptiles not mention the 'death tax', though for some reason, it couldn't be a straight death tax, it had to be, air quotes please maestro, a 'death tax': The Albanese government has blindsided the financial sector with a surprise ‘death tax’ on wills and estates, triggering urgent calls for clarification from wealth advisers.

Fresh from the reptile school of fear mongering, 101.

Time now for "Ned" to drag in sundry "experts" who can reinforce his point of view:

Yet the budget’s own figures mean housing progress by the time of the 2028 election will be marginal at best. While the tax changes are predicted to shift the housing ownership mix towards more owner-occupiers, this results in only 75,000 more owner-occupiers across the full decade while rents will rise and Treasury estimates housing prices will fall by about 2 per cent in a couple of years. In addition, lower housing price growth weakens supply and there are likely to be about 35,000 dwellings fewer compared with the no tax policy change scenario.
The point is that asking the public to judge the tax reforms in 2028 according to progress in the housing market becomes an invitation to electoral failure. Taylor sees this and is already running on that impending failure. It will merely help the Coalition in its campaign against the tax changes.
Deloitte Access Economics senior partner Stephen Smith told Inquirer: “The intent of the government’s changes on the CGT discount is good. This is a relatively modest but meaningful reform. In my view, however, the government has created a rod for its own back by linking this change to intergenerational fairness – the economics stands on its own.
“The potential payoff for intergenerational fairness is also dubious, given it will take a long time to unwind the effect of the 50 per cent discount in the property market – this change won’t make it any easier for a young person to buy a home next week or next year, but it likely will next decade.”
This leads directly to the second vulnerability. While running on intergenerational equity sounds brilliant politics, it may prove far more difficult than Labor imagines. The risk for Labor is that the budget turns the Baby Boom generation more hostile towards Labor while failing to win a comparable level of support from the younger generations now expected to reward Labor.

Cue a snap of an agitated fellow traveller ... Mortgage broker Samuel Buckley blasted the budget, arguing sweeping changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing will force rents up and squash aspiration for young Australians. Picture: John Feder

And so after that interminable climb, "Ned" draws himself up to deliver "the judgment":

Younger people will have divergent views on the tax crackdown on assets. They won’t necessarily applaud Labor for diminishing the asset returns of their parents, nor might they appreciate being denied the access to the capital gains and negative gearing benefits available to past generations.
The big picture remains in the shadows for Labor. Albanese said post-budget that Labor “is the only political movement in Australia now that occupies the sensible centre” and declared: “I want to be a mainstream leader in a mainstream political party that seeks to govern for all Australians.” This is an excellent statement. But Labor does not deliver for all Australians.
The budget shows since the mid-year update that spending increased by $18bn for 2026-27, a forecast of obvious interest to the Reserve Bank given governor Michele Bullock’s warning about government spending making the anti-inflation task more difficult.
This budget shows ongoing weak productivity, meaning a drag on living standards, a decade of budget deficits, and a failure to deliver serious personal income tax reform – while suggesting something next year.
Given Labor’s political dominance, the judgment on this budget is that Labor’s reforming vision is too narrow to meet the economic challenges that Australia faces.

Note that delusion of grandeur:

the judgment on this budget

The judgment?

Who appointed "Ned" sole arbiter, judge and jury wrapped up in one pompous conceit?

The pond will miss much of the reptile comedy when forced offline, but it won't be missing these "Ned" Everests ...

And now to an echo of the bromancer's woes ...

In which Our Henry dodges and weaves away from Thucydides to join the reptile budget jihad, and the bromancer also refuses to see what Xi said ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:49:46 +0000

It being Our Henry day the pond thought it might open with a little troll.

Over the past few weeks the pond has been spending time with John Lurie and the three seasons of short shows he made for HBO during the plague years, Painting with John.

Lurie's something of a polymath in that he's a musician, an eclectic jazz-inclined composer, an 'outsider' painter and an actor that delivers personal anecdotes in an enjoyably hammy way.

The series isn't epic in any way. Lurie paints, and as well as the anecdotes, does attempt some slapstick interruptions, of a vaguely surreal kind (e.g., an animated cowboy romp positioned in his artwork), some of which work and some which struggle.

All are over quickly, as are the episodes, and throughout he's an amiable and likeable companion revealing something of his world (especially in the penultimate episode which showed him in the studio making the music for the series).

It turned out that the pond had other things in common with him, to quote from his wiki:

In December 2023, Lurie condemned Israel's actions in Gaza as a "genocide" and Israel's apartheid system, stating on Twitter, "Apparently it is bad for your career to say you are opposed to genocide. But fuck it. I am opposed to genocide. I am opposed to apartheid. I am opposed to children having limbs amputated without anesthesia. (sic) You absolute fucks."

The pond realises that this might sound as if the pond and Lurie are in the same turf as Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Rand Paul's son, but commenting on the situation in Gaza (or the West Bank or Lebandon, as the slaughter and land grab continues there) is not to be anti-Semitic.

In his show, Lurie comes across as an amiable old hipster, something the pond aspires to be, though without a shred of artistic talent.

Alternatively the pond could have begun by trolling Our Henry with a Chairman Xi reference.

As he sat directly across from Trump in the centre of a long oval table, Xi noted: "The world has reached a new crossroads."
"Whether China and the United States can transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and forge a new paradigm for engagement between major powers, whether we can work together to address global challenges and bring greater stability to the world, whether we can jointly create a brighter future for bilateral relations — these are questions of history, questions of the world, and questions of the people," he said. (ABC here)

The utter, shameless cheek. Referencing Western Civilisation (and not just the brass bands).

And which is the ascending and which the descending power? The one that had to beg for help in opening the strait and ending the war of choice it started? Or the other one, sending massive numbers of EVs into the world?

And did mad King Donald have the first clue as to what Xi was on about?

Crucially, was Our Henry ready to offer guidance on any of these matters this day?

The header: Anthony Albanese’s broken promises the death knell for public trust; Prime Minister’s abandonment of tax commitments risks devastating consequences for already fragile democratic fabric.

The caption for the gesticulating villain in chief: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s reversal on tax policy risks undermining public trust in government. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Dammit, the cunning sly old fox dodged and weaved, and stuck with the current reptile budget jihad, and so references to the ancient Greeks were out, with little else to hand for the five minute rant.

The reptiles seemed bored, and so offered Our Henry not a single visual distraction after that opening snap. (Perhaps the AI was feeling tired).

That didn't stop the old portentous pedant opening with a typical retreat to the eighteen century, with concomitant link to that bloody swinish Commie Labor party:
“Promises and pie-crust,” Jonathan Swift wrote in 1738, “are made to be broken.” Vladimir Lenin, who liked the line, treated it as a slogan. Anthony Albanese treats it as a principle.
The Prime Minister’s defence for repudiating assurances he had insistently reiterated – indeed, “for the 50th time” – is that Australia faces a crisis of intergenerational equity. But as Jonathan Pincus and I demonstrated on these pages, the claim is analytically incoherent and empirically threadbare. Nor, even if there were such inequities, would that justify the abrupt abandonment of repeatedly affirmed undertakings.
Serious governments seek democratic consent for contentious measures they had previously assured voters they would not introduce. John Howard did so with the GST: having ruled it out, he reversed openly, took it to the 1998 election, and proceeded only on the mandate he won there.
The reason the Albanese government has not followed suit is neither urgency nor necessity. It is fear: fear that despite the opposition’s parlous state, voters would punish a government that has spent freely, governed carelessly and is now poised to extract the greatest tax take in commonwealth history.
The budget’s own numbers make the reality plain. Even accepting Treasury’s assumptions, the budget measures will increase housing supply over the next decade by less than one-third of 1 per cent, while housing demand is likely to rise more than 15 times as quickly. This is not serious economic reform. It is a revenue grab wrapped in the language of moral urgency.
The inevitable result of that gap between political rhetoric and political practice is to corrode public trust. Trust, after all, is not a natural disposition; it is a social achievement, slowly accumulated and quickly squandered.

By this point in a very standard reptile jihad rant, some devotees of the hole in bucket man might be despairing.

Fear not, Our Henry lives in the past and still labours to produce the odd sublime medieval insight:

The word itself reveals the point. The Old English “treow” lies behind both “truth” and “trust”; since at least the 15th century, “to trust” someone has meant to believe that when he says what he will do, he speaks truthfully. Governments can sustain trust only by being truthful and trustworthy – and the institutional form through which those virtues manifest themselves is the promise.

A promise is what binds words to conduct, declarations to action, and electoral consent to subsequent government. Governments owe fidelity to their promises not merely for their own political advantage; they owe it because a healthy democratic life depends upon citizens being able to assume and assess fidelity to public commitments.
The credibility of promises is also more broadly crucial to the viability of a free society, whose very essence is that people must order their lives amid continual uncertainty. Promises, including the promise that laws will not be changed capriciously, are what give individuals, families and businesses stable ground on which to plan.

There came one more excellent reference, though sadly only twentieth century:

As Hannah Arendt wisely observed, they build “islands of predictability” in “the ocean of uncertainty” – islands that matter most to those with the fewest resources to absorb sudden policy shocks.
A young couple relying on an investment property to finance homeownership, a retiree dependent on hard-earned savings, a small business weighing expansion: all rely on governments meaning what they say.
But promises can only fulfil that stabilising role because they belong to the grammar of commitment: to the forms of obligation whose value lies in their relative insulation from changing convenience. A promise abandoned the moment it becomes burdensome is worth no more than the loyalty that melts away at the first sign of difficulty.
The preservation of credible public commitments is especially vital in Australia, where suspicion of the political process long predates contemporary disenchantment. Distrust of politicians was, as John Hirst emphasised, constitutive of the colonial polity itself. The men who entered politics were not thought fit to be trusted – and despite outstanding exceptions, many weren’t.

And let us not forget Burke!

The endless Australian debate over the accountability of parliamentarians reflected that suspicion. Both the Burkean trustee – who is guided only by the light of his own judgment – and the instructed delegate had their advocates. But it was the latter conception, entrenched by the emerging Labor Party, that ultimately prevailed. Labor parliamentarians were to be mere instruments: controlled by the ALP’s extra-parliamentary wing, bound by a pledge to uphold the platform and required to submit to caucus discipline on pain of political excommunication.
The Australian mass party thus emerged, from the beginning, as an institutional response to distrust: a mechanism designed less to cultivate confidence in politicians than to contain the risks they posed once elected. And Australian voters learned to scrutinise the distance between promise and performance with an intensity rare in comparable democracies. When that gap widened too far, confidence collapsed.
It is against this background that the events of the past three years must be seen. The Albanese government’s record on the central tax promises of two successive elections – stage three, superannuation, and now negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount – does not just constitute a litany of broken commitments; it constitutes the accelerated dismantling of an already tarnished public asset.
The predictable effect is an even more accelerated crisis of political representation. The four-decade arc from 1975’s 4 per cent third-party vote to 2025’s 34 per cent highlights its seemingly inexorable progression.
Those voters who have spurned the major parties are not ideological partisans of any third force; they are observant citizens who, having grasped what the parties no longer deliver, exercise the only sanction the system leaves them. Unable to meaningfully demand or expect faithfulness to a program from parties whose programs have ceased to bind, they withdraw their own faithfulness from those parties altogether.
The alternatives may not be especially attractive nor particularly unifying – but negative coalitions, aimed at punishing a detested foe, form more easily than positive ones precisely because they require only shared aversion rather than common aspiration. In these conditions, anti-system parties flourish, their capacity to aggregate voters a symptom not of democratic renewal but of democratic exhaustion.
To make things worse, governments confronted by a perpetually seething electorate are naturally tempted to govern through stealth and administrative manoeuvre, further impairing the trust whose disappearance produced the crisis of representation in the first place. And when a real, rather than confected, emergency arrives, they discover they can no longer summon the loyalties and willingness to sacrifice on which the survival of free societies ultimately depends.
No society can govern itself for long on the assumption that public language is merely tactical. Governments that repeatedly break faith with the electorate may secure temporary advantages. But they do so by undermining the confidence that policies announced today will survive long enough to shape behaviour tomorrow. As that confidence erodes, both the effectiveness of public policy and force of democratic authority unravel.
That is the deeper significance of the Albanese government’s conduct. It is not merely bad policy. It is the depletion of a civic inheritance that free societies squander far more easily than they rebuild. Yes, promises can be cracked like pie crusts. But in the end, public trust cracks with them. Lenin, sheltered by brutal authoritarianism, never had to learn that lesson. With the fabric of our democracy rapidly fraying, it is high time Anthony Albanese did.

It's a great pity that this is the last time the pond will spend in Our Henry's company for some time.

That invocation of Lenin lacked subtlety and wit, and shows the old propagandist descending to the lowest level of Murdochian hackery, more Daily Terror or Currish Snail or HUN than Burkean trustee.

As for whether Burke betrayed his principles by defending both the American revolution and France's L'Ancien Régime, that'll have to be left to another day.

The pond will settle for the notion that anyone who thinks a politician won't break a promise if they feel the time is right is merely delusional. (And Our Henry has been showing signs of that for many a column).

And now having done the hard yards, the pond should show what the reptiles have been up to early this morning. Get ready to scroll:

Wall to interminable, endless wall ...

And oh dear, top of the reptile world ma, not another hideous uncredited (AI?) collage as the parrots got to work with the regurgitating lead (only the early version currently in the archive):

Sorry, that's as much as the pond could stand from the beefy boofhead in the reptile séance session, but kudos to yet another Jimbo discovering this terrifying fear and shock and horror moment:

EXCLUSIVE
‘This is a death duty by any other name’: Shock tax buried in Budget small print
On the back of the clampdown on family trusts, popular ‘testamentary discretionary trusts’ are a surprise inclusion in Jim Chalmers’ budget.
By James Kirby

How the jihadists love their hysteria. What was it someone said about death and taxes?

And the pond will always give a mention to Geoff chambering his inexhaustible supply of rounds, for those who can waive their sense of existential boredom and give him a read:

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Coalition’s fork-in-the-road moment
Angus Taylor puts up biggest income tax reform proposal in a generation
The Opposition Leader will need to be well-briefed and prepared for the avalanche of misinformation coming his way.

Ditto the bouffant one, a devout and devoted cheerleader, andalways up for the jihad (though like many Australian men, he seems to have problems getting past the two minute mark. Only two minutes for the best two days ever?):

Libs’ best two days in their year of chaos
Angus Taylor has delivered his strongest parliamentary performance since the election after Anthony Albanese’s credibility crumbled over broken negative gearing promises.
By Dennis Shanahan
National Editor

And the canny Cranston was standing by to make up a triptych of jihadist reptile cheerleaders (though he too expired after two minutes. Only two minutes to celebrate the bluff of the year?):

Taylor calls Chalmers’ bluff on tax brackets
Angus Taylor calls Jim Chalmers’ bluff with bold income tax indexation that helps young people
Angus Taylor is committing to fully removing bracket creep for the first time in 44 years and ending a regressive and massive tax burden on younger Australians.
By Matthew Cranston
Economics Correspondent

The hapless reptiles had a hard time flogging this horse, and in another place James Massola was asking questions: If Angus Taylor can’t thread this political needle, his fate might be all sewn up (*intermittent archive link)

For Angus Taylor, the gamble at the heart of his budget reply is that his thoroughly orthodox economic and political response in such unorthodox times may fall well short of what is needed to turn around Coalition fortunes. The challenge for Taylor is unprecedented: never before has a Coalition leader had to win back so much support from both Labor and One Nation. In trying to thread the needle to win back both sets of voters, he must risk satisfying no one. And he may only get one shot at it.

It's all got to be worth a Wilcox:

The pond is by this point well over the reptile budget jihad, especially as there is no indication of how long this baying of the hounds will last.

It feels interminable already, and so it was a relief to turn to the bromancer, doing what he's ostensibly paid to do, scribble a few notes on current affairs, though this day he could only last three minutes:

The header: Inside the Trump-Xi summit: How public praise masked a private power struggle; Trump came into this meeting wanting more, and needing more, and needing it more badly, than Xi did.

The caption for the snap showing Xi entertaining the visiting grandpa: Children hold Chinese and US flags, as US President Donald Trump, right, participates in a welcome ceremony with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Picture: AP

Sadly the bromancer wasn't up to the challenge of doing an Our Henry and referencing Xi referencing Thucydides, so the pond must stay in the dark on that score.

Instead the bromancer resorted to an opening animal metaphor, though if the pond was going to go bear, it would have joined the infallible Pope and gone Pooh:

Now on with the bears:

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, the world’s two big beasts, the growling giant bears of international relations, had a love-in in Beijing.
The Chinese stage-managed the love-in brilliantly. They know how to treat Trump. There was, of course, red carpet. But there were also ranks of little children waving flags and singing their welcomes to Trump. (Oddly, the Chinese state often deploys little children in large numbers in international diplomatic extravaganzas – hard to imagine a Western government getting away with it.)
There were ceremonial presidential inspections of troops, a stylised military march past. The anthems played. The two presidents stood side by side as the world looked on.
Trump loved it, and fully reciprocated every gesture. “Many people,” he said, “are viewing this as the greatest summit ever.”
Trump likes people who flatter him: “It’s an honour to be here and it’s an honour to be your (Xi’s) friend.”
More than that, Trump said to Xi: “I have such respect for China, for the job you’ve done. You’re a great leader. I say to everybody, you’re a great leader. Some people don’t like me to say it.”

The reptiles interrupted the meanderings of the sundowning sociopathic narcissist in chief with an AV distraction, featuring an impeccably framed image in the way that only the reptile AI can do: Yoni Bashan wraps up a busy day in Beijing where Trump is making his first state visit since 2017.

For reasons known only to himself - the Thucydides angle was surely a glittering prize for a devotee of Western Civilisation wanting a war with China by Xmas - the bromancer stuck with the wretched grizzly bear metaphor, when he could have turned to an Eric-inspired big game hunter metaphor:

For some reason, the bromancer seemed to think that the sundowning demented mad King Donald might get oversaturated by ego-stroking. If only ...

Trump badly wants this summit to be a diplomatic and public relations success; so does Xi. So the oleaginous, mutual ego-stroking will reach and surpass saturation point.
There’s a fundamental difference between the two men, of course. Trump is a democratically elected leader, Xi is a dictator. But the two grizzly bears, underneath the fur, are strangely alike. They flatter, and they threaten. They coo, and they condemn. They kiss you, then they smack you.
When the Trump-Xi meeting went private, and got serious, the first issue Xi raised was Taiwan.
We know this because the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, put it out while the meeting was still going. If the issue is managed well, Xi told Trump, the relationship between the US and China can be calm and wonderful, a sign to all the world of how great nations should relate to each other. If it’s handled badly, this could lead to disagreement and even conflict.

In the end, the bromancer didn't know what to say, and didn't say it particularly well:

Velvet glove, iron fist.
Xi wants the US to water down its support for Taiwan. He also wants better access to hi-tech US semiconductors and long-lasting stability in the level of US tariffs on China.
Trump wants quite a lot more from Xi. Though he claims the US doesn’t need the help of any other nation in dealing with Iran, he dearly wants Beijing to use its influence in Tehran to push the mullahs towards a deal, any deal, some kind of deal with at least enough face-saving concessions that Trump can live with it.
He wants China to buy more US beef, soybeans and Boeing aircraft. Trump in fact wants a managed trade approach from both Beijing and Washington.
Trump desperately needs Chinese rare earths and critical minerals to replenish the weapons stocks the US has expended in such prodigious quantities in Iran. Since Beijing imposed a temporary ban on the export of rare earths and critical minerals to the US, Trump has gone easy on trade threats and bluster aimed at Beijing.
Trump is also, rather bizarrely, seeking $US1 trillion ($1.38 trillion) of investments by China in US manufacturing. He’s also said he wants China to be more open to US investment. Forget about decoupling. What does this mean for on-shoring, or friend-shoring, for national security-related production?

Doesn't the bromancer realise that by the end of the year aliens and their alien ships will have been revealed, and thanks to mad King Donald, a world government will be given unto the world before the year is out? (Sssh, they have those Men in Black zappers at the ready)

And so to a final gasp, where once again the bromancer must play a doubting Thomas:

According to the Chinese readout of the meeting, Beijing agreed to open its economy more to the US in agriculture, tourism, health and law enforcement. It’s notable previous trade agreements Beijing made with Trump’s administration have not been honoured.
Trump came into this meeting wanting more, needing more, and needing it more badly, than Xi did.
It’s hard to know, therefore, whether anything substantial comes out of the summit. Certainly there’s less tension, for the moment at least, between the two presidents, even if the underlying interests of their respective nations remain deeply at odds.

But are they deeply at odds? What about that ballroom mad King Donald has invited Xi over to see (or is that sea?)

The way that rube Rudio was pointing and marvelling at the hall in which he found himself showed once again that ever since the Forbidden City Chinese emperors have known to keep the plebs in their place ... just like King Donald wants to do.

Take it away immortal Rowe ...

Special Faux Noise ballroom update (whatever happened to Fetterman? A Bill Leak moment?)

Another in an endless supply of odd spots ...

In which the pond tries to cope with ongoing reptile budget hysteria and is reduced to a sobbing fit about the fate of billionaires ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:50:13 +0000

You could have knocked the pond over with a feather.

There was the pond deep inside the hive mind, only to stray and see this Ross Gittins' headline: It pains me to say nice things about politicians, but this is a good budget (*intermittent archive link)

The pond hadn't experienced that level of heresy since the days the pond's mother, in her Tamworth Martin Luther days, dragged the pond off to dull, joyless proddie services (say what you will, and the pond says plenty, the tykes knew how to bung on a do for impressionable young minds).

It was like experiencing a black mass:

...To tell the truth, the courage Albanese has shown in proposing a budget as reforming as this one has surprised me. Until just a week or two ago, I was convinced he lacked the resolve to make anything more than the most urgent and unavoidable changes.
As for Jim Chalmers’ opposite number, Tim Wilson, he deserves great praise for the honesty of his position. As the Liberals’ Treasury spokesman, he is implacably opposed to any weakening of the negative gearing and the capital gains discount going mainly to well-off older men.
And then the Libs wonder why so few young people vote Liberal.

Even worse the pond stumbled across a couple of Grattan Institute lackeys at The Conversation:

Will this budget really make housing fairer for more Australians? It’s a good start

They would say that.

Surely any talk of sunshine was entirely wrong?

Yes, the tax scare gloom will likely infest the reptiles at least until the next election or the next budget, whichever comes first.

Giddy with alarm, the pond rushed back to the citadel of well-off older men (and the odd woman, the more decidedly odd the better).

Sure enough the reptiles were still in a frenzy,

Teams of reptiles flocked together to sound the alarums ...

Contrary to that Gittins, who needed to get git, this triptych of reptiles knew wot's wot about the suffering of younglings...

VICTIMS
Backfiring budget tax measures will hit Gen Z
Jim Chalmers has rejected indexing income tax rates while defending property tax changes that break election promises and could delay young homebuyers by up to a year.
By Greg Brown, Matthew Cranston and Julie-Anne Sprague

Victims! Blood on the floor, the knife in the water ...

Just look at the villain in the uncredited (AI?) collage showing the villain persecuting the younglings ...

The bouffant one was just below, dragooned into whine about broken promises...

COMMENTARY by Dennis Shanahan
PM’s plan to beat ‘liar’ accusations after broken promise budget
After months of Labor dominance and Coalition incompetence, there is a buzz in the House of Representatives as both sides can see a fight underway.

As if comrade Albo could trick the reptiles. It's fight time, and there's going to be plenty of biff in the schoolyard ...

There were a few victims the reptiles managed to step over on their way to the biff ...

Then there was more whining from carefully selected younglings, and what a team of reptiles gathered to help with the affray...

EXCLUSIVE
Young Australians say tax crackdown pushes home ownership further away
How Chalmers just made it harder for young Australians to get ahead
Labor’s tax grab in the name of fixing intergenerational inequity will punish the very generation they claim to be helping.
By Paige Fryer, Julie-anne Sprague, Cliona O'Dowd and Pamela Rontziokos

If you don't come away with heart shattered by those tales of woe, you must be like that selfish giant in Oscar Wilde's fairy story.

Ancient Troy, who spends a lot of time wandering in the past, went there again ...

40 YEARS ON
Keating’s warning echoes from the 80s
Paul Keating’s ‘banana republic’ warning echoes as budget spending hits record levels
Former Treasurer Paul Keating’s explosive ‘banana republic’ warning burst from him ‘like a truth fountain’ 40 years ago during a kitchen radio interview, as Australia faces similar spending and economic challenges today.
By Troy Bramston

The pond confesses to being completely bewildered and only a few sideways references helped shed some light ...

Inter alia:

...The anniversary of the remarks that caused shockwaves across Australia comes in the week Jim Chalmers delivered his fifth budget with both spending and taxation projected to remain at their highest levels outside the pandemic since the “banana republic” warning.

...While Mr Keating was not commenting on the 2026-27 budget delivered by the Treasurer on Tuesday, his comments are timely and relevant given the spending and taxation challenges facing Australia.
At the National Press Club on Wednesday, Dr Chalmers bristled at comparisons with Mr Keating, his political hero, suggesting the economic challenge 40 years ago is not comparable with today.

... Dr Chalmers’ budget will see spending continue to grow next financial year and the one after, and reach 26.8 per cent of GDP.
Although Mr Keating introduced capital gains tax and fringe benefits tax in 1985, he also reduced the top marginal income tax rate from 60 per cent to 47 per cent and the company tax rate from 49 to 39 per cent while Treasurer. (It would later fall further.)

And then over on the extreme far right came the grumpy old codger himself, top of the reptile world ma, with a walk down memory lane that began with Lawsie ...(is there a youngling who has the first clue who that is/was?)

How Paul Keating’s ‘banana republic’ moment flicked the switch to savings
The treasurer was in a noisy kitchen at a wedding venue when the John Laws radio show called. The rest is economic history.
By Paul Keating

Amazingly there wasn't a single word about the current budget or Jimbo, just a lot of immodest glorification of the Keating treasurer years.

The pond couldn't see the point, except perhaps a hint of an implication that this Jimbo was no match for the banana republic man in his prime.

And that wasn't the end of it.

There were more headlines ...

Sheesh, how could the pond cover all that?

Punters would simply have to learn how to use the intermittent archive, though the pond could at least highlight one story that plucked at the pond's heart strings ...

Capital Gains Tax
Billionaires attack ‘crazy’ CGT plan that punishes success
From tech billionaires to storage kings, Australia’s elite entrepreneurs say scrapping CGT discounts amounts to economic self-sabotage.
By John Stensholt

Oh the suffering of billionaires ...

And so on and on... victims forced to go on the run ...

The reptiles were taking care of the most put upon, long suffering, and wretched of the earth ... and what joy it was to see the billionaires giving their due,

But it wasn't just the billionaires and the younglings.

Over on the far right, there were sturdy men armed with cricket bats, ready to take a whack at things...

Labor courts the kids as the boomers reach for their cricket bats
Will Anthony Albanese’s U-turn on negative gearing and CGT discounts hurt the government? Probably not, but it will be a constant conversation starter in media interviews.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Jack at first seemed to want an each way bet ...

(A little verbiage later)...

Even worse as Jack reached the end, he entirely ignored Dame Groan's formula that suggested world events had nothing whatsoever to do with the Australian economy, and that the unfolding disaster was entirely Jimbo's fault ...

...One great food bowl of the world, the Mekong Delta, expects a 40 per cent reduction in rice crop yields this season with chemical fertilisers at a premium price in Vietnam, if farmers can get them.
Grain yields, especially wheat, are down almost 30 per cent in another of the world’s breadbaskets, Ukraine. The war-torn nation’s production of urea and ammonia has virtually ceased, leaving Ukraine to import chemical fertilisers for the first time in a century.
From the micro to the macro and back again, the shortage of chemical fertilisers means some people will starve while others will pay more to keep fed, and that rule extends to Australia where the agricultural sector routinely creates twice the food we consume.
A farmer friend in rural NSW said the price of nitrogen-based fertilisers has almost doubled while phosphorus is up 45 per cent.
Urea, he said, was available but at a price.
The double whammy of increased costs and reduced yields will flow through the global economy fuelling inflation, and that’s without considering the myriad other sector-by-sector economic impacts from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Overall, more than three million tonnes of chemical fertilisers have been stalled in the Persian Gulf in the past two months. Supply of nitrogen is most critically affected as producers such as Qatar have shut plants because of gas disruptions and the threat of drone and missile strikes. A third of Australia’s urea comes through the Persian Gulf.

After some equivocation, Jack came down on the side of the boomers, and all was well in the hive mind ...

...Boomers do have the advantage of having seen this film before. For those who came in late – Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z and so forth – one of the distinctly possible outcomes is global stagflation where high unemployment and desultory, if not negative, economic growth meets spiralling cost-of-living pressures, which turns to an economic cataclysm almost impossible to repair without economic growth, which becomes nigh on impossible in a major global downturn.
Stagnation killed governments around the world stone dead at the ballot box, from Jimmy Carter’s Democrats down. Stagflation would go on to bring down Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government in 1983, re-elected only six years earlier, having sent Gough Whitlam and Labor to near-oblivion. No amount of government-promoted cross-generational ruckuses will help once the hard, enduring pain of a high-inflationary environment pervades the economy. Like the Fraser government, Albanese and Labor may survive one cost-of-living crisis but two would be a stretch.
Australian political history tells us that is when voters reach for their – we use cricket bats in this country. A well-aged Gunn and Moore Diamond sits in my garage and it is due a day out.

Is that why this ancient movie held some appeal?

Oh yes, freedumb boy and the beefy boofhead will knock up a century or two, or at least prove they could earn a spot in the English cricket team ...

The pond has only one further reptile to note ...

Jim’s budget has some tripwires for the nation’s start-up sector
The Treasurer’s capital gains tax changes could scar Australia’s growth potential for decades by discouraging start-ups.
By Petr Sedlacek

It's not just the younglings and the billionaires, it's the tech bros!

The prof was full of saucy doubts and fears, but all the pond could think about was the opening snap.

Was this snap of youngling athletics in any way related to, or a meaningful metaphor for the start-up sector? Judge for yourself:

Was there any upside in this wall to wall hysteria?

Yes, indeedy do. For some reason, petulant Peta had gone MIA ... just when she was most needed, what with the onion muncher needing her support, and the budget crying out for a rabid denunciation by her.

And for some reason no reptile spotted by the pond mentioned the gas spectre ...

With that elephant tucked away, after all that, roll on Friday, where hopefully Our Henry can link the current budget follies to the budgets and economies celebrated in Thucydides ...

How soon before we can forget all this budget blather and venture back into a sane world?

It could be some time ...

In which the pond covers a few key reptiles - "Ned", Lloydie of the Amazon, and Dame Groan - covering the budget... (boring)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:54:00 +0000

Despite the best efforts of the ABC, the scurrilous Seven network (see Media Watch), the Nine rags, and the climate science denying, anti-renewables reptiles of Oz, the pond is getting an EV to help with the transition to living down south.

This might sound like a knee-jerk response - after all, Trump’s Iran mess festers, and the world economy slouches toward crisis

But the pond has been to this rodeo before, what with this the third EV in the pond household.

Once you've tasted this reptile-forbidden fruit, it's hard to get back on the ICE, gas-guzzling addiction.

If the pond hadn't been making the move south, likely it would have settled for public transit.

As it is, being deeply conservative, the moment the pond saw a YouTube video asking "is this car too sensible?", the pond was hooked.

Actually the EV in question isn't in any way a leader. Slowish to charge, and with the "extended range" version risibly modest, the Geely EX5 is only a middling middle-class vehicle (unless you count the luxury of seats with a massage function).

With the Geely of Chinese origin, the pond is aware that Chairman Xi will use the pond's shopping data to invade and conquer Australia, but helping Uncle Leon and mad King Donald make Australia the 53rd state would have been more expensive (and they happen to be doing more to ruin the planet than Xi at the moment).

And so to this day's tour of duty, and as anticipated the reptiles were in a state of high budgetary excitement and high dungeon ...

The pond had to cut the reptiles off at that point, and to be honest, the pond's eyes glazed over at the sight of that modest sampling, because the budget had very little of personal significance in it.

It was Brownie who was given given top billing, accompanied by an appalling uncredited (AI?) collage and an even more appalling lesser Leak cartoon making a play on "The Joy of Tax".

Luckily the intermittent archive was working, and even more joyfully the saved copy was stripped of the lesser Leak:

2026 federal budget: Full breakdown of every major announcement
Jim Chalmers has unveiled billions in net tax increases, with a hit on housing investments and trusts easily outweighing the cost of a new $5-a-week tax cut.

The pond also made only dishonourable mentions of two of the most boring reptiles in the lizard Oz hive mind:

Analysis
Jim Chalmers just became the highest taxing treasurer of all time
New tax changes on capital gains, negative gearing and trusts will raise more than $100bn over the next 10 years.
By Matthew Cranston

That canny Cranston outing began with the heavily recycled lesser Leak, so the pond wasn't being a tease by cutting it off.

Anyone who wants to assault their eyeballs can do it in the privacy of the archive.

The completely tedious Geoff chambered one of his seemingly endless rounds.

Let off the leash, battler Jim finally shows his true colours
Chalmers has grasped the big tax stick and fulfilled his dream of becoming a Labor treasurer who wages class warfare in the 21st century.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

The old "class warfare" angle eh Geoff?

"True colours"?

Karl Marx meets Cyndi Lauper?

What an inspired reptile you are, and no doubt an inspiration to the hive mind. The pond guesses someone has do it, and when it doubt, break glass and pluck out some reptile with a limited imagination.

When the pond wants to be bored by the reptiles, it will always turn to a master of the art, "Ned" in full blown natter mode ...

The header: Survival of the fittest: how the 2026 budget rewires Australia’s housing market; The Albanese government risks everything on property tax reforms that could trigger a generational political war over Australia’s housing market.

The caption for the boring snap showing houses with black roofs, undoubtedly the best way to prepare for global warming: Labor’s surgery on negative gearing seeks a generational bonus for the government with younger voters.

Surprisingly "Ned" could only manage four minutes boring socks off feet, perhaps because there wasn't enough time available for him to borrow the thoughts of others and recycle them.

What he managed on his own was direly predictable:

This budget is a political and economic reset for the Albanese government.
Its forecasts are optimistic, it imposes tax increases on assets, it enshrines a reformed NDIS as the linchpin of its fiscal future and, above all, it seeks to keep Labor on the offensive as the status quo falls apart.
It is a budget of rival worlds.
Jim Chalmers calls it Labor’s most important, ambitious and responsible budget – but for the nation these economic reforms don’t reach deep enough to recharge productivity, puncture a decade of deficits, and deliver serious personal income tax reform.
But it virtually guarantees a political war over tax.
Labor’s surgery on negative gearing for property and replacement of the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount to “restore the taxation of real gains” is an audacious strike at a weakened Coalition, and seeks a generational bonus for the government with younger voters.
At the same time, Labor’s working tax offset – an annual $250 income boost from 2027-28 onwards for 13 million workers – creates a political test for the Coalition.
Do the Liberals support or oppose it, given their pre-election tax rejection blunder last year? In truth, they should exceed it.
Taylor’s challenge

Oh hang on, that sub-heading reminded the pond that it has the perfect 'toon for any talk of prime Angus beef's challenge ...

Nothing like a Hitchcock joke for those who can dimly remember the 1950s, as "Ned" tried to help the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way (watch out for the cornfield):

That means enabling Angus Taylor to outsmart Labor by pledging in his Thursday budget reply to index the personal income tax scale, a superior reform that would upstage Labor, reinvent Labor’s move, and market the Coalition with the type of bold tax reform it desperately needs.
Frankly, it is hard to see Taylor dodging this chance.

The pond was disappointed "Ned" didn't give "class warfare" a run, and instead settled for "political war", The stage is set for a political war on tax reform. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

"Ned" got into the weed and the numbers ...

A defining feature of the budget is the herculean transformation in the purpose of the NDIS. It is projected to reduce scheme payments by $184.9bn in the years to 2036-37.
Once an icon of Labor social conscience, the NDIS now becomes the mainstay of Labor’s budget savings over the coming decade and its capacity to get the budget to surplus in 2035-36.
The NDIS growth is estimated to average only 2 per cent over the forward estimates – a task verging on the improbable – before returning to 5 per cent from 2030-31. If the savings aren’t delivered, then fiscal policy doesn’t work.
The Treasurer is proud that in this budget, savings from spending restraint is almost three times savings from higher tax; again, that’s the NDIS story.
Anthony Albanese and Chalmers have wilfully embarked on their negative gearing-CGT changes calculating they can overcome the broken promises legacy, judging that the public is more ready for reform than in 2019 when Bill Shorten ran these initiatives, and branding them as generational equity.
That’s deceptive, of course, giving that gross debt in this budget breaks through the $1 trillion barrier – the ultimate generational inequity. The negative gearing-CGT reforms deliver only modest extra revenue across the forward estimates running at $3.630bn, which doesn’t compensate for the $250 working tax offset that costs the budget $6.380bn over the same period. But these assets tax increases generate a windfall over the decade. Indeed, the total tax changes improve the budget bottom line by $77bn out to 2036-37. At the heart of the fiscal policy lies a deception.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of the main villains, Treasurer Jim Chalmers is congratulated by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese following the delivery of the 2026-27 budget. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Left to his own devices, "Ned" quickly ran out of steam:

While the cash balance is the government’s preferred budget measure, the gulf with the headline balance is now respectively $150bn versus $264bn across the forward estimates. The latter includes a large number of off-budget items that distort and exaggerate the government’s fiscal credentials.
The budget prioritises maintaining living standards in the teeth of the Iran war and energy crisis, with extra commitments on Medicare, hospitals, aged care and housing. It radiates confidence in the outlook forecasting inflation peaking around 5 per cent, the labour market staying buoyant with unemployment not exceeding 4.5 per cent, and the crisis shaving growth next year to 1.75 per cent before kicking back to 2.5 per cent, still below the long-run trend.
Treasury’s more severe scenario of the Middle East conflict assumes the oil price peaking at $US200 a barrel and delivering a quarter of negative growth, persistent economic weakness, inflation rising above 7 per cent, and unemployment scaling pre-pandemic levels of 5 per cent. But Chalmers is adamant: “We would still avoid a recession.”
While Chalmers projects real spending growth is limited to an annual average of only 1.5 per cent out to 2030, the overall bigger government under Labor remains the status quo. Government spending as a proportion of GDP is 26.8 per cent in 2026-27, far ahead of the long-run trend, and stays above 26 per cent across the forward estimates.
The budget cash balance sits at a 1 per cent of GDP deficit across the current four years but since mid-year the deficit across the forward estimates has been cut from $195bn to $150bn, a huge improvement dominated by a revenue surge, with economist Chris Richardson saying “war and inflation” delivered this boost to the government “on a platter”.
In short, it came via an economic gift, not by Labor decision-making.
This is not a transformational budget for bottom-line fiscal policy. The budget will remain in deficit for the coming decade.
It concedes that productivity gains will emerge over a longer period. Living standards for most people will remain under pressure.
But the budget constitutes a significant repositioning for Labor.
It puts the government on to a new pathway. Albanese and Chalmers have shifted policy to retain the political initiative, reset tax priorities, pitched to a younger generation of voters, fused economic resilience and national security, and created conflict to better define their convictions.
This is a second-term preparation for the next election.

It's an election platform?

Oh well they've lost, because you'd have to scour the lizard Oz from top to bottom for a positive response, or even a kind word, and then you'd come up short.

Speaking of platforms, the pond was delighted to see that the infallible Pope had at last returned. The pond had been worried about him, but no doubt he needed the break, as we all do ...

The pond was startled and shocked to see Lloydie of the Amazon emerge from the jungle to ring the climate science denialist alarum bell, again with a wretched, uncredited (AI?) graphic at the top of the offering:

The header: Budget 2026: Capacity Investment Scheme the hidden green debt bomb; For taxpayers and energy users, this massive renewables scheme threatens a repeat of the NDIS.

The pond has almost forgotten Lloydie of the Amazon was a reptile thing, and this time the hapless lad could only manage a two minute outing to shout fear, rage and beermb ...

There is a potentially multi-billion-dollar green debt bomb hidden in the federal budget that for taxpayers and energy users could one day be a repeat performance of the NDIS.
While attention in the budget was focused on tinkering with current programs and limiting any reference to net zero, the sting in the tail is what might happen to the Capacity Investment Scheme that is designed to underwrite future large-scale renewable energy developments.
The CIS is listed in the budget papers as a contingent liability, alongside the Snowy 2.0 hydro electric scheme, which has already blown out in costs by billions.
According to the budget papers, “The Australian government’s maximum liability and estimated payments under these (CIS) agreements are not for publication due to commercial sensitivities”.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, which began by offering an exquisite framing of a beard.

Does Lloydie boast a toilet bowl beard? Who knows? Who cares? Graham Lloyd on the key energy changes the government plans to bring in with their 2026 Budget.

Lloydie carried on, giving "potentially" and "potential" a massive hard ride, though to be fair "could" and "likely" were also given an outing ...

If what is happening overseas is any guide, the scheme could represent a massive potential liability for the commonwealth – the British equivalent has grown to £90bn on the national budget, with a cash cost of between £1bn and £2bn a year.
The eventual costs will likely dash the hopes of Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who this week said it would be unsustainable for the government to indefinitely continue “supercharged spending” on the net-zero transition.
Labor commits $12.3bn in new net zero spending
Her sentiments were not mirrored in the budget papers, which disclosed $12.3bn in new net zero spending commitments over the forward estimates and $18.2bn over the medium term.
The action is taking place off-balance sheet, however, where billions are being spent assisting climate-focused investments.
In his budget speech, Jim Chalmers said the Albanese government was “progressing the most significant reforms to the National Electricity Market since the 1990s as the world moves to net zero – including to attract more investment in renewable energy and increase competition”.
The CIS is designed to help deliver the government’s 82 per cent renewable electricity by 2030 target with an additional 40GW of capacity by 2030.
The Powering Australia plan
It complements other programs under the Powering Australia plan.
This includes rewiring the nation to build the network of high voltage transmission lines. The CIS is supposed to support about $73bn in investment in the electricity sector but things already are not going to plan.
Winning bidders in tenders so far are lobbying to renegotiate contracts that set a floor and ceiling price.
Under the terms of the underwriting agreements, once the projects are built and operational, if the actual revenue earned by a project is below the agreed revenue floor, the Australian government will pay the project operator 90 per cent of the revenue shortfall up to the agreed annual cap for 15 years.
If the annual revenue earned by a project exceeds the agreed ceiling, the project operator pays the Australian government 50 per cent of revenue above the ceiling up to the agreed cap.
Because CIS payments depend on uncertain future electricity prices and project revenues, the exposure is disclosed through fiscal risk statements rather than through a large, explicit budget provision.

And that, luckily was that.

Let's hope Lloydie of the Amazon returns to the jungle like a Japanese soldier unaware the war has ended, so that we might hear from him potentially in a decade or so with his potently potential insights.

Another reptile deciding to end with a whimper rather than an intergenerational bang ...

And where would the pond be without the triumphant return of Dame Groan as the capper, boldly proclaiming "we'll all be rooned", as if referencing The Castle yet again was some sort of new insight she was peddling. (Can't someone show the old biddy Muriel's Wedding so she can go around saying "oh you are terrible Jimbo"?)

Again Dame Groan was launched into the world with that hideous recycled and uncredited (AI?) graphic suggesting that the lizard Oz's budget was in as much trouble as the country.

Poor Dame Groan, forced to make out with Brownie's graphic, like Dolly made to wear rags and patches:

The header: Fifth time lucky for Jim? Tell him he’s dreaming; It’s almost comedic the lengths to which Jim Chalmers is prepared to go to ensure no blame is attributed to his actions.

Amazingly the old chook could only lather up a three minute groaning about dire Jimbo:

The second week of May is traditionally a time of great excitement for a federal treasurer. It’s the culmination of many meetings, decisions made and marketing plans mapped out.
Most of the budget details are strategically leaked, although some are held back so some interest lingers when the treasurer does rise in the house to deliver the budget speech.
Notwithstanding all this hard work, including for the Treasury bureaucrats putting in long hours, most budgets are quickly forgotten.
All that flowery rhetoric about the outstanding job the government is doing to manage the budget and oversee an improving economy simply falls on many, many deaf ears.
There have been exceptions. When Wayne Swan got up to announce four budget surpluses in 2012, we all got a good laugh.
Mind you, most of us can’t remember anything else about that budget.
The 2014 budget was a bit of clanger when Joe Hockey proposed a series of cost-cutting measures that hadn’t been previously mentioned and ultimately never passed parliament except for the income tax surcharge. (There is an important message here: the changes announced in budgets almost always require legislation, which does not always eventuate.)

Inevitably there was a snap of Dame Groan's foe: Treasurer Jim Chalmers takes questions from the media on arrival to Australian Parliament House ahead of handing down the 2026 budget on Tuesday night. Picture: Getty Images

The pond means no disrespect, but the old biddy could do with something a little less terrifying than that ominous ogre, who always sets her off ...

As she has done many times before, Dame Groan was determined to downplay the dire straits the world has been plunged into by mad King Donald.

(And who knows where the tariff wars will be after the mad King's visit to China?)

Dame Groan was determined not to let Jimbo wriggle off her hook, or escape her baleful ancient mariner eye:

This is the fifth budget Jim Chalmers has handed down. It carries on the theme that whatever has gone wrong with the economy or the hardship that ordinary folk have been feeling has nothing to do with his government.
Indeed, there is a whole box in the budget papers on the drivers of the recent increase in inflation but no mention of the role of excessive government spending.
It’s all about the war
It’s almost comedic the lengths to which Chalmers is prepared to go to ensure no blame is attributed to his actions.
Now it’s all about the Iran war, but it was the war in Ukraine before that.
The reality is these wars have made a net revenue contribution to the budget through the impact of higher commodity prices.
Talking of comedy, some of the tables in the budget papers look particularly weird. This financial year, the CPI is expected to increase by 5 per cent, but next financial year (and across the forward estimates), annual inflation miraculously returns to 2½ per cent. How good is that?
Obviously, Jim knows something about what is going to happen in the Strait of Hormuz that no one else does.

The caption for the next meaningless snap was a little Sir Echo of Dame Slap's line ... Does Jim Chalmers know something we don’t about the Strait of Hormuz? Picture: AFP/US Navy

None of this sort of nonsense please ...

With the notion that Australia had anything to do with the rest of the world and its fortunes banished from the old biddy's mind, she could sail on in her denunciation of Jimbo, and the pond could do a Donald and nod off (eyes closed means the pond is just blinking):

We’re also told not to worry about the decline in real wages this financial year because there will be (assumed) real wage growth in the out years.
Marginal reductions in underlying cash deficits forecast in the budget compared with the 2025 MYEFO are hard to take seriously. A difference of $3bn when the government is spending $830bn carries no bragging rights.
Chalmers is also deliberately misleading when he talks about savings and the budget being in better nick. He was very keen on the figure of $114bn as the savings and reprioritisations going into this year’s budget. The problem with this figure is that it’s a gross figure, not net.
Only the bottom-line matters, not the creative accounting he applies to arrive at a politically appealing figure. By 2029-30, gross government debt is expected to be $1.193 trillion or 35.6 per cent of GDP. This is up from $982bn next financial year, or 33.1 per cent of GDP.
Net interest payments go from $19.9bn to $31.7bn – a massive increase of 60 per cent.
This year’s budget adds another $64bn to these gross savings and reprioritisations.

Imagine the pond's disappointment that Dame Groan didn't reach for low hanging fruit, one of her stock in trade items ...

Instead she just resorted to a billy goat butt of uncertainty and assumptions ...

But here’s the thing: these savings are dominated by assumptions that apply to the immense scaling back in the NDIS. It’s worth quoting from the budget papers here. “Nominal growth in the NDIS is projected to decline from over 10 per cent in 2024–25 to an average of around 2 per cent between 2025–26 and 2029–30.
“As a share of GDP, NDIS expenditure is expected to decline from 1.7 per cent in 2025–26 to 1.6 per cent in 2028–29 and 1.5 per cent in 2029–30. Without the government’s recent changes, NDIS expenditure as a share of GDP would have been projected to exceed 2 per cent by 2029–30.”
Let’s be clear: there has never been a program that had been growing at more than 10 per cent being scaled back so drastically, so quickly. It beggars belief that the government will not face fierce blowback from affected groups, particularly as the useful reform of attaching co-payment to the scheme has been ruled out.
At least, the budget papers clarify the overall net saving figure. “Over the five years to 2029–30, net policy decisions improve the budget by $26.1bn, when accounting for previously made provisions.” That’s $5bn a year, close to a rounding error.

That's it? Wouldn't it have been simpler and quicker to just scribble "we'll all be rooned", and not finish with a whimper rather than a bang with talk of a "rounding error"?

The pond is certain that the budget will echo through the hive mind for days to come, but speaking of "butts", there is possibly a bigger game afoot than the reptiles v. Jimbo ...

And on the upside, it could be a whole lot worse, as Little England sinks into a mire and a deep funk:

In which the pond tries to cram all the reptiles into a hearty stew, with Dame Groan, ancient Troy and the bromancer as the succulent bits ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:59:00 +0000

The pond would like to begin the day by boasting how it's boycotting Eurovision, but as the pond has never watched the show, that's a tad hard.

To the consternation of the pond's gay friends, the pond has always said it would be rather be struck deaf and blind than take in that cacophony of trash, and so it will continue.

And now before beginning this day's reptile tour of duty, the pond was startled to see this story, and in the WSJ of all places ...

Talk about complete cheek and a colonial, or rather expansionist imperialist mindset..

More of the yarn here...

Israel Built and Defended a Secret Iran War Base in Iraq (*intermittent archive).

And now to the tour of duty, and the pond will confess that in its enforced absence, it will miss the old biddy's groaning into the digital ether.

That's why the pond gave Dame Groan pride of place, especially as she's still blathering on about the "vibe":

The header: The Treasurer is talking up tax reform, but the facts don’t add up; Tuesday night’s tax measures look set to fail the tests of efficiency, equity and simplicity but Jim Chalmers will still claim to be a reforming treasurer.

The caption for the outrageously laughing Jimbo, as he (allegedly) deals death, destruction and woe to the country: Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

It wouldn't matter a brass razoo what's in the actual budget, or what Jimbo did, or attempted to do.

In Dame Groan land, we'll all be rooned by Jimbo. He began by rooning us, he continued rooning us and this will just be the latest example of roonation ...

So the old biddy squawked, so the old biddy still groans ...

There was a time when Paul Keating declared that all the pet shop galahs were talking about microeconomic reform. If you believe many members of the press gallery and progressive commentators, those pet shop galahs are now squawking about tax reform.
You know the sort of thing. What do you want? Tax reform. When do you want it? Now.
It’s important in this context to question the objectives of some of those who participate in this debate. It’s generally about the vibe rather than the facts. Loose terms such as intergenerational equity, social cohesion and young people getting a fair crack are used to justify radical changes that had been explicitly ruled out by Labor in the election campaign.
Take the case of the tax on gas exports, a proposal that was loudly launched by various left-leaning individuals and groups over the past several months. The idea was that a 25 per cent export levy could potentially raise billions of dollars annually and wouldn’t cause any harm to domestic gas users.

The reptiles interrupted this groaning with a shot of the perfidious document in preparation: Production of the 2026-27 federal budget papers enters its final secure phase in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

As always, Dame Groan was gobsmacked. The thought of questioning Japan's ability to mark up our gas to extraordinary levels as it onsells the gas was nothing short of delusional, if not downright treacherous:

The naivety in this idea was breathtaking. The levy would not be paid by the gas producers, but by the customers. The delicate state of trade-related international diplomacy would be significantly unsettled, including our need for imported fuel.
But here’s the real rub: the proponents of this idea were not unhappy with the notion that this tax impost would deter further investment in the gas industry in this country. Indeed, this is seen as an upside of the policy. When it is pointed out that the investments on the east cost LNG industry would never have occurred had such a levy been in place, they regard this as missed opportunity.

Just to rub it in, Jimbo was shown clutching a copy of his wicked text, like some Satanic worshipper of evil: Jim Chalmers receiving his copy of the budget. Picture: Instagram

That snap of the man rooning the country (allegedly) sent Dame Groan off on a wild, extended groaning ...

When thinking about tax reform, there are three key criteria: efficiency, equity and simplicity. The aim should be to raise a certain amount of revenue at the least economic cost and as simply as possible while meeting equity objectives. Changes to the tax code should also be judged as a whole, rather than as individual measures.
There is also an important dictum – an old tax is a good tax. What this means is that the compliance costs are essentially sunk and the decisions made by individuals and organisations are based on long-established parameters in the tax code.
This is particularly important for investments in assets held over long periods of time. It’s also why grandfathering any changes is essential – to stay true to the basis on which legitimate decisions were made.
Having explicitly ruled out changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing, it now seems likely Tuesday’s budget will contain some significant changes on both fronts. The trouble for the Treasurer is that the consequences, both intended and unintended, of these changes are difficult to predict. There will be both short-term and medium-term effects.
One potentially serious consequence of altering the capital gains tax is the impact on start-ups, and entrepreneurship more broadly. The owners of start-up businesses often forgo current income for years in anticipation of reaping the benefit of a significant capital gain. They may also partly pay the staff in equity to conserve scarce cash.
It is interesting to note here, in Canada’s recent botched attempt to increase its rate of capital gains tax, there was a specific carve-out for start-ups. Commercially savvy Prime Minister Mark Carney at least understood the importance of this aspect of the change.
There is also likely to be a wrinkle to the change to the capital gains tax arrangement: the special deal that applies to superannuation funds is likely to be preserved. (Had this not been the case, we would have heard a great deal of wailing leading up to the budget.) What this means is that a further arbitrage will be created for investments by superannuation funds, entities highly favoured by Labor.
When it comes to negative gearing changes, the exit of individual investors in real estate – many mums and dads – may be replaced by large corporations managing large numbers of properties in a hands-off way. This is common in the US, for instance.
Companies can deduct all the costs of investment from their taxable income and will thus be favoured if the benefits of negative gearing are denied to individual investors. Ironically, some of the current investors with multiple properties – they attract particular scorn from the progressive crowd – may be able to establish companies that own the properties. Save for the transaction costs of the transfer, these investors may end up being no worse off.
The seeming aim of these changes is to tilt the playing field in favour of first-home buyers by discouraging investors. One problem is that many properties attractive to investors are not attractive to homeowners, particularly those with families.
There is also the potential problem of rising rents caused by the loss of the benefit of negative gearing and any increase in the capital gains tax. Investors will naturally focus more on cash flow rather than the ultimate capital increment.
This will make it harder for renters to save up for a home deposit, even the 5 per cent variety. For forever renters – and there is a substantial cohort of them – this will be unambiguously bad news.
There is also talk about changes to the tax arrangements that apply to trusts, including a minimum 25 per cent tax on trust income. Many years ago, the Coalition government toyed with the idea of altering the tax of trusts but concluded there were so many complications that it would simply end in tears.
Just think about it: there are discretionary trusts and unit trusts. There are testamentary trusts and disability trusts. There are trusts associated with superannuation and funds management. There are trusts attached to companies. There are trusts that hold farms over the generations. Many small businesses are set up as trusts.
It simply cannot be a one-size-fits-all. There is also some serious misunderstanding of how trusts work and how they are taxed.
In the case of a vanilla family trust, all income must be distributed each year, and tax is levied at the marginal rate of each beneficiary. Children under the age of 18 are taxed at a punitive rate. Losses cannot be distributed. In many cases, trusts are established to protect assets, not for the purpose of tax minimisation.
For wealthy families, establishing a minimum rate of tax will make no difference. This is not so for struggling small-business owners or other trust beneficiaries.
Excluding farm assets from the change is also fraught. An incentive will be created to include some farm-related assets within existing trusts to qualify. This is surely not an intended outcome.
I come back to those three criteria: efficiency, equity and simplicity. When judging the changes that will be announced on Tuesday night, bear them in mind. On the face of it, it seems highly unlikely that efficiency will be improved, particularly as any significant cuts to income tax won’t be part of the package. Simplicity will be sacrificed, without a doubt. The equity effects will be very unclear apart from damaging existing asset holders.
But Jim Chalmers will claim to be a reforming treasurer, which is what this is really all about.

Case closed.

Nothing Jimbo could do could possibly have impressed Dame Groan, because she's got his number (allegedly).

She's got the vibe.

We'll all be rooned, and likely before the year is out, and it has nothing at all to do with mad King Donald rooning the world's economies...

There was other reptile budget coverage, but the pond wasn't tempted ... not even by a canny Cranston EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Tax bracket creep will eat Jim Chalmers’ ‘WATO’ budget cash splash handout in financial year 2027
Jim Chalmers’ budget sweetener will only return half of what bracket creep costs average workers, while a 30 per cent capital gains tax looms.
By Matthew Cranston

... even though it began with an astonishing collage which shockingly was uncredited...

Goes without saying. Just as Dame Groan called the vibe, doomed before it even begins.We'll all be rooned, before the year is out...

Nor could the pond find room for indefatigable Geoff, chambering what seems an inexhaustible supply of rounds ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
PM and Chalmers are in ‘sync’ and all smiles – but this is an ambitious Treasurer
Anthony Albanese and his Treasurer, whose ambition is undisputed, were all smiles as they met on Monday to discuss their trickiest budget to date.

Does this Jimbo seem ambitious?

Geoff says he is ambitious;
And, sure, as far as reptiles can go, he is no doubt an honourable man.
The pond speaks not to disprove what Geoff spoke.

Let this teaser trailer cry to the heavens ...

A Betoota analysis. Now there's the vibe. No wonder we'll all be rooned before the year is out ...

And now speaking of slinky seductresses, the pond should note this story, yet another reptile EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Hanson’s challenge to Coalition: Let’s get together to beat Labor (*intermittent archive)
Pauline Hanson demands the Coalition guarantee support for a One Nation-led government if it wins more seats than them at the next election.
By Rosie Lewis

The pond only offers that teaser as a further example of the way the reptiles at the lizard Oz continue to do mischief, a form of mischief-making denounced by the keen Keane in Crikey...

Everywhere the Liberals look, the feral right and their News Corp friends are killing them
The collapse of the Liberal vote in Farrer is only the end stage of a process that’s been underway for a long time — the destruction of the Liberal Party as a centrist organisation (Sorry, possible paywall)

The Murdochians as sleeper agents? So the pond has been doing a Smiley ...

From there it was a natural segue to ancient Troy in the slough of despond ...

The header: Liberal Party faces terminal decline after catastrophic Farrer by-election loss; Losing one of its longest-held seats is a result that threatens Liberals’ survival, yet Angus Taylor is clueless about how to respond.

The caption for the oopsy daisy snap: Opposition Leader Angus Taylor at Lavington Public school polling booth on Saturday. Picture: Simon Dallinger/ NewsWire

To say that the pond enjoyed ancient Troy's four minute tale of woe and misery and despair is possibly an understatement:

Angus Taylor failed his first major test as Liberal leader, losing one of the Coalition’s longest-held seats at the Farrer by-election. He now leads a party with fewer MPs than when he took over just three months ago. Moreover, he has no viable strategy to deal with the existential threat facing the Liberals from the rise of not only One Nation but also the teal independents.
We are witnessing the continued destruction of the Liberal Party, uncertain of its identity and purpose, unclear about who it represents, losing members, voters and donors, and plagued by organisational and leadership weakness. The extremist far-right One Nation, which claimed Farrer with almost 40 per cent of the primary vote, will pose a major threat to the Liberal Party’s viability.

The chief villains in ancient Troy's yarn: Taylor and Senator Matthew Canavan chat wih a voter. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Dallinger

Ancient Troy couldn't resist another recounting of an origin story beloved by reptiles:

Farrer includes the border town of Albury, where the second conference to form the Liberal Party was held in December 1944. It took place at Mate’s Lounge over three days, and delegates agreed on a platform and constitution, structure and operating principles, with the goal of encouraging “individual initiative and enterprise”.
Eight decades on, Liberal tradition is being erased across Australia. I’ve noted before that every seat held by Liberal leaders, apart from two – Malcolm Fraser’s Wannon and Scott Morrison’s Cook – have been lost to Labor or independents. We can add Sussan Ley’s Farrer. It charts how the party has lost its heartland and is disappearing from the electoral map.
The loss of Farrer is directly related to Taylor’s Liberal leadership challenge to Ley in February, the party’s first female leader. Ley’s resignation was always likely if toppled by Taylor. But an opposition losing a seat at a by-election is extremely rare. Farrer was comfortably held by the Liberal and National parties since Robert Menzies led the Coalition to victory in December 1949.

Oh dear: Taylor and Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski pose for photos. Picture: AFP

And still the unravelling continued, as Susssan was as graceful as she was when she conceded to the lettuce.

Not like that humbug beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, the wind turbine wonder:

Ley, travelling overseas, departed the leadership and the parliament with dignity and grace. She said nothing that could harm the party’s chances and gave no interviews. Taylor was given a clear run to defend and hold the seat. “I urge the Liberal leadership to accept this result with humility because the voters never get it wrong,” Ley said in a statement.
Taylor’s speech in the wake of defeat was extraordinary. “This by-election was always going to be a mountain to climb for the Liberal Party,” he said.
Yet it has been a Liberal seat since November 2001. “We have been a party of convenience, not of conviction,” he added.
Like conviction on lower taxes, deficits and debt? As shadow treasurer, he supported higher taxes and larger deficits than Labor.
“The Coalition hasn’t done what it should do: be united, stable and strong,” Taylor also noted. The Coalition did split; Nationals leader David Littleproud did face a leadership spill and later quit. But Taylor, too, has been part of that disunity and instability with his takedown of Ley.
The cost of toppling a leader is rarely factored in; this time it was the loss of a relatively safe seat. The result is that the Liberal Party has lost more of its heartland. The May 2022 election brought a warning that it was in crisis, but MPs, officials, members and past leaders routinely ignored it. Yet that was abundantly clear when voters bundled Morrison’s government out of office with brutal efficiency.
In Farrer, the Liberal Party was relegated to third place with just 12.3 per cent of the vote, a swing of 31 per cent since the May 2025 election. The incumbent party was almost wiped out. In the March 2026 South Australian election, the Liberal Party also came third with a miserable 18.9 per cent of the primary vote. The Liberal Party is going out of business.
While the focus is rightly on One Nation’s triumph, winning its first House of Representatives seat at an election, independent Michelle Milthorpe came second in Farrer with 28 per cent of the vote. The independent and teal movement – Milthorpe denies being a teal – represents another major threat to the Liberals having snatched several seats and (mostly) holding them. Labor could also be vulnerable to One Nation in the outer suburbs.

Then came a snap of the betrayed: Michelle Millthorpe lashed the Coalition for preferencing One Nation ahead of her.

Ancient Troy was inconsolable as he shouted his despair to the high heavens:

The Liberal Party’s task, as ever, is to return to the mainstream centre-right. It should not mimic One Nation’s xenophobic and nativist policies and rhetoric, as Taylor has done on immigration. One Nation has not changed; it is the same grievance rather than solutions- based, far-right extremist party. Most of its voters have given up on the major parties and are lodging protest votes.
It was catastrophic for the Liberal Party to direct preferences to One Nation. Coalition preferences helped delivered a One Nation victory in Farrer. This will keep happening, across Australia, unless the Liberal Party takes One Nation on, critiquing its policies and leadership, and preferences it last. One Nation is toxic to mainstream Liberal voters who have turned to Labor, teals and independents.
Yet shadow treasurer Tim Wilson is open to forming a coalition with One Nation. On Sunday, he did not rule it out. Those words will be an albatross around his neck. Labor’s 2028 election campaign strategy is written: vote Liberal or National and you may get One Nation in a three-party Coalition government. This will only hasten the Liberal Party’s demise.
At the conclusion of the Albury conference that formed the Liberal Party, Menzies spoke in response to a motion thanking him for his efforts.
“We have brought into existence for the first time in the history of Australia the Liberal Party of Australia,” he said. “This is the first occasion on which those of, broadly speaking, our political way of thought have established themselves on an Australian footing.”
That party, organisation, leadership and “political way of thought” have lost their footing. The Liberal Party looks to be in terminal decline without a radical rethink of its purpose, policies, constituency, organisation and leadership.
We may look back on Albury as the place where the Liberal Party was born and where it died.

"We may"?!

Oh come now ancient Troy, that's a fudge worthy of the beefy boofhead himself.

And now the pond will admit in this farewell tour to throwing everything at the wall, including the kitchen sink, knowing nothing will stick, but how could the pond leave out its most prized exhibit, another chapter in the deep thoughts of the bromancer?

Unlike wimpy, creepy ancient Troy, the bro was up for the fight. He was onion muncher mad, fighting fit and ready for a trip back to the future ...

The header: Hanson, Farage and Trump show centre-right must fight or die; To prove they are serious, Liberals must engage on net zero and elect Tony Abbott as party president, otherwise the party could be totally eclipsed.

The caption for the snap of the epic fails: Farrer candidate Raissa Butkowski with Angus Taylor, who did manage to mention net zero in his later speech to the handful of Liberals who stayed for their election wake. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Dallinger

The bro was keen for the beefy boofhead to maintain the rage, and pace the keen Keane, what better way that to go full King Donald, full mad far right climate science denialist?

Here’s a critically important take-out from the Farrer by-election. Almost 65 per cent of all voters chose parties that explicitly reject net-zero emissions targets. Yet for how long have we been told that it would be electoral death for any party to oppose net zero in principle?
The Liberals and Nationals were right to give preferences to One Nation, just as Labor preferences the Greens. On any measure, the Greens, whose policy outlook and rhetoric enable antisemitism and whose actual economic policies are nuts, are vastly more toxic than anything One Nation has ever been.
One Nation, in the way of many right-of-centre populist parties that sustain a parliamentary existence over decades, has moderated over the years. It is certainly no longer racist, if it ever was.
In Farrer, too much of the Liberals’ campaign was directed at badmouthing One Nation, rather than holding the Albanese government to account and offering a compelling economic and social vision for regional Australia. The failure to fight on net zero is key.

But there’s obviously a much deeper story to tell.

Uh huh, the deeper story is to join Pauline in her climate science denialism, thereby ensuring absolutely no product differentiation whatsoever. Bring on the seducer of reptiles: One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

The bromancer was keen for the beefy boofhead to emulate such feats as the Brexit triumph...

Pauline Hanson, Britain’s Nigel Farage and US President Donald Trump are manifestations – and there are more on continental Europe – of the same underlying impulse. That is a conviction by sizeable numbers of voters that the political system no longer works. Not just that it no longer works for them, but that it’s gone wrong fundamentally.
Of course Trump, Farage and Hanson are wildly unalike. Yet all three evidence similar impulses and syndromes in similar societies. Trump is the most consequential disrupter. But Farage has already fundamentally changed British history. Without him, Brexit would never have taken place. A few days ago he won a staggering victory in local council elections held over most of Britain, and came second to the nationalist party in the Welsh assembly, pushing Labour into a humiliating third. Reform came equal second in Scotland, again humiliating Labour in a former heartland.

Speaking of manifestations, the pond regrets not having found a space for the immortal Rowe celebrating Nige and Sir David ...

Oh dear, speaking of more manifestations, not that scarf again: David Farley, the day after his election in Farrer.

Consider again the many virtues of climate science denialism, and not just an eternally stuffed planet to bequeath to the younglings. Everybody wants to stuff the planet, so why not join the cause?

If an election were held today, Farage’s Reform would go close to a majority. That doesn’t mean Farage will perform that well when an election finally arrives. Like Trump, Farage defies political niceties and orthodoxies, though he certainly is nowhere near as foul-mouthed or verbally undisciplined as Trump.
But consider, again, net zero. Farage is utterly contemptuous of net zero commitments and just won very big. Farage and the Conservatives combined score just under half the popular vote in Britain. They, and a couple of smaller parties, now thoroughly oppose net zero. Even Tony Blair says the Labour government should ease back on net zero, as so many other developed countries are doing, either pulling back their official targets or quietly going for more fossil fuel development and power generation.
Across Asia this is undisguised. In much of Europe, it’s happening a bit more shamefacedly. Almost the last true-believing net-zero governments are Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain and Anthony Albanese’s in Australia. Britain, in all its mess, is probably Australia’s future.
I mention all this because it goes to the heart of the Liberals’ contemporary dilemma. The Coalition has renounced net zero. But having done so, Angus Taylor and the Liberals almost never mention the fact. It seems they quietly try to reassure country electorates that they’re done with net zero, but do so in such a sotto voce way that they hope city electorates such as Wentworth and Kooyong won’t notice they’ve changed.

Could the reptiles resist slipping in a terrifying snap of an infernal windmill, the carcasses of dead whales just out of frame so as not to upset the hive mind?

Of course they couldn't: The Coalition renounced net zero, but the failure to fight on it is key. Picture: Christophe Archambault / AFP

The bromancer pressed his point by conscripting his favourite Catholic scribbler, truly an indication of where his mind resides, an eternal Edwardian (born Victorian):

But here’s a simple law of political physics. Changing a policy then not campaigning on it doesn’t win you the support of those who hated the policy, nor does it win you the acquiescence of those who support the policy you’ve abandoned. As my hero, GK Chesterton, observed, it’s the willingness to die fighting that gives the brave soldier a chance of surviving a terrible battle, where the coward has no chance at all.
One Nation’s winning candidate in Farrer, David Farley, gave a stirring speech to his supporters after victory was declared. It was full of specific things he, and One Nation, wanted to do, among them tearing up net zero in order to once more produce cheaper power for Farrer communities. The Liberals should oppose net zero as economic policy.

Of course. What a vision. Stuff the planet and all will be well.

The reptiles decided to offer the prime Angus a little AV distraction: Opposition Leader Angus Taylor says the Coalition is now “strong” under his leadership. Mr Taylor said “we are back” and ready to work together with the National Party. “This will pay dividends over time, I will guarantee it.”

The bromancer pressed his point. The planet might be facing an existential crisis, but what a chance to get ahead by denying it was happening, or better still, making it even worse...

Angus Taylor did manage to mention net zero in his later speech to that tiny handful of Liberals who stayed for their election wake. Managerial politicians typically try to avoid conflict and hard choices. But especially in the era of populist disruption, politicians who don’t make and stick to hard choices die the coward’s death of a thousand cuts. The Coalition has had one big victory in recent years, defeating the voice. The Liberals were a quiver of indecision on the matter. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s courage and conviction forced the Nationals to take a stand, and that forced the Liberals to follow. Then Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine’s brilliant, passionate campaigning won the day.
Initially, the polls were against Nampijinpa Price and Mundine. They did what’s meant to happen in a democracy – they won the public argument. Initially, the polls were against Farage on Brexit. He won the policy debate with the British people.
The Liberals face existential crisis. They must fight like hell to show they have convincing economic arguments and that must mean fighting on net zero. To have any chance of a centre-right government, they must exchange preferences with One Nation. One task is to beat One Nation on primary votes.
It’s similar in Britain. If the Conservatives enter an election campaign well behind Reform in opinion polls, voters who badly don’t want Labour in office will tend to vote Reform.
One way the Australian Liberals can show they’re serious is electing Tony Abbott as party president. He will galvanise the base, energise the party, project purpose, and he’s a gifted fundraiser who will work hand in glove with his friend, Taylor.
All mainstream centre-right parties face a choice: fight or die. As the old saying goes: if you must be a dog, make sure you’re an Alsatian.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Why didn't the pond think of that?

Why does the bromancer always have the most perfect solutions? Bring back the onion muncher so that ludditism, far right fundamentalist, and climate science denialism might flourish one more time.

Yes, if you want to stuff the planet, make sure to stuff it in best far right Brexit fashion, and then we'll all enjoy the return to the days of the onion muncher of yore ...

And if you can't beat 'em, remember to join 'em ...

Further to the pond's opening, is the god of Israel inclined to genocide?

You betcha ... the things that you're liable to read in the bible start with a hearty genocide:

Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

A mass extinction event, and more at the Skeptic's bible showing god willing to get down with it, and urging his people to do the same.

And then there's this ... perhaps a tad ponderous and pedantic, but convincing up against the genocide deniers:

So the current government of Israel, which has form, has some pretty impressive biblical verses to quote in aid of its ongoing ethic cleansing ...

The pond is on the move ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:09:00 +0000

In a short time, the pond will be upping stakes lock, stock and barrel, leaving Sydney and moving south.

That means that after next weekend, the pond will perforce cease to trade, perhaps for quite some time.

At such moments, the pond tends to get a bit nostalgic.

It's been a long road, which started way back on 20th July 2008, when a piece by a certain Michael Duffy, Strength of US evangelicals is one of the big myths of our time (*intermittent archive link) sent the pond into such a frenzy that the pond immediately set up a blog and began abusing the hapless chap.

(To revive that ancient argument, the pond trusts that any female friend of the Duffster in a US state run by fundamentalist Xian bigots isn't in search of an abortion, or even, it seems in the near future, contraceptive services. The pond also hopes that the Duffster has caught up on the way the evangelicals gave the world King Donald the redeemer).

In those days, the pond traded under Duffy's name, which the pond regrets, but the pond does take credit for turning the Duffster into a much more useful member of society than being a Fairfax hack keeping company with the likes of Paul Sheehan (oh the texture and the cost of Paddington bread).

Over the years, after dallying with the likes of the fat owl of the remove in the Daily Terror (the much loved Akker Dakker) and little Timmie Bleagh, the pond settled on the reptiles at the lizard Oz, what with them being the most pretentious and dangerous of the Emeritus Chairman's brood.

Some eighteen years of blogging, allowing for medical emergencies of the heart attack kind, and some time off, is a long time to be in the company of reptiles, and in the last few years, the pond has only stayed in the game for the pleasure of reading correspondents' commentary below the fold.

The pond isn't saying never - never say never, because otherwise you could end up appearing in a really bad James Bond film - but perforce the pond will have to focus on making the shift, so this week's tour of duty will be the last major outing with the hive mind for some time to come.

The pond intends to relish the opportunity, starting with what's on offer this Monday in the lizard Oz.

The pond had hoped to begin the celebrations in a bigly way with Lord Downer's latest insights about the best ways to fix the country and the planet, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Could this be a sign? The pond had been certain his incredible genius would have allowed him to save the Liberal party while still being a scribbler for the lizard Oz, but maybe not. Maybe arcane intrigues distracted him this week ...

Instead the pond was left with the Caterist trying to cope ...

The header: ‘Sick of the lot of you’: Farrer insurgency a warning for both Liberal and Labor; Farrer voters have delivered a stunning rejection of Australia’s major parties, with four out of five casting ballots for minor parties and independents in a dramatic political uprising.

The caption for the Pauline peril showing off her status as Gina's new pet: Pauline Hanson departs from Albury in her new private plane after One Nation candidate David Farley was elected in the federal seat of Farrer. Picture: Ash Smith

That headline including the line insurgency a warning for both Liberal and Labor made the pond wonder just how badly the Labor candidate had done in terms of votes.

When the pond checked the tally, the pond was reminded that Labor hadn't actually bothered to run a candidate.

The TCP battle was between an independent and One Nation, and it was the Liberals and The Nationals that had copped the thrashing.

There's no doubt the Labor government is on the nose in some quarters - the lizard Oz reminds the pond on a daily basis - but this was totally on the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, not to mention a reluctance to join the Canavan caravan (who has even less to be proud of than that band of ragamuffins' former leader).

Don't drag everyone into a mess entirely of the Liberal party's making, what with the way they reduced one time local member Susssan to competing with a lettuce ...

Now marvel at the way that the Caterist attempts to conflate and confuse...

At the 2013 Tony Abbott landslide election, four out of five voters in Farrer voted for the Coalition or Labor.
On Saturday, the old normal was flipped as four out of five cast their votes for none of the above.
Released from the discipline of choosing the next prime minister, voters were free to indulge emotions normally suppressed and tell the political elite what they really thought. The message, written so large it was visible from space, could be summarised in seven syllables: we’re sick of the lot of you.
The scale and deliberateness of the Farrer insurgency suggest this was more than a knee-jerk reaction to the resignation of a sitting party leader.
It was the clearest expression yet of the political realignment that has ended the political duopoly that has held since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944. That also happened in Albury, as it happens, where the party convened for the first time in an unassuming room above the Mates department store.
That, too, was a revolt against the elite of sorts. The real life of this nation, Robert Menzies maintained, was not to be found in great luxury hotels, the so-called fashionable suburbs or in the officialdom of the union movement.
“It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised,” he said, “who see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race.”

Albury? Again the pond had to check, and as Antony Green patiently explained, around Albury voters were pretty much all in for the independent; it was out Woop Woop way that the voters went One Nation, proving that NSW in spots can be as deep north as any cane toad.

Again don't try to drag Labor into the mud in a seat that has always been held by a Liberal or Nationals party member.

But the Caterist has to do his best to cope at the dire spectacle of a man wearing a scarf ... David Farley the day after his election. Picture: Ash Smith

Eek, a rustic poseur with the fashion sense of a frump.

In classic flood waters in quarries mode, the water whisperer did some field research:

Nameless and unadvertised people filed through the gates of Jindera Public School on the suburban fringes of Albury at the weekend with a peculiar sense of purpose.
These were hardly the dickheads and dinosaurs veteran journalist Ray Martin described in his revealing description of the archetypal No voter at the voice referendum. It’s worth noting that 75 per cent of Farrer voters rejected that elitist frolic too.
Jindera is as conservative as it gets. The absence of a Labor candidate was barely noticed (especially by the Caterist) and the sole Greens representative sat brooding on a wall under an Akubra, hugging a small pile of how-to-vote cards close to his chest.
There were conservative candidates to suit every taste: One Nation, Family First, People First and a bunch of independents. With the Liberals and Nationals standing separately, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers were the only coalition on the ballot paper, although a split between the gun owners and rod-bearers is surely only a matter of time.
Then there was Michelle Milthorpe, a Jindera local who turned up to vote surrounded by a coterie of the national press. Milthorpe denies allegiance to any party, especially the teals who shun party status. Independence, or its appearance, is the favoured political currency of the day.
My lengthy drive down the Hume Highway to spend a day at a polling booth proved far more agreeable than it sounds. It was also informative. During 10 hours of pleasant conversation among volunteers in the late autumn sunshine, climate change was not raised once. Discussion about fossil fuel was confined to the price of diesel.

The reptiles then decided to remind the pond that it was man who had little to be proud of who drove Tamworth's enduring shame into Pauline's arms ...Barnaby Joyce, speaks to voters outside a polling booth in Albury for the Farrer by-election on Saturday. Picture: Getty Images

Around this moment in his navel gazing, the Caterist seemed to realise that Labor hadn't fielded a candidate ...

At Jindera, delightfully, the old taboos about discussing religion and politics with strangers still hold. So too does the Australian instinct not to dwell on your own bad luck, in the certain knowledge that others are doing it tougher.
Yet it hardly needs stating that in a town in which half of households are paying off a mortgage and three out of four households own two or more cars, interest rates and the cost of energy bite hard.
The Liberals – the party of homeowners and sound economic management – should be romping home in Jindera. The party that believes in rewarding enterprise and thrift should be crushing a loose-spending, big-government government in the polls.
That they are not is no credit to Labor, which by declining to field a candidate denied voters the opportunity to test whether a second Albanese term commands any greater enthusiasm than the first.

It seems unlikely that Labor would have performed better than it did in the election a year ago, when support slumped to 5.6 per cent in Jindera and 15 per cent in the seat as a whole.

So why bother? Why turn up to a flogging so that the likes of the Caterist and the lizard Oz could mock them?

Finally the Caterist had to attempt to deal with the fate of the beefy boofhead, and in the first refuge of the scoundrel, turned to Shakspere, as a way of dragging Labor into the affray in classic both siderest way ...

To say the Liberals performed badly would be comical understatement. Yet the insurrection was not aimed exclusively at the Liberal Party, nor was it a particular reflection on Angus Taylor’s leadership, whatever the ill-judged Saturday night statement from his predecessor might imply. A breach of trust this wide with the electorate cannot be repaired in eight weeks or even eight months. Indeed, eight years might be pushing it, although for the sake of our sanity let’s hope not.
Voters were not railing against a single party any more than the scorn of Mercutio distinguished between the Montagues or the Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
The sentiment on Saturday is captured in the play’s crowning phrase, “A plague o’ both your houses! They have made worms’ meat of me”, albeit expressed in more prosaic language. Both parties have been given a chance and both in the eyes of Farrer voters have irredeemably blown it.

Nah, the Labor party wisely didn't stand, so it was all on the beefy boofhead ... Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor in Laverton on Saturday could at least enjoy a lighter moment with a young voter of the future. Picture: Getty Images

Then came a final gobbet of the Caterist trying to cope, and sounding a bit like a defamation judgement had been awarded against him, and though it's perhaps wrong, the pond was vastly amused:

Saturday’s result leaves Australia in a dangerous and uncertain position, as revolutionary change almost always does.
It was an emphatic repudiation of the old order without articulating what might follow. Farrer voters clearly want Labor out. Yet the question of how Labor can be toppled under the novel rules of asymmetric politics was left hanging.
Australia’s peculiar instant run-off preferential voting system inevitably reduces general elections to a two-sided presidential contest. Taylor remains the clear favourite for the role of challenger.
What role will One Nation play in this? No one, not even Pauline Hanson, appears to know.
As the federal election draws closer, Hanson can expect tougher questions about One Nation’s true intentions, beyond the eminently achievable ambition of holding the balance of power in the Senate and scattering conservative preferences willy-nilly.
In the meantime, Taylor’s task is not to drag the Liberal Party to the right or the left. That sterile debate in the party has pretty much run its course. His job is to pull a top-heavy party with too many chiefs and precious few Indians back into the real world, the one outside the metropolitan bubble, exemplified by the seat of Farrer, a three and a half-hour drive and half a world away from the Canberra parliamentary triangle.
Amid the multipolar confusion of the new political landscape, Menzies’ conception of the Forgotten People remains the defining reference point.
Our future is in the hands of the great, sober and dynamic middle-class – the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones. As the Liberals discovered on Saturday, we dismiss them at our peril.

At that point, a Golding 'toon came to mind ...

Or Lord Downer?

After all that the pond had to pass over simpleton Simon's analysis, and here the intermittent archive came in handy, as the simplistic one went full apocalyptic...

How Farrer is rewriting our political history – and our future
The Liberal Party’s collapse in Farrer is not a story of gradual decline. It has been rapid and spectacular.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

The pond couldn't bear to show the dire opening Leak cartoon, but this teaser trailer will show just how desperate the reptiles are sounding, with the simplistic one going against the Caterist's remedies what ails them, by suggesting an alliance with Pauline, proposing that the Nats might split or just disappear, and calling on the beefy boofhead to somehow fix things ... (as if, this Angus ain't so prime)...

Indeed, indeed ...

What else?

Saul was over on the far right ...

Equity gas push is more of a socialist ploy in Greens’ clothing
Populist sentiment is now driving energy policy from every direction. But the knee-jerk solution – more government
By Saul Kavonic

For those who came in late, Saul is a reliable renewable energy basher, with a devotion to the private sector (how else to make a living as a consultant?) and oodles of implied climate science denialism.

There's only so much Saul the pond can take, even on a celebratory tour of duty... and so the pond checked the other far right offerings, and as expected of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Is anyone listening to testimony at Bell royal commission?
The royal commission’s findings will be critical but it’s the openness of the bulk of the population and their willingness to respond in kind, that will be equally critical in healing our country.
By Vic Alhadeff

Perhaps it was the news of the defiling of a grave by West Bank settlers that made the pond a tad less interested... Settlers force exhumation of Palestinian man from West Bank grave, family says

Usually at this moment, the pond would turn to the Major for a final word, but the Major had gone there ...

ABC, Nine papers ignore true plight of Indigenous children
Indigenous children will continue to suffer unless media confronts uncomfortable truths
A five-year-old’s death has triggered the same political paralysis that has plagued Aboriginal child protection for three decades.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

The pond has more than a fair degree of contempt for anyone attempting to make political capital out of the death of a child, and to use that death to bash rival news organisations, but Major Mitchell has no sense of shame. That doesn't mean the pond has to pay attention to him as he seeks new ways to find new lows ...

So the pond turned back to the triumphalism over in the "news" section, which saw news of the dire straits the world is in pushed down the page early in the morning ...

Always with the renewables bashing, this time with Katy helping the reptiles ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Supercharged’ climate funding can’t last forever, Gallagher admits
The Finance Minister concedes the government cannot sustain its current rate of climate spending as Labor lays the groundwork for breaking promises in Tuesday’s budget.
By Greg Brown

Well played Katy, and just after that the reptiles dug up an entirely new snap of Jimbo smirking and simpering ...

Enough already, the intermittent archive for all that lot ...

The indefatigable Geoff chambered another round, and what better way to do it than by invoking Comrade Bill?

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Labor’s budget threatens legacy of division, as voters rage against the machine
Perhaps Bill Shorten’s name should feature as a co-author of the Albanese government’s fifth budget.

Could Geoff have done better? Easily ... perhaps comrade Bill Shorten's and Comrade Dan Andrews names should feature as co-authors of the budget ...

Fixed.

Geoff eventually ended with a whimper...

Albanese and Labor are benefiting from a favourable preferential voting system and the fact that conservative forces in Australia have never been so divided.
Pragmatic Liberals and Nationals realise that dealing with One Nation is not the same as in the 1990s. That means preferences deals at state and federal elections and political alliances to unseat Labor governments will be considered.

That didn't stop Geoff from trying again, this time team tagging to pump up the volume for Gina's pet performing seal...

BY-ELECTION VICTORY
Migrants are on our side, Hanson claims
One Nation believes migrants are on their side as they target Labor
One Nation has set its sights on Labor’s western Sydney strongholds after claiming migrant voters helped deliver its historic Farrer victory.
By Geoff Chambers and Elizabeth Pike

Sure, what ever you and Liz say Geoff...

In that "news" splash there was one other "top of the world ma" story, an accompaniment to Major Mitchell's outing ...

EXCLUSIVE
Where are all these town camp millions going?
Millions in funding questioned as Alice Springs residents decry unliveable homes
Residents live without working doors or taps while the corporation meant to help them outspends an entire city council on wages.
By Liam Mendes and Christine Middap

Finally the pond simply had to admire this latest example of never ending reptile jihads ...

Lattouf unloads at Aunty as she’s allowed back on air
Antoinette Lattouf invited back by ABC to spruik her book and uses opportunity to unleash
Antoinette Lattouf has used her ABC comeback to unleash on the broadcaster, claiming she suffered trauma while admitting she forgets supporters vandalised ABC buildings in support of her.
By Steve Jackson

Once you're the target of a lizard Oz jihad, the elephant never forgets and keeps carrying out the jihad with the ferocity of the Taliban ...

And so to a few notes on weekend reading. This one in Bezos's shame caught the eye, as it's unusual for the lamestream media to pay attention to this sort of caper ...

How Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire lost its grip on the conservative internet
Once ascendant in right-wing media, the “anti-woke” company now faces contentious layoffs, ideological battles and dwindling relevance online.

The pond loves wallowing in the world of far right American loons.

And close by was a story explaining the level of political debate in the US, whereby posting a snap of seashells can get you in trouble ...

They’re not saying someone should kill Trump. But they’re coming close.
“Somebody should do it” and its variants have become increasingly popular online memes.

Well played Mr Bezos.

And the grifter in chief carries on, and for this one the Variety headline is sufficient unto itself

Trump Media, Parent of Truth Social, Reports Q1 Sales of $871,000 and $405.9 Million Net Loss (*internet archive link)

And now it's up to the immortal Rowe to have the final word ...

And as one comment on this video noted, "I wouldn't trust Putin to walk my dog".

In which the bromancer does over Sir Keir, the dog botherer does over Albo, and Polonius does the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:00:00 +0000

For the first time in many years, the pond decided to strip Polonius of his "first on Sunday" rank.

The reason will become obvious below, but it allowed the pond to catch up on some other items.

Even so, there had to be some also rans, some try hards, some losers and dropkicks and some whom the pond couldn't feign the slightest interest ...

Off to the intermittent archive with them, with appropriate thoughts and prayers, and all the best for anyone sailing on these ships...

This crisis ‘harder than the GFC was’
From GFC to Trump: Jim rates budget degree of difficulty
Jim Chalmers describes next Tuesday’s budget as having a higher ‘degree of difficulty’ than Labor’s big-spending stimulus response to the global financial crisis.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

A shift from butter to guns to thrive in a dangerous world
Our defence has relied since 2024 on a ‘strategy of denial’, which means arming up to the point where an adversary believes the cost of using martial force to get what it wants is too high.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

‘Rent-a-womb’ industry looms as review pushes for commercial surrogacy in Australia
Commercialising Mother’s Day sentiment is one thing, but what of the commercialisation of motherhood itself? Two law inquiries are attempting to do just that.
By Angela Shanahan

That stern talk of the need to shift from butter to guns (butter? Another reptile stuck in the 1950s) really should have belonged to the bromancer, always a war monger of the first water, but this weekend he turned his attention to Sir Keir's decline and fall ...

The header: Keir Starmer’s leadership in crisis after Labour election disaster, fuelling fears for Britain’s future; The PM is surely finished after the Labour election disaster. Nigel Farage is the new giant of British politics.

The caption for the thankfully uncredited visual mess typical of the lizard Oz style (what on earth is that grey blob?): Keir Starmer, with his 18 per cent approval rating, has comprehensively messed up leadership.

The pond was reminded of the sort of conversation you can have with an angry Reform voter.

You're angry about the economy and lack of opportunity? You do realise that Brexit did significant damage to the British economy, and continues to do damage? And that Reform led the way on Brexit? So you'll cheerfully vote for the party that did the country significant harm?

Worked for King Donald, didn't it? Go Nige ...we could have a tariff-led, non-European recovery because the rest of the world is wasting away waiting for British products.

It seems it's still hard to accept the realities of the end of Empire.

But enough of the sheeple, it's time for the bromancer to bury the hatchet:

Keir Starmer is a failed Prime Minister, leading a badly failed government, in a failing politics. The drubbing Labour has taken in local council elections on Thursday, losing hundreds of councillors, and in Welsh and Scottish assembly elections, indicates a party and leader in crisis, a nation barely scraping along the bottom of public policy. In a seismic result, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is the big winner.
Starmer, with his 18 per cent approval rating, has comprehensively messed up leadership. His failure is epic. He’s as unpopular as Liz Truss, as chaotic as Boris Johnson, as ineffectual as Theresa May, as isolated as Jeremy Corbyn, his efforts to explain mistakes and scandals as unconvincing as Joe Biden’s were. He has the charisma of Gordon Brown, the campaigning panache of Peter Dutton.

Ouch, fancy including the mutton Dutton in that list.

The reptiles then quickly interrupted with an AV distraction: TalkTV host Peter Cardwell has predicted the UK Labour Party to do “very badly” and Reform to do “very well”. “The pressure is on already on Keir Starmer. The vultures certainly were circling in regard to his own position,” he told Sky News Australia. “Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, he’s going to be a very happy man later on today.”

TalkTV is still a thing?

Apparently it's online, but the pond remembers the Emeritus Chairman's glory days way back in 2022, Piers Morgan ratings dive as talkTV struggles to attract viewers:

Flagship show audience down 80% after launch and rating agency detects ‘zero viewers’ for other key slots
Rupert Murdoch’s talkTV television channel has been rated as having “zero viewers” during primetime broadcasts, as the new television channel struggles to attract an audience despite signing up Piers Morgan as a presenter.
The News Desk, the channel’s hour-long political show hosted by Tom Newton Dunn, did not register a single viewer for half of its Tuesday evening broadcast. Although this does not rule out the possibility that some people were watching somewhere in the UK, it means the television audience was so small that it was not picked up by official rating agency, the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board.

The pond loves to remember the Chairman's greatest hits, as the bromancer sank in the knife again:

This election shows British politics shattered into shards of incoherence. The government leaks constantly against itself like Richard Nixon’s administration in its last days.
Sharks are circling Starmer. Angela Rayner, who resigned from cabinet because of tax irregularities, Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who isn’t even in parliament, all think they’d do a better job than Starmer. They could hardly do worse. They’re all challenging from the left, when it’s left policies that have failed dismally. Woeful as Britain’s performance has recently been, it could get worse.
British politics is confused, as polarised as American but less coherent. The worst development is the rise of the Green Party, led by the execrable Zack Polanski. The British Greens, who make Australia’s Greens look like Roosevelt Democrats, won big in some Muslim neighbourhoods on the cause of Gaza (obviously central to British local government). They’re normalising antisemitism and racism. They’re worse than Corbyn.
One Green candidates. (sic, later corrected) posted an illustration of a giant serpent, with the Star of David on its skin, devouring the Earth, and also declared Donald Trump “is owned by the Jews”. Two Green candidates were arrested for antisemitic offence

The reptiles naturally featured a snap of the chief villain... UK Greens Party leader Zack Polanski at the launch of his party’s local government pitch in Deptford, London. Picture: Jacquelin Magnay

We're back in ethnic cleansing denialist territory, a feature of the Australian Daily Zionist News that's so regular the pond can tiptoe by ...

Polanski, a deeply weird person, reacted to the arrest of the Somali-born knife attacker at the Golders Green synagogue, who repeatedly stabbed two Jewish men, by criticising the police. The offender was trying to stab the police and they, unarmed, subdued him. Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley, who never gets involved in party politics, publicly rebuked Polanski.
Polanski is a preposterous character. He falsely claimed to have been a spokesman for the Red Cross. When previously a hypnotherapist, he claimed he could enlarge women’s breasts through hypnosis.
That such grotesque leadership could command strong support in Britain is a withering indictment of sustained indoctrination by the British education system, and the extremism of some Islamic voters, who presumably don’t care what madness the Greens encompass so long as they hate Israel. There’s a faint whiff of Weimar Germany in all this.
Britain boasted for decades, perhaps centuries, deep political stability and competent government. The two-party system, as Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch argues, is now dead, with five genuinely national parties emerging: Starmer’s Labour, Badenoch’s Conservatives, Farage’s Reform, Polanski’s Greens and the Liberal Democrats led by Ed Davey.

Poor old Kemi, she was expected to fail, so nobody much cared, while everybody from the cracking Crace to Marina handing out a Hydeing were all in on Sir Keir ...

The cracking Crace did spare a thought for Kemi's Tories ...

For the Tories it was James Cleverly who was left to hold the fort early doors. Darling Jimmy Dimly. Reliably half-witted. He thought the Tories had had a mixed night. Mixed if you count becoming of relevance only in London and a few home counties. “We are the only party holding the government to account because we are holding the government to account,” he said. You can’t fault the logic, though you did wonder if what Jimmy D really needed was a long lie down. The results from Essex would soon be in and he, along with Kemi and Priti Patel, would all lose their seats to Reform in a national election.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch takes a selfie with supporters on the eve of local elections. Picture: Getty Images

Could Ireland at last be free and united?

But British politics is more fractured even than this. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party dominates; in Wales, the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru seemingly has displaced Labour; in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein won the last election. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will thus all have elected chief ministers who want to secede from the UK, who don’t regard Britain as ultimately legitimate. Imagine Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane with premiers all determined to break up Australia.
Given Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, literally any government outcome is possible at the next election in 2029.
Some of Britain’s worst problems arise from terrible decisions made by Tony Blair as prime minister in the 1990s. Constitutional devolution in Scotland and Wales created the worst type of federalism. Scottish and Welsh governments spend money they don’t raise by their own taxes. So they market every issue as Westminster victimising them by withholding money. In reality the “devolved nations” get huge subsidies from Westminster and receive more money per person than those in England. That then fosters English resentment and nationalism.
Blair also pioneered mass uncontrolled immigration. He misunderstood or misrepresented how many people would come and didn’t establish effective legal or administrative frameworks. He created the anything-goes approach that is proving impossible to get rid of.
Conservative and Labour governments, including Starmer’s, have vowed to change this and failed. Tens of thousands of illegal migrants arrive every year.

Why they arrive in this desolate, failed, comprehensively ruined country - worse than being caught in a war in Sudan - must remain a mystery.

Populist Nigel Farage's Reform party is riding high in polls ahead of elections this week to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. Reform's tough stance on immigration is appealing to more and more Scottish and Welsh voters, but it remains divisive, and might even boost its rivals.

At last the bromancer found hope, albeit in an unlikely form ...

This fuelled Farage’s dramatic rise. He’s more capable than Pauline Hanson but, like One Nation, Reform lives off the leader’s personal following. Many Reform candidates are eccentric. The councils they newly control will likely govern as badly as other councils. This may offer Badenoch, whose personal ratings outshine her party’s and who has mastered Starmer in parliamentary combat, a way back against Farage.
People who want immigration controlled vote Farage, those who want open borders vote Green. Labour is hurt on left and right and losing votes directly to Reform.
Objectively, Britain’s a mess. Economic growth is persistently anaemic. Britain’s less than two-thirds as wealthy, per person, as America. If it were a US state, it would be one of the poorest. National debt is £3 trillion ($5.6 trillion), equal to its national economy. It will borrow more than £130bn this fiscal year.
Starmer can’t fashion an effective economic or social policy response or narrative. He desperately needs to cut government spending. But he’s also committed, in modest recognition of reality, to a big increase in defence expenditure and he can’t cut welfare. It doesn’t add up.

Then came a photo op ... Starmer meets British military personnel in Bahrain in April during his three-day visit to the region. Picture: AFP

The bromancer wasn't fooled, and took time out to assail the wastrels and the bludgers in approved Tory style...

Welfare spending is completely out of control. One million young Brits are neither working nor in education, including hundreds of thousands on “benefits”. Welfare has grown so haphazardly, and is so elaborate, people can end up receiving more than Britain’s average wage in welfare payments. Working hard is a mug’s game.
The British state ballooned during Covid but has never been less effective at getting things done. In Britain now everyone rorts the system. The interaction of work from home entitlements (an economic death-wish policy in Western nations) and flexi-time arrangements have many civil servants claiming 50 days off a year, beyond their generous holidays, sick leave, social leave etc, and sporadic office appearances.
Starmer has no clue how to fix this. He began by cutting pensioners’ winter energy subsidies (like Australia, Britain has excessive energy prices because of net-zero policies) while giving big pay rises to public sector unions such as bus drivers.
On top of all this, Starmer’s judgment is shocking. It emerged shortly after the election that he’d taken £100,000 ($190,000) in personal gifts from a Labour donor, more than £20,000 for suits for himself and clothes for his wife. Yet he was wealthy, he’d been director of public prosecutions, his wife a successful lawyer. This discredits “moral socialism”, even just playing by the rules.

The reptiles then flung in the dog botherer ... Writer and Broadcaster Esther Krakue blasts UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer for having “no judgment”. “If he was so set on having someone like Peter Mandelson, he clearly didn’t seem that swayed by whatever evidence would have come up against him being appointed. What does that say about his judgment?” Ms Krakue told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “It says something very terrifying for him leading the United Kingdom, that he has none; he has no judgment.”

And now the pond must pick a bone with the bromancer, as he talks of an "inexplicable appointment".

Sadly the desire to get Mandy appointed was all too explicable.

The hapless mouse (Sir Keir) was terrified by King Donald, and so decided that an affable intermediary of no scruples or competence was needed - two pedophile peas in a pod as it were, solving the King Donald problem with a quick fix.

Send in someone who'd have no trouble calling the King a "risk-taker" ...and make it sound like a grovelling compliment.

That worked out tremendously well, and now to the final gobbet ..

Worst of all was the inexplicable appointment of former cabinet minister Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. Mandelson had twice been dismissed from office in public scandals. He had a well-known love of money and the high life. He had deep Russian and Chinese business connections, and was a friend of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
When the depth of Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein was exposed it led to his dismissal. Starmer, who had insisted on the Mandelson appointment, grotesquely and implausibly claimed innocent ignorance of all the bad stuff.
Starmer Starmer, the Britain harmer, is surely finished. But changing prime ministers is inherently destabilising.
None of the contenders has a credible plan for Britain. The land of Shakespeare and Churchill could do with a regular, competent, John Howard-style prime minister, someone to begin rebuilding.
There’s no sign of one on any horizon.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

All the UK can do is console itself that it might be worse ...

And so on to the dog botherer, delivering a bog standard shellacking, part of the reptile weekend campaign to distract from the great LibNat Farrer apocalypse...

The header: Anthony Albanese’s trail of broken election promises are catching up with him; The PM’s record of broken pledges could reach a tipping point come budget night. Here are some of his greatest hits.

The caption for the wretched cartoon: The Prime Minister’s lack of honesty and almost delusional disregard for truth has developed such a pattern that it is now revealed as a serious character flaw. Cartoon by Johannes Leak

As an aside, the pond should note that it rarely runs Leak Jr. cartoons.

They only turn up in this sort of wretched propaganda outing.

His presence is only a relief in the sense that it stopped the reptiles from doing a Daily Terror and fitting out Albo in a Nazi uniform, the way they did with former Chairman Rudd.

Whatever the pond thought about Leak Sr. - and the pond thought plenty when he rapidly went downhill after that fall - he at least had technical skills and a facility as a painter.

The pond appreciates that the reptiles stayed loyal to the untalented seed of the apple that didn't fall far from the tree, but loyalty isn't the same as rewarding talent.

Now on with the hatchet job:

It is time to judge Anthony Albanese by his own lofty pledges to political integrity and trust. He set himself a high bar and has manifestly failed to meet it, breaking faith with voters as he has sullied his reputation.
The Prime Minister’s lack of honesty and almost delusional disregard for truth has developed such a pattern that it is now revealed as a serious character flaw. It is also a growing political problem that could reach a tipping point come budget night.
When he addressed the Labor caucus after winning power in 2022 Albanese said: “We want to change the tone of politics in this country. We want to be more inclusive. We want to make sure there’s less shouting and more delivery.” And when he first spoke to parliament as Prime Minister two days later he said: “My colleagues and I want to treat every day in this job in this place in government as an opportunity to deliver for the people of Australia, to fulfil our promises and to prove worthy of the trust that the Australian people have placed in us.”
Since then, this career politician has broken prominent election promises, denied his own misdeeds, flagrantly denied episodes we have all seen and heard, and constantly ducked responsibility for his actions.

What do you do when you have a serve of dog botherer?

Double down, and serve him up again ... Sky News host Chris Kenny says it’s clear Labor’s budget will contain “tax hikes and broken promises”. “You know the pack drill, they lie to you to get elected, they make promises to get elected, then early in the term they take us all for mugs, break their promises, and sock it to us,” Mr Kenny said. “Anthony Albanese has a very loose relationship with the truth.”

Albo can mount his own defence.

What's interesting is the way that the dog botherer thoughtfully outlines attack points for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

“My word is my bond,” he told Mark Riley on the Seven Network’s Spotlight program in July 2022 in an interview testing Albanese over whether he would break his promise to deliver the Coalition’s legislated tax cuts. “I’ve always been a man of my word, and I believe that when you go to an election, and you make commitments, you should stick to them,” he pronounced. He then broke that very promise. See what I mean? He broke his word over the issue he said he would never break his word over.
Let me walk you through more of Albanese’s greatest hits to flesh out this problem. No doubt there would be more.
Albanese on energy policy

For no particular reason, the reptiles interrupted the walk and the sub-heading with a frankly awful piece of Frank ... Artwork by Frank Ling.

The pond thought it remembered this as being distinctly shop worn, and indeed it was ...

Who knew that the reptiles were keen environmentalists, always busily recycling?

The reptiles then allowed the dog botherer only one par...

In December 2021 Albanese declared that under Labor’s energy policies electricity bills “will be $275 for the average house lower in 2025 than today”. It was a promise he and his frontbench colleagues repeated ad nauseam until election day and beyond.

... before inserting another video ...

That represented a desperate attempt by the reptiles to escape the hive mind and be seen and heard on YouTube.

But they've lurked for so long in a paywall ghetto that their attempts at social media are ludicrous and inept.

It was two days old, and the pond won't be providing a link. Instead the pond ploughed on ...

Five years on it has morphed from a central campaign promise to a sick joke; power prices have moved only in the other direction, with costs increasing three or four times more than the promised reduction. When Albanese was cornered over this failure last year he duckshoved the broken promise, telling journalists repeatedly that it wasn’t a promise but “it was RepuTex’s modelling based on circumstances at the time”. Did he really expect voters to accept that obfuscation? Does he really want to insult voters’ intelligence in that way?
Albanese on antisemitism

The same thing just happened. There was the sub-heading and then the reptiles were off to show another insufferable outing by the lesser junior Leak ... Nothing to see here. Cartoon by Johannes Leak

Even for a standard bit of reptile slopaganda, that 'toon really lowered the tone ...

When Albanese doggedly refused to call a royal commission into the Bondi terrorist attack five months ago, pressure mounted. He resisted escalating calls from a wide range of people for weeks and was still rejecting a royal commission in early January. But when he caved in, on January 8, Albanese pretended he had been working on a royal commission all along. “We’ve also been working through – these recommendations and the terms of reference weren’t done this morning, they were done over a long period of time,” he told the ABC.
We were asked to believe he was preparing a royal commission at the same time he was publicly dismissing the idea. Sure thing.
Some of the less consequential lies from Albanese have been telling, displaying a brazenness that is breathtaking. Even though we have seen and heard episodes with our own eyes and ears, Albanese has tried to reconfigure these events to provide more palatable versions of reality, presumably to suit his narrative.

Time for another victim of a popular reptile jihad ...

Grace Tame, domestic voilence (sic, so and thus) and ‘The Fall’

And then the Joe Biden angle came into play ...

Television cameras caught him plunging dangerously off the back of a stage while campaigning in the Hunter Valley last April. But in Albo’s world it never happened: “I stepped back one step, I didn’t fall off the stage, just one leg went down, but I was sweet.” Got it. I guess we were supposed to believe the cameras had lied.

The reptiles were keen to provide the visual receipts of a crime which almost having a sheet of toilet paper attached to a shoe: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has fallen off a stage while posing for photographs after delivering a speech in Lovedale in the Hunter region of New South Wales. Mr Albanese is fine and has not been injured from the fall.

The dog botherer maintained the rage ...

In a public word association game in February Albanese described Grace Tame as “difficult” and soon copped criticism from Tame and feminist supporters. The following day, instead of merely brushing it off or apologising, Albanese recast what he had said. “Grace Tame you can’t describe in one word,” he revised. “She has had difficult life, and that’s what I was referring to.”
That story would have been difficult for anyone to swallow. I guess we should be relieved that it wasn’t RepuTex’s modelling again.
In 2024 when Albanese took the stage in Canberra at a protest against domestic violence, he said his earlier request to speak had been denied. Event organiser Sarah Williams called this out immediately as a “full out lie” and later appeared on the ABC doubling down on her accusation that Albanese had lied (he argued it was a misunderstanding).
Albanese was booed and heckled in ugly and threatening scenes at Lakemba mosque in March before being led away under tight security. He didn’t like the media coverage and said the event had been misreported.
“Overwhelmingly, the reception was incredibly positive,” he said the next day. “I walked through the crowd to the mosque and not a single person heckled. There were a couple of hecklers inside.” Again, it must have been those lying cameras.
Albanese’s personal political rise

It happened again. First the sub-heading and then a distracting snap... A young Anthony Albanese, left, leads students in a protest atop the University of Sydney clock tower.

That's a reminder of how the reptiles like to live in the past, and brood for all eternity ...

You might as well hold the onion muncher to account for his pugnacious ways...

On with the axe-grinding...

One of Albanese’s problems is that his entire political persona as Prime Minister is an exercise in deception. He is a Labor radical, a leading light of the Socialist Left faction, pretending to be a centrist so he could win the leadership and then present an electable face to mainstream voters.
We are talking about a man who attended anti-Israel protests even as a federal parliamentarian. He was seen yelling, “The response of Israel has been to meet children throwing rocks, with helicopter gunships, with tanks and with missiles.” Yet now as Prime Minister he has tried to argue that “Australia has stood with the people of Israel” when all his actions have done the opposite.
This is emblematic of his life of political contortions. A lifetime in the Socialist Left, for instance, and Albanese must now pass himself off as pro-business; a lifetime of “fighting Tories” and now he pretends to desire bipartisanship.
This shapeshifting must be exhausting and confusing. And perhaps it smooths the path to untruths. Betrayals in politics are so common that the phrase “political lie” is almost tautologous. Yet the degree matters; successful leaders need an element of trust with voters, some plausible link between words and actions.
Kevin Rudd sealed his demise by walking away from his pivotal emissions trading plan; Julia Gillard torched her leadership by breaking her carbon tax promise; and Tony Abbott broke election pledges in a standard “things were worse than we thought” formulation. In Albanese’s early days in office all the heat was on the other side because of the stunning revelations about Scott Morrison’s secret ministries.
Negative gearing and capital gains tax

Not another sub-heading and another distracting collage of a frankly pitiful kind? Albanese with his Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Artwork by Frank Ling

Consider the hatchet well and truly planted, consider the dog botherer in the noble tradition of Lizzie Borden ...

Now Albanese’s record of deceit is starting to register. Turning his back on clear pledges about negative gearing and capital gains tax (policies that helped kill off Bill Shorten’s career) risks a moment of voter reckoning – come Tuesday night the scales could fall from their eyes.
As a minister, Albanese was exposed for plagiarising a political speech from a Hollywood rom-com, The American President. It is surprising this humiliation did not do him more damage.
Now Albanese and his ministers claim to have made $114bn in budget savings while in office. Yet all their budgets have spent more, and spending as a share of GDP has increased by more than 2 per cent – so what are they spinning?
Albanese and Jim Chalmers have made the mistake of believing their own publicity. They claim to be helping young voters but are saddling them with $1 trillion of debt. Albanese has supported the use of punitive taxes to reduce carbon emissions, tobacco use, alcohol consumption and gambling. Yet now Labor seems to suggest that extra taxes on housing will increase supply – it does not compute.
Albanese was interviewed by Seven’s Riley again last Sunday and was pushed on the question of election promises and integrity. “What you’ll see in the budget is a range of measures consistent with the values we took to the election,” said Albanese.
Ah yes, Prime Minister, we should forget your promises and rely on your values. And what, pray tell, would those values be? “It will be a responsible budget that will be consistent with Labor values,” Albanese said this week. It was perhaps the late Graham “Richo” Richardson who described Labor values best with his phrase, “whatever it takes”.

The pond always finds it piquant when a band of liars, thieves and cheats take to hectoring others about values and morality.

It was, after all, News Corp where Richo found a rewarding later life. How they loved the Swiss bank account man. How they made a home for him, how the then Chairman religiously followed his teachings ...

Congratulations, dog botherer. Your relentless lurch to the extreme far right, your dissing of Sussssan, your support of the hapless beefy boofhead and his minions, and reptile raging about furriners and the white Anglo-Celtic, Judaeo-Xian tradition has finally achieved its dream result - the LibNat apocalypse in Farrer.

And so at last to Polonius ...

The header: Malcolm Roberts’ dangerous equivocation on Bondi conspiracy theory; A senator’s refusal to firmly reject a ‘false flag’ claim raises fresh concerns about antisemitism, political judgment and media failure.

The caption for the snap: Senator Malcolm Roberts faced criticism after declining to unequivocally dismiss a conspiracy theory about the Bondi attack. Picture: Martin Ollman

First of all, pond send Polonius to third place because this is a pitiful straw man exercise.

Take a certified loon, climate science denialist and conspiracy-inclined theorist, and almost anything sounds sane by comparison... even an outing in the Australian Daily Zionist News.

As correspondents have noted, Polonius is clearly off his oats, and this was yet another reminder.

Secondly, Polonius uses the prize loon to smear others who might want to make a point about the current government of Israel's inclination to ethnic cleansing, continuing to this day, and currently expanding in to Lebanon.

The reptiles thought so little of it that they didn't bother interrupting Polonius with visual distractions, and the pond will mostly follow suit:

It was May 1, the day after commissioner Virginia Bell handed the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion interim report to the Governor-General, that senator Malcolm Roberts made the news.
The One Nation senator for Queensland was interviewed by online comedian Lisa Jane Spencer for her social media channels. A young (gentile) friend drew this to my attention and there was a brief report on the matter in the Daily Mail.
Early on, Spencer asked Roberts whether he was “worried about foreign influence into our politics”. When the senator answered in the affirmative, he was queried about “One Nation’s thoughts, particularly when it comes to, you know, say, AIJAC or even being involved in the Iran war, Israel and all that”.
AIJAC is the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council headed by my friends Mark Leibler (chairman) and Colin Rubenstein (executive director). Spencer was running the line popularised by John Lyons, the ABC’s Americas editor, in his book Dateline Jerusalem. Lyons named AIJAC as having too much influence over Australian foreign policy.
As I documented when reviewing Lyons’ work in The Sydney Institute Review Online in November 2021, his account of the alleged influence of Jewish Australians in this country is grossly exaggerated. It is not clear whether Spencer is aware of Lyons’ book but his polemical conspiracy theory about AIJAC and all that is capable of having an impact beyond the written word. Which may explain her question to Roberts.

One small interruption.

You see? Polonius has no clue about whether Spencer is aware of Lyons' book, but how easily she can be slotted in with Roberts as a conspiracy theorist, which "may explain" why Polonius felt so free and easy in his defaming of Lyons ... it being a matter of observable (Minns) opinion as to wether certain members of the Jewish lobby hold sway over governments, and that opinion in no way a conspiracy theory when the totality of examples are considered.

On with this entry in the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

But then the matter became more serious. Spencer said: “I was going to ask one more question on the Israel thing. Do you think that Bondi was a false flag?” The Britannica website defines a false flag operation as a “harmful, often militant, event perpetrated by someone other than the person or group responsible for it”.
In other words, false flag operations occur when a group wants to attract sympathy for itself. The implication in Spencer’s question is that Israeli operatives and/or Jewish Australians organised the Bondi massacre in which 15 individuals died, most of whom were Jews, to generate support.
This was a despicable implication. The obvious answer to the question was an emphatic “No”. But Roberts could not quite bring himself to do so. His immediate response was to say: “I haven’t got the evidence. I doubt whether it’s a false flag, but I could be” – following which he was interrupted.
Then Spencer said it was all a “bit suss” when legislation on guns and hate laws followed the Bondi massacre. Roberts responded: “You asked me if I thought it was a false flag. If I make a statement, it’s got to be backed by fact. I don’t have the facts yet. I’m not ruling it out – you’ll notice that.”
Yes, it was noticed. Now, Roberts shows no evidence of being antisemitic. But he is at best naive. Or perhaps he did not want to disagree with Spencer. In any event, it was an unwise and dangerous comment to make. Especially since the Queensland senator is well qualified for his position – except for the fact he lacks judgment.
However, to be fair, Pauline Hanson has demonstrated support for the Jewish Australian community, as has her fellow One Nation parliamentarian Barnaby Joyce.
There has been some unjust criticism of the royal commission following its interim report. Some commentators have suggested that it has downplayed the significance of antisemitism in Australia. This is not so. There are close to 200 references to Jew/Jewish/Jewry etc and 350 references to antisemitism/antisemitic in the interim report. There are only a couple of references to Islamophobic or Islamophobia.
Moreover, it is only now that the royal commission is hearing evidence of the experiences of Jewish Australians with respect to antisemitism. This has increased dramatically in Australia since Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, and the antisemitic and anti-Israel protests that took place in subsequent days, especially in Sydney.
The interim report focused primarily on examining the circumstances surrounding the antisemitic terrorist attack on December 14. However, the royal commission’s letters patent refers to “the necessity for the inquiry to be conducted in a manner that does not occasion prejudice to current or future criminal proceedings on national security or undermine social cohesion”. That’s understandable. It is in Australia’s interest that any accused person receives a fair trial.
What the interim report makes clear is that in August 2024 ASIO upgraded the chance of a terrorist attack in Australia from possible to probable. ASIO also warned in early December 2025 of the “terrorism threat to crowded places and religious events over the 2025-26 holiday period”. In 2024 ASIO warned of attacks on Jewish and Christian celebrations.
It is also clear that NSW Police did not anticipate the risk of a terrorist attack when Australians were celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach on December 14.
The royal commission’s interim report documents that the response by NSW Police to the request by NSW Jewish Community Security Group for assistance with security was for a command inspector to “take a car crew or two with you and provide a HVP (high visibility policing) presence”. The instruction continued: “No need to stay the entire duration, but your presence will ensure the community feel safe.”
The NSW police officers who attended the Bondi celebration acted with considerable bravery when the massacre began. But they were outgunned before reinforcements arrived. It is not an act of hindsight to state that the warnings of ASIO in general and the NSW Jewish community in particular were not acted upon.
Why was this so? The answer seems to be that the relevant authorities did not take the pre-December 14 attacks on the Jewish community seriously enough. Here the media should take some responsibility.
As Michael Gawenda wrote on these pages last Saturday, the mainstream media – the ABC, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Guardian Australia – downplayed the reality of violent antisemitism in Australia. For example, Four Corners did not cover the issue between October 2023 and December 2025.
It is this form of denial that makes possible Spencer’s bigoted conspiracy theory and Roberts’ foolishness in not taking a stand for evidence over prejudice.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Ah, Michael Gawenda.

What a pathetic source for Polonius to cite, but it does give the pond a chance to bookend the weekend.

Thanks to the venerable Meade, the pond started with Journalism in decline: a response to Michael Gawenda

That evoking of a notoriously incompetent member of the Jewish lobby gives the pond a chance to close proceedings with Jeff Sparrow's opening ...

They can rail, deflect, deny and downplay all they like, but what's happening in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank is there for all to see ...

A reminder: like minds flock together when it comes to the killing fields ...

It's great days in King Donald's America, what with Iran so docile and the bonespurs-clad warrior ready to take a triumphal march through his new arch ... and even better days for Scottish independence...

In which the pond only has the energy for "Ned" going full Pauline and the Ughmann doing his usual climate science denying routines ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 08 May 2026 22:04:00 +0000

Once again the venerable Meade kept the pond up to date with yet another failing of the eternally shameful hive mind at the lizard Oz.

The sub-header Writers duke it out saw Michael Gawenda have a go at Jeff Sparrow in the ethnic cleansing enabling Oz, and unsurprisingly coming off a little the worse for wear.

The venerable Meade thoughtfully provided a link to Sparrow's response to the fuss in Overland ...and there were a couple of zingers.

After dealing with the matter of the government of Israel committing genocide, Sparrow ended up this way ...

Move along folks. Nothing to see here. Just another day in the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Meade provided a sublime coda:

Late Thursday, days after Sparrow asked for a correction and an apology, The Australian’s article was partially corrected. The first mention now has Sparrow as “a former editor of Overland” but the second still has him as “the editor of Overland magazine”. There is no editor’s note to acknowledge the changes.
Sparrow told Weekly Beast: “Nothing says journalistic ethics like surreptitiously correcting falsehoods without telling your readers – and nothing says journalistic quality like bungling your surreptitious correction.”
The editor-in-chief of the Australian, Michelle Gunn, was approached for comment.

A comment from the hive mind?

Good luck with that. Never admit error, never surrender, never cease from waging endless jihads ...

The venerable Meade also took a shot at the frequently execrable ABC, and the always execrable Kyle-Jackie O saga, but it's her coverage of the reptiles that keeps the pond tuning in.

There's only so much any one person can do to make sense of the morass, the mugwump swamp that is the hive mind, and this weekend's edition is another reminder that only so much can be covered before exhaustion and a sense of existential ennui sets in ...

Just look at the early Saturday headlines:

Perhaps in a bid to distract from the coalition's pending flop in Farrer, they decided to go all in on Jimbo ...

Jim Chalmers is going for broke. Will we end up a poorer country?
If Australia tips into recession, voters may blame the Treasurer’s great big gamble on tax reform and fairness.
Matthew Cranston
14 min read

A fourteen minute read?!

That's worse than a "Ned" Everest climb.

Thank the long absent lord the pond could refer correspondents on to the intermittent archive, offering only a teaser trailer which showed off the appalling gif-like illustration (the black and white heads rotate):

Fourteen minutes of fear and loathing, lizard Oz style?

Enough already, and ditto this headlining piece.

Off to the intermittent archive with it. (It was only allegedly a five minute read, but enough already with the endless Jimbo bashing, which this time required a reptile tag team) ...

EXCLUSIVE
Chalmers’ long path to fiscal repair (take it as … red)
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has warned of tough decisions ahead while unveiling $13bn productivity reforms and signalling tax hikes on housing investments.
By Greg Brown and Geoff Chambers

But "Ned" was also a part of the top of the world ma triptych, and there was no way the pond could duck its obligation to climb the "Ned" Everest.

Sadly, perhaps in another bid to distract from the Farrer matter, it turned out that "Ned" had decided to go full Pauline ...

The pond wanted to start that way to provide some visual context.

See how "Ned's" piece starts with an Australia so overcrowded that some are forced to live in the ocean?

As a visual misrepresentation of the actual demographics of Australia, it's a stunning, malicious, distorting lie, though of a piece with the tone of "Ned" going full Pauline.

And that shot of angry people clutching flags and shouting at someone of dubious ethnic origin is also evocative of "Ned's" tone.

And now we pick up the story with "Ned" heading off to the Caterist MRC for more inspiration in the matter of bashing threatening, disturbing furriners ...

...The Menzies Research Centre reports there are now about 2.9 million temporary migrants in Australia, about 10 per cent of the current population of 28 million.
The main category is international students, now running at about 515,000 – and that’s a reduced level – with some of our best universities having nearly 50 per cent of their enrolments being overseas students.
The other remarkable feature in our immigration legacy is that 32 per cent of our population, or 8.8 million people, have been born overseas, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Indeed, the 2021 census showed that more than half of Australian residents, 51.5 per cent, were born overseas or had one parent born overseas. This figure would be even higher today.
The comparable foreign-born figure for the US is only 14 per cent, less than half Australia’s, with the US often wrongly mistaken as being a stronger migrant nation than Australia. In truth, there is no comparison. The average foreign-born percentage for OECD nations is also 14 per cent, far below our figure.

It's easy to see where this is heading.

Cue a shocking image of soiled, polluted Oz beaches ... Indian-born residents now make up 971,020 of the 8.8 million people in Australia who were born overseas. Picture: NewsWire / Nadir Kinani

What a compelling image of a country flooded by furriners, as "Ned" continued full Pauline ...

Taking the easy road to economic growth
All the above results reveal a sustained transformation in Australia’s society, culture and economy. While migrants are indispensable to our labour market, over the past decade our GDP growth has been driven by population, not productivity, a decisive event. The nation has taken the easy road to economic growth and is paying a devastating price – immigration as a substitute for productivity means per capita income – that is, wages and living standards – has languished, leading to an impatient, disillusioned and angry public mood.
Australia’s immigration story runs far in advance of most other nations and drives social change at a rapid rate. Many people celebrate such diversity; many others believe that Australia’s character and values are being lost. Both feelings demand respect.
Immigration is in overreach. It faces multiple problems, the result of weak management and lack of vision. Recent numbers are too high, the skills program demands a reset, growth in temporary migration is unsustainable and devoid of policy control, while there is rising concern about the values set of a minority of the intake.

Naturally there had to be a snap of Pauline, shown in kindly aunt mode surrounded by dinkum flags ... Pauline Hanson’s One Nation continues to draw support from voters disillusioned with the major parties. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Of course "Ned" attempts to distance himself from Pauline, but it's brief resistance, because she's completely right...

This situation has created an inexcusable gift to Pauline Hanson, courtesy of the Albanese government. Labor deserves much of the blame and should be held to account. Hanson has captured the wave of concern about immigration with polls over the past six months (Newspoll, Resolve Monitor, the Lowy Institute and the Institute of Public Affairs) all showing majority support for a lower intake and sentiment in the plus-50 per cent to 65 per cent zone to cut numbers.
Immigration turning point
Many Western nations now face a turning point in their immigration policies. While the foundations of Australia’s program are stronger than those of most nations, a showdown is coming. The real issue is whether changes will be modest or radical or sensible. The worst mistake the pro-immigration progressive movement can make is to pretend nothing is wrong and that such criticisms are merely racism, a denial sure to be counterproductive.
The coming collision is driven by three simultaneous and inflammatory factors. The biggest is the housing crisis with many young people priced out of the market, feeding intergenerational frictions. Labor is now promoting tax changes in next week’s budget, while Angus Taylor tells Inquirer that immigration will be a “key feature” in his reply to the budget.

And there's the nub of it, the real point of the exercise.

The beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way has decided to go full Pauline himself, as a way of cutting her off and taking over her turf, being too dumb to realise that he's actually giving her more fuel ...

“You cannot bring people to this country if you don’t have the houses for them. It’s that simple,” the Opposition Leader says.
“Migration levels must be capped by the availability of housing. That’s common sense but it’s not what we have seen. Labor has done the opposite with an unpreceded escalation in immigration numbers, yet housing supply has gone backwards.”

Just to push the point, the reptiles slipped in a a snap reminding the hive mind just how much the Liberal leadership looked like the Mafia ... Angus Taylor is set to unveil a new Coalition immigration policy linking migration to housing supply. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

That reminded the pond of a headline in Crikey by the keen Keane ...

If your answers are Tony Abbott or Alexander Downer, you should probably give up
The Liberal presidency wouldn’t be that important in normal times. But given the recent criticism levelled at the party — both externally and internally — it’s become crucial.

Sorry, it's behind the paywall, but the opening three pars says all that needs to be said...

For a failing party that is now, even in Coalition with the Nationals, polling in the low twenties below One Nation, the choice of federal president is apposite: two old male political failures.
In the blue corner, Tony Abbott, Australia’s worst prime minister, who couldn’t even make two years before his party dumped him, and then lost his seat in what remains the best demonstration of how the Liberals have systematically alienated their heartland.
And in the other, also blue, corner, Alexander Downer, briefly Australia’s worst opposition leader and then worst foreign affairs minister, chiefly known for outsourcing Australian foreign policy to the Bush administration and his still unexplained role in bugging the Timor-Leste cabinet, then going off to work for the chief beneficiary of the bugging, Woodside.

And that's why "Ned" paused to offer a message from his sponsor:

Taylor says the ratio of migrants to housing is running double over the previous figure. He says: “The situation is unsustainable and it’s no wonder young Australians can’t get into a home. For the year we are going into, they are running immigration numbers 80,000 above the targets and housing 70,000 a year below the targets. And Labor’s answer is to put more taxes on it. Seriously, who thought that up?”
He will attack Labor’s intergenerational tax changes by saying the real problem is immigration. Taylor’s pledge to cap migration flows by housing availability points to a decisive shift in immigration policy and politics. It follows a similar move by Canada that cut migration numbers and foreign students in a desperate bid to reduce housing costs – the result has been a shrinking population with benefits for the housing market and affordability but with related evidence that high migration was not the sole cause of the problem.

Now back to full Pauline fear mongering, because everything is fracturing and fraying, all is chaos, and how soon can we introduce a down under version of ICE to bring peace to the streets?

The second factor in Australia’s political debate has been the immediate leap in the net overseas migration numbers with the border opening after the Covid freeze. The NOM hit 538,340 in 2022-23 and 429,000 the following year. These numbers received massive and damaging political prominence, but they measure all arrivals and departures and should not be confused with the formal policy. The government is desperate, given the political optics, to cut them but the task has proven difficult, Jim Chalmers has conceded the current planned reduction to 225,000 won’t be reached.
Social cohesion is fraying
The third element has been the erosion of social cohesion with an entrenched antisemitism that repudiates our multicultural ethic and that culminated in the Bondi massacre of 15 people and the creation of the royal commission.
The Middle East conflict has resounded in this country with pro-Palestinian protests, open support for pro-Hamas terrorism, attacks on Jewish people and almost free licence given to radical Islamists and preachers endorsing violence against Jews – events that have led to a profound rethink within conservative politics in this country.
In his recent Australian Values Migration Plan, Taylor, after declaring his support for immigration, said people with the “wrong motivations” who had “subversive intent” were being allowed entry. The upshot is that Australians “can see the country they love changing for the worse”.

At this point you need to understand lizard Oz dogwhistles which are immediately understood by the hive mind ... The Middle East conflict has resounded in this country.

Islamics!

Say no more!

Now back to another message from the sponsor, making sure you get the dogwhistle, which is to say "based on values"!

Taylor says the nation cannot discriminate on nationality, race, gender or faith but must now discriminate “based on values”. He says migrants from liberal democracies have a greater likelihood of subscribing to our values – a claim that has provoked criticism and poses implementation difficulties.

Time now for more saucy doubts and fears... and not just from the beefy boofhead, but from experts!

In truth, reform of both numbers and of standards is a diabolically challenging mix. The apparent success of Hanson’s populist anti-immigration campaign complicates the task, given that Hanson polarises opinion. Taylor needs to win back voters from One Nation yet also differentiate the Liberals from One Nation. While One Nation is seen in the polls as the party best able to manage immigration, its real position is to throttle immigration in a way guaranteed to damage the country.
The multiple defects in the current immigration agenda have provoked multiple solutions – even from established champions of the program. Commentator and former senior immigration official Abul Rizvi said last month: “Three million temporary entrants are incompatible with the size of the current permanent intake.”
Immigration specialist and Australian National University emeritus professor of demography Peter McDonald has recently produced, along with ANU Migration Hub director Alan Gamlen, a blueprint for major change, warning that the growth in the temporary intake must be curbed and stabilised.

How else to make sure the oil on the water catches fire?

Send in a Kroger to Kroger it, to the delight of unlovely meter maid Rita ... Former Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger claims the problems with housing in Australia are “too much regulation” and “mass immigration”. Mr Kroger told Sky News host Rita Panahi that housing is “regulated to death”. “Too much regulation on housing and too much mass immigration; they’re the problems with housing today.”

By this time the pond had grown full weary, but not "Ned" as he kept on pounding the Pauline drum ...

McDonald tells Inquirer: “We think the temporary population needs to be managed and stabilised. It’s about 1.7 million and there’s a tendency to think it’s going to go away. But this population is embedded in the economy. We estimate there’s roughly half a million temporary migrants working in skilled jobs. Temporary migrants are a high proportion of the labour force in aged care. We need to recognise we have an ongoing temporary population, not ignore it, which is the current kind of policy.
“We sleepwalked into this situation. Over the last 20 years both Labor and Coalition governments have made various changes leading to the temporary population continuing to grow. This country has a history of saying migration should be permanent only, so if we are going in this direction then we need to plan for our temporary population.”
In a recent analysis, Nico Louw from the Menzies Research Centre says the key to reducing immigration numbers lies in the temporary migrant category. The permanent program at 185,000, split between the skilled and family streams, is “only a small part” of the immigration story.
Temporary migration comprises students, working holiday makers and visitors. But international students dominate, with many staying for years and a significant number becoming citizens. Getting the temporary numbers down needs action on both sides of the equation – limiting arrivals and increasing departures.
Louw argues public sentiment is changing decisively on immigration: “Australians have historically been more willing to accept higher levels of legal migration when they believe the government has control of the borders” – this is the legacy of the border controls of the Howard and Abbott governments – “but this relationship has broken down, as legal migration surged at the same time as a rising cost of living, high housing costs and a sense of fragmenting social cohesion.”

Nico Louw? That name doesn't quite sound Anglo-Celtic approved, but don't worry, the reptiles have lined up a stunning snap to illustrate tertiary education ... Australia’s university sector is moving towards a likely crisis over the reduction in international students.

The university sector is moving towards a likely crisis?

That's nothing up against the actual crisis currently happening in the lizard Oz graphics department ...

In January this year official figures show there were 515,717 international students in Australia, a fall on the previous year, with China comprising 23 per cent and India 17 per cent. Before the 2025 election both Labor and the Coalition focused on lower student numbers in their efforts to return immigration overall to its pre-pandemic levels.
Australia’s university sector is moving towards a likely crisis over the reduction in international students, a cohort vital in delivering revenue for the higher education sector. The university sector has been stunningly incompetent in managing its interests and its image with the public and the political class in recent years. Having enjoyed, along with the mining industry, a generation of national income success wired into the Chinese market, the message now being sent is one of retreat.
The government is driven by the politics and the reality that, if reductions in numbers are essential, then the student intake is the obvious target. Whether Labor has the nous to protect the export industry, reduce the numbers and manage the consequences is doubtful.
The wider migrant story is the dominance of India and China. Recent official figures reveal the explosion of migrants from India with our Indian-born numbers now numbering 971,000, more than doubling over the past decade. India has now replaced England as the largest source nation of foreign-born residents. Chinese-born migrant numbers are 731,000, another substantial increase over the decade.

At this point the reptiles did what they've taken to doing often lately.

Wind back the clock ... Children aboard the post WWII Sitmar liner, Fairsea, which made several journeys to Australia under the International Refugee Organisation from 1949 to 1951, carrying displaced persons affected by the war. Picture: National Archives of Australia

"Ned" went on to provide a hint of the great displacement theory ...

Australia, courtesy of immigration, has rapidly turned into one of the world’s most culturally and linguistically diverse Western nations. The 2021 census showed that one in four people (23 per cent) spoke a language other than English at home, the most common being Mandarin and Arabic. A total of 872,000 people self-reported speaking English “not well” or “not at all”.
Too much of the current debate ignores the Australian fertility crisis and the indispensable role of immigration in our tight labour market filled with job vacancies. Our current fertility rate has fallen to 1.42 compared with the 2.1 replacement level – this means the Australian people are deciding they have no economic option but a strong, ongoing immigration program.
But that program demands reform in our economic interests.
Former Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson, who reviewed the program in 2023, found that almost half of permanent migrants work below their skill level, despite one in three occupations facing worker shortages. The skills mismatch undermines both our economy and the immigration program. It needs to be urgently addressed.
Analysing the economics of the program, University of NSW Scientia professor Richard Holden tells Inquirer: “Australia has historically focused too much on GDP and too little on GDP per capita. It’s the latter which is the right measure of living standards. Immigration mechanically boosts GDP, but only boosts GDP per capita if immigrants are more highly skilled than average, or fill gaps in the labour market that aren’t being met domestically.

In these kinds of reptile stories, there always has to be some kind of villain, hiding the real story, and here he is ... Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s department has been called to develop ‘a better picture of temporary migrant outflows’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

We're flying blind, completely in the dark, as hordes of furriners take over the country ...

“The other element of confusion on immigration concerns temporary immigration. This can also be economically and socially valuable, but we must focus on steady-state levels, not the large outflows or inflows that occurred around the time of the pandemic. The Department of Home Affairs needs to make more accurate forecasts and a key element of this is developing a better picture of temporary migrant outflows. The quality of our national discussion about migration would be vastly improved and more constructive if we had accurate numbers.”
Yet there is a bigger issue because immigration is not just a policy. By definition immigration changes a nation because it changes numbers, people and culture. This is a decisive political event. The question then becomes: is it possible to substantially reform an immigration program that has become an integral component in our national identity?
This is the conundrum that Australia is about to face.
In a September 2025 paper authors Gamlen and Andrew Jaspan said that despite a global populist disruption around immigration, Australia was different. Reaching a remarkable conclusion, they wrote: “Migration in Australia is thus not just policy but part of the nation’s identity and state machinery: it is pre-political. This stability has shielded it from the immigration-driven turmoil seen in Britain with Brexit and in the US with Trump. Though Australia has more foreign-born residents than either, its debates are calmer, thanks to both national identity and long-term state capacity.”

Is it ironic then that "Ned" should turn to an Australian of Greek descent for insights? RedBridge Group director Kos Samaras says Australia ‘has fundamentally changed who it is’. Picture NCA NewsWire / Aaron Francis

Not really, it's just the way the reptile game is played ...

These are revealing judgments pointing both to the confidence and complacency of the immigration establishment. It is true that immigration has borne exaggerated blame for many of our current ills from housing costs to political polarisation – yet it is equally true that it must bear some of the blame, that the current program is losing public support and that it is undermined by a range of policy mistakes.
Is genuine reform of immigration possible? The ruthless assessment of the Coalition’s prospects by RedBridge Group director Kos Samaras suggests it might be a bridge too far and that Australia is far different from the nation that initially voted for John Howard in 1996.
Samaras says Australia “has fundamentally changed who it is”. In the inner metropolitan seats the percentage of people who are foreign born or had a parent foreign born is now nearly 66 per cent.
“These voters are not looking for a cultural restoration project,” he says. Samaras seizes on the turning point that India is now replacing England as Australia’s largest overseas-born diaspora and warns that Taylor, in pitching to so-called “Australian values”, is not talking to the people he needs to win.
It is a fair warning. But there is no reason Indian and Chinese migrants should automatically shun the Liberals, nor is there any reason to think they would automatically oppose sensible immigration reform. But that is a bigger question that will need to be addressed in the Australian democracy.

And there you have it.

Despite a token gesture at the end, a mild warning about so-called "Australian values", it looks like "Ned" and the reptiles are going to swing in behind the beefy boofhead, in a desperate bid to beat Pauline, by becoming Pauline, and by provoking even more hysteria and bigotry.

As if News Corp hasn't already done enough to damage the world ...

Dealing with "Ned" entirely drained the pond of energy.

The pond realises that the dog botherer was also out and about bashing the federal government, while the bromancer was to hand to dance on the grave of Sir Keir.

The pond will tackle them tomorrow because it took the last reserves to summon up the courage to deal with the lizard Oz's resident climate science denialist in chief ...

The header showing some nifty Ughmann footwork: Australia is facing an energy addition, not a transition, as fossil fuel use grows; Increased electrification and more efficient tech don’t replace fossil fuels but complement them.

The caption for the image reminding the hive mind that they must live in the past: A GMH ad shows a Holden VT Commodore SS fying (sic, so and thus) over a group of Ford Falcons amid record sales in the late 1990s, when the big car brands were still locked in competition.

The current oil shock has perhaps made even the most catatonic of the hive mind a little EV curious, which helps explain why the Ughmann had to do that incredibly clever bit of tap dancing: Increased electrification and more efficient tech don’t replace fossil fuels but complement them.

How to set the tone of someone determined to live in the past?

Please, allow the Ughmann to show the way ...

As my mates and I finally got our licences towards the end of the 1970s there seemed to be an unwritten rule for all teenagers: you could drive Mum’s car but not Dad’s.
In the shadow of the 1973 oil shock, the mums’ cars had one thing in common: They were tiny. Because getting a licence is such a seminal moment in any teenage life, the brands are seared into my memory: the Datsun 120Y, the Toyota Corollas and my mum’s car, the Holden Gemini.
But all the dads’ cars were still big and, in those days, most fell into one of two tribes: Holden or Ford. This disposition was genetic and every year sons and fathers geared up for the annual title fight between the rival camps that played out on the racetrack at Bathurst.
My dad was a Holden man and I got to drive the Statesman just once. When I arrived, beaming with pride, to pick up my mate Damien from his place, his father shook his head and said my dad must have rocks in his head. I think that was because Damien’s dad was a Ford man.

Cue yet another back to the future illustration, archive cheap ... A Ford Falcon and a Holden Torana in 1973.

Despite screaming and kicking, the Ughmann was forced to deal with the oil shock elephant in the room, while still celebrating the way that fossil fuels are helping ruin the planet ...

Markets and people did change their behaviour after the first big oil shock, but they also hedged. Small cars became fashionable, but big cars did not disappear. People adapted around their needs.
It was during this era that oil’s share of the world’s primary energy system peaked. It has drifted lower since, but the surface story is deceptive because the total volume of oil consumed kept rising as the world grew richer and industrialisation spread.
Energy addition — not transition
In 2024 humanity burned more coal, oil and gas than in any single year in history, despite all the talk of record growth in renewable energy. Both statements are true and together they point to a deeper reality. There is no simple transition from one energy system to another. There is an energy addition. New energy sources do not necessarily replace old ones. More often they are layered on top as societies consume ever more power.
The pattern was identified in the 19th century by English economist William Stanley Jevons in what became known as the Jevons Paradox. He observed that as steam engines became more efficient, Britain did not burn less coal. It burned far more. Efficiency lowered costs, expanded capability and unleashed greater consumption. That pattern has repeated ever since.
More efficient little cars did not consign the big ones to history. More efficient computers increased electricity use. LED lighting cut the cost of illumination and we responded by festooning the world with pretty lights.
Human beings rarely use efficiency to consume less energy. More often we use it to do more.
This energy shock will drive a move away from oil dependence and ensure every government tries to secure more of it within their own borders.
There has been a spike in electric vehicle sales here, which is a good thing and will probably endure. But how many of those sales are for a second car?

Say what? EV sales are a good thing, useful for mums to do the shopping perhaps?

But not manly things, not full beast ... and ineluctable, completely mysterious, full of strange and exotic rituals ... An electric vehicle charging

Quick, time to downplay any heretical thoughts ...

The geography of our island continent, the way our systems are built and the slow turnover in our car fleet mean it will be a very long time before EVs dominate the private vehicle market. The next step, electrifying all road transport, mining and agriculture, remains a distant dream.
The other feature of this crisis is to highlight what might be called the hangman’s noose theory of politics: the imminent threat of execution does tend to clarify the mind and prompt deathbed conversions. Our leaders have finally recognised that this nation runs on liquid fuel, that energy security is national security and that their job security depends on securing hydrocarbons.
It is too early to declare that the era of fossil fuel hysteria in our leadership caste is over, but it may have peaked. The man who once declared fossil fuels had no place in our future is now on the diesel diplomacy circuit, breathing a sigh of relief each time a supertanker full of fuel heaves into view. The leaders of the march to poverty are quietly retreating.

Ram the point home with a graph ...

Actually since the Ughmann mentioned Indonesia, the pond came across this EV tidbit while reading an old Bill McKibben substack entry, An El Niño is brewing, And with it the next, pivotal, chapter of the climate fight.

The pond came to it via a story in the both siderist NY Times, David Wallace-Wells writing The World is About to Get a Preview of Life in 20235 (*intermittent archive link)

A climate monster is growing right now in the Pacific Ocean, perhaps the most fearsome El Niño since before scientists even began modeling them. They now know the pattern quite well: A marine heat wave in the Pacific Ocean scrambles global weather and produces in some places more intense droughts and in others more intense rainfall and flooding; disruptions to hurricane patterns and monsoon seasons, which can cause widespread crop failures; and much more punishing heat.
The El Niño building right now, and expected to crest around the end of next year, arrives on top of all our global warming. And it appears stupendously intense — almost certainly stronger than the “Super” El Niño of 2015-16, and perhaps the most intense since the epochal El Niño of 1877. The global consequences of that climatic event were so devastating that the environmental historian Mike Davis called them “Late Victorian Holocausts.”

And so on.

Fiddle-de-dee and back to that Indonesian EV tidbit ...

Good possible news from Indonesia, where a surge in EVs means that the government may not need to turn over millions of acres of forest for biofuels plantations. David Fickling has the story:
"The switch in Southeast Asia has been less celebrated, but is becoming breathtakingly rapid. EVs in Thailand are already cheaper than the fossil-powered equivalent, and made up about a fifth of the market last year. In Singapore, they accounted for a Chinese-style 45%, and 32% in Vietnam.
The pivot in Indonesia, the fourth-most populous country with 285 million people, has been even more dramatic. In 2020, less than one in every 350 cars sold was electric. In December, that number stood at more than one in three."

Oh yes, times are are changing, and in his attempt to hold back the tide, the Ughmann offered a curious mea culpa...

I have never held Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen or the Albanese government solely responsible for Australia’s deep exposure to this fuel crisis. That failure has been decades in the making. Several generations of politicians of all hues hollowed out our resilience and the incumbents’ demonisation of hydrocarbons just drove the nails deeper into the coffin.
The measures the government has announced to secure and store more fuel, and the modest proposal to examine expanding refining capacity, are welcome first steps. The aim should be to become as energy self-sufficient as possible and Australia has the resources to do it. That will be expensive and take time, but weigh it against any future crisis.
Gas is on the march from sea to shining sea and even Victoria, whose government turned its crusade against all fossil fuel into a long morality play, has been mugged by reality.
Victoria’s multi-titled Energy Minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, likes to refer to the fuel essential to her state’s survival as “fossil gas”. On her watch Victoria made it all but impossible to tap that resource even as its reserves declined and the state drifted towards energy bankruptcy. Victoria entrenched a permanent ban on fracking and coal-seam gas extraction in its constitution and imposed a moratorium on conventional onshore gas exploration.
When gas prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in an act of supernatural hypocrisy Victoria whined that it should be entitled to Queensland’s coal-seam gas. It then wanted all Australian taxpayers to underwrite the absurdity of building a liquefied natural gas import terminal in a state sitting above untapped gas reserves. Now Victoria is in the middle of an awkward script rewrite.

And so it was back to full-blown fossil fuels worship, as the faithful climate science denying unreformed seminarian is always inclined to do ... A crippling onshore exploration ban for a decade failed to recognise Victoria’s dependency on gas.

And at this point the Ughmann dived off into a tale about how this new fangled battery thingie was ruining everything, including F1:

This week the Allan government approved Amplitude Energy’s Annie project in the offshore Otway Basin that is expected to begin delivering gas by 2028. The Victorian budget also borrowed more money to secure 10 million litres of diesel.
So the winds of change are blowing, they will likely blow in all directions at once and right now we are in the eye of the storm. If the Strait of Hormuz does not return to something approaching normal service soon, this crisis is far from over. Australia has been insulated by its wealth, but money cannot paper over physical supply shortages forever. We have outbid poorer countries for fuel. We cannot see and do not care about their suffering. But in time the pain will work its way up the food chain.
And amid all this, one of the clearest signals about where the energy story may be heading came from an unlikely place: Formula One president Mohammed Ben Sulayem is on a quest to bring back V8 engines by 2031. The former rally driver has been pushing at this door for some time and, after mounting complaints about the sport’s latest hybrid rules, it may be starting to open.
F1 is the world’s most technologically advanced motorsport, a rolling laboratory where elite engineers push the limits of machine performance. For the past 15 years it has pursued ever more sophisticated hybrid technology, turning its cars into astonishingly efficient but increasingly heavy, expensive and complicated energy management systems.
Many drivers and fans loathe the latest cars. Gone is the raw mechanical violence of the old V10s and V8s, the screaming engines driven flat out on instinct and nerve. The new hybrids draw roughly half their power from batteries, making them fast but bloodless and difficult to handle.
Like everything in energy, there are trade-offs.
The problem at the heart of the new 2026 rules is that drivers are forced to constantly harvest energy under braking and carefully manage how their car’s power is used. Drive reports that, on tracks with fewer heavy braking zones, drivers “are required to do what’s known as “superclipping”, which means instead of using the engine to drive the wheels, they use it to charge the battery, running it as a kind of electrical generator”.

And there you have it.

You can grow a 12 year old into a man, but you'll still get a 12 year old lusting for raw mechanical violence, and screaming engines ... (preferably doing doughnuts at 3 am outside your home) ... Drivers are having trouble controlling cars under the new regulations. Picture: AP

Damn you electricity and batteries and such like, you're ruining everything, including the beasts!

And so at last to the final gobbet ...

Instead of the machine serving the driver, the driver increasingly serves the machine. The car is no longer built simply to be as fast as possible. It must constantly manage its own energy anxieties, diverting power away from performance to sustain the system itself.
Then there is the cost. Before the hybrid era, engine deals reportedly cost teams between $4m and $7m a season. Today’s turbo hybrid power units run to more than $20m, while manufacturers are estimated to have spent more than $1.4bn developing competitive hybrid engines.
F1 has stumbled into the same dilemma confronting much of the wider energy transition. As systems become more complex, more capital, engineering and effort go into managing energy, storing it, shifting it and stabilising it, rather than simply producing abundant, reliable power.
Producing affordable, reliable energy using all our natural resources should be the goal of any sensible government. Without it we will go broke. We should reduce emissions where we can, as fast as we sensibly can, within the limits imposed by physics, engineering and economics, not driven by slogans such as net zero.
As we are learning, physical systems do not bend to ideology.

Oh there's a saucy admission ...

We should reduce emissions where we can, as fast as we sensibly can...

Indeed, indeed, nothing like an oil shock to make a climate science denialist tread a little warily, while still worshipping at the altar of fossil fuels.

Is that a reminder of the way that the planet actually behaves in response to an overdose of fossil fuels, what with physical systems not bending easily to Ughmann ideology?

On the other hand, it could be worse ...

And with that other game entering a new phase ...

... this couldn't happen to a nicer authoritarian dictator ...

In which the swishing Switzer goes full Pauline, Killer of the IPA offers more Killernomics, and Our Henry, in being determinedly apolitical, ends up being fiercely political (go Israel) ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:54:00 +0000

It'd be a real tragedy for the pond if Lord Downer was dragooned into running the Liberal party.

Opening the week with his ancient bleats nicely bookends a week of reptile follies, with Our Henry's ruminations closing proceedings out on the Friday ...

Oh that's cruel ... please save His Lordship from that fate, for the sake of the pond and the lizard Oz hive mind.

The reptiles didn't seem to care.

Instead it was onwards and upwards with the indefatigable Geoff celebrating the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

It's always a relief to see signs that the reptiles still care ... and luckily the intermittent archive was working this morning ...

Angus Taylor’s not going to die wondering in fight with Pauline Hanson for centre-right voters
The Opposition Leader will use his first budget-in-reply speech to lay down economic and immigration gauntlets to Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Pauline Hanson.
By Geoff Chambers

Over on the extreme far right, Rodger took up the cause that was at the top of the lizard Oz "news" section (the pond uses the word loosely):

ISIS brides pose the mother of all political dilemmas
As another group of women and children returns from Syria, debate is intensifying over security risks, rehabilitation and political responsibility.
By Rodger Shanahan

The sandgropers also scored an outing, which the pond should note to boost its readership in that remote land from one to perhaps five:

Why Saffioti’s public service cuts barely touch WA’s growing debt
Western Australia’s $579m in belt-tightening sounds impressive until you realise the debt pile will grow 18 times faster than the savings.
By Paul Garvey
Senior Reporter

Meanwhile, the reptiles thought that roughing up the other Jimbo was jolly good fun and worthy of a whimsical headline:

Cor blimey, what a caper ...(and dig what friends of the rich and useful tools get to fly in) ...

Farrer by-election
Corflute blimey! Hanson ‘stands by her man’ in booth brouhaha
‘I’m going to shake his hand’: Pauline Hanson to meet volunteer who scuffled with James Paterson
Senator Hanson held a press conference beside the ‘sexy’ Cirrus G7 aircraft gifted to her by Gina Rinehart upon her arrival in Albury on Thursday afternoon, as the countdown begins for the high-stakes by-election.
By Elizabeth Pike

Perhaps it was the sight of the plane, and a fit of envy that brought out the swishing Switzer, and he celebrated Gina's new sock puppet in fine style:

The header: Why One Nation can no longer be dismissed as a protest sideshow; Pauline Hanson’s party has tapped into voter discontent ignored by the major parties — and the Farrer by-election may test its growing reach.

The caption for the jingoistic, flag-waving snap: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation continues to draw support from voters disillusioned with the major parties. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Whenever the pond sees a surfeit of flags, there's an immediate surge of nausea. If you grew up under empire, you had any number of reasons to avoid the Colonel Blimps wandering about, shoving flags up their rectums and those of others.

Not so with the swishing Switzer.

Still on his rehabilitation tour with the reptiles, those flags seemingly set him off, and he was all in on elevating Pauline to centre stage.

Apparently he just loves himself some fear of furriners, white Xian nationalism, and fossil fuels, or so it would seem from his bleating about "ordinary concerns":

Every so often, democratic politics is shaken by insurgent movements that give voice to grievances long ignored by the governing class. Sometimes such forces flare and fade. Occasionally they alter a nation’s political landscape.
Donald Trump did so with MAGA in the US; Nigel Farage did so in Britain through the UK Independence Party and now Reform UK.

Um, be a little careful what you wish for?

In Australia, the most durable expression of this phenomenon has been Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The instinct of the political establishment is usually to dismiss such movements as crude, backward and outrageous. They challenge assumptions long embedded in mainstream discourse and reopen questions elites would prefer closed.
For years, Hanson was treated in precisely this fashion. Much of the media and political class regarded her concerns about immigration, national cohesion and energy security as unworthy of serious debate. Yet Hanson’s appeal, including across (of all places) Victoria, has not been difficult to understand. She speaks for many Australians who believe politics has become managerial, remote and deaf to ordinary concerns. She gives voice to voters who feel looked down upon by those who govern them.
Many of those drawn to Hanson are lazily caricatured as racists and xenophobes. In truth, what often animates them is something different: the belief that the political class has become detached from the people, and that the nation is governed by men and women with little understanding of the concerns, interests or anxieties of Middle Australia.

Nah, in truth, it isn't lazy to caricature them as racists and xenophobes.

If you haven't worked out where Pauline is coming from, what she uses as rabble-rousing triggers, you haven't been paying attention.

Dressing her up in Switzer's fine words - donning the MAGA cap like Dame Slap did - is exactly the sort of nonsense that gave the world King Donald.

Now back to that bigotry ...

For decades, polling has shown deep unease about high immigration, particularly in working-class suburbs and regional centres already under economic strain. Whether one agreed with their anxieties or not, they were genuine. Many felt no major party – not the Liberals, not Labor and certainly not the teals or Greens – represented them. One Nation does. Their concerns are practical and immediate: stagnant wages, scarce housing, overcrowded schools, energy dependency abroad, mounting pressure on hospitals and public services, and a sense that Australia is losing control of its borders and direction. Yet too much of Australia’s political and media classes have often shown scant interest in these anxieties.
Too many inhabit a comfortable bubble, seeing chiefly the benefits of globalisation and the energy transition while rarely confronting the social strains borne elsewhere. Politicians such as Anthony Albanese, along with much of the commentariat, can appear quick to condemn those who challenge elite orthodoxies, and slow to understand why such dissent arises. Nor is this uniquely Australian. In Britain, prominent liberal intellectual David Goodhart argued years ago that large-scale immigration risked weakening national solidarity and straining the welfare state. Though he plainly was no racial ideologue, many within London’s political and literary circles treated him as beyond respectable opinion.

David Goodhart?

The Road to Somewhere author argues that the liberating impact of feminism has harmed our children in a book shot through with claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny

So it's not just furriners ruining everything, it's those bloody feminists, and poor old Malware must also share the blame ...

That helps explain why One Nation evolved from a protest vehicle in the late 1990s into a broader symbol of revolt against an aloof political class. Founded in 1997, it surged at the 1998 Queensland state election before fading. Its revival came amid disenchantment with Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership and the mood of the 2016 federal election.
Rather than reaching out to those voters, Turnbull largely behaved as though they scarcely existed. The strategy failed badly and nearly cost the Coalition power after just one term. Indeed, Turnbull’s patrician and often condescending manner helped drive many working-class and lower-middle-class Liberal supporters into Hanson’s arms.
Voters disillusioned by professional politicians, broken promises, identity politics and cancel culture are turning instead to a figure whose greatest asset is unmistakeable authenticity. Hanson may be blunt, but she has restored passion, argument and consequence to a political culture that too often seems bloodless and stage-managed.
For this, she has paid a heavy price. Hanson has endured relentless hostility from sections of the press and broadcast media, frequently portrayed not merely as wrong but beyond the pale. She has been labelled racist and fascist, compared with Hitler and even served time in jail. She has endured even more hostile media coverage than anything encountered by Malcolm Fraser, John Howard or Tony Abbott.
The reason for such visceral contempt is plain enough: Hanson has reintroduced something increasingly scarce in Australian life – genuine political opposition. On immigration, climate policy, cultural identity and the failures of public institutions, she challenges the consensus views long treated as settled.

About this time in the martyrdom of St Pauline there's usually a billy goat butt needed, and sure enough, it came in the form of "none of this requires romanticising" ...

None of this requires romanticising One Nation or pretending it offers the answers to our nation’s productivity malaise and chronic debt.

And as sure as night follows day, a token billy goat butt must be immediately followed by another than renders the first one pointless:

But protest parties need not be competent ministries to exert political importance. Their role is often to expose failures that established parties would rather ignore.
The Farrer by-election on Saturday may mark a milestone. Should One Nation perform strongly, it will become harder to dismiss the party as a ramshackle sideshow. It may instead claim its place as Australia’s principal insurgent force in a volatile political age.
Finally, a confession. I long underestimated both Hanson’s wider appeal and One Nation’s capacity to emerge as the principal vehicle of opposition to the Albanese government. I placed greater faith in the ability of the Coalition parties to recover and resume their traditional role as the country’s main alternative administration.
That may still happen. For now, however, circumstances are changing. Across much of the democratic world, established centre-right parties have weakened or splintered. As British journalist Andrew Neil has observed: “The mainstream right is out of kilter with the tenor of the times. In government, it often let conservatives down by not being very conservative.” No wonder insurgent populist movements have grown in strength. Australia may not prove immune to the same realignment. Hanson increasingly reflects that broader trend – one that could gather considerable momentum should One Nation capture Farrer this weekend.
Tom Switzer is presenter of the Switzerland podcast.

So we should be making plans with Nigel, King Donald and Pauline?

Oh come now, under the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, the Liberal party is thriving and brand new guardians are standing by to usher in a new era...

And so to a rather short dose of Killernomics:

The header: Why Labor’s CGT reform plan looms as another bungle; Capital gains tax speculation has revived debate about inflation, housing affordability and whether Labor could accidentally lower tax revenue.

The caption for that snap of that dreadful Jimbo person, always pointing and harassing the reptiles: Treasurer Jim Chalmers faces growing debate over possible changes to capital gains tax settings. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Devotees of Killer will recall that he was very big on suggesting Australia follow Argentina and Milei.

The pond wondered how that was going and luckily a few days ago the Financial Times ran an update:

Argentina’s Javier Milei battered by scandals and slowing economy
President’s popularity falls as officials face graft allegations and unemployment climbs (*intermittent archive link)

There's lots of graphs and things, but the pond thought the wrap-up was an encouraging sign of the times:

We don't hate journalists enough?

Lucky that Killer is from the IPA and so excluded from the cull?

And now, before plunging in, the pond should note that this day, for all the columnists noted herein, the reptiles provided absolutely no visual distractions, whether snaps or AVs.

The pond has no idea why, but will follow suit.

Stand by for a huge gobbet of Killernomics, IPA style ...

After last year’s federal election, I tried to look on the bright side: Perhaps a Labor government with a large majority might have the courage to simplify the tax system or slash federal spending, prioritising the nation’s long-term interests over the risk of losing a few far-left marginal seats in the capital cities.
Jim Chalmers’ fifth federal budget next week is likely to confirm, unfortunately, that nothing of the sort has or will happen any time soon, except in one intriguing case: capital gains tax.
It is possible that poor financial literacy among the left-wing commentariat could see the government actually improve the tax system, however modestly or accidentally. It appears poised to reform CGT in a way that could reduce rather than increase tax revenue.
For months Labor figures have been fuelling speculation the so-called CGT discount would be pared back, perhaps to 33 per cent from 50 per cent, as part of the government’s plan to “do something” about “intergenerational equity”.
Far from trimming an obviously unfair concession, such a policy would have led to a massive increase in tax, so it’s been pleasing to read speculation that the government won’t be doing that after all. It will instead, apparently, be reverting to an earlier method that taxed only real capital gains (after accounting for inflation) that was introduced by the Hawke government in 1985.
That would actually be an improvement over the prevailing and widely misunderstood CGT discount introduced by the Howard government in 1999, which has been accused of providing an unfair advantage to housing investors in particular.
Yet despite its name, the CGT discount is often not a discount at all compared to the previous indexation method, despite widespread perception that the earlier method was a tougher regime. Which is better depends on how well an investment has performed relative to the change in the CPI over the investment period. Obviously, the indexation strips out inflation, while the discount method taxes the entire nominal capital gain, albeit after applying a 50 per cent discount.
Intuitively, if inflation is high relative returns (specifically, if it makes up more than half the nominal gain), the previous 1985 system, which adjusted the purchase price for inflation, would offer the lower tax rate for investors. To be sure, the CGT discount represented a big reduction in tax for most investors when introduced in 1999. Back then, inflation hovered around 2 per cent, where it stayed until the Covid era. At the same time, major asset classes such as property and shares were belting out great returns, often above 10 per cent a year.
Even under those conditions, it wasn’t always better than indexation though, as IPA research recently illustrated. Consider the unfortunate investor who sold a typical investment property in late 2012 after holding it for five years, during which national dwelling prices gained 7.4 per cent while the CPI increased by 14.5 per cent. That seller would have made a significant real loss, yet still owed capital gains tax.
Under the indexation method, by contrast, he or she would have paid zero tax. Blue-chip ASX200 share investors who sold in June 2025 after four years would have faced a similar tax fate with stockmarket returns failing to keep pace with the CPI.
All this is why the speculation about a revival of indexation is puzzling, if promising. The sort of high-inflation environment we are entering would in fact make the prevailing “discount” more punishing than the old Hawke-Keating system. Moreover, asset prices are at record levels in many markets, potentially pointing to a period of weak nominal returns.
If the government is hoping to raise more revenue than it currently forecasts to raise from CGT, this is a very strange way to go about it. Whatever the theoretical merits of reviving a CGT that allows for inflation, doing so will do next to nothing to improve “housing affordability” or “intergenerational equity” – the two meaningless political goals of our age. Who wouldn’t want homes to be more affordable or generations to be treated more fairly?

Even the most partisan analyses suggest shifting the CGT rate would have a price impact on dwellings of a few per cent at most. New Zealand has had among the highest house price growth in the world in recent years without any capital gains tax at all. It is disappointing the government hasn’t adopted more creative tax reforms that could have increased revenue and housing supply, such as adopting a US-style step-up in basis.
In Australia, inheriting assets doesn’t trigger a change in the cost base to the time of the previous owner’s death, as it does in the US. This creates a capital gains “lock-in” effect at death that discourages families in Australia, for instance, from ever selling their assets, lest they trigger a CGT event that is massive.
Such a reform here could see a dramatic increase in the number of home sales that boosts housing supply and, in turn, possibly government revenues too. Alas, any such move would be seen as a sop to the rich, and so is unlikely to ever emerge.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Trust the IPA to offer a sop to the rich in the guise of benevolence for all? Sure can.

The pond can't recall the last time that the pond presented a reptile without any visual (or verbal) interruptions, and felt an urgent need for some relief ...

That's better.

And now maestro, drum roll please, because it's the turn of the hole in bucket man to take the stage and rant into the ether in a decidedly political way about how politics should not apply to y'artz ...

The header: The Biennale of hate, folly and mediocrity; When politics takes over, artistic quality sinks into a stinking canal.

The caption for the stinking art: The Venice Biennale has been engulfed in controversy over politics, censorship and artistic freedom. Picture: AP

Anyone expecting any more illustrative snaps of the artworks on hand will be bitterly disappointed. Again the reptiles exercised their new "no distracting snaps" rule.

And those wondering what set Our Henry off - he hasn't ever shown signs of being bigly into the y'artz - should look no further than Israel's extensive efforts at ethnic cleansing, and the fuss that has caused in Venice. You don't have to scratch hard to find the politics lurking on the surface.

But Our Henry plays it cool and is relatively sotto voce about that aspect.

Instead he comes at it crab style, so Mussolini comes in handy ...

The Venice Biennale did not so much open this week as lurch into crisis after its jury – chaired by Brazil’s Solange Farkas – resigned on the eve of its launch.
Beneath the rhetoric lies a stark asymmetry. Farkas, a far-left activist with longstanding links to Russian cultural institutions, pressed for Russia’s return (it had withdrawn in 2022) and Israel’s exclusion. The Biennale’s leadership baulked; the European Union, backed by the Italian government, threatened to withdraw its €2m ($3.25m) subsidy. The jury walked out, invoking, as is now de rigueur, “artistic freedom”, while pursuing its own selective ban.
None of this is sudden. It is the culmination of years of encroaching politicisation, and it recalls something no less disquieting: the period in which the Biennale willingly served Benito Mussolini’s regime, its claim to universality enlisted in the service of ideological orthodoxy and vicious antisemitism.
Founded in 1895, the Biennale was brought under direct fascist control in 1930, when Antonio Maraini – secretary of the Fascist trade union of fine arts – was installed as its secretary-general. A 1938 decree completed what its architects hailed as the exhibition’s “genuinely Fascist” transformation, with prizes for “Maternity”, “the poetry of labour” and the “March on Rome” soon displacing aesthetic judgment altogether.
The 1938 laws excluding Jews from public life dealt the final blow. Having visited the 1937 Munich exhibition, Maraini urged Mussolini to impose a Nazi-style tightening of cultural discipline. He then purged Jewish artists and critics from the Biennale’s rolls, rendering it entirely “Judenfrei”. With the outbreak of war, the exhibition became a mere arm of Fascist propaganda.
The 1948 Biennale, the first post-war edition, set out to decisively turn the page. Its content was conspicuously non-political, dominated by Peggy Guggenheim’s collection – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian – and master retrospectives. Oversight was vested in brilliant Italian critics, including the recently returned Lionello Venturi, whose orientation was unapologetically aesthetic. And the prizes – Georges Braque (1948), Henri Matisse (1950), Raoul Dufy (1952) – honoured artists Fascism had despised.
However, two decades later, politics roared back. The immediate catalyst was the anti-American protests that convulsed the Biennale in 1968. But the underlying causes ran deeper than a reaction to Vietnam, civil rights or feminism.

At this point the hole in bucket man's theories about y'artz really kicks into gear ...helped by the delusion that somehow art can be tidily cleaved from politics and never the twain should mix, and what you need is "beauty, expression and formal mastery", because, you know, an exquisite portrait of Marie Antoinette has absolutely no political meaning.

Nor do any portraits of clerics or royalty or nobility, they're just more examples of beauty and formal mastery ...

Repudiating the past and binding itself to the imperative of incessant novelty, a new generation of radical artists dismissed beauty, expression and formal mastery as inherently reactionary.
Emptied of intrinsic interest and stripped of aesthetic moorings, the art object required a new substrate. Leftist politics – emancipation, anti-capitalism, identity – supplied it, offering inexhaustible content, a standing warrant for novelty, and a claim to relevance that aesthetic judgment alone could not sustain.
Where religious art once served the church, secular art would now serve a political theology, with quasi-sacred authority transferred from revelation to revolution. And the more transgressive the works, the keener the market proved to be.
The 1973 reform of the Biennale’s governing statute did not arrest the radicalisation; it ratified it by granting artists, curators and arts administrators an unprecedented degree of control.
The reform’s underlying assumption was that the arts community would champion quality, variety and creativity. Yet artists are no less susceptible than anyone else to the impulse to impose their convictions on those who disagree. Once the arts-curatorial complex accepted the claim that the idea of an art world “isolated from broader social and political issues” was, as feminist art historian Whitney Chadwick put it, “a fiction” – and that refusing engagement endorsed an imperialist, patriarchal and racist status quo – space for deviant opinion rapidly disappeared.
The consequence is that rather than being the victims of political repression, artists, curators and arts administrators have become its most zealous enforcers. Operating as agents of exclusion, they ruthlessly police orthodoxy through grant denial, no-platforming and reputational ruin. And when challenged, the art-curatorial-bureaucratic ensemble hypocritically cloaks the demand for unswerving ideological alignment in the language of freedom of expression.
The damage is first to the social fabric. It is utter nonsense to claim, as so many do, that “art has always been political.” Until recently, no more than 5-10 per cent of leading works carried an explicit political message, even at the Venice Biennale.

Butt, billy goat butt, explicit political messages are entirely beside the point when any artist worth their salt can load up a work with implicit messages.

While Picasso might paint a Guernica in protest, his allegedly apolitical works can be read as containing loaded political meanings.

Whatever an artist might think they're doing, the viewer (or the reader) will come to their own viewpoint on the meaning of a work.

You don't have to go the full Godard:

The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically. (here)

That way lies meretricious nonsense and full-flown Maoism.

But in its day Breathless was determinedly political too, embracing a desire to sweep away the old order, conjure up a filmic revolution, and embrace a peculiarly French form of nihilism.

And speaking of that, the pond recently caught up with a traditional French gangster offering made just before Breathless, starring Belmondo in a supporting role, Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques

It too offered a form of gangster nihilism, and apart from a desultory, off hand ending, it made sense by having a start, a middle and an end, and in that order.

It made the pond realise that much was lost as fools and the pond blindly rushed to embrace the Godardian revolution.

Whether politics is implicit or explicit, it's always present.

The pond digresses, but the same can be said for Our Henry, because embedded in this tirade, this rant, aka this celebration of the allegedly apolitical, is a deeply political wail about Israel and the persecution of Jews (damn you Islamics):

Ostracism was rarer still: Pablo Picasso the Communist and Georges Braque the apolitical formalist not only coexisted but collaborated, readily participating in a broader, politically diverse, artistic world. The exclusion of Jewish artists, now spreading in the West, was confined to Muslim countries, where intolerance prevailed.
For the visitor, politics was incidental. Exhibitions offered instead a rare republic of taste – a space in which citizens of irreconcilable convictions could find themselves momentarily united in their response to beauty, the sublime, or formal achievement, sustaining what Alexis de Tocqueville called a sinew of freedom: a realm of non-political sociability that holds a liberal society together against the centrifugal pull of identity and interest.
But once exhibitions become another arena of contest – in which works are judged by alignment rather than achievement – that function is inverted. Art generates division where it once dissolved it.
The cost to aesthetic quality is just as severe. Conformity, unlike excellence, requires no talent; it is more reliably produced without it. The result is that the young artist is now rewarded not for mastery but for the right claim of ancestry, the correct opinions and, most of all, self-asserted victimhood; the curator for the outrage a work proclaims and provokes; and the arts bureaucrat for disguising favouritism as fairness while directing public funds to kitsch tarted up as subversion.
The effects are evident at this year’s Biennale. Spain’s display presents a montage of old postcards that supposedly constitutes an “act of resistance that challenges traditional modes of cultural legitimation”. Mexico’s pavilion purports to dramatise “urgent issues such as ancestral memory, epistemic justice, decolonisation and relational ecology” by treating “indigenous cosmogonies as living matrices of thought”, while the UK’s “addresses race, history, feminism, cultural memory and identity to challenge dominant Eurocentric narratives”.
Denmark alone provides inadvertent light relief: a pavilion devoted to “activism” centred on “a large-scale video work featuring porn star Nicolette Shea as a laboratory scientist in a sperm bank”. Amid the nonsense, the US pavilion is one of the few that strikes a sober, unambiguously aesthetic, note – and it is being angrily boycotted by anti-Trump “artivists”.

At this point some readers might be starting to miss the usual bigly array of pompous, portentous references, showing off Our Henry's astonishing ability to misread the point of texts.

Please hold the hole in bucket man's beer...

From Giorgio Vasari’s Accademia del Disegno (1563), which freed artists from the guilds, to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), which grounded contemporary aesthetics, securing the autonomy of art from politics was the hard-won work of centuries.
Max Weber and Theodor Adorno regarded this as an extraordinary civilisational achievement: by allowing art to flourish on its own terms of aesthetic judgment and technical mastery, it produced the unparalleled succession from Impressionism, through Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism, to Abstraction – a flowering no era of political control has rivalled.
Now, at what Lionel Trilling called the “bloody crossroads where art and politics meet”, that autonomy lies in ruins. And, with its appallingly mediocre pavilion, Creative Australia has not used your money and mine to defend art; it has used it to hasten art’s destruction.

Gibberish and nonsense.

Just because Jackson Pollock urinated in Peggy Guggenhim's fireplace didn't mean he didn't appreciate the advantages of a filthy rich patron advance his causes... (here)

As for hastening art's destruction, the pond has noted such cries over the centuries, and yet somehow art in some form or other has managed to survive. What it does suggest is that Our Henry's doom-saying millenarian streak is now a mile wide and rapidly expanding, an old codger attempting to hold back the tide, incapable of understanding the old, while resolutely rejecting the new ...

And so to close celebrating another sublime supporter of y'artz and architecture ...

Warning: there is absolutely no politics in this clip.

Any mention of a pending civil war should be treated as clickbait.

Instead admire the "beauty, expression and formal mastery" and the wan aestheticism of dying on a battlefield ... and be outraged at the temerity of the curator suggesting that the clothes in the painting actually have political signs and meanings ...

In which Cameron explains the war, and the onion muncher hovers like a foul stench in the reptile air ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:51:00 +0000

What was that all about?

Two ships allegedly rescued, only 1,600 to go, then Operation Project Freedom gets suspended, but not before Kegsbreath delivers yet another jut-jawed speech ... and peace is near, but shots fired and too soon to sit down to negotiate, yet negotiations are going astonishingly well and it'll all be sorted in two weeks or so.

The pond could only make sense of it all if the bromancer had been to hand, but instead the reptiles sent in Cameron ...

The header: Donald Trump pushes for new negotiations with Iran as US halts Strait of Hormuz operation; Donald Trump has paused military operations against Iran and softened US rhetoric to revive stalled peace negotiations ahead of his Beijing meeting with Xi Jinping.

The caption: A woman waves an Iranian flag in front of an anti-US billboard in Tehran referring to President Trump and the Strait of Hormuz. Picture: AFP

Cameron could only summon up a three minute read, which seemed a tad short to sort it all out ...

America is pushing hard for a quick exit from the war against Iran. Donald Trump’s decision to pause Project Freedom in the Strait of Hormuz just a day after it began and Marco Rubio’s claim that the combat operation against Iran has ended are both aimed at giving diplomacy another chance.
Trump would love nothing more than to strike a deal with Iran to end the war in the coming days, ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week.

The reptiles decided the best way to help was to load it up with AV distractions ... U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday (May 5) he would briefly pause an operation to help ships escape the Strait of Hormuz, citing progress toward a comprehensive agreement with Iran. Syakir Jasnee reports.

Cameron struggled to make sense of it all, just like the pond.

If only the bromancer had been on hand to help, but Cameron battled on alone..

Trump has overseen an abrupt softening in both US rhetoric and actions towards Iran in recent days in order to breathe life back into the stalled negotiations with the Iranian regime.
The great unknown is whether Iran will take this olive branch provided by the US to also concede some ground in its own excessive demands which might pave the way to end the 10-week conflict.
The motivation for Trump to end the war is growing with each week as the global energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continues to hold world markets to ransom and eat into his political standing in the US, where fuel prices have risen by 50 per cent since the war began. Iran’s economy is also suffering as it is robbed of oil revenue by the US blockade of its ports, but Iran has so far gambled that it can outlast the US in an economic game of chicken.
Trump’s decision to temporarily halt the so-called Project Freedom for the US to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz and Rubio’s claim that combat operations have ended were the latest in an endless series of rhetorical U-turns by the President and his officials on the war.
Trump claims that the decision to suspend Project Freedom for now is aimed at giving negotiations with Iran another chance.
The move has been accompanied by a pronounced dial-down in rhetoric from both Rubio and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Who could trust a word the head of the clown carnival says?

US President Donald Trump claims Iran should wave the “white flag of surrender” and make a deal with America to end the war in the Middle East. “They should wave the white flag, the white flag of surrender,” he said. “When are they going to cry uncle?”

Cry uncle? Oh the late night comedians ran with that one - every day's another field day - but the pond must cry nuncle like the Fool in Lear, and move on ...

Rubio now claims that any US efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are “defensive” in nature and that the US is not seeking to attack Iran and would do so only if attacked.
Rubio says Operation Epic Fury is now concluded, although such claims are also part of an effort to avoid the need for the President to seek formal approval from congress for war activities 60 days after beginning military action.
Hegseth, whose over-the-top muscular rhetoric has been a constant during the war, now claims the US is “not looking for a fight” over the Strait of Hormuz.
Importantly, the US has chosen not to interpret Iran firing several missiles and drones at US ships in the strait this week or its strikes against oil facilities in the UAE as constituting a breach of the existing ceasefire.
Iran has so far responded to the moves with its usual rhetorical belligerence, with Iran’s parliamentary Speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf saying “the status quo is intolerable for America; while we have not even begun yet”.

To add to the sense of confusion and chaos, the reptiles flung in Liddle Marco ...

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke on the proceedings of the war in Iran as the US transition from Project Epic Fury to Project Freedom. “We told you guys from the very beginning, and we are very consistent in this messaging, the operation that has concluded was going to destroy their navy, they have no navy left,” Mr Rubio said. “Their ability to build their shield behind which they could hide their nuclear program was wiped out … that was the purpose of this operation from day one. “The operation is over, Epic Fury, as the president notified Congress, we are done with that stage of it.”

By the end of Cameron's short survey the pond remained completely clueless...

But what Iran says publicly and what it does behind the scenes are often very different.
If Iran were willing to come back to the negotiating table with a half-decent proposal on suspending its uranium enrichment for its nuclear program, then the Trump administration might be tempted to grab at such a deal.
At least publicly, both sides give the impression of being a long way from an acceptable peace deal. Iran has refused Trump’s demand that it surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and end all enrichment inside the country. Iran has also rejected US attempts to persuade it to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
But Trump’s good cop/bad cop routine with Iran is back into “good cop” mode. The question is whether Iran will take this chance to end the war now or prolong the uneasy ceasefire in the belief it has the upper hand and time on its side.

All is clear as mud, though the brilliant Golding did make some sense...

Talk about a lot of tail-chasing ...

As for the rest, it was the usual disappointing reptile parade, with petulant Peta leading the way ...

Look out: Labor has revived its old class war instincts
Labor has broken its election promise by preparing negative gearing changes for the budget despite Anthony Albanese saying such policies were ‘off the table’.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

She would say that, and the pond is on a winning streak with the intermittent archive of late, but this morning the "save" function seems to have broken yet again ...

So here's the url for possible future use ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Flook-out-labor-has-revived-its-old-class-war-instincts%2Fnews-story%2F7926b8131432548c55751ebb6e41c853?amp

No matter how many times the pond tried, PP simply couldn't be saved - perhaps she was beyond redemption - so here's a teaser trailer explaining why the pond couldn't be bothered going the whole ten yards ...

Just straight political blather of an extremely dull kind.

The pond has been over that sort of reptile one-eyed jihad for such a long time.

All the pond will note is that the reptiles were surprisingly quiet this morning about the petulant one's old sock puppet, the onion muncher, jostling for the top job of El Presidente Supremo with Lord Downer ...

For any of that gossip, noted by correspondents in the comments section, you had to head off to the AFR, and at least the intermittent archive had recorded that ...

The pond should note that the onion muncher was out and about in the hive mind, in his usual sensitive, deeply narcissistic, attention-seeking way, allowing the families involved to grieve without making any political capital ..

COMMENTARY by Tony Abbott
Culture? An innocent girl is dead. Let’s have some truth
Life on the ground often fails to conform to the Dark Emu romance of deeply spiritual people.

Unpopular figure? That computes.

The stench was too much for the pond, so it was a relief that the intermittent archive had caught that one...

As for the rest the diligent Geoff kept firing away, and he too made it into the archive ...

Roll up, roll up for the great Albanese ‘Trust me’ show
After breaking promises on superannuation tax concessions and stage three tax cuts and being re-elected, the PM would feel confident he can breach the trust of voters and get away with it.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

One of his efforts sent the lettuce into a teary, sodden trip down memory lane ...

Vacant Ley or valiantly: Libs headed for historic defeat
One Nation stands poised to claim its first lower-house seat in Farrer as former Liberal leader Sussan Ley remains conspicuously absent on a six-week overseas holiday.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Just to keep the lettuce happy, the pond slipped in a teaser trailer ...

Ah memories ...

It's all a go, and the immortal Rowe was on hand to help celebrate the bulls ...

Some might think it a relief that Jennings of the fifth form couldn't be saved into the archive by the pond ...

ISIS families’ return expose limits of counter-terror
As women and children linked to Islamic State return, questions mount over arrests, monitoring and the long-term risks of radicalisation.
By Peter Jennings
Contributor

The pond wouldn't have gone there, but here's the url in case it comes in handy ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fisis-families-return-expose-limits-of-counterterror%2Fnews-story%2F22abee3ff53baef9645411479b1e6cea?amp

All the pond wonders is why Syria was expected to do all the dirty work in relation to Australian citizens?

If they had passports, they had the right to return and then let the chips fall as they may ...

And so to close by celebrating the sympathy and empathy shown by both sides in all matters rectitudinous...

At least someone thinks of the children, especially, it turns out, King Donald ...

In which "Ned" at last returns for a natter, and Dame Groan demolishes the sparrows of the south ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:41:00 +0000

It's been a considerable time since the pond heard from "Ned", and frankly the pond hasn't much missed his patented bland of pomposity and the borrowing of the thoughts of others.

He was last sighted way back on 27th March offering Burn-down-the-house mentality that has splintered the right is coming for the left too; Establishment politics is under massive assault in a nation that is losing its way — but don’t be misled by Hanson’s ‘consistency’ myth. (*intermittent archive link).

That was an interminable ten minutes of humbuggery, but on his return "Ned" could only manage a more seemly five minutes of his natter.

All the same, climbing any "Ned" Everest is part of any sensible herpetology student's warm up routine, so it was off to base camp:

The header, which immediately made the pond wonder why anyone in their right minds would want to keep up with King Donald: Xi Jinping and Donald Trump have remade the world - can Australia keep up? Whether the nation possesses the political and bureaucratic brain power to create a new economic model remains in grave doubt.

The caption for the collage which was unwisely given a credit. (Sometimes, Frank, discretion is the better part of AI slop valour): Artwork depicting Xi Jinping alongside Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump. Artwork by Frank Ling.

"Ned" has some bizarre ideas about "transforming the world".

Neither role model on offer seemed particularly beguiling, but remember this is "Ned", so he's determined to compete, bung on a do, and in the process, it won't belong before the borrowings start to appear:

Two men have transformed the world. China’s Xi Jinping and America’s Donald Trump in their global rivalry have created a new world that affects every democracy and feeds into the challenges and policies that Jim Chalmers will unveil next week.
Strategic competition now spills into economic and technological warfare. It is all-encompassing. In their relentless competition Xi and Trump have retreated from the era of market-based interdependence – the age of globalisation and liberal free trade – and embraced a fusion of economics and security, creating what many call the “economic security state”.
This trend has been on display for a decade. As China expert Elizabeth Economy has identified, Xi has repudiated liberal reforms in favour of supply-side controls, maximising security capabilities, huge government subsidies and promoting a fusion between the civilian economy and military prowess. Beijing runs the globe’s most ambitious industry policy.
In the US, Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have rejected the previous “neoliberal economic philosophy of the past 40 years” – to quote former national security adviser Jake Sullivan – with Trump using tariffs as a strategic weapon and deploying protection, reindustrialisation, support for hi-tech and artificial intelligence in an economic and security rivalry with China set to last for decades.

The pond does appreciate the way that "Ned"conformed to GOP talking points and dragged poor old Scranton Joe into the current mess, and the reptiles helped him out with a snap... Joe Biden speaks at the International African American museum, January 2025.

Jake Sullivan?

He's certainly one of the worst of the Biden era for entirely missing the point:

In May 2024, Sullivan expressed concern at the Irish, Norwegian, and Spanish recognition of Palestine and Israel's growing diplomatic isolation, saying that "we certainly have seen a growing chorus of voices, including voices that had previously been in support of Israel, drift in another direction. That is of concern to us because we do not believe that that contributes to Israel's long-term security or vitality."

And that fog of words could be found in a Foreign Affairs piece...

History is again knocking. The growing competition with China and shifts in the international political and economic order should provoke a similar instinct within the contemporary foreign-policy establishment. Today’s national security experts need to move beyond the prevailing neoliberal economic philosophy of the past 40 years. This philosophy can be summarized as reflexive confidence in competitive markets as the surest route to maximizing both individual liberty and economic growth and a corresponding belief that the role of government is best confined to securing those competitive markets through enforcing property rights, only intervening in the supposedly rare instance of market failure.
The foreign-policy establishment need not come up with the next economic philosophy; the task is more limited—to contribute a geopolitical perspective to the unfolding debate on what should follow neoliberalism and then to make the national security case for a new approach as it emerges.

That ship has sailed, or perhaps not, just sat somewhere in the strait of Hormuz ...

But the pond digresses, because it was then on to the gnashing of teeth and wailing into the ether, and running about clucking that the sky was falling down, a genre in which "Ned" is as adept as Dame Groan is in her "we'll all be rooned" carry ons ...

Australia has no option but to live in the world being created by Xi and Trump. But that’s a more complex, dangerous and uncertain world – like other nations, we struggle to grasp what it means. There are two certainties – the vast prosperity Australia enjoyed from the age of globalisation won’t be repeated, and whether the nation possesses the political and bureaucratic brain power to create a new economic model remains in grave doubt.
In this new world false prophets and fraudulent ideas are everywhere. The most penetrating analysis of the epic challenge facing this country comes from John Kunkel in his monograph for the United States Studies Centre titled Paradigm Shift: The End of the Washington Consensus and the Future of Australian Economic Statecraft.

Yet again the reptiles shamelessly refused to provide a link to "Ned's" borrowings, but anyone wanting the original Kunkel can head here.

Others will have to be content with "Ned's" shameless borrowings as he attempts to come up with his own version of a paradigm shift:

Kunkel says: “In the coming years, whether willingly or not, Australia will be forced to construct our own variant of an economic security state. This will be a demanding task. It will require enhanced state capacity to distinguish between essential economic security needs and non-strategic transactions.” The Albanese government now wrestles with this task – beneath the politically driven cost-of-living issue in the budget, it constitutes the long-run foundational challenge for policymakers that will run for decades.
Recently Anthony Albanese has become far more open about the sweeping strategic change in Labor’s framework, telling the National Press Club we cannot “continue to rely on an economic model designed in a different time and built for a more predictable world”. His message: the nation must become “more self-sufficient and less vulnerable”.
The Prime Minister pledges to deploy state power to make Australia “more resilient” because in the new world “economic policy and national security are bound together”. He says global supply chains are now “instruments of economic power and strategic competition”. The Iran war reinforces the message, with Albanese desperate to secure vital fuel supplies, the lesson being that we cannot rely on “somewhere else because it’s cheaper” – a direct repudiation of the economic law of the globalised age that helped to make Australia a rich, high-income country.

Actually there are some countries, European ones and Asian ones too, that still cling to the notions of a globalised world, what with it bleeding obvious that we're all in the mess together, and must cope with rogue nations of the King Donald kind by forming new alliances.

Never mind, have a snap of Jimbo ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers addresses the media at Parliament House. Picture: Martin Ollman

Stuck back in Hawke/Keating and fossil fuels days, "Ned" was startled by the shock of direct repudiation.

He didn't seem to know where local oil might be coming from, though his fellow reptiles had suggested down under was rich in oil just waiting to flow.

Perhaps there might have to be an appeal to globalised sources ...

While he respected the reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments, Albanese said we now live in “a very different world”. He said “building and strengthening” national resilience will be a “key focus” of the budget – think prioritising fuel supply, strengthening supply chains and making more things in Australia.
But the sobering insight has been the government’s estimate that providing 90 days’ fuel supply would cost $20bn or $230 per adult a year or nearly $500 annually for an average family. And that’s just the fuel supply story.
Herein lies the hard truth: resilience comes at a higher cost. The Australian people will pay more for having to inject the security paradigm into economic policy, just as the people of China and the US will pay. The revolution in global economic policy may sound thrilling, but it comes with a hefty price tag.

Um, don't blame the world for this "revolution".

Perhaps instead blame the Emeritus Chairman and his Faux Noise chums, who helped guide the United States into rogue banana republic status?

The Treasurer says the budget is about reform and resilience. That’s a sound message, but how does it play out? Our efforts so far are weak on reform-based productivity to deliver a more competitive economic and our promotion of resilience is burdened by truckloads of defects.
Albanese boasts about his government’s new agenda; witness its Future Made in Australia policy, its National Reconstruction Fund, its Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve, its strengthening of defence manufacturing and its 82 per cent renewables target by 2030 – some are justified and worthwhile but many of these state-driven investments and subsidies are flawed and highly dubious; witness the serial bailing out of smelters.
Productivity Commission chief Danielle Wood, in The Australian Financial Review, has delivered a lethal warning about the pitfalls of resilience, saying our politicians and advisers must separate the support that makes our economy stronger from those “costly follies for taxpayers and consumers”.
Wood said that while insuring for essential products made sense, beware falling for local production as the default position since co-operative deals with trading partners might be more cost-effective. She warned of the latest political con job: “old-fashioned industry assistance arguments for bailouts of copper and aluminium smelters dressed up in shiny supply chain security and economic sovereignty wrappers”.

Once again the pond had to check out the source of "Ned's" borrowings, and luckily Wood could be found in the intermittent archive.

But by this point the pond hadn't a clue what "Ned" was on about.

He seemed to start off in the resilience camp, and then he ended up suggesting that reverting to co-operative deals in a still globalised economy might be a better bet.

The reptiles didn't help out by throwing in a snap of comrade Ablo, Anthony Albanese holds a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

"Ned" kept up his borrowings, and then emerged triumphantly to blame the victims:

Wood then delivered the killer blow: scattergun industry policy actually reduces resilience. Think about that message. It goes to the heart of Australia’s policy reset. Wood captured its essence: “any productivity package in the budget is also a resilience package”. But such truism is not accepted by much of the political class, both Labor and Coalition, now resurrecting the failed ghosts of our protectionist past with a new rhetorical spin.
Kunkel said: “Australia’s economic policy settings remain ill-prepared for this new era. The task of making our economy more resilient is multidimensional, necessarily bound up, for example, with fostering economic growth, improving budget discipline and pursuing pro-productivity structural reform. Resources will remain scarce and Australian governments will need to set priorities in a way that is both uncomfortable and outside current policy mindsets.”
He said the task ahead is the “need to forge a new marriage between economic rationalism and state capacity” that equips Australia to succeed in the “more fractured and contested world” bequeathed by Xi and Trump.
Conceptually, this is new territory. Yet our efforts so far seem uncoordinated, piecemeal, a mishmash of different initiatives largely driven by politics. Who in the Albanese government is supposed to be devising what constitutes a new economic model for Australia? Do we have these days a political and bureaucratic class capable of meeting the challenge? Not on the evidence so far. We await a judgment on the budget.

Is anyone capable of meeting the challenge of mad King Donald and his mob of minions? Is it possible to reverse the damage done by the Emeritus Chairman in his lust for money and power?

Perhaps we need to retreat to a bunker until the storm blows over, or somehow works out how to do better potty training for dragons ...

The pond always gets a tad disturbed when the immortal Rowe goes into anal mode, but that 'Trump in Iran' turd is a pretty big one.

As usual there were any number of reptiles the pond chose to overlook this day, but the pond did personally supervise their storage in the intermittent archive, so those who might care could check them out.

Amongst them ...

From Omelas to Alice: this is our cruel bargain
Without major changes, the country will find itself repeating this trauma and too many of our children will remain powerless.
By Denise Bowden

The cranky Cranston was bold enough to support the RBA - as big a reptile heresy as going the round - but the pond made sure he was in the intermittent archive for anyone who might care:

Tough news but Bullock had integrity to deliver it
Michele Bullock makes the right rate call for the nation
The two things might have sent a shiver down the spine of consumers and businesses on Tuesday were the effectiveness of interest rates and the brief talk of the ‘r’ word.
By Matthew Cranston
Economics Correspondent

The pond routinely ignores the lizard Oz's pearls of wisdom, on the basis of predictability, and there was no sign in the header that things would be different this day:

Bullock sends Jim a message – but Labor’s budget will undo the work
The budget the Treasurer is set to deliver next week is likely to deepen, not lessen, our economic predicament.
By David Pearl

The indefatigable Geoff was also at it (the pond is tired of joking about him chambering another round, yet this day more shots were heard, with an exceptionally inflamed header):

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Budget bonfire as inflation inferno engulfs Reserve Bank
A week out from Jim Chalmers handing down his fifth budget, RBA governor Michele Bullock stated the bleeding obvious in warning governments (again) to stop spending and driving up demand.

Dimitri also lurked below the fold, but why settle for a B lister, when you can have a main woman to do the hatchet job ...

Victoria is the sick man of the Antipodes – and the disease is advanced
Jacinta Allan’s sleight-of-hand budget ‘surplus’ is just the latest deception from Victorian Labor.
By Dimitri Burshtein

That should keep herpetology students busy, but f the pond wanted a 'toon to summarise the reptiles in a budget frenzy, this one by Fiona K. seemed to do the job ...

Speaking of a main woman, the pond had to abandon all those reptiles because in a rare outing Dame Groan immediately followed news of the scuppering of a rail link to nowhere:

The pond couldn't immediately see a connection, but ignoring a Dame Groan offering would be like rejecting some of St Paul's letters because they were written by someone else.

They're all infused by the holy spirit, right, and so infallibly correct ...(cf. Adam Gopnink in The New Yorker on St Paul)

Similarly groaning must always command the pond's attention, because Dame Groan cultists salivate at any sighting of her.

The header: Fiscal fiction: Why Victoria’s economy is basically buggered; The rate of deterioration in Victoria’s fiscal position is quite extraordinary. It is the nation’s biggest basket-case state.

The caption for what looks like a rare find, an actual reptile visual gotcha: Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan on state budget day. Picture: NewsWire / David Crosling

It was only a three minute excursion, but this time Dame Groan did for Jacinta what she'd usually do to Jimbo:

Victoria is Australia’s worst fiscal basket case. The state of its public finances is shambolic even though the economically naive Premier Jacinta Allan and Treasurer Jaclyn Symes are trying to convince the voters this is not the case.
Michael Brennan, the CEO of e61 Institute, has described Victoria’s budget position as “boxed in”. I wouldn’t be as kind: it’s basically buggered.
For those who don’t live in Victoria, you might think this doesn’t matter. But at the end of the day, the commonwealth will make sure the state doesn’t become insolvent. Short of the big bailout, the feds will play a role in funnelling additional grants and more GST payments to the state – it has already begun this – to keep it afloat.

There was only one AV distraction for the excursion, which named and shamed Jacinta, but on the evidence, it seemed to point the finger at that arch villain, comrade Dan, though the framing was so weird and wild, who can say? Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan will try to sell a budget littered with billions of dollars in extra spending.

What a reprehensible way to treat an always recurring reptile shibboleth.

As usual, just as Dame Groan refuses to make any allowance for the current dire straits the world is in, this time the steely Groaner refused to allow any attempt to buck pass on Covid.

If you can't handle the plague and emerge with a booming economy, you must be in charge of a cruise liner suffused with rats ...

While putting Victoria on watch, the ratings agencies clearly believe the commonwealth would rescue any state in dire circumstances. This partly explains why the yields on government bonds don’t vary a great deal between the states – say, Victoria versus NSW.
Let’s be clear here: the Victorian public finances began to deteriorate before Covid. To be sure, spending went through the roof during Covid, in part because of the excessive periods of lockdown the state endured.
The rate of deterioration in Victoria’s fiscal position is quite extraordinary. When Dan Andrews came to power in December 2014, the state’s net debt was a tad over $20bn. It is now heading towards $200bn at the end of the decade.
(The quoted figure in the budget of $199bn in net debt for 2029-30 is essentially fictitious, made to come in under $200bn for political reasons. It’s what economists call spurious precision.)
It’s worth recalling here that state budgets are divided into two parts: the recurrent and the capital. Typically, but not always, states will run a net operating surplus while accounting for capital spending in the other account. (The Victorian government will run a trivial operating surplus of $1bn next financial year.)
But there is some fudging that can go on in relation to the operating balance. Grants are part of the revenue recorded for the operating balance, but some of these are essentially for capital purposes. Some grants from the federal government are routed through the recurrent account and recorded there, but they are just capital spending.
Allan and Symes have been making a great deal of the possibility that the ratio of net debt to gross state product may fall over the forward estimates. Again, this is a contrived figure made up of overly optimistic forecasts of GSP as well as an underestimation of future expenses.
Real GSP growth is expected to be 2.5 per cent in 2027-28, for instance. These forecasts contrast with the more sombre (but more accurate) ones of the Reserve Bank.

Dame Groan was feeling her oats, with a b*gger here, and a b*llocks there ...

It’s also bollocks that the only thing that counts is the ratio of debt to GSP. The servicing costs relate to the total size of the debt, and these costs have been rising substantially. They are about to jump sharply as the cheap debt, secured during Covid and before, expires, and the debt needs to be rolled over. You can see this in the budget figures on interest expense. Last financial year, interest expenses were $7.7bn; in 2029-30, the figure is expected to be nearly $12bn.
The fact is that over the course of the past decade or so in Victoria, state government spending has ratcheted up by around two percentage points of GSP and there is no indication the Allan government is capable of – or is of a mind to – reducing this proportion. The Victorian Labor government has a lot in common with the Albanese government in this respect.
Unsurprisingly in an election year, the Allan government is looking to offer up some sweeteners notwithstanding the fact that the budgetary position should prevent it from doing so. Free public transport, discounted motor registration, meeting the teachers’ pay demand to avoid strikes, additional healthcare services – and this is just for starters.
The argument is that these benefits will simply be paid for by transferring some of the future operating surpluses to 2026-27 and there will be no net change in the budget settings. The trouble with this argument is that when those future years come around, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to make those savings.
There is no indication in this state budget that the political leaders are prepared to acknowledge the fiscal hole they have dug or to think about means of paying down debt. It will probably blow up at some stage, but Jacinta Allan is likely to be gone by then, sitting on a few well-paid government boards.

Ah, the bitterness.

What chance of a place for Dame Groan these days on a well-paid government board? Instead she must pocket a few pitiful shekels from the Emeritus Chairman for her regular "we'll all be rooned" groans...

Meanwhile, back in that notorious banana republic and speaking of dragons ...

And this is for those who've heard of Alex Jones or InfoWars or The Onion.

Perhaps skip to the last four minutes, wherein there's a little transubstantiation involving human blood?

In which the bromancer goes gaga over Takaichi and correspondents in the cult can line up for a serve of the Tuesday groaning ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:43:00 +0000

The news that the world continues in dire straits made the pond want to pull up the covers and do an ostrich routine.

The next best thing was to plunge into the hive mind, where the only fear to be found was in the form of the federal Labor government.

Luckily the bromancer was to hand to provide that kind of distraction, coupled with a remarkable infatuation for the Japanese PM:

The header: Japan’s ‘Iron Lady’ shows up our feeble PM; Mark Carney was treated as though he were a world statesman. Yet Japan’s dazzling new PM has been treated in a very low-key manner. Only a nation as dumb as us could fail to fully see her significance.

The caption for a snap ruined by that preening mug standing alongside her: Prime Minister of Japan, Her Excellency Ms Sanae Takaichi, visits the Canberra Nara Peace Park at Lennox Gardens alongside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Of course the bromancer has been infatuated with Japan before.

Remember this?

Japan building Australian submarines is a match made in heaven

The pond couldn't resist a plunge back into ancient times, and besides inducting the piece into the intermittent archive, decided to offer a teaser trailer reminder of the good old days ...

What glory days there could have been.

Instead the bromancer cheered on AUKUS, and the nuking of the submarines, a phenomenon never to be seen in the pond's lifetime, and now here we are.

But the bromancer has always been fickle, moody, changeable, and with the memory and consistency of a gnat.

It's way too late to revive any thoughts of what might have been, and instead we have the spectacle of the bromancer dissing the Canadians to creepily crawl up to Takaichi:

If you want to get a glimpse of just how badly Australian intellectual life, and very often the Albanese government, exist in a foreign policy make-believe land, consider this astounding contrast.
Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, a figure of almost no consequence to Australia at all, and whose international policy proposals are based on bad analysis and would generally be disastrous for Australia, was an honoured guest, as though he were a world statesman, and gave an address to a joint sitting of the Australian parliament in March.
Yet Japan’s dazzling new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, who has recently won a landslide election victory in her nation, was given no such honour in her visit to Australia, and in fact has been treated in a very low-key manner by the Albanese government.
Takaichi recently won a huge super majority in Japan’s parliament. She stands in the tradition of strong Japanese leaders like Yasuhiro Nakasone, Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe. Only a nation as dumb as us could fail to fully see her significance.
The visit is good and useful. No international visitor today could be more important. But this should be a very big deal in our national life, not a minor bit of routine Canberra falderal.
The visit’s formal agreements – on economic security, critical minerals and defence co-operation – were good, marginal, incremental steps on existing agreements many times announced and rehearsed previously. Agreements with Japan tend to be substantial. Japan is the only one of our many critical minerals partners that really seems to want things to happen in a relevant time frame.

Elbows up Canada, because this is the only flourish you'll get: Canada’s Mark Carney listens to Anthony Albanese speak during a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: David Gray / AFP

The bromancer carried on with his almost uxorious scribbling, and never mind the way that the Japanese currently make a motza out of onselling Australian gas purloined from the rubes down under.

Instead, inevitably, the bromancer reverted to his war with China, possibly in alliance with Japan, and hopefully by Xmas:

For reasons of Japanese politics and protocol, visits by Japan’s PM to Australia are rare. It’s in our interest to make them big. Abe in 2014 was the only Japanese PM ever to address the Australian parliament. I covered that speech and wrote then that it was one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in our parliament.
That happened when Tony Abbott was PM, and was the high point of Australia-Japan relations.
Parliament’s not sitting this week. The government should have recalled it for a day to hear from Japan’s first female leader. Takaichi is the most popular political leader in Asia (except in China). The China dimension probably explains why Albanese took such a lame, low-key approach to what should have been an important national moment.
Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, after the US and China. It’s a member of the G7. It’s America’s most important ally in Asia. US Studies Centre polling two years ago showed 60 per cent of Australians would like a formal defence treaty with Japan. Tokyo is now more forward-leaning on this than Canberra.
Japan’s Sanae Takaichi has won a resounding victory in Sunday’s snap election
Tokyo is doubling and more its defence budget. It remains, with South Korea, one of few US allies that is still a huge manufacturing power. It operates at the highest level of technology. Increasingly it’s investing in defence technology and, in a development of profound historic consequence, becoming a defence exporter.
The Albanese government’s decision to buy Japan’s advanced Mogami general purpose frigate for our navy, and to get the first few built in Japan, may be the single best decision (to be frank, there aren’t many) it’s made in defence.
In the Japanese parliament some months ago, Takaichi was asked if a Chinese military attack on Taiwan would endanger Japan. At its closest point, Taiwan is only 100km from Japanese territory, so the answer is, naturally, yes. Nonetheless, many national leaders would have fudged an answer to such a question. Albanese surely would have done so in similar circumstances. Takaichi answered the obvious truth; yes, it would be a danger to Japan.
This is important because the designation of such danger would trigger the legal justification for Japan to engage in collective defence efforts. As a result, Beijing went bananas in trying to intimidate Japan, and Takaichi specifically. One Chinese diplomat in Japan crudely said Takaichi should have her head cut off. Beijing imposed coercive trade embargoes on Japan.

The reptiles decided it was time for the bromancer's heroine to feature, though sadly with that disgrace by her side: Sanae Takaichi, visits the Canberra Nara Peace Park at Lennox Gardens alongside Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

The bromancer continued his rant, determined to find a conspiracy of cowardice in the matter of his war with China:

But Takaichi is a tough woman. She didn’t fold. She made some mollifying remarks but neither retracted nor apologised for her answer.
Here’s another curious element to the Albanese government’s management of her visit. The two prime ministers made joint remarks, but there was no joint press conference. The Canberra press gallery was led to believe this was because Canberra didn’t want to answer questions about gas.
But the Albanese government has decided not to impose any new taxes on gas exports. This is in part to avoid sovereign risk and to underline our reliability as a supplier, and because at a time when the world desperately needs more fossil fuels of all kinds, it would be barking mad, an act of grievous national self-harm, to put new disincentives on production. It’s such a ridiculous proposal that naturally the Greens and some crossbenchers are all in favour of it.
But that may not have been the problem with a joint press conference at all. Had the two PMs held a press conference, Albanese would have been asked about Taiwan and Beijing’s crude efforts to bully and coerce Takaichi and Japan. He would have had no alternative but to express solidarity with Japan. But Albanese doesn’t much do that sort of thing. Defence Minister Richard Marles has a mandate to say, two or three times a year, mildly disobliging things about China. The rest of the government has the courage of a sleeping kitten with a bad valium habit. Albanese never says boo to a goose on Beijing’s behaviour.

At this point the reptiles decided to provide yet further visual evidence of the pond's thesis that the reptiles are determined to live in some ancient glorious past, at least until the current mob are swept aside by the reptiles' never-ending jihad.

How else to explain the return of the onion muncher, from 2014? Tony Abbott and Shinzo Abe shake hands during a trilateral meeting at the G20 Summit on November 16, 2014 in Brisbane, Australia. Picture: Ian Waldie / Getty Images

Why do they do it? Why do they dwell so much in the past?

It turns out it's much like the bromancer's memory of the past:

Takaichi is visiting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic post-war trade treaty the Menzies government signed with Japan. Like most big Australian moves into Asia, this was carried out by a Coalition government with the support of Washington. The Coalition has an infinitely better record than Labor on both the Japan and India relationships, but is strangely incapable of telling this story.
Albanese seems so attached to the narrative that he’s stabilised relations with Beijing that it puts a severe political limit on what he does with Japan, and to some extent India. One tragic lost opportunity was when internal Liberal Party instability prevented Tony Abbott from going ahead with a submarine deal with Japan. We would now probably have the first Japanese sub and it would be world class. This would have solidified a quasi alliance between us, and deepened the strategic intimacy of both nations with Washington.
But as a nation, we seldom miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as now.

Say what?

The Coalition has an infinitely better record than Labor on both the Japan and India relationships...

Oh then the first of those Japanese submarines, spawn of the bromancer-Japan alliance, should be arriving in Sydney by Xmas.

Or is that why the bromancer is strangely incapable of telling this story.

To be fair, that outing has to be worth a couple of Goldings ...

Or perhaps an ancient Wilcox?

And so to other reptile contributors, assigned by the pond to the intermittent archive.

There was John Curtin's shame, at last acknowledging Pauline's problem:

Billionaires or the battlers? Pauline Hanson’s dilemma
One Nation: a populist movement railing against elites, financed by the country’s wealthiest individual
Precisely when One Nation is becoming the vehicle for battlers, it is becoming something else: the beneficiary of a growing network of elite patronage.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

That has to be worth at least one Golding ...

And early on the budget was top of the lizard Oz:

The reptiles have a remarkable capacity for showing meaningless graphs, with snaps showing Jimbo looking like a smirking, gibbering idiot, and this was peak reptile graphics department (there was no credit for the image, which perhaps was just as well).

Following on, the remarkably diligent Geoff chambered yet another round ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Labor ignores Reserve Bank warnings to deliver a multi-billion-dollar cash splash
At a time of soaring inflation, higher interest rates and increasing housing market pressures, the lures of populist tax changes and cost-of-living sweeteners appear to have won the day.

The pond consigned him to the archive with a note that it much preferred the earlier original headline, preserved in the archive: 2026 budget: Armed and dangerous: ‘hunting’ squad to fire populist scattergun

Now that's a pack of metaphors, but why this cruel despatch of Geoff?

Regular correspondents know the reason: this is Dame Groan day, and what a groaning and a sighing and a grieving and beating of breasts there was to be seen:

The header: The budget myth Labor is using for its big tax grab; Don’t believe the Treasurer’s untested platitudes when mooted tax changes use disputed claims about intergenerational inequity and ignore overseas failures on similar reforms.

The caption for that pair of misery makers, the ruination of Dame Groan's life: Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Treasurer Jim Chalmers, ‘who is very good at rattling off unbelievable cliches in the hope they make sense’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Correspondents in the Dame Groan cult - you know who you are - already know the format.

"We'll all be rooned", in a four minute read, with the only interest the way that the attack is launched.

You have to hand it to the Albanese government: ministers don’t bother to let facts get in the way of their arguments. This is particularly the case for Jim Chalmers, who is very good at rattling off unbelievable cliches in the hope they make sense.
We hear a lot about intergenerational inequity as a rationale for policy changes even though all the serious analysis suggests there is no such thing. Older people have always held more wealth than younger folk. It has always been the case, and it will be in the future.
But identity politics is a potent force. Suggest that Baby Boomers had it easy and are now ripping off their children and grandchildren, and an argument is made that the privileges the Baby Boomers have enjoyed over their lives – forget the hard work and sacrifices – need to be pared back.
Wrap the argument in terms of the difficulty of home ownership and Chalmers suddenly becomes confident that the major tax changes to be announced in the budget are saleable. The press gallery will love them.

So far so good, but at this point, the lizard Oz graphics department decided to make it deeply weird: ‘Older people will rightly feel some of the wealth accumulated from years of hard work and saving will be confiscated, simply to be thrown on to the bonfire of wasteful spending.’

It turns out that this was an image culled from one of those wretched stock footage libraries, though these days it might also be a form of AI slop that litters the full to overflowing interubes and can be found with an image search. (Click on to enlarge, the pond doesn't mean to insult eyeballs).

Why do the reptiles do it?

Because they're cheap as, and they need to shove some form of visual distraction into the groaning as a way of breaking up the indigestible crap.

Why was the pond distracted?

Well it already knows the main message, we'll all be rooned before the year is out ...

It’s worth summarising the analysis undertaken by e61 Institute on the issue of intergenerational inequity. The argument made is that we have “a fiscal system that was designed for a higher productivity growth economy than the one we are in”.
“Seen this way, many of the issues look less like an intergenerational divide and more like two different problems: a system that is front-loading costs on to young people’s lowest-earning years, and a windfall that will largely flow to those who inherit.”
Without productivity growth – something the Boomer generation enjoyed for several decades during their working lives – the economic compact is beginning to disintegrate. Excessive government spending has meant that bracket creep is the only reliable way to increase revenue, leaving aside the lucky break of high commodity prices. The effect has been to increase the proportion of total government revenue derived from income tax. This has a much bigger impact on those who are working rather than the retired.
There is also the issue that an impost of a 12 per cent superannuation contribution charge on younger people is far too high when lifetime earnings and needs are considered. It’s impossible to see a Labor government deciding to reduce this figure for younger folk, even if this makes perfect sense. When you are in your 20s and 30s, buying a home is a much bigger imperative than saving for retirement. Mind you, if the younger generation does have a legitimate beef about anything, it’s the run-up in government debt that they will have to pay off down the track. That’s real intergenerational inequity.

The reptiles decided at this point that they needed a Little Sir Echo, so they sent in Freedumb boy, but all that did was remind the pond that Sky Noise down under still hadn't undergone a rebrand: Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson claims the Labor government is pouring “debt petrol on the inflation fire”. “They’ve decided to continue pouring debt petrol on the inflation fire,” Mr Wilson told Sky News Australia. “Australians will continue to pay a price for that.”

What an odd way to talk about petrol in these straitened times.

And why was Jimbo featured in the thumb? Sure, he looked suitably sly and sinister, but what have the reptiles got against Freedumb boy?

No matter, back to the 'rooning ... which began to take on the eerily prophetic tone of a shining ...

So, what are the likely contents in the budget that will be justified by intergenerational inequity? One of the most likely candidates for change is capital gains tax. There is leaked chatter about moving back to the indexation method implemented by Paul Keating, which was replaced in 1999 with the far simpler 50 per cent discount rule.
What is not frequently mentioned is the scope to average capital gains over five years under the Keating method, which can significantly reduce the amount of tax payable. This facet of the arrangement is not expected to be part of the new package.
While there is some vague reference to grandfathering the new policy, this is not locked in. There is also talk of partial grandfathering, a concept that defies both logic and practical implementation. For instance, there are currently 2.5 million investment properties. The very idea they would all have to be revalued on a particular date is fanciful.

At this point the reptiles decided to really lower the visual bar: It’s not clear how a minimum rate of tax on trusts would impact on intergenerational inequity because many beneficiaries of trust income are young people.

It's not clear? What's clear is that these days the reptiles have entirely given up on the graphics game and much prefer the sort of slop that can be found all over the place:

Hey, AI, show cash and locks and coins, we need some slop to fill up the hive mind trough.

As for Dame Groan, why was the pond surprised to find she was a lover of trusts? (Truth to tell, the pond wasn't that surprised):

It’s interesting to observe what has happened recently in Canada under the normally canny Prime Minister, Mark Carney. A decision was taken to reduce the capital gains tax discount, and a date was set for the changeover. Bedlam descended because of the sheer impracticality of the proposal and the flood of assets on the market seeking liquidation before the cut-off date. In the end, the Canadian Liberal government – read Labor – was forced to back down and the change has been put on hold.
There is also a great deal of chatter here about imposing a minimum rate of tax on trusts, although there is likely to be an exemption for farmers. It’s not entirely clear how this would impact on intergenerational inequity because many beneficiaries of trust income are young people.
There is also a great deal of misinformation about trusts, with comparisons made with salary income splitting. In most cases, trust income must be distributed annually to the beneficiaries who then pay income tax at their top marginal rates. For the wealthiest, this change will not affect them. And note that trusts are, in part, a device to preserve assets.

At this point, the pond couldn't be bothered pointing out the banality of the farm illustration: Farmers are demanding the nation’s 80,000 family farms be exempt from any capital gains tax changes.

What would the world do without a drone POV?

And that led to the final gobbet of the current 'rooning ...

Having said this, many small businesses are set up as trusts and this change could adversely affect many owners who are struggling to survive in the current environment. Negative gearing has been part of the tax code for over a century. Being able to deduct the cost of investment from tax payable is a completely unexceptional feature of the tax system. It’s also impossible to sustain the argument that negative gearing (and capital gains tax) is to blame for recent high house prices since the former arrangements have not changed.
Again, it’s worth looking at what has been done on this front overseas. Several countries have pared back the generosity of negative gearing – it’s not called that in other countries. Both the UK and New Zealand changed their rules to reduce house prices and to widen the scope for home ownership.
The short- to medium-term impacts were extremely modest, with a multitude of other interventions creating chaotic housing markets – very much like here.
So, my advice as always is to hang on to your hat. Don’t believe the untested platitudes of the Treasurer or have any confidence in the advice being given to him by the commercially naive Treasury officials. Older people will rightly feel that some of the wealth they have accumulated from years of hard work and saving will be confiscated, simply to be thrown on to the bonfire of wasteful spending. But the government is not seeking their approval or their votes.
It’s all about the vibe.

That's the best Dame Groan could do for a closer? A reference to The Castle?

The pond would prefer to drag in a Wilcox ...

As for the rest, the pond will leave that to correspondents embedded in the cult, pausing only to note the singular way that Dame Groan manages to think it's all business as usual, and that a bit of demonising Jimbo and his mob is more than enough.

The world is in dire straits, and it's getting direr by the day, and yet there's no reptile in the lizard Oz willing to tackle the enormity of what mad King Donald and the mad Mullahs are managing to do to the world economy each day.

There was only one decent point to be made in favour of a war - that it might provide some relief for the Iranian people from a cruel regime.

That was never likely, it was more just an excuse dreamt up by the sociopathic Benji to sell King Donald on the war ...

Meanwhile, the sociopathy never seems to end...

Israeli minister served golden death penalty noose birthday cake

It's not just the Iranian regime that specialises in cruelty.

And so to a note from the fringes as the both siderist NY Times decided that Tucker needed help with his platform ...

In which the intermittent archive does the reptile heavy lifting, while the pond indulges Lord Downer and Major Mitchell...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:48:00 +0000

The pond can't live by bread or reptiles alone, and so recently enjoyed a two part documentary about the 1950s Suez crisis.

It won't be for everyone. Filmmaker Chris Holt seemed to think he was doing a Christopher Nolan, and so the timeline swings wildly all over the shop.

And like many documentaries, there's only so much room, so there's no mention of the Hungarian uprising happening around the same time, nor of minor players in the folly.

Our own Ming the Foolish's role in the folly isn't mentioned. For any of that you need the wiki at a minimum. (Ming travelled to London and "became an informal member of the British cabinet discussing the issue").

But what the pond did enjoy was the way a team of ~~experts~~ wolves were let loose to ravage Britain, France, and Israel, and the delusional Anthony Eden, who presided over the end of Britain as empire (though there was a twitch in the old lion's tail in the Falklands, and the likes of Tony Bleagh kept living the delusion).

Much was made of the enormity of the folly, and there are obvious echoes in King Donald's current "excursion", with the show suggesting that history rhymes, repeats and resonates.

The show also reminded the pond that stupidity is endless, and Lord Downer was on hand in today's reptile display to prove the point yet again ...

The header: Energy policy has turned this country into a land of nonsense; In 50 years, historians will look back at what we were doing during the 2010s and 20s and think we had gone slightly mad.

The caption for a standard demonising collage featuring Satan's little helper, for which Sean unwisely took a credit, thereby revealing himself to be a pathetic hack of the lower kind: Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Artwork: Sean Callinan

The pond has been here before with the reptiles and will doubtless be here again, but there's something additionally poignant about Lord Downer harumphing away about being a child of the Victorian era:

When I was a child, my father used to read me limericks from Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense. I used to love them. They were nonsense.
I’m reminded of this book whenever I contemplate Australian public policy because Australia has descended into the land of nonsense. We’ve been through a few years when the government has been telling us we have to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. We have to invest in renewables. We have to increase the price of fossil fuels to make them less attractive and cross-subsidise investment in windmills.
We’ve been told that for years, and many people have been persuaded that by doing this we’ll somehow change the weather. What’s more, we are told we have to move away from carbon-emitting industries because that, too, will change the weather. So instead of emitting carbon dioxide from our own industries, we have moved to importing products that in their production are high carbon emitters.
Since global warming is a global phenomenon, how does that make sense? We produce only between 1 and 1.3 per cent of global emissions. Nothing we do is going to make the slightest difference to the global climate. Sure, we should make a contribution to a global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but not a disproportionate effort that will be all costs and no benefit.

The pond always likes to take its victories where it can when confronted by this form of apologetics, and here it came with Lord Downer's startling admission: global warming is a global phenomenon.

That's almost enough to get him drummed out of the reptile school of climate science denialism for heresy.

Of course Lord Downer doesn't actually believe that, he's just using the notion of "why bother, it's all futile and meaningless" to cudgel his enemies...Anthony Albanese with Chris Bowen during a press conference following National Cabinet on Thursday. Picture: NewsWire / Nikki Short

It's the inanity that gets the pond. Every so often the pond likes to joke about the "windmills" down the beefy boofhead's Goulburn way, but actually we're talking about wind turbines.

Does Lord Downer catch the difference? Nah ...

What is incredible is so many people believe that by building more windmills and solar panels we will stop bushfires and floods. And, quite apart from anything else, we believe by doubling up on our energy production and thereby reducing productivity in the electricity sector this would somehow bring prices down. That’s nonsense: using intermittent renewables, and having to back them up with coal and gas, has increased the price of electricity, not reduced it, and it’s obvious why. The renewables don’t give us 24/7 electricity.
We need to maintain coal and gas-fired generation to produce constant energy but we have reduced the output of those power stations. We have to run two energy systems where once we ran one. The government says we have a productivity problem in Australia. It’s the government that is causing it. Productivity in the electricity generation sector has declined by 30 per cent across the past 20 years. You see what I mean by nonsense.
Then the Iran war came and we saw more nonsense. Once upon a time, Anthony Albanese was running around the world telling everyone we had to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Now he’s climbing on board his fossil-fuel driven aircraft and flying from country to country, begging them to maintain supplies. Yes, you guessed it, supplies of fossil fuels.
At home we’re told we need to move to electric cars, and the government has been subsidising electric vehicles in many ways to make them cost competitive with petrol and diesel cars. While there are heavy excises on petrol and diesel, EVs are free of that impost. What has happened in the past few weeks? The government has reduced the tax on petrol and diesel, but surely an increase in the price of petrol and diesel will encourage people to move towards EVs. Introducing subsidies now for all forms of transport is just nonsense.
Then there are the steelworks and the smelters in South Australia and Tasmania. By increasing the price of electricity – and steelworks and smelters need electricity – these fossil-fuel dependent industries have become decreasingly competitive.
Surely that’s good. That’s what the government wants: to get rid of industries that are big carbon dioxide emitters. These industries are subject to the so-called safeguard mechanism that limits their carbon emissions. If they exceed those emissions, they pay a penalty.
Once these industries struggled financially, what does the federal government do? It introduces subsidies for these industries to keep them going.

The pond bit its tongue about EVs, no point in arguing with the clueless, as yet again the reptiles reminded the hive mind of the real point of the exercise ...demonising: Anthony Albanese meeting works at the Whyalla steelworks. Picture: Supplied

It was a relief to reach the final gobbet, with Lord Downer intent on showing the Eden spirit never really died in the Adelaide hills...

The government and its counterpart government in South Australia are spending around $2bn to keep the Whyalla steelworks going. Subsidies also are being poured into smelters.
In the world of nonsense, no one does a cost-benefit analysis before spending money. Take Snowy 2.0. It’s now estimated the total cost of the project could be as much as $40bn. That is just a staggering amount of money, which even a wealthy country such as Australia can ill afford. Snowy 2.0 is essentially an electricity storage system, like a huge battery. That’s fine, but at $40bn it’s just a staggering waste of money.
Not surprisingly, much of the world thinks Australian energy policies are just nonsense. How is it that a country so rich in coal, gas and uranium has its Prime Minister flying around begging for energy from neighbouring countries? Australia has substantial reserves of oil as well, but they’re not being exploited.
The Dorado field off the coast of Western Australia is said to contain 155 million barrels of oil. Because the federal government is against fossil fuels (or it used to be anyway), that oilfield is lying fallow. And when it comes to gas, we are one of the world’s two biggest exporters of liquefied natural gas. But our governments, state and federal, have been restricting the exploitation of gas. Victoria, which has huge reserves of gas underground, is building an LNG receival terminal. That’s just nonsense.
Finally, there is uranium. We export uranium and we have the world’s largest exploitable reserves of it. However, uranium mining is apparently controversial. But it’s fine to export it from designated places. We’re happy to provide fuel for nuclear power stations abroad but opposed to nuclear power stations at home. Our government is happy to have nuclear reactors in submarines but it thinks nuclear power is too dangerous as a source of electricity.
You see what I mean? It’s another example of a country that is descending into nonsense. In 50 years, historians will look back at what we were doing during the 2010s and 2020s and think we had gone slightly mad. I think they will be right.

"I think"? What an abuse of the word, and what a feeble rhetorical flourish for a closer.

Did we really need 50 years to realise what a gormless waste of space Lord Downer was as a politician?

And as for Lear being mere nonsense ... why Ellen Vrana even manages to drag in Camus when considering the meaning of his work.

Why, consider the ways that birds can talk and act ...

And now thanks to the intermittent archive still working, the pond felt comfortable assigning a number of items to that cornfield, if only because there's going to be much budget blather in the next few weeks and the pond only takes its advice from Dame Groan.

Geoff was a very busy reptile this morning and chambered many EXCLUSIVE rounds ...

EXCLUSIVE
Bosses plead with PM, Chalmers: get a grip on debt
Business chiefs to PM and Jim: It’s time to stop the spending
Australia’s biggest employers are pushing Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers to impose strict limits on spending, debt levels and the tax-to-GDP ratio, as the Treasurer promises to save more than he spends in next week’s budget.
By Geoff Chambers

EXCLUSIVE
Push to keep young in work, especially men, as welfare recipients near 1.4m
Despite relatively low unemployment and near-record participation rates, an additional 122,000 people aged under 34 have moved on to welfare payments since the 2022 election.
By Geoff Chambers

And he even found the time to put it in a column form as well:

Watch for devil in budget detail, as business finds voice
Australia’s business leaders are finding their voice after keeping quiet for most of 2025 following Labor’s emphatic federal election victory.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

For some reason, the reptiles had marked down the Caterist early in the morning but one look at the headline explained why ...

He helped create the problem, now Jim wants you to pay
The sin taxes on thrift Jim Chalmers is about to impose are an act of desperation.
By Nick Cater

You can head off to the archive if you like, but the flood waters whisperer was sounding like Geoff in drag, or poor old oLord Downer whining about history ...

Future historians may look back on this blinkered, small-minded, economically ignorant government as the architect of a new era of intergenerational inequity. Ignorant of the lessons of history, it imagined taxes and transfers as the answer to every woe.

All that was missing was a petulant stamp of the foot, and perhaps a sulk in the corner.

Roll on Dame Groan ...

All that left the pond feeling quite exhausted and perhaps that explains why the pond also avoided this 'top of the Australian Daily Zionist News world ma' headline ...

EXCLUSIVE
First witness: ‘Give us justice for the dead and freedom from the worst of us’: Alex Ryvchin takes royal commission stand
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin will be the first community leader to take the stand at Virginia Bell’s inquiry into antisemitism on Monday, kicking off the royal commission’s first two weeks of public hearings.
By Richard Ferguson

This was by any standards a beat up because Ryvchin hadn't actually taken the stand, yet here he was being channeled by the reptiles. Talk about an inside job by the ADZN ...

The pond also skated by this effort from simpleton Simon ...

Forget ideology, anti-establishment sentiment is what counts
Trying to resolve unconventional problems with conventional politics just isn’t going to work anymore.
By Simon Benson

The pond did at least want to acknowledge the stunning opening artwork by Emilia ...a collage for the ages, and in such vibrant, vivacious colours too ...

Simon struggled to make sense of it all, so the pond doesn't mind skipping to his closer...

... Nepean shows the public polls are putting about 3 to 4 per cent more on the One Nation vote than what’s occurring at the ballot box. But assuming they are closer to being correct in Farrer, where one poll has One Nation leading on 30.8 per cent of the primary vote, then what other choice does the Coalition have but to be putting One Nation ahead of its traditional enemies?
And how is it any more controversial than the teals, Greens and Labor combining in some seats at the last election to the point where volunteers were swapping shirts and how to vote cards and Labor organisers were co-ordinating with all of them?
One Nation may end up being to the Coalition what the Greens are to Labor. The Coalition needs to fight One Nation but at the same time it will have to find an accommodation if it is to counter the left-wing alliance it is also up against.
For Labor, the danger is it seeks to indulge the myth that its election victory in 2025 reflected a more progressive Australia. All evidence points to the opposite.
The combined size of the primary vote on the centre right remains higher than that on the left in the current polls. A study by Advance Australia in November 2025 illuminated the contradiction. Whereas most people ended up putting their vote in the left-of-centre column, a significant majority identified as being politically right of centre.
If Labor wants to run the argument that the Coalition is preferencing a party of bigots, it will backfire on the basis that it will have fundamentally misunderstood what the anti-establishment movement represents and how much this is starting to eat into its own base.

Really? Of course the Coalition is preferencing a party of bigots, led by a bigot who got kicked out of the party for being a bigot ...but there's a simpler attack line, because it's also a party of bigots being sponsored by Gina, trying to do a Clive ...

Or as the immortal Rowe put it ...

Such a nicely demonic image.

And with that all done and dusted it was time to turn to the Monday Major ...

The header: Albo’s meagre reforms don’t amount to a hill of beans; Many journalists and politicians misunderstand the point of economic reform. It’s about making the country richer by working smarter.

The caption for the snap of the very naughty boy: Jim Chalmers must understand reform is not to help finance an endless expansion of public sector employment Picture: Liam Kidston

The Major spent a bigly five minutes channeling Rick and his hill of beans, and the pond only went there because he showed the inclination of the reptiles these days to live in the past.

The pond can understand why. The world is currently in dire Hormuz straits, and so it makes it much easier to brood about economic reform if you ignore the current situation and circumstances, and instead head back to ancient times for comforters...

Many journalists and politicians misunderstand the point of economic reform.
Reform should not be about fairness, intergenerational equity, social cohesion or getting back at “greedy multinationals”. All have been cited as reasons for changes to the capital gains tax discount, negative gearing and taxes on gas exporters.
Economic reform is about making the country richer by working smarter and improving incentives within the tax, welfare and industrial relations systems. It’s about making governments at all levels more efficient.
It’s not about a tax grab to help a lazy government pay off the nation’s debt, or to help finance an endless expansion of public sector employment.
The reforming Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in the 1980s and ’90s told voters upfront that the world does not owe Australians a living.
Hawke and Keating floated the dollar, opened the economy to international competition, deregulated banking and industrial relations and, cut personal and company tax rates.
John Howard’s Coalition government introduced a GST and privatised lazy government-owned businesses.
These governments wanted Australia to be able to compete with the rapidly growing open economies of Asia.

Sure enough, the reptiles reinforced the Major's desire to live in the past... Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating exchange words in Parliament House in Canberra prior to delivering the federal budget in August 1986.

We could well be living in a very difficult world if the mad Mullahs and mad King Donald keep on carrying on, what with shipping still in peril, but the Major prefers to live in a void and howl about the way things were ...

Their reforms gave Australia 30 years of productivity improvements that underwrote growth and kept the nation out of recession.
Political wins today come from giving away free money on the national credit card.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese won the May 2025 election with handouts to subsidise soaring power prices. He cancelled $16bn of student debt accumulated by people who would go on to become high-income earners.
He signalled subsidised childcare for families earning up to $530,000 a year and an $8bn boost to bulk billing that gave doctors $3 for every dollar saved by patients.
The only tough thing his government has promised since 2022 was last week’s decision to limit NDIS growth to 2 per cent a year and cut 160,000 people from the scheme. The big question is will it happen or is it just a number for the forward estimates when Treasurer Jim Chalmers hands down the budget on May 12?
Albanese last Wednesday linked possible changes to the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount and to negative gearing to building national resilience. Seriously?
The PM believes populism is rising globally because people feel governments are not listening to them. Yet he thinks this can be solved with minor tinkering to taxes on investments.
Albanese and Chalmers say changes to the tax treatment of housing would deliver more “intergenerational equity”, yet they refuse to deal with the biggest threat to future generations – the $1 trillion national debt.
The Australian’s economics correspondent Matthew Cranston on April 25 reported Chalmers was likely to axe the 50 per cent tax discount introduced in 1999 for all assets held for more than 12 months, not just housing.
Tax will be paid on an inflation accounted basis, so only real gains will be taxed.
Cranston said negative gearing could also be axed for existing properties, but the change would be grandfathered. He reported on Wednesday that several within the government wanted revenue from the changes handed back as tax cuts, an idea the PM and Chalmers do not support.
Just as well, given the likely savings would be minimal, would not pay for meaningful PAYE tax cuts, and won’t even do much to boost housing supply for the young.
As this column pointed out on February 22, such changes will only increase rents as investors offset costs the only other way possible. The government seems unable to move the dial on housing supply, partly because it is also unable to control immigration.
Such tax changes will not improve productivity or increase incentives to work and save. Yet much of the media – especially the ABC, Guardian Australia and Nine’s city tabloids – has treated these meagre plans as serious reform.
Many journalists of the left never accepted voters were correct to reject these policies when they were put forward by then Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten in 2019.
Imagine how Australia would have been placed had Shorten’s huge spending program been met less than 12 months later by the Covid pandemic. Smart governments save in good times so they have the finances to handle bad times.
The best that can be said of the latest property plans is they won’t do much damage. But as a PhD student of Keating, Chalmers should know the last time Labor scrapped negative gearing in 1985 it had to reverse course 18 months later because investors stopped building homes.
More dangerous is the idea being floated by the anti-reform crowd at the Greens and their favourite think tank, the Australia Institute.

Institute boss Richard Denniss, the Greens and federal independent senator David Pocock have been pushing for a 25 per cent federal charge on all gas export revenue.
Senior journalists such as ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson and ABC Melbourne Radio’s Ali Moore have treated the proposal reverentially, apparently unaware Labor’s favourite post-war economist Ross Garnaut actually designed the much-maligned PRRT (Petroleum Resources Rent Tax).

Such ritual incantations, such railings, at such predictable foes ...

especially the ABC, Guardian Australia and Nine’s city tabloids

the anti-reform crowd at the Greens and their favourite think tank, the Australia Institute.

Does the Major ever get tired of it? Is there another track, or will it always be a one-track mind?

It's certainly very tiring to read, especially when the reptiles conjure up an image designed to terrify the hive mind ... ABC's 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson appears in favour of a 25 per cent federal charge on all gas export revenue. Picture: ABC

The Major's a fossil fools sort of dude, and so he carries on in the Lord Downer way...

The PRRT is a virtual super profits tax payable once development costs of a project have been paid down. Today’s gas exporters will end up paying 60 per cent tax on all profits, not as high as Norway but Norwegian taxpayers are co-investors in big resources projects and Australians are not.
Resource operators here also pay state royalties for onshore gas plus payroll tax, so the idea we are giving our resources away for free is silly. Yet ABC online has run pieces making that claim. Journalists seem unable to understand most large gas export projects in Australia are relatively new and just at the start of their PRRT liabilities.
At least the Prime Minister ruled this out last week. A large new tax on projects that have cost more than $400bn since 2010 is precisely the wrong strategy during a global energy crisis as he tries to secure oil products from countries that buy our gas.
Journalists should apply scepticism to a resources tax proposal from a think tank that has long advocated against gas and all fossil fuels. Yet many reporters covering this story reserve their scepticism for critics of the tax plan, claiming arguments against it are “gas industry talking points”.
Moore, like the Greens-led Senate inquiry that took evidence over three days from April 21, even gave airtime to a social media activist, Punters Politics host Konrad Benjamin, to advocate for the tax idea.
Benjamin and Pocock have been claiming the gas industry pays in PRRT less than the annual excise on beer. The comparison does not account for the imminent ramp up of the PRRT. The gas industry last year paid $22bn in tax, and the PRRT will eventually be a multiple of that.

Could the Major's outing be complete without a truly terrifying image, designed to send the hive mind into panic mode ... Senator David Pocock claims the gas industry pays in PRRT less than the annual excise on beer. Picture: Martin Ollman

It seems to the pond a pretty fair bet that neither federal nor state Labor will rock the fossil fuels boat, especially in these straitened times, but that won't stop the likes of the Major howling and whining into the ether ...

This is how far journalism has fallen. Journalists who can’t understand a 40-year-old tax think it’s OK to give airtime to social media activists with no tax or resources background.
Centre for Independent Studies boss and former editor of this newspaper and editor-in-chief of The Australian Financial Review Michael Stutchbury got it right in the AFR last Saturday week. Labor should use the energy crisis to give certainty to international investors so Australia can become the world’s leading gas exporter, he wrote.
That would be a reform to make our children wealthier. A retrospective 25 per cent tax based on revenue would ensure investors never put money into another gas project in Australia.

What makes this truly funny?

It's the major railing at social media activists being given airtime, when there's absolutely no sign that the Major himself has any meaningful background in tax or resources ... unless you count ranting like a right wing ratbag in the lizard Oz in recent times, and before that making a name for himself and the Currish Snail by tracking down Order of Lenin medials.

On the other hand, the Major's desire to block or silence dissenting voices is very Soviet ...so perhaps there's some sort of consistency there.

And now to play fair with the immortal Rowe, the pond really should show the full cartoon from which that excerpt was taken, and if it's a repeat, it's because it's worth repeating ...

And finally a soupçon of social media, with Vlad the Sociopath's Russia always good for a laugh ...

As promised, Polonius takes up the King Donald burden this day, while jihad Jennie continues the Ughmann's war on climate science ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Apropos of the bromancer and Kimmel yesterday, the pond only caught up with this later... Joe Rogan Trashes ‘Ridiculous’ Backlash to Kimmel’s Melania Joke: ‘Nobody Gave a Sh*t!’

Even the MMA battered, delirious brain of a man who did much to help elect King Donald thought it was a load of hooey ...

... “So it’s on Thursday, and this is Carolla’s point, and it’s a really good point, no one gave a sh*t on Friday. It came out on Thursday, no one cared on Friday, no one cared on Saturday, until Saturday night when there was an assassination attempt and then all of a sudden everyone’s blaming Kimmel.”
Shaffir quipped that it was “funny” how the right had now resorted to tactics that he said were typical of the left.
“It’s the same sh*t!” Rogan said.

And so on to King Donald part II, with Polonius cheerfully prattling away for the pond's Sunday meditation ..

The header: Reckless ‘fascist’ label against Donald Trump risks fuelling the fire of political violence; Academic Anna Funder has branded the US President a fascist, but such political hyperbole threatens democratic discourse and potentially incites violence.

The caption: Protesters push an effigy of, from left, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. during a May Day rally in Manila. Picture: AP

The pond has taken to heart the Polonial admonishment.

Clearly labelling King Donald a fascist is reckless and needlessly drags Godwin's Law into the morass.

The pond much prefers the simpler, more endearing terms of king or emperor, though on some days it seems as if authoritarian dictator might help. King Donald certainly loves to keep himself company with certified dictators of the Vlad the Sociopath kind, and does what he can to help them, as he's currently doing for Vlad in Ukraine.

There are more than superficial similarities in style.

Apart from that fixation with splattering gold on everything, there's the architecture, up there with anything Speer devised for Adolf, and there's the love of art... especially statues ...

Of course that statue was just another part of the grifter/scam model which does with minions aping their betters... (here)

...It is now in place at Trump National Doral, one of the president's clubs in Miami.
While it is on display at a Trump property, it was bankrolled by a cryptocurrency group named $PATRIOT.
It was made by Ohio sculptor Alan Cottrill, who was locked in a legal dispute with the cryptocurrency group over its use.
Cottrill took issue with $PATRIOT using the statue to promote its business selling a memecoin.
The company paid Cottrill about $A500,000 for the statue.
But despite being on display at Doral, the Trump family has made clear they are not involved in $PATRIOT.

So much grift and so many grifters and so maybe Polonius is right ... maybe Xi, Putin and the Dear Leader Kim are better role models ... or perhaps CEO of "Robber Barons Inc"

Whatever, time for Polonius...

It’s just over two decades since British-American historian Michael Mann wrote this in his 2004 book, Fascists: “As a word usage today, it appears largely as the exclamation ‘Fascist!’ – a term of imprecise abuse hurled at people we do not like.”
I was reminded of this last Thursday when The Sydney Morning Herald carried a story by Jacqueline Maley about the appointment of Anna Funder to a professorship at the University of Sydney. Funder is perhaps best known for her important book Stasiland, about the former communist regime in East Germany that was effectively created by the Joseph Stalin-led Soviet Union.
It is reasonable to expect that Funder, as an authority on communist totalitarianism, would have significant understanding of Nazi and fascist totalitarianism as practised by the regimes headed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Germany and Italy, respectively. But apparently not.
Funder’s new role is to focus on creative writing at the time of artificial intelligence and social media. But she also sees her task as making a stand against President Donald J. Trump, telling Maley: “You can see … how Trump and other fascists I have studied have gone for universities because they are places where the new, important and challenging thinking is happening.”
Funder went on to state: “Trump is a lot more personally corrupt than many other fascist leaders.” And added that the Trump administration was “capitalism with fascistic characteristics” – whatever that might mean.
Maley is no political conservative. But she saw the need to comment that “there is a debate about whether it is appropriate to use the ‘f’ word – fascist – to describe the US president”. Quite so. But Funder was not for turning.

And yet how delusional is the emperor/king? Pretty, pretty gone ...

The YOLO Presidency (*intermittent archive link)

Trump is focused on becoming one of history’s “great men.”

Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?

Impossible. And yet. Hegel’s theory of “world-historical individuals,” men who redirected the course of humanity, focused on three figures: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel described them as unlikely “heroes of an Epoch” for upending established orders that had previously seemed fixed. They were “practical, political men” who were each condemned in their age for smashing norms and for other conduct “obnoxious to moral reprehension”—as Trump has been accused of, centuries later.

And though Trump has long compared himself to America’s two greatest presidents, we were recently told by two people who are in a position to know such things—a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant—that the president had, in private conversations, begun thinking about himself less as a peer of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and more as an addition to Hegel’s immortal trifecta.

“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the confidant told us. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”

That's a familiar concept. There was a movie celebrating the notion, Triumph des Willens.

Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon? Why not, so much better than referencing modern fascists.

And so Polonius sees his task as making a stand for the fatted golden Napoleonic beast, and bows at his feet...

Polonius next turned to the topic familiar to readers of the Australian Daily Jewish News...

Before taking up her position, Funder worked at the nearby University of Technology Sydney. As such, she would have had a reasonable idea of what was going on at her new employer. Rampant antisemitism, in fact. Engaged in by academics, students and campus visitors (including some activists from the radical Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir).
In late September 2024, University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott told the Senate’s Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities that he and the university had “failed” its Jewish academics and students. Scott did not offer his resignation.
Despite this, Funder told Maley “we are lucky to have extremely good universities in this country”.
Well, that’s true. But Funder overlooks the fact that many Australian campuses are dangerous places for Jewish Australians and are taxpayer-subsidised institutions hostile to political conservatives. Especially in the areas of social sciences.
Funder understood the brutality of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. But she has scant self-awareness about the intolerance of her fellow members of the left intelligentsia in this country and elsewhere.
In recent times, The Australian has reported that the Jewish Australian Michael Gawenda, a one-time editor of The Age in Melbourne, can no longer get published in the newspaper he once edited.
And Janet Albrechtsen has covered the fact that well-regarded feminist academic Catharine Lumby was “cancelled” after having accepted an invitation to address a What Were You Wearing Australia gathering. Apparently, some members of the left objected to Lumby’s concern about antisemitism in Australia.
Funder has a following at various literary festivals. Anyone who honestly examines the program of such events in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne will know they are essentially leftist stacks in which, on rare occasions, a token conservative gets a guernsey.
Whatever may have been true in days gone by, today the political right-of-centre is more tolerant than the political left-of-centre. Moreover, conservatives do not control the debate in the universities, schools and other educational institutions. The same is true in large sections of the media.
Gawenda has identified The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Guardian Australia and the ABC as comprising the “left liberal media” that failed to accurately report antisemitism in Australia following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Indeed, antisemitism in Australia was on the increase before Israel entered its defensive war in Gaza.
The situation in many Western democracies has come to this. Leading politicians, such as Trump, who support the right of Israel to exist within secure borders and take a stance against antisemitism, are frequently described as fascists or Nazis, while those on the other side of the debate are depicted as “progressives”.

But surely King Donald qualifies as royalty in his own way?

Susan B. Glasser intimated in The New Yorker that there were briefly two kings in the country, but only one knew how to be kingly ...

In Trump’s America, It Takes a King to Praise Democracy (*intermittent archive link)
Reflections on Charles’s state visit.

Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, it turns out that it takes a King to tell us how to run our Republic.
On Tuesday, His Majesty King Charles III, the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of George III, the British monarch who lost the Revolutionary War to a bunch of impertinent colonists enamored of Enlightenment ideas about the natural rights of man, spoke to the U.S. Congress. With dry wit and a sense of irony that was surely lost on the host he so subtly trolled, Charles extolled the virtues of American-style liberal democracy now under threat by America’s own leader. What does it say about our current politics that polite British-accented clichés about the benefits of the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and the strengths that flow from “vibrant, diverse, and free societies” could end up sounding downright subversive?
The King’s biggest applause line was a tribute to Magna Carta, the thirteenth-century compact between an English monarch and his restive nobles, which, Charles noted, has become a pillar of American constitutional jurisprudence, with the Supreme Court citing it at least a hundred and sixty times in its history, not least to establish “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” It was a telling sign of our dysfunctional times that members of Congress from both parties, having been increasingly iced out of decision-making by a President claiming unprecedented executive power for himself, immediately rose for a standing ovation. There were whoops and cheers and what appeared to be grins of amazement at the King’s cheek.
Did it matter that Donald Trump did not get the joke?
Even as Charles was speaking, Trump’s White House posted on social media an image of the two men with the caption “TWO KINGS. 👑” .

Later that evening, during a toast at a state dinner for his royal visitor, Trump praised his “fantastic” speech and lauded Charles for accomplishing what he could not—getting Democrats to stand and applaud him. He seemed utterly oblivious to why they had done so, and remained apparently unaware for the rest of the King’s trip. “He’s a great King,” Trump said on Thursday, at the conclusion of the state visit. “The greatest King, in my book.”

Of course wannabe kings and pale faux imitations of kings can have fascist inclinations, as Glasser noted...

Trump spent the rest of the week proving Charles’s point about unchecked powers, with his Justice Department indicting the former F.B.I. director James Comey, for a social-media post of seashells—which prosecutors improbably claim constituted a threat on the President’s life—and his Federal Communications Commission ordering a review of the broadcast licenses for ABC stations just days after the comedian Jimmy Kimmel had used the network’s airwaves to make a joke that the First Lady did not like.
So here we are, two and a half centuries later, with a King who venerates the American Bill of Rights and a President who, increasingly, rejects it. It hardly seemed a coincidence that, on the same day as the King’s speech, reports emerged about the Trump State Department’s plans to honor America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary with a commemorative passport whose distinguishing feature will be a large likeness of the President. Watching Trump and Charles together this week, I could not help but think of the bizarre contrast between the public modesty of the crowned monarch and the pomposity of the self-styled populist President; of these two, it’s not George III’s heir who is the one planning to erect golden statues of himself in his palaces.

Precisely. The pond has never thought much of Comey, and certainly doesn't have the regard the man has for himself, but for this you might be up for ten years in the slammer?

Then Polonius came up with a grotesque attempt at point scoring:

Among the Western democracies, politically motivated violence on both sides of the political divide is most prevalent in the US. In recent times, this has seen assassination attempts directed at Trump. But not his predecessors Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Wrong. To cite just one example, Barack Obama assassination plot in Denver (aka things to do in Denver when you're dead).

It turns out, in the bog standard reptile way that it's all the fault of Democrats and lefties...

Anyone who understands real fascism and real Nazism would know that Trump is not a Nazi or a fascist. No political leader can be a fascist in a functioning democracy. And the US is a democracy, despite what some left activists may say.
Trump is neither a dictator nor a king. If he were either, he would not be facing midterm elections in November in which the Republicans could lose control of their majority in the House of Representatives. It’s easy for the likes of Democrats such as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to cry “fascist!” in the political theatre at Trump. But it’s meaningless jargon.
The problem is that the political hyperbole of a Harris or Walz can encourage a young man such as Cole Allen, who has been accused of attempting to assassinate the US President in Washington DC last Saturday.
Allen’s 1000-word manifesto reads like an extremist leftist tract. Allen knew he could die in the attack that targeted Trump’s “administration officials … from the highest-ranking to the lowest”. The alleged shooter declared he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes”.
Now, Trump is none of these things. But his left-wing political enemies claim otherwise. And so Allen went into self-declared “rage”.
It’s an old saying that words are weapons. Asserting that a democratically elected politician is a “fascist” or a “rapist” are words that can motivate a crime of rage. The real enemies of free speech these days happen to include some who see fascism in others.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

And yet ...

Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll (*intermittent archive link)

After Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, his legal team and his defenders lodged a frequent talking point.
Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse.
“This was a rape claim, this was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that — made other findings,” his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said outside the courthouse.
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.

You won't find many common understandings in Polonius or the rest of the reptile pack, though it's noteworthy that Polonius didn't even attempt to slip in a few bromancer style-billy goat butts.

Instead he was all in on the golden fatted Napoleonic/Caesar beast ...

And so to the losers, also rans, dropkicks and others that the pond couldn't be bothered dealing with this meditative Sunday.

Being the Australian Daily Zionist News, the reptiles felt the urgent need to import a Pom...

London left’s anti-Israel obsession endangers Jews in Britain
Progressive activists who condemn minor slights have remained silent as synagogues burn and Jewish people face violent attacks across Britain.
By Brendan O'Neill
Columnist

As previously noted, Brendan was ably supported by garrulous Gemma ...

The trauma we allow for everyone — except Aussie Jews
How can the Jewish community ‘get over’ the Holocaust when modern events mirror 1938?
By Gemma Tognini
Columnist

Sadly pressure of space decided the dog botherer's fate, but here's the intermittent archive link for those determined to catch up.

I’m still not wrong about the voice, but I was wrong about Sam Mostyn
On Anzac Day, the Governor-General showed how to honour Indigenous culture without division. Then came the booing, revealing an uglier truth about post-voice Australia.
By Chris Kenny

And speaking of reptiles who like to disappear up their fundament, Dame Slap was at it again ...

Why every sacked worker now sounds like Jackie ‘O’
Adverse action claims: the new goldmine for disgruntled workers
If you enact laws that represent a one-way bet for the unscrupulous to make money, don’t be surprised if you get knocked over in the rush.
By Janet Albrechtsen

Everyone sounds like Jackie 'O' on a$100 million year package?

Oy vey, we should all be so lucky.

But why do they sound like a woman? Why don't they sound like a Kyle?

You guessed it. Dame Slap prefers to give women a good slapping.

Perhaps she even keeps a grapefruit near her keyboard to remind herself how that sort of violence should be done..

And so to jihad Jennie, waging her never ending war on renewables, the electro state and whatever else you've got...

The header: Australia on wrong track as energy crisis exposes shocking policy failures;As global shocks hit supply, Australia’s dependence on imports and policy choices are under scrutiny — raising questions about energy independence.

The caption for the snap featuring the sort of installation which produces a state of rapture in your average reptile: Australia’s shrinking refining capacity has increased reliance on imported fuels. Picture: NewsWire/ David Crosling

On the plus side, jihad Jennie could only summon up a three minute read, which is way better than having to endure ten minutes of the Ughmann.

On the down side, jihad Jennie is a pale imitation of a dedicated fanatic of the Ughmann kind.

Perhaps that's why the reptiles decided not to interrupt with visual distractions, and instead left her to maunder along.

The pond didn't have the heart to interrupt either. It's all so heartbreakingly familiar, such an endless regurgitation featuring the same bees buzzing in the denialist bonnet...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently said “a country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options”. It was a simple message with great force, one that provides a benchmark for our energy future.
Once the Strait of Hormuz closed, the unfolding energy crisis exposed our vulnerability. Anthony Albanese travelled to Asian neighbours, cap in hand, to secure additional supplies of petrol, diesel, jet fuel and urea. Trading on our reliability as a gas exporter reinforced the indispensable role of fossil fuels.
Diesel, the industrial fuel, powers freight, agriculture, construction, mining, defence and emergency services. It’s not optional. When diesel stops, Australia stops.
This lesson was lost on Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who claimed “there isn’t one country in the world that said ‘we need more fossil fuels’ … that conversation was not being had anywhere in the world”. Bowen is COP’s chief negotiator promoting the phasing out of fossil fuels, and the conflict of interest is clear.
Despite years of demonising fossil fuels, coal, gas and oil still account for 91 per cent of the energy that runs the country. Wind, solar and batteries will never replace everything that’s done by them. The evidence didn’t stop another minister claiming “the world’s moved on in terms of energy security”. It’s why Labor’s wishful thinking, so divorced from reality, left us ill prepared for this energy crisis.
Decisions of previous governments, of both political persuasions, also contributed to our predicament. It began with Australia’s growing dependence on imported fuels. Bowen’s recent argument that “the time to save the refineries was between 2013 and 2022 when they were closing” overlooks an inconvenient fact.
Announcements to close the two NSW refineries occurred on the watch of the Gillard Labor government – Clyde in July 2011 and Kurnell a year later – when Bowen and Albanese were cabinet ministers. Bowen’s suggestion that “it’s a lot cheaper to intervene, to save the refinery while it’s still there than to rebuild one after it’s been dismantled” was not on offer when it mattered most. Perhaps it could have prevented the nation being left with only two refineries and NSW with none.
Back then resources and energy minister Martin Ferguson claimed Kurnell’s closure “will not jeopardise Australia’s energy security”. This was “nonsensical”, according to Australian Workers Union secretary Paul Howes, who said: “If you can’t refine, you can’t run your nation in times of crisis.” The AWU’s proposal for an east coast gas reservation also was rejected. It’s cold comfort that Howes was prescient. Years later both issues are still on the political agenda.
The International Energy Agency requires fuel-importing nations to reserve 90 days of fuel onshore, accessible in the event of global emergencies. Australia hasn’t met this obligation since 2012. Having taken the policy to the 2019 election, the Albanese government was reminded of its obligation in the IEA’s 2023 country report.
With Labor’s commitment to an energy transition based on intermittent, weather-dependent renewables, a strategic fuel reserve should have been a priority. In December 2025, we had reserved just 49 days, compared with an average 141 days for comparable import nations. Australia stood out as the only laggard.
Labor’s attitude to international obligations reflects its ideological priorities. The Paris Agreement is sacrosanct, even though we contribute just 1.15 per cent of global emissions. The billions spent subsidising the renewables transition are often off-budget, kept from public scrutiny, despite Labor’s promised transparency.
Cost factors are the usual defence for not meeting our IEA obligations and losing our refining capacity. Yet the costs flowing from the fuel crisis will be far greater: higher power bills, higher inflation, interest rate increases, the underwriting of fuel purchases and excise cuts. This crisis will leave a long tail.
Business as usual won’t serve our national interest. Doubling down on Labor’s transition plans will lead only to more of the same. There’s now the added issue of our reliance on imports, often from China, for the renewables infrastructure. These supply chains are deeply embedded in geopolitical realities that can’t be wished away.

Reducing our high costs of energy is essential to restoring industrial competitiveness and ending the deindustrialisation cycle. The recent loss of Incitec Pivot’s Gibson Island urea plant and Qenos, our largest producer of polymers and polyethylene, adds to our woes. It makes no sense to extend lifelines to refineries and smelters while hitting them with a de facto carbon tax under Labor’s safeguard mechanism.
We should strive to be energy independent using our coal, gas, oil and uranium, together with rooftop solar, in a balanced mix. Energy security is not optional. It’s the foundation of economic stability and national security.
We have the resources to be energy self-sufficient. What we lack is not capacity but political will and direction. We’re on the wrong track and need to change course. If not, we will face exactly what was warned – a nation with far fewer options in future.
Jennie George is a former president of the ACTU and Labor MP for Throsby.

It took considerable restraint not to interrupt, but the pond didn't even baulk at lines such as We have the resources to be energy self-sufficient.

Indeed, we do, we have wind, solar, EVs, all kinds of other developments in terms of the electrostate and electrification, designed to cut back on dependency on fossil fuels as a way of avoiding the current shock to the system, and the future shocks that will surely come.

But the pond doesn't expect to find any of that in the lizard Oz, just as the pond doesn't expect to find much justice in King Donald's reign...

In which the chattering classes do their best to cope with the Napoleon who has blessed them with his presence:

Simon Marks also thinks King Donald looks Kingly in the presence of another king, and why not?

The alternative would see him as a pathetic 79 year old roué or wannabe rake, a faux imitation Hugh Hefner, desperately trying to downplay his age, and pretend that he's cool by hanging out with his geriatric mates and a chick with big boobs.

Who'd want to carry that image as baggage in their head?

Much better to think of him as a Napoleonic emperor or a King John, intent on ruining the world's economy as fast as the fertiliser shortages allow ...

In which there's only room for the bromancer and the Ughmann, and even that's way too much ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:26:00 +0000

Deflection and distraction are part of being a reptile.

The bromancer is a master of the art, and offered a classic example this weekend.

Rather than brood about King Donald - say with the headline "What Trump's behaviour, and his administration's actions - reveal about the mad far right in the disunited States" - he does a convenient shuffle, a step into easy turf ...

The header: What the Trump assassin’s manifesto reveals about the educated left is terrifying; Donald Trump’s physical bravery is beyond question. But Cole Allen’s manifesto reveals something deeply disturbing.

The caption for the opening snap? No need for a caption for that magnificent beast, shown in prime patriotic pose ...

In a way this heavily illustrated five minute magnum opus is an attempt by the bromancer to restore his far right credentials.

If anyone wanted to be terrified, they simply have to look at demented King Donald. But the bromancer is determined to be terrified by lefties.

Of late he's been a tad critical of King Donald, so it's time to balance the books ... beginning with sympathy for the victim.

Donald Trump has now endured and survived more assassination attempts than any previous president. Two involved gunfire – the most recent from Cole Allen at the White House Correspondents Association dinner – three involved guns. In one he was hit in the ear by a bullet millimetres from killing him. Another murder plot, linked to Iran, resulted in a criminal conviction.
This column has its criticisms of Trump, but no one can doubt his physical courage or sense of calm and control in threatening circumstances. However, that’s not the point. What do these assassination attempts say about the social and political divisions rending America today?

Not that much? It's a country saturated with guns and riven with violence, and the easiest solution is to mow someone down...

Rather than indulge in sophisticated analysis of social and political divisions, the bromancer turned to ... Jimmy Kimmel.

The pond is more a Colbert than a Kimmel man when it comes to comedy stylings, with Kimmel inclined to round out his monologues with many more miss than hit comedy sketches, but all the same, it's astonishing he's become such a figure of hate.

The bromancer joined the pile on ...

A few days before the latest shooting, ABC TV host Jimmy Kimmel ran a skit in which he “welcomed” Melania Trump who, he said, had “a glow like an expectant widow”.
Who jokes about widowhood for the wife of a president who has survived multiple assassination attempts? Kimmel wasn’t sacked, refused to apologise and laughed uproariously at his own wit and daring. Could Kimmel say that to any wife if he hadn’t thoroughly dehumanised her first? What effect do such words have on people such as Allen? Kimmel’s attitude is immensely widespread among the moralising liberal left who see themselves as vastly morally superior to Trump. Many liken Trump to Hitler, and you’d kill Hitler if you could, right?
After the US First Lady called for him to be sacked over a "light roast" of her and President Trump, the comedian has fired back.

What's funny about this?

No, it's not that the reptiles turned Kimmel into their own form of clickbait, meaning that the bromancer didn't even have to bother to explain the how and the why of Kimmel firing back ...(you can avoid indulging the reptiles by going to Variety for that, or to Kimmel's YouTube channel)

Nor is it the bromancer's abject lack of a sensa huma. That's always been a constant.

What's funny is that the President of the United States, in the middle of sundry wars, is obsessed with a minor comedian, still managed to deploy a variation on the same routine in his welcome speech to King Chuck...

“[My mother] came to America at 19, met my incredible father, we loved him so much, we all loved him, we loved her, we loved him: Fred. And, they were married for 63 years,” Donald, 79, said during the live speech on Tuesday, April 28.
“And, uh, excuse me, if you don’t mind, that’s a record we won’t be able to match, darling,” the former reality star continued as he turned to Melania, 56. “I’m sorry, it’s just not going to work out that way. We’ll do well, but we’re not going to do that well.” (here)

Deeply weird, and Melania's look in response would make any straight man in a comedy act bow down in admiration.

Given King Donald's age, that has to be a joke about her pending widowhood, right?

Who jokes about widowhood for the wife of a president who has survived multiple assassination attempts?

Only in bromancer land ...

Throw in the exquisite agony of the King trying to play handsies with his Queen, getting pushed aside, and then finally getting to clutch her hand so he could walk down the stairs, and it's a wonder that American satire struggles to cope.

As for Krazy Karoline Leavitt...

Hours before Donald Trump was due to give his first address at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as US president, his press secretary Karoline Leavitt promised it would be a night to remember.
“He is ready to rumble,” she said in an interview with Fox News.
“It’ll be funny. It’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room.” (here)

It's impossible to make this stuff up ...suffice to say, the guns, the violence, it exists at the most basis levels of speech ...

And after that detour, on with the bromancer...

Allen’s manifesto, posted to family and friends, is not the deranged, extravagant nuttiness of so many would-be assassins. It repeats mainstream left-liberal critiques of the Trump administration and of Trump as “pedophile, rapist and traitor”. These terms are grotesque. They arise from paranoid fantasies about Trump’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, immigration policies and military campaigns.

And yet as noted before, there are stories about King Donald's behaviour in company with Epstein, and a court in a civil action awarded damages for what, on the balance of probabilities, was a form of rape, and King Donald attempted to orchestrate a coup, remarkable for its banana republic incompetence, but still the sort of thing traitors do.

What's remarkable is that the bromancer wipes any thoughts of all that from the record, and blames the left, as bromancers are wont to do ...

That Allen’s language is so unremarkable is its most disturbing feature. There’s a growing acceptance of the legitimacy of political violence in the US on both left and right, but it’s much stronger on the left. A YouGov poll late last year showed 24 per cent of those who describe themselves as very liberal (with liberal meaning left of centre) say it’s fine to feel joy at the death of a public figure they disagree with. Only 4 per cent of conservatives agree.
Some 25 per cent of the very liberal think political violence is sometimes justified. Among the very conservative, 5 per cent hold that view. That’s a stark difference.
Importantly, a majority, across ideologies, oppose political violence. A big majority of Americans think political violence a major and growing problem.

The reptiles then interrupted with the victim of the bromancer's worst descriptor, "nutty" Cole Allen. Picture: CNN; Allen inside his hotel. Picture: AP

Now some be wondering about tales of rats infesting Gaza's tent camps, biting children and spreading disease, but you won't be hearing a peep from the bromancer ...

As the royal commission report on the terrorist killings at Bondi Beach reminds us, as do the stabbings of two Jewish men near a Golders Green synagogue in London, Western societies are experiencing a hateful, culturally ruinous crisis of resurgent antisemitism, the oldest hatred.
This is partly fuelled by broad Islamic traditions of antisemitism and, among a small but deadly minority, specifically Islamist hatreds of Jews and Israelis. This is less acute in the US partly because the proportionate size of America’s Muslim population is smaller than Europe’s.
Left-wing antisemitism, however, certainly among those who consider themselves very liberal, is surging in the US.
Charlie Kirk and America’s factories of hatred
Especially worrying is that antisemitism is stronger among the young and formally better educated. Approval of political violence is also stronger among the younger and better educated.
This is just further evidence of the pervasive crisis of Western universities, institutions that should inculcate reflection, wisdom, dialogue, empathy, but have instead in some measure become factories of hatred. In their exaggerated critique of Western tradition and history, they frequently invert good and evil.
The same cohort that justifies political violence seeks to censor conservative political views. Political violence is valued as a liberating form of speech, whereas conservative speech is demonised as “unsafe”, even bizarrely labelled as violence, and thus frequently banned.
The US is today divided over many issues and many identities.

The pond loved that sub-heading, and the way it managed to overlook the way that Kirk himself was a factory of hate, fear and far right loathing.

Cue Moira Donegan in The Graudian, Charlie Kirk's killing was a tragedy. But we must not re-write his life...

Inter alia ...

...such a description of reasoned, honest, good-faith debate is so inaccurate a description of what Charlie Kirk engaged in on college campuses – in his series of large, staged events where he “debated” untrained liberal undergraduates with cameras rolling – that it reads as willfully naive, if not outright dishonest. Charlie Kirk’s “debates” were aggressive, unequal, trolling affairs, in which he sought to provoke his interlocutors to distress, shouted them down and belittled them, spewed hateful rhetoric about queer and trans people, women, Black people, immigrants and Muslims, and selectively edited the ensuing footage to create maximally viral content in which his fans could witness him humiliating the liberals and leftists they perceived to be their enemies. This was not “debate”; it was not reasoned, good-faith discourse; it was not the kind of fair deliberation that democracy relies on. It was a mockery of those things.
If reasoned debate is a precondition of a liberal democracy, there are other preconditions as well. A state cannot be called democratic if it does not offer equal protection of the law – if not all of its citizens are awarded the same dignity by their government and the same vote, same rights of expression and same prerogatives before courts and elected officials in their attempts to influence its policies and navigate its laws. Civic equality – not just civil engagement – is central to the American experiment, too. It is not to excuse his murder to be honest that Kirk opposed that equality. Some historians and political scientists have argued that the United States did not become a democracy until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the laws that intended to end de jure segregation and racist voter suppression. But Kirk opposed the Civil Rights Act, calling it a “huge mistake”. He endorsed the racist so-called “great replacement theory”, in which nefarious actors (usually cast as Jewish people) are seeking to “replace” America’s white population with immigrants, saying it was “well under way every day at our southern border”. On his podcast, he hosted a “slavery apologist” and a man who said that after women “got, you know, the right to vote – after that, it all went downhill”. Kirk himself once said that Black women – he named Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson – “do not have the brain power to be taken seriously”. He condemned Democrats for supposedly wanting to make the US “less white”, and claimed: “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution.” (It is.) And yet Ezra Klein praised Kirk’s “moxie”. One wonders what such a euphemism is meant to obscure.
In the rush to canonize Kirk and revise his history, honest accountings of his life have not only become rare – they have also become dangerous. In the days since his death, journalists, media personalities and others who have not been sufficiently laudatory to Kirk in public have lost their jobs for telling the truth about his life. Matthew Dowd, a Republican political consultant, was fired from MSNBC after saying that Kirk had spoken “hateful words”. In Phoenix, a sports writer was fired for criticizing euphemistic accounts of Kirk’s beliefs. “‘Political differences’ are not the same thing as spewing hateful rhetoric on a daily basis,” he wrote in a social media post. Many of those eulogizing Kirk want to paint him as a champion of free speech, as a man who peddled in honest inquiry, uninhibited expression and the open exchange of ideas. This is a laughably inaccurate picture of the man’s work; it is in these punishments of those who oppose him that we can see a truer reflection of Kirk’s values.

Sorry, ,the pond just wanted a little balance before getting back to the assassin with a riveting illustration ...The U.S. District Court has released a new video showing Cole Allen shoot a U.S. Secret Service officer during his attempt to assassinate the President at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

At this point the bromancer finally decided to getting around to admitting assassination attempts are more the rule than the exception in the USA ...

It’s important to remember that there has always been an element of violence in US politics. In the 19th century two presidents were assassinated – Abraham Lincoln (killed 1865) and the little-remembered James Garfield (1881). In the 20th century two more presidents were assassinated – William McKinley (1901) and John Kennedy (1963). One presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, was shot and killed in 1968.
Another, George Wallace, was shot and partially paralysed, though not killed, in 1972.
Three presidents (or ex-presidents) were shot but not fatally – Teddy Roosevelt (1912), Ronald Reagan (1981) and Trump (2024). Martin Luther King, a great civil rights leader and deeply Christian thinker, was murdered in 1968.
Charlie Kirk, also deeply Christian but centre right, was murdered last year.
Two specifically American dynamics are at work. One is the sheer ubiquity of guns and their increasing precision and lethality. In Australia, by contrast, an angry idiot throws a shoe at John Howard. No gun is available to tempt momentary rage.
Then there’s the passionate quality of American political conviction. America is a paradox. I’ve lived there four times. Each time neighbours embodied what Michael Gawenda memorably called “the great American friendliness”.

The reptiles reverted to Kirk, Charlie Kirk minutes before he was shot in September, 2025. Picture: Amy King

And the bromancer continued with his recanting ...

Barbecues, church services, welcome for a stranger, the obligation to be “neighbourly”, co-exist with both intentional and random gun violence unimaginable in Australia.
French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, as long ago as 1835 in Democracy in America, identified the singular American civilisational quality as individualism. This allows America to be, even today, the most innovative nation in the world, yet it also fuels the libertarian sense of me-and-my-gun.
As a youngster I delighted in reading Gone With the Wind. Only later did I realise it dishonestly justified the Ku Klux Klan, a racist, violent outfit that hated the freeing of African-American slaves. It also hated Jews and Catholics.
While America is divided today, it has been more divided in the past. The 1860s civil war was ultimately about slavery, and the determination of abolitionists to wipe slavery out. More than 700,000 soldiers died in that war, yet, incredibly, America subsequently came together and built the world’s most cohesive and powerful nation.

At this point, exhausted reptiles slipped in an audio distraction ...

Having just said that the United States became a cohesive nation, the bromancer decided to undercut himself by pointing to a lack of cohesion...

The US was divided in the Depression, even more so in the 1960s and 70s, the era of Vietnam and Watergate. No sooner had pundits finished writing their learned books about US decline than along came Reagan and it was morning in America once more. Under Reagan the US boomed, its society flourished, it unequivocally won the Cold War.
And of course Reagan set a tone of great civility and goodwill, of humour and good humour. The situation today is made much worse by the cyber activities of hostile states such as Russia, China and Iran, all of which are extremely active across social media with the purpose of exaggerating grievance and sowing division. Western intelligence believes the first emanation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which spawned wildly violent demonstrations, came from Russian intelligence. Similarly the algorithms of the net exaggerate and reward extremism.

At this point the bromancer slipped in a considerable admission of an even more considerable omission:

This column has not considered Trump’s own contribution to coarseness and incivility. It’s very great, very great indeed. He has rejoiced in the death of democratic opponents and consistently spoken in ugly, unreasonable, abusive and extreme terms. I’ve often written about this in the past.

But not today. Not when there's Kimmel, lefties and black people to bash.

When has a reptile gone wrong blaming it on black people?

The pond was reassured to be reminded yesterday by the venerable Meade in her Weekly Beast that the lizards of Oz had recently indulged in a jihad.

The pond wasn't being paranoid, the pond wasn't detached from observable reality. She too had observed the phenomenon ...

The Australian wasted no time publishing multiple opinion pieces calling for an end to welcome to country addresses after the widely criticised booing of Indigenous speakers on Anzac Day.
The newspaper has form for leaning into bringing an end to the tradition. During the voice referendum in 2023 the Oz clipped up a comment by the Indigenous scholar professor Marcia Langton and posted it widely on social media.
Janet Albrechtsen asked why Australia should be divided into “our land and your land”?
“Many Australians hate the mere fact they must sit through this kind of mandatory ceremony,” Albrechtsen wrote. “For many of us, the worst thing about WTC is that it stands between us and the footy.”
On Thursday the Sky News host Peta Credlin admitted she herself “boos on the inside”.
“Because your land is my land too and your country is my country just as much as it’s yours,” Credlin wrote. “After all, Credlins have been here for 172 years, worked hard to build this nation and have sent four generations to war to defend it, so being Australian is all we know.”
Louise Clegg, whom the Oz described as having “worked as a barrister specialising in employment law and public law”, said Indigenous Australians who had served should not be commemorated separately.
“But on Anzac Day that service is part of the same story, not a separate one,” she wrote. “The losses are equal. The grief is equal. The remembrance is shared.”
We wondered how many of the Oz’s readers know that Clegg is married to the leader of the opposition, Angus Taylor.
For the record, Taylor said the booing was “un-Australian” but also that welcome to country ceremonies were overused and devalued.

And so to a snap of difficult, uppity black people, balanced by difficult, uppity weird people ... The Black Lives Matter movement spawned violent demonstrations. Picture: Mark Ralston/AFP; Trump supporters stormed the US capitol building. Picture: Saul Loeb / AFP

At this point the bromancer wound down with a final gobbet ...

Both sides of US politics have contributed to the spread of political violence and the deepening of divisions, yet this is more structural, more organic, on the left. There are economic causes of division too, a sense in Generation Z that the American dream of home ownership and economic security is beyond their reach.
Similarly, regular politics has been unable to deal with inflation, crime and, previously under Joe Biden, uncontrolled illegal immigration. That failure provokes extreme responses.
But American history demonstrates fantastic capacity for rebound. Maybe we’re on the cusp of sustained violence; conflicting, street-fighting mobs. Maybe not. Whoever the next president is, Americans will want a calmer tone. One big social division is political addicts versus the rest, exhausted by partisan conflict.
In the long run, I still bet on America.

It's somehow all the fault of the left, but at the same time, the bromancer suggests a President with a calmer tone?

He might need plenty of lipstick ...

The pond will bet on the canker at the core ...

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

That worm is everywhere, from RFK's brain to golf...(please note the detail of the saw)

And so because the bromancer exhausted the pond and there's even more exhausting work to do, a few intermittent archive mentions ...

First up was garrulous Gemma's contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The trauma we allow for everyone — except Aussie Jews
How can the Jewish community ‘get over’ the Holocaust when modern events mirror 1938?
By Gemma Tognini
Columnist

And because the pond isn't certain that the dog botherer will make the Sunday cut, here he is in the intermittent archive for his devoted followers...

I’m still not wrong about the voice, but I was wrong about Sam Mostyn
On Anzac Day, the Governor-General showed how to honour Indigenous culture without division. Then came the booing, revealing an uglier truth about post-voice Australia.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)

Moving right along, the pond has the appalling task, the most onerous of duties, to point herpetological students towards the ugliest reptile in the aquarium... the Ughmann ...

The header: Chris Bowen says no one wants more fossil fuels. The rest of the world begs to differ; While Chris Bowen insists the world is moving beyond fossil fuels, other nations are quietly considering hydrocarbon expansion.

The caption for the image of Satan's little helper, a man loathed by the reptile jihadists: Chris Bowen may be displeased at the re-expansion of hydrocarbon energy that contradicts his public passion for renewables but his claim that no one is looking to increase fossil fuel supply is easily disproved, in Australia and around the globe. Image: Sean Callinan for The Australian

This is a 10 minute outing. The pond makes no apologies even though it's very familiar turf.

You see, the reptiles decided to give it "top of the world ma" status ...

And so the pond simply had to pay attention.

It is of course by a compleat climate science denialist, who has never found a way to doubt the wonders of fossil fuels. Nor has he ever wondered whether comprehensively f*cking the planet (*google bot approved) might be a matter of some mild concern.

That's for the younglings who come after him to worry about.

Instead he wants to do a full peacock feather display, a full pantheon of praise for fossil fuels, a cornucopia of energy bliss ...

It was another rhetorical flourish full of the passionate intensity only a mind untroubled by doubt can muster. At a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra on April 13, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen was asked whether the global fuel shock from the third Gulf war might reshape talks at this year’s UN climate jamboree, where he has been given a newly minted role as head of negotiations.
“In all my discussions with my international colleagues, energy and climate, there isn’t one country in the world that said, ‘You know what this fuel crisis reminds us, is we need more fossil fuels’,” Bowen declared.
“That conversation is not being had anywhere around the world. In fact, countries around the world are saying this underpins and underlines the need to keep going with things like electrification and ensuring renewable energy is an important part of the mix going forward.”

The Ughmann couldn't let that stand, so he immediately turned to a German, and not just any German.

If the pond might interrupt with the Graudian ... Germany’s climate U-turn is the worst possible response to the oil shock

Inter alia ...

The pond interrupted the bromancer far too much, and will try to limit interruptions going forward, but it was essential to establish the sort of company this fossil fool is determined to keep ...

Here let’s cede this space for a moment to include some thoughts from Katherina Reiche, Germany’s Economic Affairs and Energy Minister, published on April 7 in her country’s newspaper of record, Frankfurter Allgemeine.
“We are experiencing one of the most severe energy crises in history,” Reiche writes. “Since the start of the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, prices for oil, liquefied gas and diesel have surged to painful levels.
“This is placing a burden on consumers and businesses alike and is costing us economic growth that Germany urgently needs. Many are therefore calling for an immediate exit from oil and gas. The argument is that we simply need to expand wind and solar energy more quickly – and the problem would be solved.
“Well, it is not that simple.
“Let us look at the facts: Germany has a total energy demand of 2900 terawatt hours for electricity, heating, transport and industrial processes. Just under one-sixth of this is electricity, and more than half of that comes from renewable energy. However, the share of renewables in total energy consumption in 2025 was only just under one-fifth.
“For years, we have comforted ourselves with ambitious targets. Eighty per cent of electricity from renewables by 2030, climate neutrality by 2045 – fine figures that soothe our conscience. But while we clung to these targets, electricity prices exploded.

The reptiles doubled down with a snap of the Reich leader, German Economic Affairs and Energy Minister Katherina Reiche speaks during the German National Maritime Conference in Emden this week. Picture: Focke Strangmann/AFP

The fossil fool gave the German fossil fool the floor ...

“German households pay up to 37c per kilowatt hour – more than 9c above the EU average. Our industry is bleeding. Deindustrialisation is accelerating.
“Yes, wind and sun do not send a bill. But the overall system certainly does: (environmental levies), capacity reserves, grid reserves, redispatch costs, grid subsidies, subsidies to lower energy prices – all of this adds up to system costs of more than €36bn ($58.6bn) per year. That is €430 for every German citizen.
“We pay almost €3bn alone for curtailing wind turbines and solar plants because the grid cannot absorb their electricity. There is no other industry that receives guaranteed financing for more than 20 years and is even compensated when its product is not needed. This cannot continue.
“One fact has been suppressed for too long: an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country it claims to save.”
Well, amen to all that.

Yes, amen to f*cking the planet, what could possibly go wrong.

At this point, the reptiles decided to throw in a couple of snaps.

Terrifying shots of hideous windmills, up against picturesque cows lolling in contented bliss in a field alongside a coal-fired power plant.

A wind farm near Zorbau, Germany, this week. Politicians have reopened debate on domestic gas exploration. Picture: Sean Gallup/Getty Images; Cows graze in a meadow as steam rises from cooling towers of the Niederaussem coal-fired power plants near Bergheim in Germany. Germany expanded coal-fired power production to offset reduces natural gas imports from Russia after he Ukraine war began. Picture: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Has any reptile spent any time in the Hunter and Latrobe Valleys?

The Ughmann quickly moved on to the urgent need to flood the world with carbon dioxide. What could go wrong?

Recall that Germany has long been the energy transition poster child, going hard and early on wind and solar. Bowen must have missed the memo, but Berlin began searching for more fossil fuel before the third Gulf war flared and the current crisis has quickened that quest.
Reiche has reopened debate on domestic gas exploration, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz concedes coal-fired power stations may have to stay on the grid for longer than planned.
Cast your eye beyond Germany and it quickly becomes clear Berlin is no outlier. Once you bother to look beyond governments’ words to their deeds, you see that energy security elbowed its way ahead of emissions cuts in many countries’ hierarchy of needs after the Ukraine war caused a global spike in gas prices.
The hunt is on for more hydrocarbons.

Quick, another distraction ...

After the fallout from the global pandemic, the spike in energy costs as Russia invaded Ukraine, and punishing U.S. tariffs, the war in the Middle East is ramping up the price of key raw materials once again and dealing a major blow to Europe's industrial heartland, where costs are higher than other regions. Diane To reports.

How the Ughmann loves those fossil fuels ... especially coal ...

The International Energy Agency says global coal demand rose to a new record high in 2025, with China leading the charge. The agency likes to headline that Beijing is building more wind and solar than any country in history, which is true, but China is also pouring concrete for more new coal-fired plants than the rest of the world combined.
Detailed plant-by-plant tracking by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the Global Energy Monitor database shows China commissioned more than 50 new coal-fired power stations in 2025, the largest wave of completions in a decade. Those researchers expect a similar number of new plants to be completed this year and next as a post-Ukraine war surge of approvals works its way through construction.
China now burns about 56 per cent of the world’s coal but power is only part of the story. Nearly 400 million tonnes a year goes as feedstock for coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemicals plants that make synthetic diesel, gasoline and petrochemicals.
China also is stepping up conventional oil and gas exploration at home and abroad. Chinese capital is powering a coal boom in Indonesia, with more than 40 off-grid coal-fired plants running nickel mining and smelting operations that feed its electric‑vehicle and battery supply chains.
Vietnam has just commissioned the Vung Ang II ultra‑supercritical coal-fired plant, one of six being built under the country’s official power plan.
India is opening new coalmines and targeting more than a billion tonnes of annual production by the end of the decade to feed new blast furnaces and power plants.
The Philippines, Japan and South Korea have all added new coal capacity since 2020, even as their governments talk up phase-down goals.

The unreformed seminarian went giddy at the vision splendid ... Reuters energy editor Dmitry Zhdannikov said on Thursday (April 30) that an oil surge, caused by the ongoing war in Iran, will have a "massive" impact on consumers across the world, as "everything will become more expensive."

Oils ain't just oils, they're what fixes everything that ails the planet ...

Oil is central to every nation’s energy security and the scramble for new fields and more production is on worldwide.
In the US, the world’s largest oil producer, Donald Trump is urging companies to boost supply in response to the fuel crisis he spawned, and his Department of the Interior is rolling out an expansive new schedule of auctions for the right to drill for oil and gas in federal waters, which is badged as essential “to promote US energy security and affordability”.
No one better embodies the art of walking both sides of the street than Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who talks up climate leadership while ramping up oil and gas exports.
In November last year Carney signed a memorandum of understanding with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to build a pipeline to the Pacific Coast, aiming to expand the nation’s oil exports beyond the US market. He also has fast-tracked the Ksi Lisims LNG export terminal, with an eye on Asian gas markets.
After his recent visit to Australia, Carney went to Japan where he pledged that “Canada is in a position where we can double our LNG exports by the end of this decade, and double again by the end of the following decade”.
This should send a loud message to Canberra. Ottawa wants to lock up the same gas markets we depend on; if we do not supply them, it will.
In South America, Argentina is aiming to produce one million barrels of oil a day by 2027 by fracking its giant Vaca Muerta shale field. If it hits its targets it will make Argentina a net exporter of oil and gas, with the potential to generate $35bn to $37bn a year, as much as it makes from agricultural exports.
Brazil is aggressively expanding its oil exploration, even in the environmentally sensitive Amazon River mouth. State-run Petrobras started drilling just before Brazil played host to last year’s UN climate summit.
Riding the wave of soaring oil prices, Russia is cashing in by stepping up production. The world’s third largest oil producer is pumping more than 10 million barrels a day, and there is no shortage of buyers, collectively pouring hundreds of millions of euros a day into its coffers.
Across Africa, tens of billions of dollars are flowing into new oil and gas projects, with several dozen large gas and LNG developments in countries such as Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Mauritania already under construction or close to final approval.

Indeed, indeed, f*ck over the Arctic, and while we're at it, why not f*ck over the Antarctic, teach those bloody useless penguins a lesson as to what's more important in life... The Arctic LNG 2 above is a key project for the Kremlin and became a target of US sanctions because of the Ukraine war. Picture: Reuters

If Vlad the sociopath thinks it's right and good, that's more than enough for the Ughmann ...

Even the polar regions are in play. In the Arctic, Russia and China are expanding LNG projects, ports and shipping routes aimed at tapping offshore oil and gas and getting it to Asian markets, while analysts see their growing web of Antarctic research bases as positioning for future resource claims. Now throw in critical minerals and consider Trump’s deep interest in Greenland through the same lens.
This is an incomplete global survey but it does tend to suggest that Bowen’s assessment of where the world’s compass is pointing in the hunt for fuel security is, well, a tad wayward. Alas, his analysis doesn’t even pass muster at home, where there is bipartisan enthusiasm for hydrocarbon projects.

And so it was time to go domestic, bash Satan's little helper, and winkle out devotees of the fossil fuell lifestyle ... NSW Natural Resources Minister Courtney Houssos says the NSW government is planning ways to ensure “more gas production” is done. Mr Houssos told Sky News Australia that one of the requirements the Minns government is implementing is gas in NSW must be for “use here in Australia”. “For local mums and dads, for local households, for local businesses.”

Renewables? They don't have that pretty flare of fire.

Completely useless, whereas Minns is the man, as is the wise LIV and writers' festival loving Malinauskas ...

This week Premier Chris Minns declared the NSW government would open new areas for gas exploration in the state for the first time in more than a decade, “taking decisive steps to secure the state’s energy supply for households and businesses”. As an incentive for prospectors the government has slashed the gas exploration licence application fee from $50,000 to $1000.
In Queensland the Crisafulli government has already extended the life of coal-fired power plants and now wants to unlock “the development of Australia’s first oilfield in 50 years at the Taroom Trough, to bolster the nation’s long-term fuel security”.
South Australia’s Peter Malinauskas knows the limits of a wind and solar-dependent grid better than most. In February he announced a new strategic gas reserve, in a “unique and unprecedented” deal under which Santos will supply enough gas each year from 2030 to power a city the size of Adelaide, locked in for a decade.
In the Northern Territory, Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has championed the Beetaloo Basin as helping secure Australia’s energy future. Beetaloo Energy has just raised $66.3m to fast-track a pilot project, aiming for first gas sales by late 2026 and positioning the region as a new source of domestic and export supply.
Western Australia is the most gas-dependent economy in Australia, so it is hardly surprising that Premier Roger Cook led the charge to ensure the federal government did not impose a 25 per cent tax on gas exports, warning it would hurt the state and scare off the investment that keeps its lights, and mines, running.

After those celebrations the reptiles slipped in another AV distraction ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rules out higher gas tax on existing contracts in next month's budget. Mr Albanese claims the government is “working through details” to increase fuel reserves rather than implementing tax hikes. “We’re pursuing that because that is the right thing to do.”

By this point the pond had lapsed into a sullen resentment ...

This week Anthony Albanese chose WA to put a stake through the heart of the push for a gas tax. But it wasn’t done at the Premier’s behest. The Prime Minister has been engaged in shuttle diplomacy around the region bartering for liquid fuel with Australia’s hydrocarbon chips of gas and coal. He knows Australia wouldn’t have a gas industry if it had not been financed by those nations and they would have told him that their energy security depends on our reliability on price and supply.
This message has been underscored by the Foreign Minister, Penny Wong. She embarked on her own flying fuel mission this week that included having to go cap in hand to China to try to get it to meet the commercial obligations to this nation that it abandoned when the first shots were fired in Iran. To all but a privileged few, Beijing shut down fuel exports to preference its own supply. Surely this must make any foreign minister ponder her nation’s long-term security on the flight home.

The reptiles also became quicker with AV distractions ... Oil companies in China have begun direct talks with Australia’s jet fuel businesses. Foreign Minister Penny Wong met her Beijing counterpart for diplomatic negotiations on jet fuel sales yesterday. She says the talks were an early, but positive sign of co-operation and is praising China’s response to the nation’s fuel security needs. Australia currently has around 30 days of jet fuel.

How the Ughmann loves to dance on the corpse of climate science.

There's nothing like f*cuking the planet to bring on a sense of the impending rapture in the unreformed seminarian. Once the planet is comprehensively stuffed, his god will swoop down and save the righteous ...

Japan’s Prime Minister will be in Canberra soon. Sanae Takaichi knows that energy resilience is essential to her nation’s survival and will seek assurances that we remain a reliable, predictable supplier. Australia is learning the hard way that fuel security is national security and we have left ourselves dangerously exposed.
Resources Minister Madeleine King also would have been a loud voice in cabinet urging caution on a gas tax. The West Australian is one of the few in Labor’s ranks who understands energy, and holding your nerve in this unhinged era of energy myopia takes courage.
In 2022, when King made the routine announcement of 10 new oil and gas sites for offshore exploration, she said: “Gas enables greater use of renewables domestically by providing energy security. Australian (liquefied natural gas) is also a force for regional energy security and helps our trading partners meet their own decarbonisation goals.”
An aghast journalist wrote that this boilerplate statement of the bleeding obvious sent “a shudder through the sprawling ecosystem of climate activists and scientists in Australia”.

Because the reptiles never want anyone to leave the hive mind - once you check in you can never leave - those interested can check that last quote in the Nine rags in Australia risks mangling the brake and accelerator on climate (*archive link)

They always disappoint, and that's why the Ughmann loves them ...

Resources Minister Madeleine King is considering activating the 'gas trigger' mechanism after an ACCC report forecasted a potential shortfall in the third quarter of the year. The report warns of a possible 12 petajoule shortfall, including a 10 petajoule deficit in July alone, which is roughly a 10 per cent shortfall on expected supply. The Minister has initiated a 30-day consultation period with gas companies to explore solutions. If not satisfied that shortages can be avoided, she has the power to redirect gas earmarked for export to remain onshore. The move could have implications for international trading partners.

And so to despatch climate science with yet another rhetorical flourish ...

This vast ecosystem of richly funded, self-aggrandising, moralising fanatics is responsible for stuffing Australia’s energy choices into the iron maiden of wind, solar and batteries and pretty much nothing else. This is the instrument of self-harm Germany is desperate to escape. The same ideologues are behind the push for a gas tax. It should be clear, even to a casual observer, that they see this as the pathway to shutting the industry down.
But others should know better. Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn has joined the ranks of those calling for a gas tax of between 15 per cent and 25 per cent. It would have been better if he apologised for his company’s role in manufacturing our current energy crisis.
Commonwealth Bank has made a big deal about its goal of ending finance for coal, oil and gas and been as good as its word. The bank’s loans to fossil fuels decreased by 92 per cent from 2018 to 2022, from $4bn to $267m. This performative display of morality has done real harm to this nation.

Time to turn the heat on the CBA ... Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood analyses the Commonwealth Bank’s profit and revenue over the past six months with profit and revenue both up six per cent.

Does the Ughmann care about the damage he's doing?

Of course not. He's a fanatic, and he's pleasing his masters in his own fanatical way, and that's enough for him, and to hell with the younglings and the planet ...

As a rule of thumb, this column is opposed to the federal government extracting another dollar from anyone because it will just get thrown on the giant money bonfire. But if more tax dollars must be tapped, then the Treasurer will find his mates at the cosseted, taxpayer-underwritten big four banks present far richer fields than coal, oil and gas.
In 2025 Commonwealth Bank cleared north of $10bn in profit, roughly four times Woodside’s take. If there are super profits to be milked then less harm would be done by slapping a big new tax on the banks than by mugging the companies that earn export dollars, support regional security and help keep the lights on.

More a whimper than a bang to end, that plea to keep the lights on, a message that might better directed to King Donald than to the banks...

And so, despite this battering, the pond carries on... on to a meditative Sunday, where the pond will do exactly the same all over again, this time with Polonius prattling about King Donald and climate jihad Jennie George doing the science ...

So much to look forward to if you lead a reptile life.

And speaking of the King, after those interminable tortures, what better way to end than with a comic?

Is comedy the only hope?

In which Our Henry brings lumps of Islamic coal, while other reptiles are noted in passing ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:48:00 +0000

The pond should have braced for it, should have expected it.

The release of that interim report set the alarm bells ringing in the Australian Daily Zionist News, and any number of reptiles lined up to have their say.

Geoff chambered a round in ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Anthony Albanese can’t whitewash security failures exposed by Bell report
When the government looks for job cuts or lower spending, it should not only quarantine the national security agencies, it should keep their spending trajectory at a higher rate.

This is where having functioning interim archive is such a relief to the pond ... because over on the extreme far right, others clamoured to join Geoff ...

The cardinal questions not answered in interim report
Virginia Bell’s report findings a step in the right direction, but little has changed
The good and decent of this country embraced the Jewish community in our grief. But the good and decent have never been the problem.
By Alex Ryvchin

The pond hasn't the slightest interest, not while ethnic cleansing goes on in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and fanatics espouse it. (YouTube)

But correspondents should feel free to browse, so long as the intermittent archive stays working ...

Horrors of Bondi Beach massacre must instruct fight against terrorism
Despite post-9/11 counter-terrorism successes, a security expert warns the ‘unfortunate reality’ that violent ideologies endure.
By Levi West

And now the pond has to turn to the main Friday feature, Our Henry.

The pond had suggested as a teaser that he might be considered some kind of Santa Claus, but you can bet the hole in bucket man is the kind of Santa that has copious amounts of coal in his sack ...

The header: UN resolution on slavery falsifies history by ignoring Islamic world’s role; The UN has passed a resolution branding slavery a uniquely Western crime despite Islamic nations transporting more slaves than crossed the Atlantic.

The caption: The UN resolution on slavery has sparked debate over historical interpretation. Picture: Getty Images

So nothing really has changed. We're back to bashing Islamics, as Our Henry spends a good five minutes explaining how slavery should be pinned on Islamics.

To do this, he used standard tricks of the trade.

Here's the opening set up:

That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute.

Opening apologetic and caveat done, then comes the billy goat butt ...

But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.

Then comes another concession ...

Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole.

Then comes another billy goat butt ...

Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a “racialised capitalist system” and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime.

Oh yes, Our Henry is full of indignation that anyone should attempt to pin transAtlantic slavery on the West, or perhaps any form of slavery, even though the bible provides handy guidance from as early as Leviticus ...

44 Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
46 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour. (More KJV here)

For a bigger range of quotes, see the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which has a convenient summary, What the Bible says about... slavery ...

Sorry, the pond always gets entranced by the things that you're liable to read in the bible.

On with the hole in bucket man, righteously indignant ...

To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and “structural racism” that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.
Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.
While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as “certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century” that “questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement”.
That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.
It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples “should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service”, and affirmed “that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty”.
Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was “too pure for slaves to dwell in”. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself – an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.

The pond should at this point note that for some strange reason the reptiles refused to provide Our Henry with historical snaps or illustrations, perhaps of devious Islamic overlords enslaving whole tribes (and yet there's a question to be asked about the likes of the Olympics movement, which condoned much enforced slavery in recent times. Is it Western or is it Islamic in origin?)

Our Henry's chagrin is inclined to purposeful selectivity:

Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.

Now the pond isn't going to go into bat for the Islamic slave trade, or all the other slave trades from ancient times, or those rife in modern times. Economic/wage slavery is in an epidemic state, whether in the Arab gulf states or in the fields of American farmers.

But it's surely the last refuge of the desperate when you start toting the totals on the tape ... that's not a genocide, you've only got 30 million, what about my genocide with fifty million?

Perhaps Our Henry realised this wasn't quite the way forward, so he resorted to a more typical routine. Those bloody Islamics were heathens and barbarians ...

Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world – even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century – when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery – the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as “savages”, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.
There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that “even the most radical Muslim modernists” fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.
It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it – beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade “contrary to the holy law of Islam” and any official who attempted to enforce it “lawful to kill”.
Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania – after repeated ineffectual measures – in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of “modern slavery”, eight are majority-Muslim.
But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn’t exist. It declares the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty – which converts the horrors of the past into a “suffering Olympics” – is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.
It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust – whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews – were close to or above 90 per cent. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport – and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.

Of course there's a sting in the tail here.

What's the point behind it all? Perhaps this is one indication...

...The Netherlands remains the only European country to have issued a formal apology for its role in slavery.
The resolution has come after the African ⁠Union last year set out to create a “unified vision” among its 55 ⁠member states about what reparations for slavery may look like.
It urges member states to engage in dialogue on reparations, including issuing formal apologies, returning stolen artefacts, providing financial compensation, and ensuring guarantees of non-repetition.
Despite the longstanding calls for reparations, there is also a growing backlash.
Several ⁠Western leaders have opposed even discussing the subject, with critics arguing that today’s states and institutions should not be held responsible for historical wrongs.
Both the EU and the US voiced concerns that the resolution could imply a hierarchy among crimes against humanity, ⁠treating some as more serious than others. (Al Jazeera, here)

Ah yes, what a nasty word: reparations.

No one likes that word, not if it means flinging a little cash from the coffers.

Perhaps Our Henry should have suggested that reparations should fall where they may ... but instead he tries the feeblest form of redemptions ...

In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, “the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes’ lives”. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.

Oh come on, one sensible economic rationalist doesn't make for a summer of slavery bliss, and Our Henry had to immediately offer an "although":

Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the “middle passage” had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.
But to acknowledge those facts – which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust – might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.

He does a nice job downplaying it, though some might think dragging in the Holocaust card is a bit like dragging in Adolf to win an argument, thereby provoking Godwin.

Is the only way to deal with atrocities to line them and rate them, and if you haven't got the right kill rate, you don't cut the mustard?

And so to the final flourish:

Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.
Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries – the US, Israel and Argentina – had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren’t we?

Um, perhaps because it's really is about keeping the loot, the ill-gotten gains? And the three cited are three rogue nations veering off into authoritarianism?

Perhaps this helps in reading Our Henry:

...The UK, one of the major powers involved in the transatlantic slave trade, said it recognised the untold harm and misery that had been caused to millions of people over many decades.
But its ambassador to the UN, James Kariuki, told the assembly in his speech that the resolution was problematic in terms of its wording and international law.
"No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another," he said.
The US's ambassador to the UN made similar points during his speech, saying his country "does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred".
In addition, Dan Negrea said the US objected to the "cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage point to reallocate modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims". (Beeb)

There you go, off the hook ...

"No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another"

Way to go when it comes to fire bombing Dresden.

Yes, you won't find the Poms or the Yanks wanting to admit any guilt or loosen the Treasury purse strings, and that's not about pinning the Islamic tail on the slavery donkey, that's entirely self-centred ...

The pond blames Our Henry for taking umbrage when he could have served up King Donald ...

Once again the reptiles have failed to celebrate all that's really happening in the world ...

Did Jim and the pond suddenly get exposed to prosecution by showing that image. Relax, as the DOJ has explained, it's a selective form of persecution ...

The American justice system in full King Donald mode...

Compelling, captivating ...

And domestically the reptiles have refused to feature Gina at the top of the page, no matter how much she tries to garner attention ...

Speaking of the filthy, undiscerning rich, the pond perhaps should note one attempt at radical socialism which somehow crept into the rag ...

Culture of hierarchy a dim view from the cheap seats
A family’s night at the ballet turns into a wider debate about fairness, empty seats and who gets to access Australia’s cultural institutions.
By Alex Reszelska

This was a story of how a man and his daughter eyed off some empty seats at the ballet with a better view.

The sort of people who might be expected to try to score a seat in Qantas first class because no one was using it, and couldn't understand why the trolley dolly stood in their way.

This was the end of the story ...

...I’ve lived in London. As a student, I spent many nights at the Royal Opera House. There, you can queue for returns. You can buy standing tickets for the price of a sandwich and a cup of coffee. And, yes, people move into empty seats after the interval. Not chaotically, not disrespectfully, but with a shared understanding: empty seats are a failure of access.
In Warsaw, where I grew up, Polish National Opera has always preserved one idea: young people belong here. Students aren’t an inconvenience, they’re seen as the future the society needs to invest in. There, you can buy last-minute “entry” tickets on a first-come, first-served basis about an hour before the performance. They’re typically 35 zloty (about $13) for unfilled seats, compared to regular tickets ranging from 90 to 350 zł.
And then there is Vienna, consistently ranked among the world’s most liveable cities, and home to the Vienna State Opera. Every night, hundreds of standing tickets are sold cheaply for as little as €12 ($20). Opera, in Vienna, London and Warsaw, is still elite art – but not exclusively for elites.
Australia tells a different story. We talk a lot about fairness, egalitarianism and giving everyone a go, but those values start to feel more like branding than lived reality.
Young people are increasingly locked out of housing and stable work. And now they are being locked out of culture – through pricing, policy and a creeping social logic that says: if you didn’t pay top dollar, know your place.
What unsettled me most that night wasn’t being asked to move. It was the reasoning behind it. Someone saw an empty seat not as an opportunity for someone else to experience beauty, but as an infringement on their own purchase. As if joy were finite. It’s hard not to ask: Is this the kind of society we think people fought for? My daughter kept returning to it: “I would want someone to sit there,” she said. “If I wasn’t using it.”
There is a kind of moral clarity in children that sees through adult justifications. So here is a question – not just for the Sydney Opera House, but for the NSW government and for the Arts Minister. What is the purpose of our cultural institutions? To preserve hierarchy, or to expand access? Because right now, we seem to be choosing to leave seats empty rather than let more people in.

What a sorry, shocking story, and how weird that the reptiles would run it.

What next? Someone from the peasants' lounge attempting to gate crash the Chairman's Lounge?

Mind you, the pond is all for it, and all for storming the bastions of the privileged elites.

The pond routinely snuck into better seats at half time at the SSO, and didn't get pinged for it once.

Perhaps it's the ballet?

All the pond wants is someone willing to go bail money should a radicalised pond get pinged by the management ...

And so to close with the lizard Oz editorialist's suggestion for fixing the current and future energy crisis.

Make a wholehearted effort to get further and further away from oil and and economies based on fossil fuels?

Not on your nervous nelly ...

They've never got it, ain't for the gittin' of it, and never will get it.

Their fixated devotion to fossil fuels is admirable, in a kind of heroic Don Quixote way.

And so to close with a reminder to Our Henry that these days there are more subtle ways to keep unruly people in their place ...

Meanwhile, it gets even darker in the land of Vlad the sociopath ...

In which Dame Groan is the only reptile left standing, groaning away as Our Henry waits in the wings ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:35:00 +0000

The pond likes to think of each Thursday at the lizard Oz as a miniature Xmas eve.

A few mice scuttle about, but it's a day that must be spent in anxious anticipation.

Only one sleep and Our Henry will come down the chimney to fill Xmas stockings with an abundance of philosophical, theological and historical goodies.

Until that moment, there's nothing to be done but wait with baited breath (preferably of the snail killer kind), and give minimal, modest attention to the scuttling mice.

Luckily that doesn't mean giving some squeakers in the house any space.

The pond personally supervised the placement of petulant Peta's contribution to the latest reptile jihad in the intermittent archive.

"Commentary by Peta Credlin
I’m booing on the inside because it’s my country too
By making welcomes and acknowledgments of country mandatory, the goodwill towards fellow Australians who weren’t always extended a fair go is evaporating fast.

She's booing on the inside?

Why not just do what other reptiles do, boo on the outside, boo night and day, and make the desire to join white Xian nationalists and neo-Nazis in their booing explicit?

What's even more insulting is the way the reptiles started with a snap of an indigenous veteran, with the clear implication that he needs a good booing too:

The levels and depths of racism, fear and loathing in the reptiles knows no bounds, but the pond doesn't have to go along with it ...

It's a measure of how mindless and moronic these jihads have become that none of the reptiles seemed interested in the perils of Pauline and Gina ...

Similarly the pond doesn't have to spend time with Jack (who also refused to fly with Pauline), especially as his approach involved asking an extremely silly question ...

Elon v Altman: This is how it sounds when rich nerds cry
The Musk and Altman feud: a legal stoush to determine the future of humanity or a power grab by some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world?
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

With full disrespect, if you must head off to the intermittent archive, why not make the journey for Matteo Wong in The Atlantic:

The Richest Grudge Match in History (*intermittent archive link)
Sam Altman and Elon Musk Sure Dislike Each Other
The trial between the CEOs makes the AI boom seem sordid and small.

Or follow along with the testimony in such rags as the both siderest NY Times ...

Live updates: Elon Musk, Testifying at OpenAI Trial, Accuses Executives of Stealing a ‘Charity’ (*intermittent archive link)
Elon Musk, who split from OpenAI years after cofounding it as a nonprofit in 2015, said it was putting commercial interests over the public’s. A company lawyer said Mr. Musk had sued because he did not get his way.

There's a lot more fun to be found outside the lizard Oz when watching two criminals take to court to diss each other... (at least until Our Henry comes down the chimney with his bag of magical goodies).

The pond also decided that Saul wasn't up to snuff ...

Here’s why the Snowy 2.0 dream went south
Snowy 2.0 stands as a warning sign against more government control over our energy market. That journey is already going poorly and is likely to get worse.
By Saul Kavonic

Still taking potshots at Malware?

Never mind, the pond woke to news of a positive kind: Australia’s battery boom has doubled in a year – and is rewiring the energy grid (*intermittent archive link)

Even better, New study suggests majority of regional Australians back renewable energy transition.

Saul was on hand simply to play the grinch ...

...This is a cautionary tale for other government initiatives seeking greater control over energy investment. The federal Capacity Investment Scheme, Hydrogen HeadStart program, ever expanding Australian Energy Market Operator powers and the State Electricity Commission of Victoria are already showing similar issues to those that led Snowy 2.0 astray. Future government plans for additional fuel security in response to the global fuel crisis risk the same pitfalls unless designed carefully.
There is a role for direct government support of energy investment, but mostly in carefully circumscribed situations involving clear national security or national interest considerations – and even then it must be applied transparently and sparingly.
Snowy 2.0 remains a stark reminder that greater government control over energy can make things worse for both consumers and taxpayers, not better.
Saul Kavonic is head of energy research at MST Marquee.

As previously noted, Saul has form and knows on which side his private sector consultancies are buttered by government ..

Saul has previously worked in the energy sector in commercial, research and government policy roles. He has worked in commercial and strategy roles at Woodside Energy, Australias largest oil and gas company, and was the principal analyst in Australasia for Wood Mackenzie, the worlds leading energy consultancy.

And for some reason the pond rarely pays attention to the squeaking of Geoff, as he chambered yet another predictable round ...

PM progresses Shorten manifesto, as inflation roars
Anthony Albanese prepares to embrace Bill Shorten’s failed 2019 housing tax reforms as Australia faces soaring inflation and a looming recession.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Somewhere along the way it went wrong for Geoff, and towards the end of his piece, he had to pay attention to the men surrounding the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, and it wasn't all inflation roaring like a lion, it was a few pollies squeaking like mice ...

...Chalmers, who has lost the confidence from last year when the RBA was cutting rates and inflation was falling, hasn’t faced much opposition since the 2022 election.
Angus Taylor struggled to take a fully formed and competitive economic policy manifesto to last year’s election. Ted O’Brien, the architect of Peter Dutton’s failed nuclear energy policy, failed to land a blow and resorted to calling Chalmers the “Candy Man” and whistling tunes from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Now there is Tim Wilson, the self-described “modern Liberal” who helped Scott Morrison attack Shorten’s tax policies and last year reclaimed the Melbourne seat of Goldstein from Climate 200-backed teal independent Zoe Daniel.
Wilson, who doesn’t lack self-confidence, hasn’t enjoyed a great start against Chalmers.
After a bizarre rendition of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire in the House of Representatives, Chalmers described Wilson as the “opposition’s karaoke clown”.
After making a bad mistake in citing the Coalition’s new $800m fuel supply policy as costing “around $80bn”, Wilson on Wednesday responded to criticism from Chalmers by releasing a musical playlist for the Treasurer. The list, more university politics than federal politics, hijacked lyrics from John Farnham, Carly Simon, Michael Jackson and others to mock Chalmers for failing to “take the pressure down”, being “so vain” and a “smooth criminal”, and making “money too tight (to mention)”.
Australians struggling to pay their bills and keep businesses open deserve an opposition Treasury spokesman who is focused on policy not playlists.

Oh dear, freedumb boy strikes again ...

...but what's this talk of Jimbo not facing much opposition?

How dare Geoff suggest that?

Dame Groan has provided consistent, stiff, rigorous opposition and she was at it again ...

The header: Treasurer faces inflation crisis ahead of budget as rate rise threatens households; A stark disconnect emerges between Treasury’s rosy budget claims and the harsh reality of approaching trillion-dollar debt alongside persistent inflationary pressures hitting households.

The caption for the snap, which surely is the best the reptiles have ever displayed of this surly, sulky, insupportably snarky rogue: Treasurer Jim Chalmers addresses the media during a news conference relating to the release of key inflation data. Picture: Liam Kidston/NewsWire

Dame Groan could only manage three minutes of "we'll all be rooned, the end is nigh" this day, and she managed with great skill to downplay the clear and present danger, a danger that looks like being around for months - the decision by King Donald and the mad mullahs to mutually blockade the strait of Hormuz and thereby hold the world to ransom while they face off and pose down.

Paying attention to that would entirely defeat Dame Groan's primary T-800 purpose.

Destroy Jimbo.

And so she spends her time bleating about the feds by following the most simpleton path to hand:

When grinning Jim, our Treasurer, tells us that the budget is in better nick and he has managed to reduce government debt, informed people know these statements to be falsehoods.
Any cursory look at the budget papers will confirm the facts that the fiscal position is deteriorating, particularly when off-budget spending is considered, and government debt is fast approaching one trillion dollars for the first time.
Mums and dads are too busy and hard-pressed to investigate these tall tales. But what is clear to them, part of their “lived experience” to use an overused term, is that prices are rising and that the monthly outlay on the mortgage has been going up this year.
The quarterly CPI figures for March this year point to annual headline inflation of 4.6 per cent, driven mainly by higher fuel prices. But higher fuel prices quickly flow into other prices.
Higher prices are only too obvious at the supermarket and meeting regular bills.
To be sure, the trimmed mean of the CPI, which excludes irregular and volatile items, was 3.3 per cent, but still well above the target of the Reserve Bank of 2.5 per cent. The trimmed mean has been 3 or above since July of last year.

And what of that crisis in the strait, and news of Hormuz that you can use? Dame Groan has got it covered:

This timing is important, because it’s clear that our inflationary woes truly pre-dated the conflict in the Middle East. The proof of this pudding was the fact that the cash rate has been adjusted upwards twice this year. The cash rate is currently 4.1 per cent.

Roll that one around on the tongue, and see how easily you can dismiss news Dame Groan can't uze ...

...it’s clear that our inflationary woes truly pre-dated the conflict in the Middle East

And not content with that Dame Groan hammered the point home ...

Had excessive inflation only emerged recently, after the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed, then the bank could afford to look through any headline inflation figures. Indeed, this would be regarded as best practice. It will likely be the strategy adopted by most central banks around the world.

It was all the odder then that the reptiles rolled out the Ughmann to complain about the way that the cost of fuel was fuelling inflation pressures...and something had to be done about the news no one can us

Sky News Political Contributor Chris Uhlmann says the government must find ways to “bring down” the cost of fuel in Australia to ease inflation pressures. Mr Uhlmann said 91 per cent of “all the energy consumed” in Australia every year is coal, oil, and gas. “41 per cent of that we now know is liquid fuels.”

Never mind that stunning illustration, feel Dame Groan's ongoing wrath ...

The situation here is different and the bank will be particularly concerned that high headline rates of inflation will lead to higher inflationary expectations. Once there are widespread expectations that inflation will exceed the target figure – and potentially by a wide margin – the bank begins to be really worried.
Of course, cranking up the cash rate, which feeds into higher mortgage and borrowing costs, will inevitably feed into slower economic growth. At this stage, consumer spending appears to be holding up reasonably well, but this may well be the lull before the storm.
The Monetary Policy Board will meet next week to consider what to do about the cash rate. The market expects another increase of 25 basis points, although the fact that the trimmed mean was essentially unchanged, even if the figure is too high, may weigh on the members’ thinking. Recall that last time, there was split decision.
Stagflation – rising unemployment accompanied by above-target inflation – is something everyone wants to avoid.
The following week is, of course the federal budget, Jim’s fifth. If he really understood the predicament, he would slash the growth of government spending to ease the inflationary pressures. His constant unconvincing denial that government spending has contributed to the inflation problem points to a likely failure to act in a sensible fashion, with possibly more cost-of-living measures.
Much will be made of the highly tentative plan to radically reduce spending on the NDIS, and these figures – assumptions, really – will be fed into the four years of the budget’s forward estimates.
They will make the fiscal position look better from its poor base – the NDIS has been the fastest growing item in the budget apart from interest payments – but whether the lower rates of spending growth ever come to pass is an unanswered question. Mind you, good job for trying, Mark Butler.
The political strategy of the budget will be to draw attention away from the bottom-line figures, particularly the headline cash balance, and to focus on some adjustments to various tax arrangements on capital.
They will be seriously oversold and entail high compliance costs, but many mums and dads (and younger folk) might get the impression that the government is doing something about housing, in particular.
For Albanese and Chalmers, this outcome itself would be regarded as a success even if there are lot of complaints. Let’s face it, most of these affected don’t vote Labor. It could also set up a tricky wedge for the Coalition.
While policy is definitely not a strong suit of the Albanese government, they are really good at politics.

Here's a thought - if King Donald doesn't manage to sort out the strait, Dame Groan will be able to chortle about the way we've all been 'rooned, without ever mentioning the reason why.

As if to celebrate the King, the reptiles went full meme in the news section ...

Oh sheesh ... do they have to pander to him?

So this is what full dementia, sundowner style looks like?

Well, in that spirit ...

Look away reptiles, shield your eyes from what Faux Noise has foisted on the world.

L'État, c'est moi.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

Roll on Friday and the arrival of magical Santa Henry down the chimney ...

In which the bromancer sorts out everything in his usual way, sundry reptiles are sent to the intermittent archive, and talk of Anglo-Celtic values wraps up the show ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:28:00 +0000

The pond wondered whether the bromancer would ever get back to his theme of a war with China by Xmas, but thanks to the inspiration of that other Jimbo, one time member of the IPA and still a treasured author, he's made a nostalgic trip back to future ...

The header: New defence chief and Trump envoy pick expose deep flaws in national security; A hardline Trump ally becomes US ambassador while Australia’s defence chief lacks military experience – raising questions about readiness as China eyes Taiwan by 2027.

The caption for the orange emperor and his minion: Dave Brat with Donald Trump in 2015 in Washington. Picture: Getty Images

As might be expected, the bromancer was fully on board with a Trumpian tea party ratbag as a way of furthering a deep and warm relationship with the disunited States ...

An ambassadorial appointment, a Mandarin coronation and a strong speech from opposition – three important developments for our national security.
Former Republican congressman David Brat is a good pick to be US ambassador in Canberra. He’s a good choice because Donald Trump chose him.
Brat was a hardline conservative congressman. He rode the Tea Party, the forerunner of the MAGA movement, to a primary victory over the highly regarded Republican incumbent, Eric Cantor, who was then the majority leader in the House of Representatives.
Cantor was pretty conservative himself, Brat much more so.
In the Trump era, Brat has expressed some opinions many Australians would disagree with, such as that Ukraine should concede major territory to Russia, that there was a vast intelligence agency conspiracy against Republicans, and massive voter fraud against Trump.
But guess what? That doesn’t matter a fig. There are only two qualities that count in a US ambassador in Canberra – commitment to the US-Australia relationship, and clout with the president.
Of the two, the second is the more important. Some of the most effective ambassadors the US has sent to Australia have been non-diplomats who were close to the presidents who appointed them. Tom Schieffer was a former business partner and close friend of George W. Bush. Years before, Mel Sembler was a close friend of George H.W. Bush. Schieffer and Sembler were among the best ambassadors.
Australian governments, other Australians too, could get their concerns considered seriously in the White House through the work of these dedicated, influential men.
The bad sign is it took Trump so long to appoint anybody at all. There is, of course, much administrative chaos and delay in the Trump administration. But the fact it took 15 months since Trump’s election to get around to making the Canberra appointment is a sign no one of consequence in the Trump firmament particularly wanted the job, and it certainly didn’t figure as any kind of priority for Trump himself.

Actually the bad sign is that with a stooge and a sycophant on location and paying attention, King Donald might attempt to do more than the odd whine and bleat, and then who knows what carnage might be wrought.

Then came the bromancer on a disastrous appointment, because (a) she's a woman, and (b) she's not the bromancer, Meghan Quinn has been appointed Secretary of the Department of Defence.

See how quickly the bromancer can elide from celebrating King Donald's emissary to sneering lips and quivering disdain...

The second big appointment for Australia was Meghan Quinn, the Secretary of the Industry Department, as the new Secretary of the Defence Department.
Quinn is a distinguished public servant and deserves congratulations and goodwill on her appointment. She also deserves to be judged entirely on results.
However, Quinn’s is the type of appointment which has not been effective in Defence in the past. It’s many decades since a career Defence insider has been appointed Secretary of the Defence Department. Given how poorly Defence has performed for a long time, that might seem fair enough. In fact, it’s been part of the problem.

At this point, the reptiles flung in an AV distraction which sort of did a little undercutting of the bromancer's euphoria about the new ambassador, with him apparently being no better than Junior's old squeeze ... Former acting US ambassador to Australia James Carouso spoke on the newly appointed Australian Ambassador to the United States, former Republican congressman David Brat. “I don't think anyone can expect the type of appointments we have in the administration,” Mr Carouso told Sky News Australia. “We have a former girlfriend of one of Trump's sons as the ambassador to Greece, we have an orthopedic surgeon as the ambassador to Singapore. “This particular ambassador, I think, has more background in government, having been the congressman for two terms, with a background in economics.”

The bromancer proceeded to carry a torch for the disgraced Pezzullo, as so many reptiles do these days ... what with the lizard Oz one of the main locations for his rehabilitation tour ...

If someone goes to Defence without a deep background in defence it takes months and months just to get across all the information, much less to work out how all the defence tribes interact, where the bodies are buried, how the distinctive Defence culture militates against speed, effectiveness and accountability.
There’s a strong case, if you really want to break the mould, for appointing someone from the top of private industry who is accustomed to bringing big, complex projects to completion and actually getting things done.
The Morrison government totally squibbed its one opportunity to make meaningful change at Defence when it declined to appoint Mike Pezzullo as the head of the department. There was a feeling that such an appointment would have led to a lot of distress in senior defence circles. Good. That’s just what was needed.
When you appoint a senior mandarin without much direct defence experience you can easily end up with the worst of both worlds, you get a mastery of bureaucratic process, broad concepts, eloquent position papers, government bureaucracy gobbledygook. Every strategic challenge is lovingly described, every problem deeply admired from all angles, and nothing actually happens, or at least not on a timescale relevant to the country’s needs.

If Pezzullo's the answer, forget the ethical questions ... and now for a little fear and anxiety, Military personnel attend the ceremony as Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomes Uruguayan President Yamanda Orsi at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in February. Picture: Getty Images

That's the cue for the bromancer to jump the shark and nuke the Chairman Xi fridge ...

China’s Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to take Taiwan by force, should its government decide to do so, by 2027. The British Spectator noted this week that in 1930 Britain spent 2.5 per cent of its GDP on defence (well above our level now of 2 per cent), but by 1938 it was 7 per cent.
Australia has not remotely responded to the security challenges we face with the requisite urgency. Nothing in Quinn’s background suggests this will change. She worked on the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper which was a fatuous document with little predictive or policy value at all.
A dose of something closer to realism came in the first National Press Club speech delivered by Senator James Paterson, the opposition’s defence spokesman. He rightly demanded much greater openness from the Albanese government on basic defence information, rightly lambasted its failure to deliver expenditure or capability, stressed the centrality of the US alliance while acknowledging the difficulties posed by the Trump administration, and rightly called out the strategic danger of China.

Jimbo's the answer to getting ready for a bit of biff and a stoush by 2027? His profound insight?

Why it was a pitch for buying up big on the B-21 Raider stealth bomber.

This might have gone down well with the Sky News mob (still no rebranding?), but sounded completely clueless and desperate, what with the first of these planes to be delivered to the US air force in 2027.

What are the odds that the Yanks will immediately make them available to us as submarine substitutes, a kind of AUKUS pacifier?

Even the bromancer couldn't hack it, and he's still desperate to take on Chairman Xi.

When you've lost the bromancer, you're in trouble ...

His one mistake was to go down the road of proposing the acquisition of a fleet of B21 strategic bombers. When we’ve made such a pitiful investment in small, swarming drones, and when our defence budget can’t remotely keep even the feeble kit we have in proper working order, the last thing Australia needs is another giant, wildly expensive, technologically complex platform to cost endless billions of dollars and take forever to come online.
Dysfunctional defence culture, persistent and seemingly ineradicable, rears its head in the most unexpected places.

Grim times when even the bromancer can't be made to swallow Jimbo's massive stupidity ...

The lizard Oz editorialist chimed in on the matter of the ambassador for the disunited states, hoping against hope ...

AUKUS is in desperate need of a confidence booster?

Brat for sedulously promoting? Brat for demanding workload?

Likely he'll have a hard time explaining how to play the game ...

And so to what the pond won't be covering this day.

The pond won't be encouraging Dame Slap in her familiar bout of black bashing. The intermittent archive is a safe home for that sort of thing ...

COMMENTARY by Janet Albrechtsen
Welcome to country: is it time to take a vote?
A divisive response to welcome to country ceremonies raises deeper questions about meaning, timing and whether Australians ever truly agreed.

There's going to be a lot more of this bigotry emanating from the reptiles as they discover new ways to divide the country, but damned if the pond will help them in their mission.

The pond did at least have a couple of 'toons handy that evoked the Dame Slap spirit ...

The pond was also disinclined to feature a standard bit of Albo bashing, as Geoff chambered a far too familiar round:

Who’s fairest of all? Albanese holds the mirror up to history
Anthony Albanese has revealed his government will return to Labor’s political basics in next month’s budget, echoing the same big-spending, anti-business themes from his maiden speech delivered 30 years ago.
By Geoff Chambers

Political editor

The pond did however think that a teaser trailer was worth it, if only because it featured a novel new form of pictorial attack.

What better way to diminish comrade Albo and make him feel tired, weary and aged than by starting off with a snap showing him in his vulgar youff days?

It was too cruel, it was deliberately unkind in the reptile way ...

That's about as low a blow as the reptiles have ever managed in their war on comrade Albo, but anyone wanting more of the faux outrage must resort to the intermittent archive, while praying its still working.

Another item that was sent to the archive was this angle on the dire straits the world is in thanks to King Donald embarking on a jihad ...

West pays a price for Iran’s global cartel economy
Rather than relying on conventional statecraft, the Islamic Republic regime combines geopolitical positioning with financial resilience to extract economic consequences from disruption
By Sara Rafiee

At the end of her piece, Sara came up with a splendid proposal ...

...Western enforcement systems are designed for linear transactions. Tehran’s networks are layered, transnational and structured to pass formal compliance checks. What is required is a shift to intelligence-led enforcement: forensic accounting, network analysis, digital asset tracing and blockchain expertise, cross-border data integration and co-ordinated action across financial regulators, law enforcement and intelligence agencies. That means strengthening anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing frameworks to trace ownership, identify networks and disrupt financial flows at scale.
The West has exposure and agency. As a network of rules-based financial systems integrated into global markets, it is directly affected and capable of driving enforcement.
The Islamic Republic is sustained not by ideology alone but by access to capital, markets and financial infrastructure. Remove that access and the system weakens. Leave it intact and the cost is externalised through fuel prices, inflation and balance sheets.
The choice is clear: remain reactive and be at the mercy of the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and give in to their demands for ransom and extortion or act proactively to dismantle the financial architecture that sustains them once and for all.
The question is not whether the West pays but whether it chooses to stop.

So not just a complete blockade but also even more extreme sanctions, so that 90 odd million people can be made to suffer, while the regime skates along over their suffering.

If they chose not to stage a revolution, well let them starve, stuff 'em, serve 'em right.

It seemed an odd strategy given how Sara chose to describe herself ...

Sara Rafiee is a human rights advocate. The views expressed are her own.

Must be human rights advocacy of the King Donald kind ...

And so to a final offering ...

The header: Stop chasing nostalgia, start defending principles; Australia’s conservative movement often reaches for ‘good old days’ instead of asking: what made those days so good in the first place?

The caption: Demonstrators gather in Canberra to protest the impacts of immigration and cost-of-living pressures. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Immediately the pond's ears were on high onion muncher alert.

Was this tosser going to diss "Anglo-Celtic values", thereby undermining the entire edifice of the lizard Oz and the hive mind?

Last weekend’s March for Australia rally in Canberra drew scores of people from across the country, united by a deep frustration at what mass immigration is doing to their daily lives.
Housing is out of reach, rents are soaring, grocery prices are crippling and infrastructure is buckling under the weight of demand. These are legitimate concerns and Australians are right to be angry that government policy has left them worse off in their own country.
But alongside those concerns a familiar strain of rhetoric resurfaced. Once again, the language of “Anglo-Celtic values” and questions about who really belongs in Australia found its way into the debate.
Worse still, many on the right turned a blind eye or echoed their rhetoric, as if the way to channel public anger is to pine for a cultural purity frozen in the past. That isn’t just lazy, it’s destructive. Cultures evolve.
The things we prize about being Australian – our irreverence, our egalitarianism, our suspicion of authority – may have sprung from Anglo-Celtic origins, but over time they became distinctly Australian, shaped across the past century by the millions of migrants who made this country their home.
My own family has been here since 1946 – 80 years and five generations strong. At what point do families such as mine count as Australian? To keep insisting that the character of this country is Anglo-Celtic alone is to write millions of patriotic Australians out of the national story.
Even the so-called Anglo-Celtic values were never purely Anglo-Celtic. They were the product of centuries of evolution – first forged in ancient Greece, refined through Rome, filtered through Christianity, revived in the Enlightenment and finally embedded in British institutions.

He was, he was, and the pond was outraged on behalf of the lizard Oz.

How did this miscreant get into the mix? Where was Our Henry to box his ears and teach him a lesson?

The principles we talk about today – rule of law, liberty, civic equality – trace back to Athens as much as to Westminster. To pretend they belong exclusively to one culture is to misunderstand their nature: they were always meant to be inherited, adapted and lived by anyone who chooses to uphold them.
Worse, it’s politically self-defeating. You cannot build a broad conservative movement while telling half the nation they don’t belong. America, for all its flaws, actually gets this right.
The US came from Anglo-Celtic stock, too, but you won’t hear conservative Americans demanding the return of “English values” when things go awry.

Steady, steady, in fact in the early days, there was more than a fair sprinkling of Dutch, German and perfidious French settlers, and even worse by 1790 almost 20% of the population was of African descent, though it took some time to count them as human.

But the pond digresses, do go on ...

They talk about American values. Anyone who embraces the principles of liberty, independence and self-government, honours the country and respects its laws is accepted as American. That inclusiveness is what made America strong.
If conservatives in Australia cannot make the same leap – if they cannot stop confusing ancestry with principle – they will condemn themselves to irrelevance. The future will not belong to those peddling nostalgia. It will belong to those who can articulate a creed called Australian values, open to anyone willing to live by them.
After all, the instinct is already there: when something goes wrong in this country, we don’t say it’s “un-Anglo-Celtic”; we say it’s un-Australian.
Unlike our American cousins, Australia never had the clarifying moment of revolution. We were not born in blood. We inherited institutions rather than forging them in struggle and so we were never forced to chisel our values into stone. In the absence of a creed, we leaned on character – and for a long time, that was enough.
Stoicism, a larrikin irreverence, a practical egalitarianism and a work ethic that prized reward for effort. “She’ll be right” was more than a shrug; it was a philosophy of proportion, resilience and perspective.
But if you never articulate your strengths, you never learn to defend them.

Dammit, if the onion muncher gets to read this sort of heresy there'll be hell to pay ...

Over time, the habits that made this country work have been crowded out by bureaucratic creep, cultural risk-aversion and an ever-expanding politics of grievance. Instead of protecting the ideas that sustained our way of life, too many on the right reached for the easier script: bring back the old days. The result is a movement that sounds like a museum tour.
Nostalgia cannot save a nation. Principles, however, can. If Australia is to succeed in the 21st century, we need to stop chasing the shadows of yesterday and start identifying, clearly and unapologetically, the values that made us strong in the first place.
So which principles? Freedom of speech: not as a slogan but as a social norm that tolerates offence because truth requires friction. Reward for effort: the moral right to keep more of what you’ve built and the expectation that contribution precedes entitlement.
A “fair go” earned rather than allocated. Institutional humility: rules that bind government before they bind citizens. And an unembarrassed larrikin spirit that resists control and laughs at pomposity, including its own.
None of that requires a revolution. It requires articulation, prioritisation and courage. Articulation because we must say plainly what we stand for. Prioritisation because governments stuffed with committees can smother a culture without firing a shot. Courage because defending principles will be noisy, unfashionable and – at times – personally costly. And yes, that means fewer glossy slogans and more stubborn substance.

The pond could almost get on board, but what about Dame Slap's desire to put pesky, difficult, uppity blacks back in their box?

The less we see of them, the more of a fair go there'll be for all the whites slaving away at the lizard Oz?

Whatever, best wrap it up ...

But the purpose of that effort isn’t to look backwards. The point isn’t to sell nostalgia for a different decade or to cosplay as America. It is to recover the foundations of an Australian life that worked, then say them out loud, codify them in policy and live them again.
The debate we need is not about what we used to be. It’s about who we intend to be – and what we’re willing to defend to get there.
Damien Costas is the author of What Happened to the Lucky Country?

And speaking of equal opportunities for all, and rights and all that jazz, let's celebrate the ways of two noble monarchies, with wretched republicanism at last put back in its box ...

Finally those interested in the state of Vlad the sociopath's Russia might be amused to see the way that the country's chief Lord Haw-Haw, the nuking sociopathic Solovyov attempted to retrieve his most recent dismal situation by inviting lips-loaded Victoria Bonya on to his show, all the way from Monaco, the latest in a seemingly endless dance between the pair.

Only on Russian state media:

Vlad the sociopath must be beginning to feel the heat ...

In which the bromancer and ancient Troy tackle the state of the orange emperor's empire ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:53:00 +0000

The pond has long thought that complete shamelessness, chutzpah, and an inclination to a certain kind of insolent cheekiness are prerequisites for the practice of politics, and the thought came again with this yarn near the top of the lizard Oz this morning ...

STOCKPILE PLEDGE
Fuel fracas: ‘fill ’er up to 60 days’, Coalition vows (intermittent archive link)
Coalition vows to double reserves to 60 days
Angus Taylor has pledged an $800m plan to double Australia’s fuel reserves while Foreign Minister Penny Wong embarks on Asian diplomatic mission to secure shipments.
By Ben Packham and Geoff Chambers

This is, of course, the man who not so long ago decided that Australia's fuel reserves were best stored in the United States... from March, 2020: U.S. And Australia Strengthen Fuel Security With New SPR Arrangement

Part of the process is the expectation that - unlike elephants - punters will always forget, or perhaps not have cared in the first place ...

To be fair to Dame Groan, unlike the remarkably stupid and wildly oscillating beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, she's always been consistent.

She's always been a climate science denialist, she's always been a devotee of fossil fuels, of oil and gas, so her piece this day is just business as usual.

The header: Making the case for more refineries at time of crisis; We have been given a warning about our reliance on overseas sources for our liquid fuels and the totally inadequate level of our reserves. It would be negligent to ignore this warning.

The caption for the snap which got Dame Groan wildly excited: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen during a visit to the Ampol Lytton refinery in Brisbane. Picture: NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

You can make the case for the electrostate and renewables and such like as much as you like, but this Dame is not for turning. Never has been, never will be ...

It was quite the turn-up for the books but the photograph of Anthony Albanese and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen standing in front of one of the last two oil refineries was indicative of a change of heart, if not panic, on the government’s part.
It was only a few months ago at the UN Climate Change 30th Conference of the Parties in Brazil that Australia was championing a proposal to phase out fossil fuels. Just this week there is a follow-up conference in Colombia to flesh out the details. Plenty of countries will be attending, but there are some notable absentees including the US, India and China – all the big emitters, in other words.

How she loves to dance on the grave of the planet, how she thrives in the hothouse of carbon dioxide emissions ... Bowen and the PM have been trying to secure an increase in the supply of liquid fuels. Picture: News Wire/Thomas Lisson

This is of course just what her cult followers expect and demand ...

Back at home, Bowen has had to face the reality of a potential shortage of liquid fuels: diesel, petrol, aviation gas. Forget all that stuff about fossil fuels being the enemy.
The Prime Minister and Bowen have been working hard to achieve an increase in the supply of liquid fuels, even if the incremental additions secured thus far are relatively trivial: a few days’ extra supply.
We also are not being told the cost of the fuel carried by these additional tankers heading our way.
While the fuel situation may appear to have improved temporarily with a fall in bowser prices, the government is aware of the dangers that may emerge in the coming months. When the conflict in the Middle East began, there was a record number of oil tankers on the water. These have now mainly reached their destinations.
With the restrictions on passage through the Strait of Hormuz – it previously had handled around 20 per cent of the flow of global fuel supplies – these flows have become severely hampered. It is estimated that only about 10 per cent of the tankers that normally sail through the strait are now doing so.

Token riff raff who take a view apart from the Dame should make ready to be demonised - fires waiting to happen ... Albanese, Bowen and Deputy PM Richard Marles at the Viva Energy refinery after a fire there. Picture: NewsWire / Josie Hayden

Expecting Dame Groan to double down in her denialism? Make that a triple ...

The refineries in Asia are likely to run short of crude oil to be refined in the coming weeks. This will have flow-on effects for Australia since most of our liquid fuels were sourced from Asia. Hence, the government’s desperate attempt to diversify the sources of our supply.
Not surprisingly, Bowen hasn’t been prepared to give up entirely on his dreams of decarbonisation, bragging about the current progress of the rollout of renewable energy.
But he realises that electrification is not a short-term solution, and only a partial one at that. He also reluctantly has come to acknowledge the critical role gas must play in the electricity system.
Many voters must be scratching their heads, wondering how we got to where we are. How did eight refineries become two? How could it be that we produced enough oil for our needs a quarter of century ago and now produce less than 20 per cent? On what basis was the minimum fuel reserves recommended by the International Energy Agency of 90 days rejected?
There are a variety of reasons for the closure of the refineries, foremost among them that they couldn’t return a consistent profit. Our refineries are old; some were constructed partly based on the need to shore up national security; they are at the end of the line. They are also sub-scale, judged by the modern refineries constructed more recently in other parts of the world.
The new fuel standards imposed on them – sulphur content, for instance – would require substantial capital investment by the refineries that simply could not be justified. Add that the amount of local crude oil has been dropping and bizarre industrial relations arrangements, and closure of all the refineries was all but guaranteed.
Had it not been for the actions of the Coalition government, the refineries in Geelong and Brisbane also would have closed.

Here the reptiles slipped in Sky Noise down under (what, still no rebrand?), with the pond's only note to wonder why caps were deployed to describe a "Cane Farmer".

A new trend, inspired by Kind Donald's truthing ways?

Cane Farmer Owen Menkens says farmers are “worried about the future” with the fuel crisis impacting Australia. Mr Menkens told Sky News Australia that there are “inflationary pressures” also adding to stress for farmers. “And then there’s the fear of not being able to get fuel and fertiliser, which is really probably the scariest bit of it all.”

You can't expect Sky Noise or the reptiles of Oz to get agitated about what's actually caused, and is continuing to cause the crisis.

It provides too much in the way of cudgels with which to thump comrade Albo.

A prevert might succumb to the temptation to wish ill on Dame Groan's descendants as the planet heats up and expires, but that's to consign everybody else to the same fate.

Instead it's best just to politely nod and plough through the denialism to the bitter end of her new drill, baby, drill program, incidentally putting her at one with King Donald's desire to ruin the planet..

The Labor government has committed to continuing this support and has relaxed the fuel standards in the meantime. (Bowen had proudly brought forward the new sulphur standard but has been forced to reverse this decision.)
Bowen has now declared there is no need for another refinery, although he has not ruled out extensions to the remaining ones.
This is surely a premature stance to take, given the number of moving parts that will be needed to accommodate a policy that grows our domestic liquid fuel reliance. This must include facilitation of the exploration and exploitation of oil, onshore and offshore.
Much is being made of the potential of the Taroom Trough, which is part of the Bowen-Surat hydrocarbon basin in southwest Queensland.
While it’s unclear just how much oil there is, it’s surely the time when risks must be taken to restart our oil program.
There are other prospective areas including in the North West Shelf, the Beetaloo Basin and the Great Australian Bight. Recall that 50 years ago some experts were telling anyone who would listen that there was no exploitable oil or gas left in the North Sea. They were wrong.
On the face of it, the government seems flexible in using existing programs to facilitate the resurgence of a local oil industry. However, some legislative impediments such as the veto on funding pipelines in some programs will need to be removed.
One viable option is the construction of a new refinery at Gladstone, which would be close to several large-scale industrial operations.
There is a suitable port and there are other reasons this would make sense. Should the Taroom Trough work out, for instance, this refinery could be used to convert the crude.
It also should be possible to use imported heavy crude to produce diesel, which is critical to many Queensland economic activities, including agriculture, mining and metal processing.
To be sure, the cost of a new refinery is substantial – about $10bn to $12bn – and many components would need to be shipped in modular form from Asia. It would require the services of a major global engineering group when there is already heavy demand.
We are not the only country waking up to the weakness in their liquid fuel position and considering options such as new refineries. We need to get in the queue soon lest this option vanish into the distant future.
The real danger is the government will revert to type should the Middle East conflict be resolved in the near term and the strait reopened for traffic.
As unlikely as this scenario is, there are still powerful anti-fossil fuel influences on the government likely to re-emerge from the wings of the political stage.
We have been given a warning about our reliance on overseas sources for our liquid fuels and the totally inadequate level of our reserves. It would be negligent to ignore this warning.

Speaking of King Donald ...

Those 'toons are by way of introducing the bromancer, out and about this day, and picking up on the assassination attempt.

Yesterday the pond did its level best to ignore the Lynch mob, but the pond can never ignore the bromancer in all his glory ...

The header: In an age of narcissism and violence we need true physical courage more than ever; While we celebrate Anzac heroes, a Washington shooting incident exposes our contradictory attitudes toward the warriors who keep us safe from everyday violence.

The caption for the snap of the carry on: US Secret Service agents surround President Donald Trump after a shooting incident outside the ballroom during the White House Correspondents Dinner. Picture: AP

On the upside, the bromancer can't scribble one of those "I was there and was completely unnerved" yarns that have been littering the ether in recent times.

With due regard for the correspondents who might have actually reported from war zones, the rest of the bunch might actually write more useful pieces if they did a little cross dressing, and went as schoolgirls into current war zones in Ukraine, Lebanon, Gaza, or Iran - or any American school, where the chances of actually getting taken out by gun violence are pretty high.

On the downside, the bromancer felt the need to begin with an Orwell quote, yet another example of the mangling of Orwell ...

“Those who abjure violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.”
– George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945

If only the bromancer had bothered to check, what with those notes being freely available online ...

Context always provides a slightly different resonance, and the pond wishes it could spend more time with Orwell and far less with the bromancer, but that's not the pond's mission ...

In the scene at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton hotel, when a gunman fired shots in the foyer on the floor above the event, one figure stuck out to me.
One Secret Service agent leapt to the front of the stage, directly in front of where Donald Trump was sitting. He was a big fellow and in those seconds he had just one job – to take a bullet fired at Trump. He had a protective vest. But his actions required incredible personal courage. Presidential bodyguards have been shot before, shielding presidents.
(I played an extremely unheroic version of this role myself once. In 1997 I spent a few days trailing Philippines president Fidel Ramos around his country. At a giant national day rally in a big stadium I was part of the president’s party but respectfully sat a metre or so away from him. Move up next to the president, his staff instructed. Later they explained this was so no gunman would be able to get a clear shot at the president. Yikes.)

Oh sheesh, TMI, as the reptiles celebrated with action men, Agents stand ready to fire at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as Donald Trump, along with other government officials, were evacuated from the Washington Hilton. Picture: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

It won't be too long before the bromancer will get tired of the valourising and then he'll turn to the philosophising, and at that point bromancer cultists will reap their rewards ...

The Secret Service agent’s action underscores a feature we seldom speak of, and that is the central role and necessity of physical courage in the face of violence for our society to function at all, and for peaceful citizens to continue to enjoy peace.
This Anzac Day, we remembered and celebrated that physical courage of tens of thousands of young Australians sent to war. I was surprised and delighted at my Catholic parish last Sunday that the Ode of Remembrance was recited, with its haunting tribute to young lives sacrificed: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.” The congregation sang the national anthem as pictures were projected of Diggers going over a ridge and of a navy warship. This occurred after mass so didn’t interfere with any liturgical rite. It was a marvellous recognition of the debt we owe to the courage of soldiers. Importantly, it signified, too, Christian acceptance of the moral virtue of the profession of arms, its necessity and its heroism.
Like the Americans, we exhibit confused paradox in our attitude to violence and courage. Some neighbourhoods are saturated in crime violence. There is something like an epidemic of domestic violence. We don’t have so many guns as the US, but there’s an undercurrent of political intolerance and borderline violence, especially directed by demonstrators against the police.

The pond has absolutely no idea why the bromancer should have been surprised by the recitation of that ode in a Catholic church.

Back in the day, the pond recalls that galumphing marches up and down St. Nicholas's church aisle by school cadets was standard routine for Anzac day, with sprigs of rosemary at the ready...and as for an "undercurrent of political intolerance", apparently the bromancer has yet to catch up with the seething hatred and fear and loathing emanating from News Corps 'assorted jihads, though the reptiles decided to run a few snaps to illustrate the point... Victorian police blasted the anti-war protesters in 2024 who rioted in Melbourne by hurling acid and horse manure at police; Pro-Palestinian and free speech protesters march in Brisbane this month. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Back in the day, it used to be accepted that political protests were permissible and actually an expression of the democratic process, unless you happened to be taking a view of apartheid in Joh's streets ... or perhaps a view of US wars, when the police might be invited to run the b*st*rds over (*google bot safe).

Speaking of the undercurrent of intolerance, how long before the bromancer's own hoppy toads hop into view?

More so even than soldiers, our police are required every day to live out personal, physical courage. Every time a police officer visits a scene of domestic dispute, for example, they run the risk of confronting a violent person, high on ice or something else, armed with a gun or a knife. But if the police don’t go through the front door, the victim has no hope at all.
Courage is essential in many walks of life. Doctors and nurses display courage by exposing themselves to infectious diseases. Firefighters too. Sometimes society needs soldiers or police or even just good citizens in terrible circumstances to lawfully confront violence with violence.
The narcissism of contemporary politics is a social disorder, a mental affliction, which we suffer greatly just now.
It’s the absurd self-indulgence of any of us thinking our particular political views and causes are of such transcendent importance that they justify violence outside the law. This has for many decades been a conscious tactic of the left in Western societies.

And here you have it ...

Thus there are endless calls for “direct action” from campaigners allegedly trying to help the environment, particular racial groups, various gender and sexual preference identities and much else.

You can almost smell the resolute denialism, mingled with a whiff of transphobia and black bashing saturating the air.

So making a political protest? Not in the bromancer's street ...

The direct action call is both corrupt and corrupting.

What's corrupt and corrupting is the notion that ordinary people can't mount political campaigns to make their point known to the wider community.

Inevitably the bromancer went on to confuse such notions with wild-eyed anarchy and lawlessness...

It’s an assertion that I don’t need to abide by the rules that should bind other people. It’s most often directed at police. This has theoretical support among many elements even of mainstream left opinion.
A recent New York Times podcast was titled The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I? The podcast, obviously without justifying murder, accused assassinated healthcare fund chief executive Brian Thompson of practising murderous violence, structural violence as the left often call it, against those failed by the US health system.
The podcasters, though all affluent themselves, approved of theft from supermarkets and the like because the rich are too rich.

Oh dear, been there before, and with bonus Jewish stereotypes ...

At this point the reptiles flung in a snap of the suspect for the moment, a singularly inept and delusional wannabe assassin... Cole Allen, the suspected gunman at the WHCD dinner,

And then the bromancer revealed he really can't let King Donald go ...

For the use of force to be morally justified, the circumstances must be immediately causing great risk and the force must be authorised by law and morality. It’s the tremendous arrogance of individuals, or demonstrators demanding direct action, that believes they don’t have to abide by the rules because their cause is so transcendently important.
Thus the alleged shooter at the White House press corps dinner, Cole Allen, wrote in an almost sickly banal manifesto: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” This involves a wild mischaracterisation of alleged crimes by the Trump administration and a supreme arrogance in deciding an individual’s own political judgment is adequate to justify mass murder, as was apparently intended.

Um, actually on the balance of probabilities, a civil court decided that King Donald had committed a form of rape, and depending on your view of what hasn't been explored in the Epstein files, might have been found in an awkward - certainly uncomfortable - position with an underage girl, and could arguably - as an organiser of a coup designed to unseat the US government and ensure his continuing reign - be adjudged to have been a traitor, but the pond will leave others to argue the point.

Instead the pond will end with the bromancer deciding to be insufferably Xian ...

Trump’s exaggerated rhetoric, and the MAGA movement’s generally, creates the same exaggerated hostility and tendency to violence on the right. Right-wing violence is also growing. Both sides of politics are guilty. These trends culminate in suicide terrorists. Suicide is not the same as heroic indifference to danger. Intentional suicide for political ends (without judging those who tragically succumb to despair) comes from a hatred of life. Heroic actions indifferent to danger emerge from the deepest love of life.
Christianity is theologically unique in positing personal physical courage – Christ enduring crucifixion – as manifest in God himself. Anzac Day aside, we too often spurn traditional heroes and courageous warriors.
Yet, in our ignorance and confusion, we need them more than ever.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

About that crucifixion.

How much courage is needed when you're actually supposed to be god, and so you're enduring a little short term pain before heading off to an eternity of godly bliss?

Never mind ...

And so to ancient Troy, providing a slightly different angle on King Donald's Amerika...

The header: America at 250 rewriting its own history in the age of Donald Trump; From renaming the Kennedy Center to removing slavery exhibits at George Washington’s house, Donald Trump has turned America’s birthday year into a presidential vanity project.

The caption for the orange clown: President Donald Trump gestures after speaking at a reception celebrating Women's History Month in the East Room of the White House. Picture: AP

Ancient Troy sounded decidedly gloomy ...

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, agreed by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in July 1776. The semiquincentennial, however, comes amid deep divisions in the US, its animating goals and ambitions being revisited and reconsidered, and its global leadership in retreat.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump underscores the polarisation. There is no justification for it; there is no place for violence in democracy. Sadly, though, America was born in violent struggle and its politics has always been marred by it. Four presidents have been assassinated and many more, in office or out, have survived attempts on their lives.
I recently returned from two weeks in the US, travelling through the original colonies that banded together to fight a bloody revolution for independence from Britain and rise to become a 20th-century giant with immense economic, military and cultural power, authority and influence.

In particular, he didn't seem to have much time for the king, currently consorting with another king ... ‘Character matters and Trump … is an embarrassment to most Americans.’ Picture: Getty

Fair dibs ...

Ancient Troy clearly spent too much time talking to punters in the field ...

It remains extraordinary that a small group of people such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel and John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison could emerge at such a time and place to inspire a people to rise up and win their freedom from a powerful empire.
How that remarkable story is remembered and retold is under challenge in the US, along with the ideals and aspirations of the founders and the revolutionary generation about how they should be governed and led, during the second Trump presidency.
Everywhere I went, from Boston to New York, Philadelphia to Richmond and Washington DC, Americans went out of their way to apologise for the divisions in their country and the actions of their President.
These comments came from people on subways or in bars, at museums and galleries, memorials and battlefields.
Character matters and Trump, though long a bully and braggart, repulsive and outrageous, is an embarrassment to most Americans. He is profoundly unpopular.

Profoundly unpopular? That's a rare acknowledgement from a reptile, though if the world continues in dire straits, it might get even more profound than profound ... Tankers and cargo ships anchored off the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas, which sits on the Strait of Hormuz. Picture: ISNA / AFP

Ancient Troy didn't hold back ...

The Iran war has been a disaster and could plunge the world into recession. Trump’s MAGA movement is splintering and one-time allies are openly criticising him and apologising for having supported him.
What struck me most was the visceral reaction of everyday Americans to Trump’s treatment of longstanding allies and friendly nations, namely Canada and Denmark’s Greenland, with threats of invasion, but also his treatment of Ukraine and NATO countries, and other nations that have endured punitive tariffs, nasty social media posts and Oval Office reprimands.
It is one thing for Trump to treat people with contempt in his own country, to corruptly enrich himself, shatter norms and conventions of presidential behaviour, flout laws and ignore congress and courts, pardon or commute sentences of Capitol rioters and those who assaulted police, and attempt to overturn an election.
It is another thing entirely to humiliate and intimidate nations that Americans like and respect.
Australia has been a steadfast friend and ally, alongside disastrous wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and hosts a growing US military presence. Why treat us so appallingly?
Trump’s self-aggrandisement also troubles Americans. Presidential faces and names are carved in marble and stone mountains, appear on notes and coins, and designate roads, bridges and schools. These usually come long after a president has exited the White House. But Trump, with his unchecked ego and vanity, is seeking to remake the US in his image. This personal glorification of a president in office is without precedent. It is what you usually see in a dictatorship, authoritarian regime or military junta.

It's all too little and too late, and too irrelevant, what with the lizard Oz not a big mover and shaker in the United States, and Faux Noise still determined to note the slightest deviance from the MAGA bandwagon ...‘Ugh!’ Fox News Host Groans After Being Told Jimmy Kimmel’s Ratings Are Up Amidst Widow-Gate

Most concerning in this semiquincentennial year is Trump’s attempt to whitewash and rewrite history.

Ancient Troy kept brooding in a way that suggested he might want to join the Graudian ...

A huge banner of Trump’s face drapes over the departments of Justice, Agriculture and Labour. The US Institute of Peace was renamed for him. And he renamed the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts so his name prefaces the former president. His signature will appear on dollar bills and his face on new coins. His face also will be on tickets to national park sites.
There are plans for Trump-class battleships and several government programs already bear his name such as the $US5m ($6.98m) Trump Gold Card visa.
Trump tore up the White House rose garden, demolished the East Wing to build an oversized ballroom and decorated the walls with garish gold filigree as if it were Trump Tower. The adjacent 1888 Eisenhower Executive Office Building is to be painted white.
Most concerning in this semiquincentennial year is Trump’s attempt to whitewash and rewrite history. Philadelphia has become an early battleground for Trump’s MAGA-style assault on the past.
Near Independence Hall is the site of the President’s House. Washington lived at the site as president with his slaves (1790-97). Trump’s executive order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History requires anything at a federal site that “inappropriately disparage(s) Americans past or living” to be removed. In January, the factual text-and-image boards that chronicled slavery at the President’s House were removed.

Next came a snap of a suffering victim... Kim Sajet, former director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, was fired by Donald Trump who claimed she was ‘highly partisan’. Picture: Getty

And that was about that ...

Dozens of monuments, parks and museums also have had content removed.
As a result, the President’s House site, next to the Liberty Bell, has been activated as a place of protest. Americans are turning up in their thousands to add their voice and words of dissent.

Steady on, the cluck-clucking and tut-tutting bromancer explained exactly what that sort of behaviour means.

You can't just go adding voices and words of dissent willy-nilly in public. Please bromancer, remind ancient Troy ...

The direct action call is both corrupt and corrupting.

QED. America is both corrupt and corrupting.

The pond simply had to put ancient Troy in his place as he wallowed in pity ...

The site remains largely stripped but a legal challenge by the City of Philadelphia has prevented Trump’s version of history adorning the walls.
Slavery is at the heart of the American story. It is the original sin. Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners. Yet they adopted Jefferson’s wording that “all men are created equal”. It took a civil war to end slavery and another century before civil rights were enshrined in law.
Ahead of the 250th anniversary, it is a pity the US is so fractured and violence – shootings, terrorist attacks and attempted assassinations – is part of everyday life. At a bar in Philadelphia, a man sought to reassure me: “We are much better than our political leaders and we don’t all hate each other.”
That faith in America will be sorely tested this year.

They don't all hate each other?

Can't say that for uncle Leon and scamming Sam ... (and that New Yorker profile mentioned by Wired can be found as ...

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?
New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI (*intermittent archive link)

The pond went there because John Oliver had another go at AI on the weekend, written up at the Graudian as

John Oliver on AI chatbots: ‘Behind that machine is a corporation trying to extract a monthly fee from you’

The Last Week Tonight host dug into the many issues with AI chatbots released on the public without proper safety guardrails, from sycophancy to sexualizing children

And it provided a nice segue to a closing toon ...

Tough times for King Chuck, Sir Keir, and Maggie Thatcher's legacy, but perhaps the bromancer will sort it out ...(please, no Falkland Island street protests) ...

Or perhaps this is more to Dame Groan's taste ...

In which Killer of the IPA and Major Mitchell get the holyday Monday nod, with commendations for some reptile triers (and they can be very trying)...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:07:00 +0000

Knock the pond down again.

Just after John Birmingham had his EV rant and linked to The Drive, a certain Lisa Visentin did it again in the Nine rags with ‘Made in China’ EVs are taking over the streets, but just how safe is your data? (*intermittent archive link)

Lisa rabbited on endlessly about the dangers of the perfidious Chinese, but what of Uncle Leon getting all your data? How weird and deviant is that, but only deemed worthy of a sideways mention.

And what of all the data collection by German and Indian and American manufacturers? What, if you own a reasonably modern gas guzzler, will happen to all the data stored in your OBD port? Like in your Merc?

Not to worry, it's just standard rant suffused with paranoid fear of the Chinese.

Well Chairman Xi is welcome to the pond's data, though the pond suspects that a weekly trip to do groceries might result in extreme ennui for him.

As for celebrities and "important people", take note of whatever your vehicle is doing, be it EV or gas guzzler, because all forms of modern cars collects data and your friendly local mechanic can download it and tip off your local Daily Terror reporter.

And so to the reptiles this holiday Monday (it's a holiday here and tough luck if you don't get seasonal benefits).

The Lynch mob was out and about scribbling ...

Latest assassination attempt reveals power of Trump’s luck
It turns out luck is an important ingredient of presidential success – the luck of staying alive perhaps chief among them.
By Timothy Lynch
Contributor

The pond supposes it should pay some attention to the latest attempt to whack the King, but "Luck" is a funny way to describe the singular incompetence of the wannabe assassin, matched only by the singular incompetence of the security team surrounding King Donald.

The pond doesn't want to spend a long time defaming the University of Melbourne, and so offers only this closing gobbet (spoiler alert) as part of the ongoing evidence...

...Having spent my career in the social sciences, I’m struck by how resistant the field has been to this insight. We tend to privilege grand, monocausal explanations. For much of the past century and a half, Marxian economic determinism cast a long shadow over the humanities.
More recently, class has given way to analytical frameworks that foreground race and gender as primary engines of historical change. What unites these approaches is a shared discomfort with chance: an impulse to impose coherence and necessity where accident and unpredictability so often rule.
An academic lifetime can pass in the patient work of making the evidence line up with one’s favoured structure. Trump’s failed assassins force us to appreciate the man’s sheer good fortune unrelated to any underlying structural factors. It turns out luck (what the great theorist of executive power, Niccolo Machiavelli, called “fortuna”) is an important ingredient of presidential success – the luck of staying alive perhaps chief among them.
The 46 men who have been president of the United States are among the most studied in history. And yet it is less what political scientists call structure and more fate that controls the destiny of this select group of men. It is often blind chance and good luck which explains why we have such contrasting presidencies to assess.
It is uncomfortable to admit that “crazy people” and “whack jobs” can change history. But Trump is living proof of this claim.

Talk about a whack job ...

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne

It's hard to know where to begin with that sort of mystical nonsense - the answer apparently lies in the soil - so the pond didn't bother...

Additionally the pond decided not to participate in the latest round of lizard Oz black bashing ...

If welcomes to country were used sparingly, they’d acquire broader support
Indigenous Australians have served with distinction, but on Anzac Day that service is part of the same story, not a separate one.
By Louise Clegg

Thank the long absent lord the intermittent archive is up and running this day, so the pond need only do a teaser trailer with the closer ...

...In Goulburn, where I live, our local RSL committee has always taken a wise approach, consistent with what occurs in many country towns. The Anzac Day service proceeds without a welcome to country or an Indigenous flag. No statement is made about it. No point is proved. No one from our Indigenous community has ever complained about its absence. It is simply understood that, on this day, many people come for a particular kind of remembrance, and that nothing should be introduced that risks unsettling that shared purpose.
Anzac Day does not require augmentation. It is not an occasion to layer on another strand of our national story.
Indigenous Australians have served this country with distinction, and their sacrifice forms part of the Anzac story. But on Anzac Day that service is part of the same story, not a separate one. The losses are equal. The grief is equal. The remembrance is shared.
It is a blessing that governments bear no responsibility for Anzac Day. But those in the RSL responsible for designing services in our major cities would be wise to follow the commonsense approach of their country counterparts.

Well played Louise. You didn't actually applaud the booers, the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists, but you provided fine arguments for them and incidentally, for some peculiar reason, bolstered the bigoted beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way in his bigotry ... as he heads down the road of becoming an extreme right warrior at one with Pauline ...

The pond also avoided the latest example of the latest reptile jihad ... an endless fascination with Lattouf ...

Lattouf’s latest career move appears to be no joke
Post ABC saga, Antoinette Lattouf’s career takes a funny direction
After attempting to reduce Ita Buttrose’s immense publishing legacy to an ABC saga, the controversial figure seems to be giving up journalism for another pursuit.
By Steve Jackson

There's something awesomely sick (and fully sickening) in the way the reptiles keep up their jihads long after everybody else has stopped caring, or tries to muster up the slightest interest.

The pond will note for the record the bog standard offering by simpleton Simon ...

Labor’s overall tax take is headed in one direction
Chalmers is promising tax reform, but all the so-called reforms floated appear to amount to the overall tax take going in one direction.
By Simon Benson

Contrary to the reptiles, the pond doesn't mind the rich being asked to shoulder a little of society's burdens, but does admire the way that the supine lickspittle reptiles of Oz serve their rich masters.

That noted, for bashing Jimbo or offering economic advice,the pond will rarely stray beyond Dame Groan or Killer of the IPA, and his Killernomics was on parade this day ...

The header: Move over, Gough. PM’s spending addiction won’t age well; After almost four years of the Albanese government, it’s time to declare it worse than Gough Whitlam’s.

The caption: Anthony Albanese leaves the Museum of Australian Democracy in Canberra after delivering his speech, 50 years since Gough Whitlam's shock dismissal. Picture: Martin Ollman

The pond has noted this tendency before - the way that the reptiles love to romp in ancient times, presumably because anyone under seventy doesn't qualify as part of the demographic.

The pond supposes that a 50 year anniversary should cut some sort of mustard, but the dismissal took place on the 11th November, which is a long way from the 27th April.

Couldn't have Killer saved his rant to then?

Well no, Gough's not really the point. He's just a sock puppet from ancient times that Killer can use as a clumsy cudgel to give comrade Albo a pounding, though the pond has a few bob (verifiable shillings) on Kalshi betting that it has absolutely diddly squat meaning for vulgar youff ...

After almost four years of the Albanese government, it’s time to declare it worse than Gough Whitlam’s. The polarising former Labor leader led a chaotic, short-lived government in the early 1970s that ended spectacularly, but this government’s legacy will ultimately be worse, both culturally and economically.
Nations can deteriorate for reasons beyond their control; invading foreign armies or, less dramatically, a severe slump in demand for their exports. We’ve endured none of that yet living standards have been slipping by more than any other developed nation, largely through deliberate policy choices, including massive immigration levels and destruction of a once reliable cheap energy grid.
For all the talk of social cohesion, the national mood and sense of collective purpose is weaker than ever, amid extreme crackdowns on free speech that Whitlam would have thought unthinkable. GDP per capita, a common proxy for living standards, has steadily fallen in roughly two-thirds of the last 15 quarters – the longest sustained decline ever.
Even on the government’s own biased measures (which exclude the price of buying a home, interest rates and taxes), real wages (after inflation) are down more than 6 per cent since 2020.
At least Gough, who also had the redeeming quality of eloquence and erudition, occasionally displayed some economic sense. His government cut tariffs by 25 per cent across the board in 1973, helping open Australia up to the world.
The Albanese government’s contributions have been a roll call of recklessness, spending billions to buy university student votes, $300 electricity bill handouts, supercharging doctors’ incomes with $8.5bn of “incentives”, and bailing out steelworks and smelters its own emissions policies had made unviable. Meanwhile the NDIS, the centrepiece of the government’s so-called “care economy”, remains a policy disaster of epic proportions, and threatens to corrupt the entire nation.

For some reason the reptiles were determined to undermine Killer's work by reminding the geriatric demographic that he wasn't actually scribbling on the actual anniversary ...

Gough Whitlam addresses the crowds from the steps of Parliament House after his dismissal by Sir John Kerr, November 11, 1975. Picture: National Archives

And here we are on the 27th April, and the pond reckons this "we'll all be rooned" routine is up there with Dame Groan's always reliable output ...

Quite aside from a fiscal cost near the defence budget, the share of Australians who claim to be disabled has shot up from 17.7 per cent to 21.4 per cent in only a few years on ABS figures.
At the same time, Anthony Albanese is seeking to make childcare universal and publicly funded, adding a whole vast new layer of bureaucracy and cost at a time relentless bracket creep struggles to keep up with federal spending growth above 8 per cent a year.
Gough lifted federal spending from around 18 per cent to 24 per cent of GDP, where it roughly was when Labor won the 2022 election.
Canberra’s footprint will be almost 27 per cent by June, the biggest ever outside the Covid pandemic years, and only the naive would believe federal spending growth will collapse from 8.2 per cent this financial year to 3.1 per cent next, as the latest budget update predicts.
Whitlam famously expanded the commonwealth bureaucracy, lifting public service numbers by more than 20 per cent in just three years. Yet the Albanese government added roughly 40,000 federal public servants in his first few years, a larger increase in raw numbers, albeit from a far higher base. With a third term quite possible, Albanese could easily beat Whitlam on these measures too.

How weird does it get? Well to make sure that comrade Albo goes under the hammer, Killer of the IPA has to indulge in rampant reptile heresy ...

Gough ran a more fiscally honest administration, running budget surpluses every year of his administration.

Is Killer suggesting the Dismissal was wrong?!

Stunning stuff ... and the pond almost thought of referring Killer to the reptile Inquisition for the misrepresentation of reptile history:

Federal public debt recently burst through $1 trillion, and Jim Chalmers has pencilled in $35bn federal deficits in each of the next four years as the soaring tax take fails to keep pace with spending.
Whitlam was honest about his intentions whereas Australia under Albanese is becoming a command economy by stealth.
Gough had the 1973 oil price shock to deal with too, in which oil prices almost quadrupled overnight, pushing up inflation in our then highly oil-dependent economy to almost 18 per cent.
Even before the latest Middle East war broke out, Australia’s inflation rate was almost 4 per cent, the highest in the OECD outside Turkey, and rising.

The pond supposes that these days it wouldn't be a proper reptile piece without the Bolter and the Canavan caravan joining in the parade ...

Nationals Senator Matt Canavan comments on Anthony Albanese’s reigniting the dismissal of Gough Whitlam 50 years later. “We’ve always known that the reason Anthony Albanese is in politics is to fight Tories,” Mr Canavan told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “Perhaps it would be better, though, if Anthony Albanese’s purpose was to lift the standards of all Australians.”

Killer followed up that visitation by a final gobbet of despair ...

Whitlam didn’t enjoy the extraordinary global demand for Australia’s resources Canberra still does, providing a deluge of company tax revenue that helps paper over the economy’s otherwise structural weakness.
No wonder the nation’s productivity growth over the past five years has averaged -0.4 per cent, the worst period on record, dragged down by an ever-larger non-market sector, according to the Productivity Commission. Around four-fifths of all new jobs are in the government or de facto government sector, something unthinkable in Gough’s day.
Whitlam made university education free when academic standards were still high and very few people attended. His government full dismantled the remnants of the White Australia policy but he didn’t seek to flood the nation with millions of workers from developing countries in a way that would obviously undermine native-born Australians’ quality of life and incomes.
Look no further than speculation leading up to the May budget for hard evidence of the weakness and cluelessness of the current government, despite having a huge parliamentary majority. Reducing spending growth of the NDIS from above 10 per cent to near 5 per cent sometime over the next few years is supposed to be a highlight.
Some minor changes to the capital gains tax regime are also planned – in the only budget far enough out from the next election where the government could actually make difficult decisions that would upset its voter base. Voters increasingly take the same dim view: Labor was thrashed at the 1975 election yet still managed to pull just over 40 per cent of the primary vote; 50 years later the party will be lucky to win 30 per cent at the next election.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Well played Killer, though the pond did wonder if the country, seemingly having survived Gough, might also survive time with comrade Albo.

After all, we survived the onion muncher and Malware, so anything is possible ...

And after that burst of Killernomics and in the absence of the Caterist, the pond turned to the Major for a standard serve of Monday bigotry and bile.

Before beginning, the pond should note this delicious splash in Crikey (sorry, it's behind a paywall)

Just the header will do, and in a perverse way, it sets a tone for the Major's musings ...

The header: Let’s stop tiptoeing around Islamic intolerance and immigration; Australia needs to adopt a mature focus on the cultural integration of migrants, and the media must shed its naivety about multiculturalism.

The caption: Accused Bondi gunman Naveed Akram studied under ISIS-linked radical preacher Wissam Haddad in Sydney’s Bankstown Picture: Matrix News for the Daily Mail

The notion that the Major would ever tiptoe when he can perform like a bigoted bull in a China shop is a whimsical one.

The aim here is to bolster the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn's way in his attempt to start up a kind of war King Donald style down under.

It's part of an ongoing paranoid campaign, jihad if you will ...

Former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott was a speaker at the event. His speech had the title, "Mass migration across the Anglosphere must cease". (ABC here)

How naked can it get? Even more than that serve of white Xian nationalism?

As ugly as the way that King Donald has divided America and incidentally contributed to the ruination of many businesses that rely on migrant labour ...

Enough already with the introductions, time to get with the Major, chomping on his bigoted oats ...

Journalists are often quick to channel discussions about immigration into questions of political motivation.
ABC Insiders host David Speers was keen on April 19 to move the discussion on when both The Australian Financial Review’s Jennifer Hewett and news.com.au’s Samantha Maiden mentioned public concern about immigration.
Speers and his panel, which also included journalist Osman Faruqi, were discussing a speech by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor on April 14. Taylor flagged a new values test and other measures to vet potential immigrants.
Speers framed Taylor’s speech as a strategy for the May 9 Farrer by-election designed to boost the Coalition’s prospects against a surging One Nation.
Pakistan-born Faruqi, son of Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi and a one-time adviser to former Senator Lee Rhiannon, was sure the pivot would not work.
Hewett thought many Australians, including those not backing One Nation, were concerned immigration was too high. She said the Coalition was sending a coded message about values because it did not want to mention Muslim immigrants and thought Taylor was being careful not to offend Chinese and Indian migrants by not outlining specific cuts to the program.
Maiden said many social democrat governments were having similar discussions about migration, and referenced Denmark.
Hewett said more than 31 per cent of Australians today were born overseas, double the numbers in the UK and US.
Speers, Maiden and Faruqi seemed to agree Taylor’s approach “may not be racist enough” to appeal to One Nation voters but too racist for others.

Oh be fair, he's working hard to become a modern day Pauline, giving her preferences and doing all the things that racists do, and just to make sure we know this is a tribute to his ways, the reptiles slipped in a hagiographic snap of the bigot in chief, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has flagged a new values test. Picture: John Gass

Black people, brown people? He, and Louise and the Major have got it all covered ...

Taylor was motivated by One Nation’s poll surge. But Australia has been tiptoeing around the edges of wider issues about integration and multiculturalism since the September 2001 terror attacks in the US and the Bali bombings a year later.
This newspaper editorialised many times back then that democracies needed to be careful about allowing intolerant groups into nations built on the idea of tolerance: how much intolerance can a social democracy tolerate before its very nature is undermined?
That’s the question the Danes addressed in 2018 when they decided all Muslim immigrant children were to learn Danish, read Danish stories and taught the meaning of Christmas and Easter.
Denmark was rocked by Islamic intolerance in 2005 when a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoonists’ images of Mohammed. Nearly 200 people were killed in riots around the world and Danish embassies were targeted.
The English literary set got its Muslim tolerance wake-up much earlier, in 1989, when Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against writer Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses.
France in 2010 banned the wearing of Muslim full-face veils in public. The January 2015 Charlie Hebdo murders of 17 people, again over cartoons Muslims considered disrespectful to Islam, forced France tore-examine its attitude to one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations. France has seven million Muslim immigrants, about nine per cent of its population.
The controversial 2015 novel Submission, by French writer Michel Houellebecq, was a hit in France and Germany. It centres on the fictional 2022 election of a Muslim government in France and was branded “Islamophobic”.
The issue was turbocharged again by the 2017 publication of conservative UK journalist Douglas Murray’s examination of Islam’s expanding European footprint, The Strange Death of Europe.
In Australia it was crickets, for the most part.
But weekly demonstrations for more than two years supporting Palestine (in effect Hamas) and Iran, and the massacre of 15 people at Bondi on December 14, are changing that.
It was different after the Bali bombing and again in 2013-15 when some Muslim Australians went to Syria to fight for ISIS.
The ABC and left media between 2001 and 2015 largely ignored investigating domestic Muslim extremism, but it was covered extensively in The Australian by the likes of Cameron Stewart, Paul Maley, Martin Chulov and Sally Neighbour.
The ABC criticised The Australian in 2014 for publishing a page one photo of Sydney terrorist Khaled Sharrouf in Syria with his son carrying a severed head.

The pond wasn't surprised that the Major would revert to sensationalist glory days, so the least the pond could do was downsize the image ... The front page of The Australian on Monday, August 11, 2014

As tacky as it ever was ... but don't expect the Major or the reptiles to show a snap of some schoolgirl graveyards ...

There's no end to the atrocities to fuel the rage on both sides.

The Major carried on ...

Again, the newspaper was criticised when it hired an Arabic-speaking Druze journalist to attend mosques in Sydney and Melbourne.

At this point the pond must interrupt to note the way that logarithms can play funny tricks, in a way that makes you doubt your sanity.

For some reason an actual Tucker Carlson monologue turned up on the pond's feed. The pond only watched the monologue bit of Tucker responds to Israel's Attacks on Jesus Christ ...and only includes the link here because it's certain to offend the Major ...(strong warning, it's the first time the pond ever saw a Carlson monologue. Do you really need to soil yourself? Do you really need to encourage the criminal behaviour of the pond's logarithms?)

Now the Bondi massacre has forced the wider media to look at extremist hate preachers.
Journalists need to look at the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates that are taking a long view of the demographic challenges Islam presents the West.
The Jerusalem Post on December 18 published a piece under the headline ‘Europe is sleepwalking into the Muslim Brotherhood’s long game’ by veteran British diplomat Edmund Fitton-Brown and security and counter-terrorism expert Eran M. Teboul.
The article opens with a 2007 quote from the late Brotherhood intellectual Yusuf al-Qaradawi: “Islam will conquer Europe without resorting to the sword or fighting. It will do this through da’wah and ideology.”
Those, and a much higher birthrate than their host nations.
Da’wah is “education, charity and social aid, meant to bring others closer to Islam”.
In Australia, alleged Bondi shooter Naveed Akram studied under ISIS-linked radical preacher Wissam Haddad at the Al Madina Dawah Centre in Sydney’s Bankstown.

As expected, it didn't take long for the Major to drift off into Australian Daily Zionist News speak ...

Islamic preacher Wissam Haddad has faced court over alleged anti-Semitic speeches. Picture: Jane Dempster

The Jerusalem Post is a fine complement to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The Jerusalem Post points out the Brotherhood has been banned in Egypt and most Gulf countries for 30 years, but is thriving in Europe.
“The basic freedoms and rights given by European democracies are an enabler. Freedom of speech enables endless … protests against Israel.
“Freedom of religion is exploited to allow hate preaching. Freedom of the press allows … ubiquitous penetration by Al Jazeera.
“Freedom of association is exploited by charities and political action groups, whilst the right to privacy offers a firewall for activities hostile to the host nation.”
It’s not just Europe.
Islamists are murdering Christians in Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan. Readers who follow MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) will be aware of rising activism by Muslim hate preachers in the US.
Dearborn, Michigan, is 55 per cent Muslim.
Its Muslim mayor last September demanded a Christian minister on the city’s council leave Dearborn after criticising the renaming of an intersection after a prominent Hezbollah supporter.
Christianity was not long ago the dominant religion in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt (Coptic), Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya. Sudan and Somalia were Christian and animist.

At this point, having had his fun, the Major slipped in an obligatory billy goat butt, in the form of a "none":

None of this means most Muslims here are not good Australians. Nor at only three per cent of the population is Islam likely to become our dominant religion.

But as soon as you get that sort of butt, as sure as hell you're going to get another butt ...

But we do need a mature focus on integration and less naivety about multiculturalism.

But that means diddly squat, a faux attempt at meaningless piety, with "mature" and "naivety" flung about as a way to soften the rampant bigotry.

Cue a final snap ...Dr Jamal Rifi has worked to stop young Sydney Muslims joining ISIS in Syria. Picture: John Feder

One thing's certain.

Each time the pond reads the lizards of Oz, it gets dangerously radicalised and this sort of closing puffery does nothing to help ...

This newspaper in 2015 made Lebanese-born doctor Jamal Rifi – a campaigner against the Muslim Votes Matter group at last year’s federal election – its Australian of the Year. Rifi had worked to stop young Sydney Muslims joining ISIS in Syria.
Sky News Australia chief executive Paul Whittaker, then editor of The Daily Telegraph, awarded Rifi the newspaper’s Pride of Australia Fair Go Medal the previous year.
It was a time when newspapers had the resources to cover the ethnic tribes of our biggest cities.

The pond has nothing against Jamal Rifi, except perhaps that he's sailed too close to the reptile sun.

But isn't he one of those pesky, difficult furriners the beefy boofhead and the lizards of Oz keep warning us about?

And speaking of privacy of data, as Lisa did at the start of the show, here's some juice for her next piece ...

And so to end with a little bit of light holyday fun ... (speaking of strange logarithms) ...

In which the Angelic one sets the pace for prattling Polonius, the disgraced Pelluzzo and the lizard Oz editorialist...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Knock the pond down with a feather and pleased, do it gently.

The pond had to do a double take, and then save this lizard Oz piece for the meditative Sunday outing ...

Amidst all the war mongering and carry on that came with yesterday's Australian Daily Zionist News, the Angelic one turned up with this ...

Two Anzac brothers’ horror: gassed, amputated, traumatised
A family’s sixth-generation Australian story reveals the devastating truth about what happened when young men ignored warnings about a ‘foreign war’.
By Angela Shanahan

It's there in the intermittent archive.

The pond didn't need to relive the "great" war narrative through the lives the Angelic one describes.

There are millions of such stories, and this is the time of year the pond gets triggered and is reminded of a deeply unhappy grandfather who served as a machine gunner in the battle of the Somme.

He returned home a shell of a man, tormented by nightmares, and the pond doesn't need to be reminded of his alcohol-fuelled rages.

But the Angelic one's wrap up to her piece commanded the pond's attention ...

...After the war both brothers felt fortunate to get out of the army alive. Neither was interested in Anzac Day and, like most returned soldiers, would not speak outside the family about something they regarded as unspeakable. Instead they both carried on in their careers. Fred had a family and drove a specially altered Buick car. Ernest stayed in the family tailoring business, always immaculately dressed, and spent many long afternoons at the races with handy visits to us in Randwick.
When I hear very young people today parroting jingoistic claptrap they have overheard about the original Anzacs “fighting for Australia”, I always think about those two, who fortunately survived to realise the error of joining in 1915. I also think about them when I hear failed politicians, commentators and other armchair warriors wanting “boots on the ground” for yet another failed enterprise on the other side of the world – just as futile as that war that was supposed to end all wars.

Say what?

The pond was beguiled and entranced by the Angelic one's talk of jingoistic claptrap - of the kind that litters the lizard Oz - followed by talk of commentators and armchair warriors wanting boots on the ground for yet another failed enterprise.

It's as if she'd read the bromancer and the dog botherer, and decided to take aim at those failed commentators and armchair warriors, and by extension the whole of the useless rag.

Who knew that the pond and the Angelic one could share a moment?

Who knew she'd preemptively dismiss all that claptrap that turns up down below?

It made the pond's day, it lifted the spirits, and it was sorely needed because ... prattling Polonius ... armchair warrior and failed commentator supreme ...

The header: Australian War Memorial becomes a battleground; Critics claim Anzac Day no longer connects with multicultural Australia, but the commemoration remains vital for a nation built on sacrifice and democratic values.

The caption which doesn't identify the rogues who decided to drag a Shetland pony into the affair: Soldiers of the 1st Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR), march through the town of Charters Towers as part of the Anzac Day Parade along with their unit mascot Septimus Quintus.

It didn't take Polonius long to get into war monger mode ...

It’s increasingly fashionable among the left intelligentsia these days to query the point of Anzac Day. Come to think of it, mocking April 25 and what it stands for was around in the 1960s. What’s different now is that a target of the criticism is the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Last Monday, historian Peter Stanley was interviewed by David Marr on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live program. Stanley maintains that the Australian War Memorial turned itself into a tourist attraction 20 years ago. Presumably it’s a case of “travellers” looking down on mere “tourists”.
It was one of those interviews where Marr essentially agreed with Stanley and Stanley essentially agreed with Marr.
Asked about the challenges to the way in which we will celebrate Anzac Day in the near future, Stanley replied that one of the big differences is the sheer changes in Australian demography. He said the Australia that created Anzac Day was 95 per cent, or thereabouts, Anglo-Celtic.
Stanley’s argument is that, if we are not careful, we will have a society in which a section has, at times, an intense but mostly lukewarm connection to Anzac Day. And another large minority that feels no connection to April 25.
We shall see. It is my experience that crowds at Anzac Day football matches these days are probably more attentive to the remembrance part of the occasion than they were a half-century ago when commercial sport was first played on April 25.

The pond was bemused.

Is Polonius a footy freak, so much so that he's attended matches for half a century and so is in a position to provide a judicious survey and summary of the mood of the punters.

Does he have a team?

It seems so ...

The great Gerard Henderson, the Executive Director of the Sydney Institute is from Melbourne. He loves his AFL, and I couldn’t resist referring to his beloved Essendon Football Club, which, just like the Liberal Party, had once experienced success but now had fallen on hard times and was accused by its critics of ‘lacking an identity’. (Essendon hasn’t won a final in twenty years.) (Here)

So he's a fanatic, and worse, a loser fanatic, and the pond couldn't help but think less of him for it ...as Polonius went on to serve up some standard Australian Daily Zionist News fare ...

Stanley’s experience is of a Canberra-based academic who was the principal historian at the Australian War Memorial between 1980 and 2007. That is, before it (allegedly) became a tourist attraction.
What I have noticed has been different about Anzac Day in the Sydney CBD in recent years is the appearance of large concrete boulders at or near the path of the Anzac Day march.
By April 25, they will have been moved in place to protect the men, women and children who will be participating in or watching the procession. The concrete slabs complement the bollards that have appeared gradually on Australian city streets since the terrorist attack on the US on September 11, 2001.
Sadly, there were no concrete barriers or bollards or adequate NSW Police protection in place on December 14 last year when Australia experienced its worst terrorist attack in history. The shooters were followers of radical Islam who chose to target the Jewish Australian community gathered at Bondi Beach to celebrate the Jewish feast of Hanukkah. As The Australian reported on April 23, Islamic State has urged Muslims to follow the example of the Bondi shooters.
According to Stanley, April 25 should be devoted to commemorating “the people who arrive in this country having experienced war first-hand, not wars that Australians were involved in but wars that they were involved in”. He mentioned Sudanese, Afghans, Congolese and Rwandans. But not, for some reason, the Vietnamese. Maybe because they were/are overwhelmingly anti-communist.

The pond suspects that Polonius will never be able to let go the way the Vietnam war went down.

Cf Appropriate time to debunk myths of Vietnam War; So much misinformation is still propagated about Australia’s most controversial military engagement. Most of it on the ABC.

Inter alia ...

The pond particularly likes that last one ...

Myth: Australians fought and died in Vietnam in vain. As Edwards acknowledges in his official history, the US-led commitment in Vietnam delayed a communist victory by a decade. Former Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew pointed out that the time delay meant the non-communist nations of Southeast Asia were better able to withstand communist insurgencies in the mid-1970s than if they had taken place earlier.

... (a) because of what happened in Southeast Asian countries of the Cambodian kind after a dinkum Kissingering, and (b) because there's not that much difference between the soft authoritarianism of the government of Singapore and other forms of authoritarian rule.

But the pond digresses ...

This overlooks the fact Australia is what it is today – a tolerant democracy – because others have fought and died for the nation.
As John Terraine pointed out in his book The Great War 1914-18 (Hutchinson, 1965), Australia played a key role in the military victories on the Western Front that led to the defeat of imperial Germany. So did other parts of what was called the British Empire – namely, India, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa – during the course of the conflict.
Left-wing journalist John Pilger always claimed that Australia fought what he termed “other people’s wars”. This overlooked the fact that in 1914-18 Germany was a Pacific power and a German victory would have led to a different Australia than exists today.
At the end of the war, the First Australian Imperial Force was led by Sir John Monash – a Jewish Australian of Prussian background. It is a matter of record that when he marched in the Anzac Day procession, Monash and his comrades did not need the protection of concrete slabs and bollards.

And so there came more cognitive dissonance for the pond, what with "a tolerant democracy" being followed by a mention of Monash, who definitely needed protection from the Melbourne Club's black ball.

In fact Monash ... had declined membership in a prominent Melbourne club because that club had a rule barring Jews and he “would not give the club the opportunity to make distinctions in his case.” (here)

In fact, the Melbourne club continued its bigotry for a long time - witness Thomas Keneally getting agitated about the club in February 1994 (Trove link)

It seems it's not just idle lefties that can claim a history of anti-Semitism - the Melbourne establishment knew how to do it in style.

And now it's time for the final Polonial gobbet ...

The Australian Defence Force also played an important role in the military victories over Nazi Germany in northern Africa, imperial Japan in the Pacific and in assisting South Korea to hold off aggression from communist North Korea. The ADF helped non-communist South Vietnam to hold out against communist North Vietnam for a decade. In the words of former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, this delay helped stabilise Southeast Asia between the mid-1960s and the mid-70s. A smaller ADF force performed well in Afghanistan and Iraq in extremely difficult circumstances.
The point that Stanley overlooks is that, without the survival of a democratic Australia, the refugees who came to this country in recent decades would not be here.
Moreover, Stanley ignores the fact many immigrants who arrived in Australia before and after 1945 and their descendants understand Australia and appreciate the security and high living standards it has provided. There will be many Australians of non-Anglo Celtic background honouring the fallen on April 25.
Despite the prevalence of the alienated left in educational institutions and sections of the media, patriotism in Australia is still alive. As someone who has opposed One Nation since it emerged 30 years ago, it is a regrettable fact that the movement has benefited because, in some sense, Australia is not the nation it once was.
According to a recent study by the Australian Population Research Institute in Melbourne, “there is a large patriotic constituency who are potentially mobilisable around right-leaning causes”. The study calls them “Australian Firsters” who are patriots with a strong sense of belonging to Australia. Their number is estimated at 60 per cent.
The study finds that what it calls “Australia’s surge to the right” occurred following “the sustained pro-Palestine and anti-Israel street protests” in late 2025 and early 2026. Along with the Bondi massacre. The task of the Coalition and Labor is to win back as many of these patriotic Australians as possible. Many will be gathered honouring the fallen on April 25. Including those at the Australian War Memorial where the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier can be found.

As soon as Polonius mentioned that study, the pond had to go and look it up.

Unfortunately there was no direct link to the study (in docx form) but maybe it'll hang around in discoverable form on the site for a while.

This was the pitch for it ...

Australia’s surge to the right: How far can it go?
April 2026
Bob Birrell, Katharine Betts and Ernest Healy
Since November 2025 opinion polls have shown a surge towards One Nation. In the voluminous media commentary, the dominant view is that this surge is due to the cost of living and other household budget issues. A few commentators have suggested that it may reflect Australian’ patriot feelings.
This report shows that much of the surge to the right does come from the concerns of patriots. Previous TAPRI surveys indicate that just over half of Australian voters can be described as patriots. What they have in common is that they share a sense of belongingness to Australia ‘to a great extent’.
This patriotic constituency is opposed to the prevailing neoliberal economic orthodoxy and to its associated progressive views on cultural values. This constituency is especially opposed to high immigration and to policies promoting multiculturalism.
It is these voters who are driving the surge to the right in Australia, as manifested in the rise of One Nation in opinion polls.

It struck the pond as incredibly sloppy, and therefore right in Polonius's turf.

The definition of "patriot" is nebulous and flung around with wild abandon, and it's nakedly political ...

...the neoliberal insistence on free trade has meant that Australian is now dependent on unreliable international supply chains. In the case of petrochemical products and refined petrol and diesel fuels, the loss of productive capacity in Australia has left us highly vulnerable.
Living in Melbourne we are in the front line of casualties. This is because the Victorian Government, since 2014, has built its economic strategy on providing debt-financed infrastructure and services for Melbourne’s surging population. It proclaims, without complaint from progressive media circles, and with bipartisan support from the Liberal Party, that Melbourne is targeting a population of eight million by 2050 – the same level as in London today.
From our perspective, the right surge promises an overdue correction.

Well the authors might think a surge to Pauline and One Nation is the way to go, and to hell with that.

What was that, Angelic one?

...When I hear very young people today parroting jingoistic claptrap they have overheard about the original Anzacs “fighting for Australia”, I always think about those two, who fortunately survived to realise the error of joining in 1915. I also think about them when I hear failed politicians, commentators and other armchair warriors wanting “boots on the ground” for yet another failed enterprise on the other side of the world – just as futile as that war that was supposed to end all wars.

Darn tootin' ...and now for a distraction.

While checking up on ancient Polonial lore, the pond couldn't help but faint with it delight when it discovered by accident Humphrey McQueen's memories of Ming in The Forgotten Fascists, for Arena back in March 2025.

As this came from the time of the impending second world war, it seemed vaguely relevant to the lizard Oz's crusades ...

Oh dear, and so history repeats, wash and rinse and hang out to dry ...

And so to the search for a bonus ...

The pond immediately ruled out the disgraced Pezzullo, still being offered a rehabilitation tour by the reptiles ...

‘Lest we forget’ also means being ready for coming war
Conflict is not just in our past; it is in our future. Will we stand up for what’s worth fighting for?
By Mike Pezzullo

The pond has had an overdose of war mongering, especially from those who will never have to dodge a bullet.

A teaser trailer will suffice, because the disgraced cardigan wearer opened with an image of that fatted beast, as if we should be getting ready for a coming war with that banana republic and its risible, demented, sundowning leadership...

That outing ended with the sort of rhetorical flourish offered by someone who will never have to head into battle and find out what it's like to be shot at ...

...Will we have the fortitude to calculate the odds of war and to prepare accordingly, even as we abhor war? Will we have the moral clarity to calculate the cost of war and the price of peace? Will we be prepared to make the same sacrifices that we rightly honour on Saturday, for the sake of future generations?
Odds are, we may be tested soon enough. If we are to be ready, strategic and moral rearmament will be necessary. Or, in saying “never again”, are we really saying that such sacrifices are always senseless and unnecessary? Are we really saying we would not be prepared to make the same ultimate sacrifice in a just cause?
On Saturday, we need to steel ourselves for the wars of the future as we reflect on those of the past.

The reptiles offered a credit which lacked a crucial word ...

Mike Pezzullo was secretary of the former department of immigration and border protection (2014-17) and the Department of Home Affairs (2017-23).

Can someone help the pond?

Yes, that's the word:

Mike Pezzullo was the disgraced secretary of the former department of immigration and border protection (2014-17) and the Department of Home Affairs (2017-23), a mandarin who brought great shame on mandarins ...

Fixed it, and with a link to go ...

The pond supposes it could have looked at Cameron Stewart ...

Trump faces dwindling options in Iran conflict with no clear path to victory

The US President is scrambling to secure a peace and avoid humiliation. Can he do it?

But it was a long read to arrive at not much ...

The US President’s best hope now is a deal that leads to a meaningful delay in Iran’s ability to build a nuclear bomb as part of a wider agreement that includes an open and free Strait of Hormuz. These are minimalist aims compared with Trump’s once grandiose predictions of a new Iran and a new Middle East. But they appear to be the best-case outcome from a war that continues to confound the expectations of Trump and his team.

A bit like the mad king lashing out in revenge on the Falklands and Maggie Thatcher's legacy.

And so in lieu of a reptile column, the pond turned to the lizard Oz editorialist, source of the heart of darkness, for a summary of this weekend's war mongering ...

Shameless really, not even being allowed to remember and mourn the dead, but instead have the occasion serve as preparations for fresh war mongering ...

Now there was a completely useless war, however it ended - certainly not to the advantage of Afghan women or the Afghanis who helped American forces and now as a reward are facing deportation to the Congo.

As for the presumption of innocence, it's already been established on the balance of probabilities that Ben Roberts-Smith is guilty of war crimes and was intending to scarper to Spain, and that's enough for the pond, but it didn't stop the reptiles from running a very large hagiographic snap ...

Then it was on to the final gobbet ...

Shameless ... completely shameless, and there at the very end, once again supporting a disgraced rogue on his rehabilitation tour ...

...As Michael Pezzullo points out in Inquirer this weekend, it is right that Australians mourn the sacrifice and tragedy of war on Anzac Day, but we should not pretend that total war is an abstract or distant phenomenon. “For Australia’s part,” he writes, “we are not doing nearly enough to prepare for the possibility of a war in the Pacific in the near term. Even if we judge that likelihood to be a 10 per cent chance, we need to be doing more now to get to a war footing. Having placed our bet on the noble cause of peace (‘war has to be avoided at all costs’), we will not be ready in time to defend ourselves if a war were to break out in the Pacific.”

Mr Pezzullo asks: Do we have the fortitude to calculate the odds of war and prepare accordingly? Most Australians will be well accustomed to hearing that we live in the most threatening strategic circumstances since the end of World War II. Yet our neglect of defence and our failure to adapt to a new era of asymmetric warfare suggest both an entrenched attitude of entitlement and a complacency to the stark realities we face.

The legend has never been short of detractors; they have come and gone through the years, but Anzac Day has outlasted them all. The date endures because it proves that courage and dignity ultimately rest with ordinary people. Still, Saturday’s commemoration must do more than merely console; it should also warn. In these dangerous times we must be willing to turn reverence into readiness.

What say you, Angelic one?

Lest we forget?

When I hear very young people today parroting jingoistic claptrap they have overheard about the original Anzacs “fighting for Australia”, I always think about those two, who fortunately survived to realise the error of joining in 1915. I also think about them when I hear failed politicians, commentators and other armchair warriors wanting “boots on the ground” for yet another failed enterprise on the other side of the world – just as futile as that war that was supposed to end all wars.

Amen to that ...

It must have been a bug the pond picked up attending that funeral mass ...

And so to end on lies, all lies, and the tragedy of women caught between mad King Donald and the mad Mullahs ...

Is there any real difference in their love of the killing fields? Trump Administration Wants To Fast-Track Executions With Electrocution, Firing Squads, Lethal Gas

An odd day for the reptiles to revert to being the Australian Daily Zionist News, but the bromancer and the dog botherer show the way ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:32:00 +0000

It's been a long time since the pond mentioned John Birmingham, but the pond just has to start off this weekend by noting his substack offering, So, you've decided to write a terrible EV piece.

Birmingham is clearly a member of the EV cult, and knows whereof he writes, and his opening flourish establishes the tone ...

So, something different this week. I got angry, but this time on a Tuesday. Why? Because the ABC’s 7:30 Report decided to cosplay as The Daily Telegraph on the topic of EV’s.
Unsurprisingly there’s a lot of interest in electric vehicles at the moment, so even less surprisingly both old and new media channels are flooding the zone with clickable shit. And some of the worst, most deplorable shit has been at Ninefax and the ABC.

Well yes, but as the pond gave up the 7.30 Report long ago, the pond only finds stuff out when someone turns up in the pond's in box to explain that Ethiopia is more technologically sophisticated than the ABC ...(Much like the venerable Meade's essential service).

And so to the reptiles this day, and what a relief.

Some correspondents have been worried about the bromancer's mental state, but this day he reverted to form, rediscovered his inner Zionist, and scribbled a lengthy five minute piece worthy of the Australian Daily Zionist News.

The header: Israel and Lebanon: two victims of Iran and its proxies; Lebanon is as big a victim of Hezbollah as Israel. Both are attempting to free themselves of its deadly influence, as the Trump-brokered ceasefire indicates.

The caption: Southern Lebanon becomes a frontline in a wider Iran-Israel conflict. Picture: AFP

In this bromancer telling, mad King Donald isn't demented, he's a cheesemaker, and in the eyes of the bromancer, blessed are the cheesemakers... especially as it's all about the persecution of Xians ...

In the hours leading to Donald Trump’s White House declaration of a three-week extension of the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, Hezbollah terrorists launched a volley of rockets into northern Israel, trying to kill the ceasefire.
The Israel-Lebanon equation is a hinge of the Iran conflict, if not of global history.
Trump oversaw negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese officials and promises now to convene a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun. Trump says Iran ending support for Hezbollah is a condition of any long-term peace.
The two nations that will suffer innocent and grievous damage from this conflict are two that by history and culture should be natural partners, Israel and Lebanon.
That’s counterintuitive. Israel seems to be winning. But the evil dynamics of terror and antisemitic hatred, as practised by Iran and its proxies, and amplified by the wretched alliance of the Western left with the Islamists, offer a disturbing prognosis for Israel.

Ah the perfidious left.

Those wretches who dare note what's currently going down in Gaza and the West Bank, and assorted outrages will have to cop a lot of bromancer rage this day ...

Though you might remember reading in Haaretz A Settler Drive to Ethnically Cleanse Palestinians Is Underway in the West Bank. Israel's Security Apparatus Is Complicit, even a peep about this dismal business puts you in league with fundamentalist Islamics and mad Mullahs, and makes you anti-Semitic ...

Meanwhile, Lebanon is effectively subject to colonial occupation, not by Israel but by Iran through Hezbollah.
That’s why a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon could be destroyed by Iran acting through Hezbollah.
Israel and Lebanon should be brothers. Both host civilisations that are central to the entire Western tradition. Israel is the only Jewish state. Christianity, human rights, everything we like about civilisation proceeds in part from the Jewish heritage. Lebanon has been an essential Christian community since the first century AD. It was crucial in the history of Christianity, and the Maronite and Orthodox Lebanese Christians form, with Egyptian Copts, one of the last sizeable Christian communities in the Middle East.
The effective Middle East purge of Christianity in recent decades, which followed the Middle East purge of most Jews in the years after World War II, has seen millions of Lebanese Christians emigrate, many to Australia, and we’re immensely lucky to have them.
Once, Lebanon was a majority Christian nation; Christians are now a (large) minority. Israel, which practices religious freedom, is one of few Middle East nations where the Christian population is growing.
Official Iranian identity is fuelled by antisemitic conviction and it exaggerates these sentiments in the proxies it sponsors. There was briefly an Israel Lebanon peace treaty in the early 1980s. The Lebanese politician seen as its sponsor, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated and it never came into force. Although Lebanon is historically a nation of magnificent cultural richness, in modern times it has been ravaged by rapacious neighbours, first Syria, now Iran.

Will the bromancer at any point slip in a quiet word about the dismal treatment of Palestinians, settler violence, and the ethnic cleansing that has been a marker for the current far right government of Israel? Don't get too excited ...

For a period in the 70s and 80s, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was headquartered in southern Lebanon. The PLO launched repeated terrorist attacks on Israeli towns and villages, often targeting children and other civilians. To prevent this, the Israelis finally invaded Lebanon and set up a secure zone from the border to the Litani River. They empowered and allied with the South Lebanon Army, which was officially secular but mostly Christian. The SLA was the only Arab military force that ever fought for Israel’s security.
It allied with Israel not only out of self-interest but from a conviction that Israel was the nearest to its own values and civilisational ideals. When Israel abruptly withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, the SLA was betrayed. Thousands of its members settled in Israel, others surrendered to Lebanese forces.
Hezbollah was from the start an extremist Shia Islamist group funded and supported by Iran. It claimed victory in Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and at the direction of Iran has conducted deadly terrorism against Israel ever since. Hezbollah has no loyalty to Lebanon or consideration for the Lebanese people.
I have spent some time in northern Israel. Once I visited a Jewish retirement home on the Israel-Lebanon border. Looking into a Lebanese valley, I saw many flags flying. None showed the haunting cedar of the flag of Lebanon. All were Hezbollah flags.
After the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran eight weeks ago, it took only a few days for Hezbollah to begin a barrage of rocket, artillery and drone fire into northern Israel. This action had nothing to do with any Lebanese interest. It was entirely at the direction of Iran to mobilise another front in Iran’s endless war against Israel. Hezbollah knew this would force Israeli action.
Veteran Israeli journalist and strategic analyst Ehud Yaari tells me: “Virtually everywhere in Israel north of Haifa people were running into bomb shelters or safe rooms seven, eight, 10 times a day. There was a constant stream of rockets from Hezbollah.”
The Hezbollah attacks have to be seen as part of Iran’s long-run strategy.
The Hamas terror atrocity against Israel in October 2023, among the most sadistic, savage and barbaric actions the world has ever seen, were designed in part to prevent the imminent normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In that, sadly, they were successful.

Has the bromancer supped deep on the Netanyahu kool aid? You betcha ...

Netanyahu once told me his long-term peace strategy with the Palestinians was an “outside in” approach. Israel would normalise relations with its Arab neighbours first and this would encourage Palestinians to accept a reasonable modus vivendi with Israel.
It’s a central fact that Israel has several times offered the Palestinians a state on almost all of the West Bank, all of Gaza and compensating territory from Israel proper, but the Palestinian leadership never accepted peace with Israel. Iran’s strategy was to use its proxies to prevent Israel from settling into a normal life, prevent peace treaties with Israel’s neighbours, and gradually exhaust Israel’s morale and even its military.
Thus relentless mortar and rocket attacks from Gaza made life difficult for southern Israeli towns; sporadically, something similar could be achieved by terror groups within the West Bank, and Hezbollah could constantly harass northern parts of Israel.
Here is where Western critics of Israel are so wrong and dishonest.

So it's wrong and dishonest to note the ethnic cleansing? Or perhaps the way that fatuous blather about natural alliances muddies the waters?

Bad optics? Israel jails soldiers who smashed Jesus statue in Lebanon
Critics say Israeli attacks on Christian sites challenge claims of a Judeo-Christian shared heritage and mutual respect.

...Christian holidays, specifically those around the time of Easter, have become particular sources of tension, the report noted, with priests and nuns wearing visible Christian clothing in West Jerusalem and occupied East Jerusalem facing the risk of harassment every time they enter public spaces.
“We’ve entered a period of what [Australian genocide studies scholar] Dirk Moses called ‘permanent security’, where anything different, anything that might be a threat, or could even be a threat in the future, has to be destroyed,“ prominent Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani told Al Jazeera.
That difference is inherent to the Christian faith.
“It’s not about left or right,” Shenhav-Shahrabani explained. “It even goes to language. In everyday Hebrew, people refer to Jesus as Yeshu, which is a curse word, rather than Yeshua, which is correct.”
“That’s commonplace. That’s how it’s used in everyday media,” he continued. “If that’s where you begin, it doesn’t matter if it’s stupidity or ignorance, it all leads to the same place.”

The pond never thought it would be mentioning Xians, but here we are.

Eventually the bromancer gets around to a minor billy goat butt ...

In isolation, Israel’s actions seem disproportionate. Sometimes I think they have been disproportionate.

But in the way of the bromancer, any minor billy goat butt is immediately followed by a huge butt ...

But you have to see the totality of the threat posed cumulatively by Hamas, terrorist groups in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militia in Iraq, and previously the Syrian regime, as well as Iran’s previously huge missile stocks, to accurately judge the credible threat to which Israel is responding.
Netanyahu also once told me his reputation as a hawk and a hard man was a strategic asset for Israel. It meant Jerusalem didn’t have to take many actions because Middle East actors feared Netanyahu.
Now the Iranians and their proxies have forced Netanyahu to act decisively.
The non-Shia Lebanese population and many Lebanese Shi’ites, too, hate Hezbollah for embroiling them in endless conflict. In eight weeks Hezbollah has fired thousands of projectiles against Israel. The Lebanese government ordered Hezbollah to stop, ordered the Lebanese Army to disarm Hezbollah and expelled the Iranian ambassador.
What actually happened? Hezbollah refused to stop. The Lebanese Army said it couldn’t disarm them. The Iranian ambassador refused to leave. And Hezbollah has threatened a violent coup against the Lebanese government.
Now Israel plans to establish a security zone once more in southern Lebanon, about 6km to 8km from the Israeli border. This is necessary for anything approaching normal life to resume in northern Israel. To clear this area perhaps 800,000 Lebanese have been displaced, an immense tragedy to be laid wholly at the feet of Hezbollah and Iran.
The useful idiots of the Western left will gleefully portray this, entirely dishonestly, as Israeli “colonialism”, further undermining Israel in the West.
Islamic State is urging its followers to emulate the Bondi massacre of innocent Jews everywhere. Synagogues are attacked in London, as in Australia.
Israel and Lebanon are victims of Iran and of Hezbollah. But don’t expect to hear that much in Western societies which, insanely, are becoming themselves more anti-Israel and more antisemitic.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

And that's how it goes in the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Any consideration of the fate of Gaza and the West Bank and Palestinians is immediately dismissed as anti-Semitic, and is always in support of the mad Mullahs ...

And yet the latest excursion has been a mad folly that has done nothing for Iranian people, nor for the United States, nor for the world, which will soon begin to discover what real shortages look like ...

The lizard Oz had lots more of this sort of blather, including but not limited to ...

Moral collapse on antisemitism finds grotesque expression
The Left’s moral collapse on antisemitism has found its most grotesque expression
If declaring a murdered child beyond the bounds of empathy does not cross the most basic human test, then what does?
By Nick Dyrenfurth

Contributor

Luckily the intermittent archive is currently working, and the pond personally supervised Nick being sent off to that dismal cornfield.

Ditto the pond decided this outing by Dame Slap could be consigned to the wasteland ...

Girlcotted: how Catharine Lumby was cancelled by her own movement
After decades of pioneering activism against sexual violence, one of Australia’s most respected feminists was deplatformed by the very community she helped build.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

At the nub of this yarn were tensions over Gaza and Israel, but this is what stopped the pond dead in its tracks ...

Over a glass of wine a few weeks back, Lumby laughed about our views getting closer and closer. I winked at her, saying that I was pretty certain her views were moving closer to mine. It was a joke, the kind friends – and colleagues – with different views ought to be able to make.
The fundamentalists on the Left don’t joke. They lop off your head.

If Lumby thinks that laughing and winking and joking and sharing plonk with Dame Slap is the way forward, then the long absent lord help her.

Dame Slap lops off heads at a rate and in a way that would make your average lefty go pale with fear, and she has a platform from which she can conduct her jihads.

While noting that Islamophobia is rampant this weekend, the pond also saw that the reptiles had plenty of room for transphobia...

EXCLUSIVE
Top psychiatrist suspended for opposing youth gender treatments
‘Take my treatment as a warning’: Psychiatrist suspended for opposing youth gender treatments
Psychiatrists pleaded with professional body to support outspoken colleague Andrew Amos, only to discover it had suspended him.
By Stephen Rice

The always boiling Rice seems to make transophobia his special EXCLUSIVE work.

Such was the obsessive compulsive nature of the reptiles' transphobia that the lizard Oz editorialist felt the need to join in the jihad, encouraging paranoia and a persecution complex (something many trans people know only too well)...

Psychiatrist’s unjust suspension
Practitioners and authorities around the world are becoming more sceptical about the prescription of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-distressed children and teenagers.
By Editorial

It almost made the pond yearn for a world where normal madness can flourish ...

And so to the dog botherer, also contributing to what - amazingly on Anzac Day - is a rag seemingly more intent on being The Australian Daily Zionist News than in dragging out the two up and the biscuits ...

The header: We’re complacent about risk of extremism at home, but we’re all targets too; We may not want to be at war but Islamist fanatics certainly are at war against us, as Islamic State’s latest call to action declares.

The caption: Chayim Klein, a member of the Jewish community, stands in the damaged area of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue, holding a Sefer (holy book) that was there during the attack orchestrated by Iran. Picture: Arsineh Houspian

Did the pond mention paranoia and a persecution complex?

The barking mad dog botherer decided that the way to begin was to plunge Australia into war ...

This year we will commemorate Anzac Day under the pretence that we are not at war.

Actually we're not at war, and many other countries decided that they didn't want to have anything to do with a folly, an excursion, that will ensure the world's economy is in a state of chaos for months to come.

But the war mongering dog botherer will have none of that ...

Our government will continue to portray the current conflict in the Middle East as an unnecessary excursion by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and stress that our Wedgetail aircraft deployment to the United Arab Emirates is solely defensive, laughably justified as protection for our expats.
But while thousands gather at North Bondi for one of the nation’s most iconic dawn services, those at the southern reaches of the crowd will stand where bullets ricocheted just five months ago in an act, allegedly, of jihadist war. This is the same Islamist extremist threat being tackled in Iran by the US and Israel, one that is existential for Israel but pivotal for the rest of the world, including Australia.
Just to square the circle: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue 17 months ago, taking the Islamist extremist-inspired antisemitism in this country to an ugly nadir that tragically was surpassed a year later on the bloodied sands of Bondi.

Cue another snap designed to get the hive mind agitated ... The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was behind the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue 17 months ago. Picture: NurPhoto via Getty Images

The dog botherer was determined to see the country at war ...

We do not want to be at war but the Islamist extremists, often inspired and funded by Iran, have fanatical certitude about their war against us.
That much of the population and most of our politicians fail to understand this or choose to ignore it only exacerbates our vulnerability. Time and again we fail to learn the lessons.
For more than two years there were many people in public debate warning about the rising tide of Islamist extremism and antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 atrocities in Israel. Australian Jewish community leaders took their warnings and appeals directly to governments.
Politicians and authorities paid lip service to the problem, tangled themselves in false equivalence about Islamophobia for fear of offending Muslim communities and did not do enough. The Bondi massacre was shocking yet seemed inevitable – we will never know if, without this national indolence, it might have been prevented.
Yet even now, after 15 funerals and untold trauma, our leaders and authorities slink back into complacency. They avert their eyes and wash their hands, yet will express shock and surprise, no doubt, the next time we see an Islamist terrorist attack.

And what of Gaza, and what of the atrocities on both sides? Crickets ... Many locals attending Bondi Beach pay their respects at a makeshift memorial to the victims of December's terror attack. Picture: NewsLocal

There aren't many upsides in having a federal Labor government, but surely one of them is that it avoided getting the country involved in the current folly.

If the liar from the Shire had been in charge, or the mad monk, likely we'd have been off on the crusade, with the Murdoch press clamouring for war, and assorted crusaders of the dog botherer kind demanding that we get involved ...(while staying safe in their Surry Hills bunker) ...

A public forum is booked in a Sydney City Council building next month to discuss “Why it’s right to globalise the intifada”. This phrase is a blatant call for violence against Israel and Jews.
During two waves of intifada in the early 1990s and then from 2000 thousands of innocent Israelis were killed in suicide bombings and other random attacks, and thousands of Palestinians were killed in efforts to quell the violence. Some have dubbed Hamas’s murderous rampage in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, as the third intifada. Anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters were at Bondi Beach in September last year chanting for intifada. “Long live the intifada!” they shouted on the sand, punching the air, “Intifada, intifada!”
Three months later, 100m away, dozens of people were gunned down and 15 were killed. There it was, intifada globalised.
The chant to globalise the intifada is now illegal in Queensland and a parliamentary committee has recommended the same for NSW. The phrase could be a breach of the law already as an incitement to violence, but no police authority or prosecutor’s office has been willing to try.
The official complicity is astounding. Imagine how quickly authorities would act if groups were publicly calling for deadly violence against gays, Indigenous communities, Catholics or any other ethnic group or religion.
Jews are expected to accept this. Accept they can never live in peace and security, even in Australia.
Politicians will not even utter the word Islamist extremism (even though it is the central problem and main threat), preferring the catch-all term of antisemitism, lest they put off-side any sensitive members of Muslim communities. Yet Jewish Australians gather at schools and synagogues in suburban Sydney with armed guards, police patrols and cement barricades hastily installed by governments after Bondi.

Once again, any thought of the fate of Palestinians and Gaza is rounded up, and pressed into the crusader cause, Pro Palestine protests continue in Melbourne after the US and Israel attacked Iran. Picture: Josie Hayden

Is it possible to note that bad things are being done on both sides?

Per Haaretz ...

Dozens of Israeli settlers storm West Bank village, clash with residents and torch vehicle
Dozens of Israeli settlers entered the West Bank village of Qusra, south of Nablus, where they threw stones at local residents and later set fire to a construction machine during their withdrawal, according to Palestinian reports on Friday.

Are there any signs of hope?

'Swimming Against the Tide, but Swimming': More Israelis and Palestinians Now Choose to Grieve Together

...More Israelis are also joining, especially to do protective presence work: to act as human shields for Palestinians amid rising settler violence in the West Bank. For many Palestinians, this is a very surprising experience, Salman says. Young people in the West Bank today "haven't seen anything except separation walls, checkpoints and settler violence," which makes it difficult for them to picture an alternative, she says.
"What they know about the other is either like an Israeli soldier with a uniform and a gun, or a violent settler burning their villages and their cars and harming their fields and animals. So when they meet activists, especially on the ground, at protests and [providing a protective presence] at the olive harvest, they see something completely different. They have really interesting conversations, and it's important to learn about the other's narrative, because it's not something we learn at school."

Up against the fundamentalist madness on both sides, it's really just a drop in the ocean of hate, but it's still better than the dog botherer's war mongering ...

This is the protection they get from governments that are too timid to tackle the actual menace. Search all you like for moral equivalence, but you will find no other community in this country forced to live like this. Schoolchildren and congregations behind vehicle-proof barriers while mobs chant “globalise the intifada” at will. This, apparently, is peace for Australians who are Jewish.
Australia should, of course, be supporting the US and Israel in their war against Iran. We rejected a US request for naval assistance to protect shipping three years ago, and while we received no request before this war the government had already made its disdain known.
Anthony Albanese broke with Israel and the US in the UN and recognised a non-existent Palestinian state. In recent days he has been more critical of the US President than he has of the Islamist theocrats who run a murderous, misogynistic, antisemitic and terror-sponsoring regime in Tehran.
“We support very much the declaration that Iran couldn’t be allowed to get a nuclear weapon,” the Prime Minister said on Thursday. “What we have called for is for de-escalation. We’ve been critical and have called out some of the statements that have been made. It’s not appropriate or acceptable to say that you’re going to destroy a civilisation. And so, we’ve done that. We are allies with the United States, but that doesn’t mean that we’re automatically participants in any conflict and we haven’t been.”
He criticises Trump rather than the extremist Iranian leadership and suggests he would like Tehran to give up its nuclear weapons program but has no alternative plan as to how. Astonishingly, Albanese told a podcast that Barack Obama’s Iran deal was successful – this was the sellout that funnelled billions of dollars into Tehran while the mullahs pursued their nuclear weapons and missile programs with impunity.

And there you have it. If the dog botherer and Benji have their way, there never will be a Palestinian state, and the system of apartheid that currently prevails will be in place from the river to the sea ... The 15 innocent lives lost at Bondi should remind us to be vigilant. Picture: Monique Harmer

This is exactly why the middle east is stuffed. A middle aged man baying for blood in the Australian Daily Zionist News isn't going to sort things out, or be of any help ...

Australians would do well to accept that this is our war because we are its targets – as we saw at the Adass Israel Synagogue and at Bondi. Just because we are too weak to join the US and Israel militarily, or even diplomatically, it will not protect us from terrorists.
They target us for who we are. Strong kafirs or weak kafirs, it makes little difference.
Islamic State let it be known this week that the Bondi attack was just one “pebble from a mountain” and it would keep killing until we “grow weary of burying the dead”. And it made clear that any non-Muslim is a legitimate target.
Pretending the war in Iran is Israel’s or America’s alone, or trying to convince people the singular threat at home is for the Jewish community, is not only morally bankrupt but also intellectually feeble and strategically blind.
Defeating Islamist extremism and the main sponsor of global terrorism is an imperative for any person or country that can be targeted. This means it is a fight for all of us.
Four months before the original Anzac landing, two men believed they had a holy duty to take up arms against innocent Australians, attacking a train taking families to a New Year’s Day picnic out of Broken Hill. Children of my generation were taught that Mulla Abdullah and Gool Mahomed were Turks who decided to fight their adopted country because Australia and Turkey were at war in Europe.
In fact, they were fanaticised Muslims from South Asia who accepted the call to jihad against a nation fighting the Ottoman Empire abroad. The pair fired at picnickers killing three men and a 17-year-old girl before they were hunted down and killed.
The unsuspecting people on that train knew Australia was at war but believed they were a long way from any threat.
Many Australians today, including our national leadership, labour under the misapprehension that what is happening in the Middle East is someone else’s war, averting their eyes from a clear and present danger at home.

The clear and present danger at home?

The pond, for its sins, reads the lizard Oz daily and is reminded of what a clear and present danger these reptiles are when it comes to peace, the economy and the sustainability of the planet ...

They're part of a supine mob that now lines up to lie down and be bullied by a sundowner in the grip of dementia ...

And so to end with rants of a more congenial kind ...