loon pond

What a reptile cavalcade, what a cornucopia ... Lloydie of the Amazon, the bromancer and Dame Groan (and the Caterist skulking at the bottom) ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:03:03 +0000

Talk about an overload. This day the reptiles went into overdrive, with many of the pond's favourites out and about, and the pond's chip fried, like a transistor radio left out too long in the Tamworth sun.

Luckily the top of the "news" story could be dismissed to the intermittent archive ...

EXCLUSIVE
Wear something ‘really f—able’: nasty side of Atlassian’s ‘assassins’
Atlassian has for years trumpeted its industry-leading culture. But a new book reveals startling tensions over the official company narrative.
By Perry Williams and John Stensholt

It's news that Faux Noise's devotion to sexy blonde attire is shared by tech bros?

So too could the bouffant one, nobly pursuing the 'melongate' jihad ...especially as the brave warrior could only wring a two minute read out of the crisis.

PM’s ‘melons’ gaffe was bad – Plibersek’s defence is worse
Self-described women’s rights advocate has refused to criticise PM’s crass remarks about Kylie Minogue and a female foreign leader.
By Dennis Shanahan
National Editor

But still that left the bromancer, the quarry-whispering Caterist, Dame Groan and Lloydie of the Amazon.

Where to start, what to do?

The reptiles made a big splash for Lloydie, featuring a gif that showed the reef moving from dismal desert to triumphant blooming flower ...

Besides, the pond rarely hears from Lloydie of late, and had been unduly disturbed by all that idle talk of droughts, wildfires, and sundry other climate disasters.

What the pond needed was reassuring words, with Lloydie of the Amazon and the Riddster triumphant ...

The header: Great Resilient Reef: reports of wonder’s death have been wildly exaggerated; New data have revealed Great Barrier Reef coral cover has rebounded to near-record levels across all three regions following a recent mass bleaching event.

The caption for the lead still, which disappointingly didn't replicate the grand animated gif on the main digital page: Coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef is at near-record levels across its 2300km length from Cape York to Bundaberg. Picture: The Australian Institute of Marine Science

It was time to put all those doomsayers and neighsayers in their place, and the Riddster was the perfect guide ...

Despite decades of scientific consensus that it is facing a catastrophic climate change triggered demise, the Great Barrier Reef is refusing to die.
The latest results from the Australian Institution of Marine Science shows that coral cover on the reef has bounced back from mass bleaching in 2025 and early 2026 and remains at near record levels across its 2300km length from Cape York to Bundaberg.
The AIMS long-term monitoring program confirms the GBR maintains its resilience and ability to recover from disturbance, saying coral cover across all three regions of the reef, the northern, central and southern GBR, increased slightly or remained at similar levels to those recorded last year.
AIMS does not report a combined figure for total reef cover but marine physicist Peter Ridd said the results showed that for all of the past five years, the raw cover on the reef had been higher than in any of the previous 35 years.
He said five bleaching events – in 2016, 17, 20, 22 and 24 – had not produced a major drop in coral cover.
Dr Ridd said the AIMS data showed that the major cause of temporary coral loss over the decades had been from cyclones and crown of thorns starfish plagues, both of which were entirely natural. “There is no evidence that these are any worse than in the distant past,” he said.

Everything's fine, everything's hunky dory, the planet's never been in better shape, and there were graphs ...

Some might think that Lloydie and the Riddster were in the grip of a heady triumphalism, but after all those slings and arrows from "experts", it was time for them to strut in the tropical sun ...

The results follow a major global study by Macquarie University that used machine learning to evaluate decades of real-world observations to identify 165,992sq km of potentially climate-resilient reef locations spanning 71 countries and 100 territories and jurisdictions.
About one-third of the Great Barrier Reef was judged to be resilient to the impacts of climate change.
According to the latest AIMS survey, an annual snapshot of coral cover on the reef showed that in the northern region from Cape York to Cooktown, it had increased by 16.7 per cent relative to 2025 levels (from 30 per cent to 35.1 per cent).
The central region from Cooktown to Proserpine increased by 10.2 per cent relative to its 2025 levels.

However you cut it, it was good times for reefs and planet ...

As for those bloody useless neighsayers ...

The southern region from Proserpine to Gladstone decreased by 2 per cent from 26.9 per cent to 26.4 per cent, which is within the margin of error. Announcing the results, AIMS said the GBR was in a comparatively better condition than many reef systems worldwide, which had been heavily impacted by the fourth global bleaching event and other pressures.
“However, the increased frequency and extent of bleaching events in the last decade are unprecedented,” AIMS said. “Climate change remains the greatest threat to the reef, along with other pressures from more localised sources.”
Scientists have been warning about a collapse for decades.
In 2007 they warned that under conditions expected in the 21st century, corals would become increasingly rare on reef systems.
A 2024 paper in Nature, Benjamin et al, said climate model analysis confirmed that human influence on the climate system was responsible for the rapid warming in recent decades.

Nonsense, climate science is just a cult, the sort of secular replacement for declining belief in old fashioned religions. Time to put those preachers in their place ...

Did silly cultists hearken to these fools? Hear thou the words of Lloydie and the Riddster...

“This attribution, together with the recent ocean temperature extremes, post-1900 warming trend and observed mass coral bleaching, shows that the existential threat to the GBR ecosystem from anthropogenic climate change is now realised,” it said.
A 2026 paper in Nature communications, Eakin et al, said the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs were accelerating, with the “near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems.”
“With heat stress levels during this event surpassing those observed previously, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration developed more extreme Bleaching Alert levels that are now being used during the ongoing Fourth Global Coral Bleaching Event,” the paper said.
After UNESCO declined to put the reef on the World Heritage “in danger” list last month, Greenpeace said “the reality is that this global icon is still in deep danger from runaway climate heating, coral-killing deforestation run-off, ocean acidification and coral bleaching”.

What would those greenies know, with their minds full of climate science?

Why with a bit of luck, Australia will be blessed with a stupendous bushfire season this summer, so that the bush can be cleansed and made right, just like the reef ...

And so to the final part of the homily, with all shipshape, present and correct, and the Riddster singing his sweet song of reef joys...

“With these compounding pressures and a record El Nino around the corner, action to protect the reef has never been more urgent,” it said.
Releasing the latest data, AIMS said the findings showed many reefs retained the capacity to begin recovery after major coral loss, when given the opportunity. “Unlike the impact of the 2024 mass bleaching event, the 2025 mass bleaching event resulted in limited coral loss,” AIMS said.
“This likely reflects its lower intensity and shorter duration, highlighting that bleaching events do not always have the same consequences.”
AIMS Long-Term Monitoring Program leader Mike Emslie said the reef had experienced a summer of above-average sea temperatures, but the late summer monsoon activity, which increased cloud cover and reduced sea temperatures, likely limited the severity and extent of bleaching in the 2025-26 summer.
The reef faced other impacts from flooding and two tropical cyclones, including Narelle, but most of the surveys for the latest report were completed before its passage as a category 5 system over the northern region in March.AIMS does not give a reef-wide average for coral cover because Dr Emslie said it would be an “overgeneralisation of what is going on on the reef”.
“Our view is we should be looking at things on a smaller scale to get an appraisal of how different parts of the reef are fairing,” he said.
Dr Ridd said the latest data on the GBR indicated it was in good shape.
“It happens to have a great deal of coral in 2026 because there have been few major mortality events over the last five to 10 years,” he said.
“The five bleaching events since 2016, which have been widely reported in the media, could not have killed much coral otherwise the 2022-26 statistics would not be so good.
“The data since 1986 shows every region, every sector and most reefs have had periods of very low coral cover. This is entirely natural. The data collected by AIMS shows that the GBR is a robust system with rapidly fluctuating coral cover.
“We must expect that sometime in the future, a sequence of events will cause the coral cover to halve, as it did by 2011. We must then remember that this is almost certainly natural.”
Dr Ridd said recent bleaching events had killed very little coral, and that the institutions had been exaggerating the impact of those events.

What a relief, and with the reef never having been in better shape, the pond could quickly move on to the salvation of the country.

The pond skipped past Ben, packing it in his usual way ...

EXCLUSIVE
Marles’ missile boast slammed as ‘performative procurement’
The Albanese government is claiming credit for buying air-to-air missiles that are yet to enter service and aren’t due to be delivered to Australia for years.
By Ben Packham

A teaser trailer would suffice because there was only one important note in the piece ...

The pond had been operating on the notion that there'd be a war with China by Xmas, but it seems that the war will now take place in 2027 ... and with war just around the corner, who better to show the way than our very own Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches?

The header: US nuclear-armed boats based in WA will make us more secure; The US plan to send 2300 personnel and up to four submarines at a time to Perth is the best news Australia has had in defence for decades.

The caption for a stern-looking loser: Defence Minister Richard Marles at the 50th National Labor Conference in Adelaide Picture: NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

After mad king Donald's stunning defeat of Iran, his splendid peace initiative for Gaza, and his incredibly able repelling of Vlad the impaler, is it any wonder that the bromancer would seek shelter in those broad, if somewhat bruised, arms?

The revelation that the US plans to send 2300 personnel to Perth to support its Submarine Rotational Force, that it could rotate up to four submarines at a time through Perth and that the length of these rotations will be entirely up to Washington, is the best news Australia has had in defence for decades.
Frankly, I’d much rather entrust Australia’s security to the US Navy than to the Albanese government. Indeed, the only part of the entire defence and national security portfolio the government has handled really well has been developing the relationship with the Pentagon.
Defence Minister Richard Marles is good at defence diplomacy. He’s terrible at everything else.
The areas where he has demonstrably failed are legion – delivering capability, delivering budget resources, addressing urgent deficiencies, producing a coherent sense of what ADF operations may look like, producing budget transparency and coherence, meaningfully reforming procurement, injecting urgency into the bureaucracy or the military. Unauthorised drones penetrating our undefended air force bases is a classic illustration of our unpreparedness across every domain. On all that, he’s a dismal failure. But on the critical question of US alliance management, he has done quite well.
And he’s better than Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy. The sheer size of US resources to be deployed in Perth makes Conroy’s wacko comment that nuclear weapons in US subs after 2032 would not be a problem because the sub rotations would come to an end in 2032, which comments he had to recant a few days later, even more mystically indecipherable. If there are to be tactical nuclear weapons on some US subs, we should welcome this.

Indeed, indeed, let's nuke Perth, heck let's nuke the country, and why not think big and nuke the world?A US nuclear submarine during military exercises in the Atlantic Ocean in 2022.

Where once the bromancer was inclined to be malcontent, this day he was super content and happy ... a realist ready to blow up the planet if that's what it took ...

We actively and happily shelter under the US extended nuclear umbrella. Occasionally we have to face reality.
There has been much talk about whether the US subs in Perth will constitute an American base. ALP policy is against foreign military bases during times of peace. But as a simple matter of fact, US subs and their supporting structures won’t become a formal base. In reality, the status of a US base would make no real difference to Australian control anyway. Host governments have full knowledge and concurrence. A number of European US NATO allies prevented Washington using its own bases in those countries to prosecute war in Iran.
However, if the US has two or three submarines in Perth at any time, that’s a formidable force and they’re not just there to train Australians. As usual, the Albanese government is utterly incoherent.
Occasionally Marles talks about Australia participating in US-led deterrence. Very occasionally, Foreign Minister Penny Wong says something similar. Mostly she talks about strategic equilibrium which implies deterrence, which implies US and Australian forces acting together. Anthony Albanese almost never talks of deterrence, and never allied deterrence.
Unlike US NATO allies, Australia has no common battle plans with the US, though it’s widely reported the Trump administration, particularly Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and senior Pentagon leaders, want such plans. These would not remotely compromise Australian sovereignty. Any nation can decide to join, or stay out of, any military action, whatever contingency plans exist.
But if the US and Australia are to mount joint deterrence they ought to plan how they might work together in the event of conflict. Obviously the only candidate for adversary in such a conflict is China. But it’s the beginning of wisdom to recognise that effective deterrence is the most likely way to avoid military conflict.
Within the government, Marles would be the most likely to want to develop such plans. He has sometimes spoken of the role Australian geography plays in US military planning. But Albanese, and presumably Wong, would be against such joint planning as it might provoke the Labor Left and activist base. Naturally Marles would be unable to deliver.
In the meantime the left’s critique of AUKUS is even more barmy than the government’s constipated, spasmodic AUKUS defence. Gareth Evans’s contribution to Peter Garrett’s AUKUS inquiry is a classic.

Why not get on board with Kegsbreath? His incredible performance in Iran is just the sort of thing to create confidence when we go up against China in 2027.

Talk about the joys of AUKUS ... Former foreign minister Gareth Evans. Picture: AAP

Now in the past the bromancer has been pretty gloomy about AUKUS.

Here's one example from quite a few:

AUK-ward truth: the sinking feeling behind our subs pact, Australia has paid the US another billion dollars for submarine manufacturing capability despite AUKUS facing production delays and Britain’s naval crisis threatening the entire partnership.

But all that's forgiven and forgotten ...

Evans was a fine foreign minister but, like many good Labor ministers, out of office he has drifted ever leftward. He advances four propositions common in the left’s attack on AUKUS that are laughably wrong.
One, he repeats the claim that eight Australian nuclear submarines would make no difference to the military balance. That’s rubbish. The US has about 55 nuclear attack subs it must deploy all over the world. Eight is a significant difference. If you have eight you can reliably deploy only two or three. If you have 55 at best you can deploy 15 or 20. The problem is not the number of our subs but that they will take so long to arrive.
He argues that the only strategic purpose of our nuclear subs would be to track and attack Chinese ballistic missile nuclear weapons-carrying subs.

And what's wrong with a war on China, as if they had any sort of kit that would match the skills of Pete Kegsbreath and his incredible ability to stash away missiles for future use ... People walk past an illustration of a Chinese nuclear submarine at the Military Museum in Beijing in 2024. Picture: Greg Baker / AFP

Let's hear it for the subs...

That’s completely bonkers. Submarines are one of the most versatile military platforms. It’s true the best counter-submarine force is submarines, but they are critical in a thousand other contexts.
As Julia Gillard once explained, despite their expense subs have an asymmetric quality in that they can attack so many different military assets in so many different locations that they’re very hard to defend against.
Evans asserts that beyond Taiwan, China would never mount territorial aggression against anyone else. That’s ludicrous. Evans seems to contradict, or be unaware of, the statements of China’s President Xi Jinping, who routinely tells his own troops that they must prepare for war. Beijing’s pattern of aggression in the South China Sea and north Asia, its grey-zone conflict, its cyber attacks, its political interference campaigns, its descent into one-man dictatorship, its massive armament-building, all apparently convince Evans there’s no realistic chance of Beijing engaging in military aggression.
It’s possible to argue Chinese military attack on another nation is unlikely, but it’s not so unlikely that it shouldn’t influence military planning.
And then he rejoices in the fact that ANZUS does not automatically commit the US to military action in defence of Australia. As Evans surely knows, no military alliance is legally enforceable. The depth of the US-Australia alliance and the presence of US forces in Australia make mutual assistance much likelier.
Alliances are two-way streets. We get enormous benefit from the US alliance. We need to contribute as well.

It was a great relief that the bromancer had been distracted, and so was Dame Groan, and so there'd be no reptile squawking about gambling ads, what with the News Corp tabloids reliant on footy, and footy in love with gambling, and Labor in love with the whole damn thing ...

And so to the ancient Groaner, and no matter the length of this post already, including Dame Groan was obligatory.

There was no way the pond could disappoint her massive fan base:

The header: Labor must bite the bullet on its immigration mess; The Albanese government declared Australia’s migration system ‘broken’ nearly two years ago, but is yet to fix it, with temporary migrant numbers now approaching 10 per cent of the population.

The caption for the snap of a grinning deviant sent to torment the old biddy: Minister for Home Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship Tony Burke MP Picture: Richard Dobson

Sure it's just more of the same, bees buzzing in the old biddy's noggin about the dangers of all those furriners ruining her lunch, but it's important to be aware of the cumulative impact of incessant repetition on the hive mind:

There was a great deal of information in last week’s decision by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to cancel his speech at the National Press Club. It was widely anticipated that he would announce a series of changes to the migration settings that would have the effect of lowering the migrant intake. The Albanese government’s migration policy is in disarray, it would seem.
We had already learnt that Burke had instructed his department to prioritise onshore over offshore applicants for permanent residence, thereby reducing the observed figure on Net Overseas Migration, the difference between long-term arrivals and long-term departure.
Recall here that the Albanese government has consistently failed to meet the NOM targets set down in each budget, overshooting them in each case.
In the 2022 October budget, it was stated that “NOM is assumed to continue in line with pre-pandemic trends at 235,000 from 2022-23.” The actual figure for 2022-23 was 536,000.
This financial year, the NOM target as set down in the budget is 245,000, with the most recent NOM figure coming in at 306,000. A lot of work will be required to achieve this outcome as well as the target of 225,000 for the following financial year.
The fact is that both Burke and the previous minister, Clare O’Neil, have been aware of the weaknesses in the migration policy settings for a very long time. The increasing irrelevance of the permanent migration program has been apparent to everyone. Demand-driven temporary visas are the main source of new migrants and many of them seek to game the system to prolong their stay in the country.
The point we have reached is that there are nearly three million temporary migrants in Australia, although we should probably subtract New Zealanders who have a legal right to come here. Even so, temporary migrants make up close to 10 per cent of the population, an all-time high.
O’Neil had gone to the trouble of commissioning a former senior bureaucrat, Martin Parkinson, to write a report on the migration challenges. In March 2023, she declared “Australia’s migration system is broken, it is unstrategic, it is complex, expensive, it’s slow … it’s not delivering for the nation.”

She allows Kiwis to stay?

That's mighty big of her, even if they can't talk English, what with blather about fush and chups, and here's a snap designed to send Dame Groan right off ... Clare O'Neil MP, then Home Affairs minister, addressing the National Press Club in Canberra in 2023 Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Dame Groan was sounding just like Alice, falling beneath a pack of furrin cards ...

These were strong words but were never followed up with practical solutions. The most telling indication of our broken system is the alarming rise in the number of people on bridging visas. Prior to the pandemic, there were around 100,000 people living in Australia on bridging visas. In March of this year, the number was 432,000. This was an increase of 14 per cent on the previous year.
The flood of international students, a proportion of whom are not motivated by receiving an education but obtaining permanent residence, has been one of the main reasons for the surge in migration.
This trend had become apparent prior to the pandemic but, even so, the numbers have continued to rise. There were more than 600,000 student visas in March this year, compared with 460,000 in December 2019. Associated with these numbers has been the rapid increase in the numbers on temporary graduate visas, which now number around 260,000.
Less widely recognised is the surging number of Working Holiday Makers, with current numbers around 237,000, a rise of 6 per cent over the previous year. Special concessions for UK citizens have contributed to this trend.

At this point, some might be wondering if anyone could or should be let in.

The pond is glad you asked, because the reptiles provided a snap of the right sort of furriner, British visitors dress up for Australia Day celebrations around Sydney Harbour.

You see? They're just visitors, they can turn up and drop some cash, and then they can bugger off home ...while Dame Groan must grapple with the way we'll all be rooned by Xmas (and not just from China bunging on a do, but because all those bloody Chinese keep turning up):

The number of temporary resident (skilled employment) has also been rising strongly, currently numbering around 256,000, an increase of a quarter over the previous year.
The overall picture is of a program that lacks proper controls and is driving excessively high intakes while dissuading departures. The proliferation of migration agents with detailed knowledge of the legal provisions of the visa system has led to many migrants stringing out their stay in the country while bringing in potential partners on tourist visas who then apply for bridging visas. Bridging visas entitle holders to access Medicare.
Without the benefit of Tony Burke’s speech, we can only speculate on what policy changes he would have outlined to reduce the net flow of migrants. Three have been mentioned: swifter action on onshore asylum-seekers; reduced residence times for WHMs; and offshore application for family visas.
In terms of asylum-seekers, it’s worth quoting former immigration official Abul Rivzi: “The total number of asylum-seekers in Australia under Labor increased from about 94,000 in May 2022 to 121,000 in February 2025. The number of asylum-seekers refused at primary stage and still living in the community increased from 68,000 in May 2022 to 93,000 in February 2025.” A great many of them do not come from countries that would be deemed to be a risk to citizens – for example, Malaysia.
One approach is to classify countries according to this risk and to create a fast-track means of dealing with those from safe countries. This would involve rapid enforced departure.
One proposal for dealing with WHMs is to introduce a lottery for extended stays. There is also a case for removing the preferential treatment for UK citizens, although there may be some impediment to doing so because of the intergovernmental agreement struck some years ago.
The final method of insisting on offshore application for family visas may seem harsh, but bear in mind that most migrants, permanent and temporary, are currently entitled to bring secondary applicants, which covers spouses and children. In the UK, undergraduate international students are not entitled to bring partners with them, a restriction that doesn’t apply here. Any change must be seen in an overall context.
The real conundrum is why the Labor government has taken so long to clean up the migration program and to ensure the NOM settles at a manageable (and politically acceptable) level. There is no doubt that pressures from the education sector, parts of the business community, property developers, even state governments have weighed on the decisions made or not made by the government.
The Treasury has also been playing a role in providing misleading figures on the fiscal costs of reducing the NOM, as well as overstating the economic and budgetary benefits of high migrant intakes. Even on Treasury’s own figures, the only two types of migrants to make a positive lifetime fiscal contribution are employer-sponsored skilled and independent skilled migrants. All others generate a drain. In turn, these two groups make up a small proportion of the total intake.
With productivity and real wages essentially stagnant and voters feeling cost-of-living pressures, the political climate that is conducive to high rates of immigration simply no longer exists. It hasn’t existed for quite some time.
The Albanese government has finally woken up to this fact, but it will be a difficult road to achieve effective adjustments. Targeting a precise NOM figure is difficult enough but dealing with the massive number of temporary migrants living in the country is an even greater challenge.

Is there no end to the old biddy's suffering?

Finally, the pond must confess to being more than usually irritated and miffed by the late arrival of the Caterist.

He missed his Monday deadline, where there was plenty of room to indulge him in a seemly style, and then he turns up the next day and expects to be included in the host of reptile luminaries strutting their stuff?

The pond decided to reduce him to an intermittent archive link. Intergenerational bargain broken in name of fairness

Anyone wanting to do a copy and paste of his verbiage would have go go there, leaving the pond able to dispose of him with a few screen caps ...

So there's nothing to see there, at least for those who think that the Caterist thinking he understands the laws of economics is as risible as the notion that he understands the movement of flood waters in quarries...

The next gobbet was just as silly, with the Caterist getting into Labor mythology as a way of celebrating the joys of feral capitalism in the 1890s ... because this British black sheep loves his jumbucks ...

Indeed, indeed, Gina'spet is all the fault of the Labor party, though there was something about her glowering presence that the Caterist seemed to envy.

Perhaps he should get out a suitable hair dye?

There was only one bit of the entire text the pond deemed worthy of mention and it came in that final gobbet...

Angus Taylor has elevated raising productivity as the nation’s primary lever for raising living standards and highlighted the folly of using immigration as a Band-Aid for deeper problems.
The seemingly inevitable decline in household living standards under Labor is likely to move the debate in his favour before the next election. The challenge of conducting a serious conversation above the noise, however, is not inconsiderable.
In the event that Albanese wins a third term, Labor will own this decade.

The Caterist just ran up the white flag, surrendered the next election in a massive sulk?

Albo will likely own the decade, and the jig is already up, and that leaves the poor old beefy boofhead to stare into the immortal Rowe's mirror...

Friends of Dame Groan at play ...

In which Lord Downer and simplistic Simon escape the pond's listicle of reptile reprobates...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:00:28 +0000

The pond recently re-watched David O. Russell's American Hustle, which for those who've yet to see this American satirical comedy, began with Christian Bale's character Irving performing an elaborate and excruciating comb over.

Great cast, great movie, but the pond is haunted by what it implies about mad King Donald, narcissist, hustler grifter and comb over artiste supreme.

There's something vaguely indecent about the speculation that has resulted, Trump Goons Reveal Trick Behind His Fluffy New Hair, at a time when the country is at war, and the mad king is plunging the American and world economy into an abyss.

But here we are, and here the lizard Oz is on a Monday, discreetly walking by ... just as any sane person might want to walk past JD ...

(Vance recounted an experience) ... 'recalling how “a glass fell off the wall” while he was attending a conference with a friend and talking about Christianity.
“You know, I think an atheist would dismiss that as, ‘Oh, who cares? A glass fell off the wall,’” he said, adding that to him, “it felt like God trying to send me a message.”'

No wonder couches aren't safe in his presence, but you have to admire god, because She finds some incredible ways to pass on Her messages ...

Meanwhile, in actual news, Benji has told mad king Donald to get lost, he'll go on fighting as long as he likes, because you know, ethnic cleansing, greater Israel; the mad mullahs of Iran have told the mad king he must come to heel, and until then we'll continue in dire straits; and a desperate Vlad the sociopath has cranked up the heat on Ukraine, and might be dragging even more North Koreans deep into the fray.

So what do the reptiles of the lizard Oz do?

Walk on by, and better still, devise a new jihad ...with Ben packing it in an allegedly EXCLUSIVE way...

EXCLUSIVE
Albanese in denial over Japanese PM ‘melons’ joke as ex-envoy warns of fallout
Anthony Albanese denies he made a crude joke out of Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi’s ‘melons’
Tokyo’s former ambassador in Canberra warns the ‘insulting’ comment has damaged Anthony Albanese’s standing in Japan. But he is denying he made a crude joke at all.

It wasn't a lizard Oz EXCLUSIVE, this hare has been running for some considerable time.

See for example a column in the Japan Times back on 27th July, Sanae Takaichi: The prime minister nobody defended.

Surprisingly it took some considerable time to bubble to the surface in the lizard Oz, but the wrinkle was to drag in an indignant columnist over on the extreme far right ...

PM’s sexist melon joke was not only ungracious, it betrayed the close bond of our two nations
We are living in an increasingly dangerous world. So please, Prime Minister, enjoy Japan’s sweet melons and focus on what our two countries must do together.
By Shingo Yamagami

Contributor

Close on the heels of this melongate came another attack angle ... drag up Juliar and fling her into the fray, what with her still living rent free in the hive mind, and so always available to reference, what with chaff bags at the ready ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Bleak winter for PM as Labor plummets to a Gillard low
Anthony Albanese’s popularity remains at near-record low levels, as One Nation maintains its dominance over the Coalition in the latest Newspoll.
Geoff Chambers

As always in these yarns, the double barrelled Chambers let off his other chamber, because one good blast deserves another ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Everything’s coming up Julia for PM
The Prime Minister and his government are entering a polling twilight zone many Labor MPs haven’t encountered since the bad old days.

One thing the reptiles left out of the splash header?

Everything’s coming up Julia for Anthony Albanese amid Newspoll blues, but the Coalition’s vote is just diabolical

Diabolism is a reptile speciality, just don't mention the diabolical coalition.

While doing a listicle of the things the pond consigned to the intermittent archive, this was a no brainer.

EXCLUSIVE
Shock at Bondi royal commission’s Frydenberg snub
Josh Frydenberg – the highest-ranking Jewish Australian government minister in history – has not been invited to appear at the final hearing block in Sydney.
By Geoff Chambers and Noah Yim

Nobody wants to hear from yesterday's man, a man notorious for lacking ticker?

Shocking, but the reptiles were quick to remedy that and provided the loser with a platform...

COMMENTARY by JOSH FRYDENBERG
What we must do now to save our nation
The royal commission must be the circuit breaker
If the royal commission is to effectively bring the hate and violence to an end, it must do two things.

As soon as the pond hears a man with no ticker insisting on "must", and he thinks it's all about "saving the nation" - no one at the lizard Oz has any interest in saving Gaza - the pond turns off, tunes out and drops out.

Sorry Josh, if you think you can help with the solution, the problem's likely beyond us ...

The pond also had no interest in pandering to Major Mitchell, pandering to Pearson ...

Noel Pearson’s reset puts politicians in their place, and offers fresh hope for nation
Following the defeat of the Voice referendum in 2023, media coverage of Aboriginal affairs fell away. But in truth, it wasn’t the media’s fault. Others were to blame, writes Chris Mitchell.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

What's that? It's suddenly become the Voice again?

Fear not, the reptiles apparently just made a typo boo boo in that sub-header, and the opening line in the Major's piece reverted to reptile voice form...

Asked during a panel discussion at Garma in Arnhem Land on Saturday, August 1, whether the media had dropped the ball on Aboriginal affairs since the defeat of the voice referendum in October 2023, this column steered moderator Sally Warhaft’s tricky question down leg side.

The Major is routinely tiresome but pretending the lizard Oz is in any way cared about Aboriginal Voices is tiresome beyond belief, especially as the Major ended with a major suck ...

As the founder of this newspaper and this company, Rupert Murdoch, wrote to Djawa Yunupingu – the Gumatj clan leader today – in 2013 when he visited Arnhem Land in a private capacity: “To all my Australian brothers we have a responsibility to make our great country even greater.”
It won’t be the voice but a deal will come.

Really? MAGA in 2013?

Is there an upchuck bucket handy?

But if this listicle of losers and dropkicks suggests the pond had run out of reptiles, fear not, because - to carry on a Major metaphor - plucky Lord Downer stepped up to the crease ...

The header: How the Liberals can counter Labor’s latest cunning play; The latest tactic from the progressive left – pinched from British Labour – is to bombard voters with the idea the Liberals will form a pact with One Nation.

The caption for the snap of the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way looking like a startled rabbit caught in the headlights: If the Liberals and Nationals want to win back the sorts of voters they have lost in teal and other metropolitan seats, then a sure way of failing to do that is to talk of an alliance with One Nation.

Lord Downer offered a standard four minute reptile ramble, but at least he took in British politics, though the pond must fault him for excluding Count Binface from the conversation.

For that aspect, you'll have to head off to another place, where the cawing Crowe is keen to help out ... Alien space warrior v right-wing populist: The UK election that is beyond a joke (*intermittent archive link)

His Lordship isn't famous for his sensa huma, and that form continued today as he dropped solemnity bomb after bomb, in an astonishing way ...

It’s quite astonishing how similar British and Australian politics are.
For a start, we both have Labour governments, and they apply exactly the same formula to governing. They like to tax savings and investment. They spend eye-watering sums of money on windmills and welfare. They run up ever-increasing levels of government debt, and they get the same results.
Both countries have anaemic rates of economic growth and declining productivity. Both countries suffer from declining real per capita GDP and sticky inflation. There’s no surprise here. The same policies give you the same results.
So poorly has British Labour been polling that it has recently changed its leader from Sir Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham. Australian Labor is not about to change it leader; however, its polling has dropped below 30 per cent.
Then there is the similarity of the opposition parties. The Conservative Party in the UK is polling around 20 per cent. Yet, just over two years ago, it was the government. Its counterpart in Australia is polling at a similar level, and it too was the government, albeit four years ago.
The insurgent parties – Reform in the UK, led by Nigel Farage, and One Nation here, led by Pauline Hanson – are polling in the mid-20s. In both cases, the traditional centre-right parties disappointed their voters, and some of their voters have switched to the insurgent parties. Both Reform and One Nation have also attracted a slice of Labour voters who are sick of the woke cultural agenda and their associated denigration of national achievements.
But that’s not the end of the similarities between the UK and Australia.

Nor is it the end of Lord Downer making tedious and meaningless comparisons, with only the odd illustration to serve as a distraction ... Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer … Labour’s claim that the Conservative Party could return to government only if it were in an alliance of some kind with Reform is lethal to both conservative parties.

On and on he rambled, in the smug, sanctimonious way he made famous as foreign minister ...

Both Labour parties are making extravagant speeches claiming, in the case of the UK, that the Conservative Party could return to government only if it were in an alliance of some kind with Reform. More than that, British Labour leaders argue that Reform is the real opposition.
No sooner had the British Labour Party been running this line, and, hey presto, up popped its Australian counterpart making exactly the same arguments about the federal Coalition and One Nation. Anthony Albanese and his team say One Nation are the real enemy and that the Coalition could govern only in an alliance with One Nation. Gone are the days when Labor leaders such as Paul Keating denigrated their opponents for tugging the forelock to the British. When it comes to politics, Australian Labor is British to its boot heels!
There is a very crafty electoral rationale behind British Labour’s argument. Australian Labor has cracked on to that. In the UK, Labour judges that if the Conservatives and Reform went into some sort of alliance, then erstwhile Labour voters wouldn’t switch to Reform because of their hatred of the Conservatives. Added to that, right-wing Labour voters who might, in normal circumstances, switch to the Conservatives out of disillusionment with the performance of the Labour government would hesitate to do so because the Conservatives would be in league with Reform.
The judgment is that even if people become disillusioned with Labour, enough of them will think Labour is a better and more stable option than some sort of alliance between the Conservatives and the more right-wing Reform party. I think this judgment is right. The split in the opposition parties in the UK is manna from heaven for Labour.
The same logic applies in Australia. Even if more right-wing Labor voters become disillusioned with the performance of the Albanese government, they would hesitate to vote for the Liberals or the Nationals if they thought they were going to form some sort of governing alliance with One Nation.
Equally, some hitherto Labor voters who are more attracted to One Nation would hesitate to vote for One Nation if they thought they were going to do some kind of electoral deal with the dreaded Liberals. On that basis, they would stick with Labor.
So, whichever way you look at it, be it in the UK or in Australia, for the two Labour parties, it’s a very cunning plan. The question is: How do centre-right opposition parties deal with this?

Lord Downer's answer? Cower at the sight of Nigel making plans, and whatever you do, don't point out he's a 'leet goose on the five million pound take ... Tory attacks on Nigel Farage will only reinforce support for his argument that the old parties are scared of him. Picture: Getty Images

His Lordship reeled away in fear ...

In the UK, there has been intense analysis within the Conservative Party to find the answer to this question. It has come up with two conclusions. The first is that personal attacks on Nigel Farage will only reinforce support for his argument that the old parties are scared of him and giving him the oxygen of more publicity. So from time to time, the Conservatives think they should attack Reform as a party over proposals they have that are unworkable or damaging to the country, but attacking Farage himself is seen as counterproductive. Secondly, they make it clear that under no circumstances would they go into coalition or some sort of electoral alliance with Reform.

There came a final image ... Kemi Badenoch would be wise not to speculate on what happens if there is a hung parliament in Britain. Picture: Getty Images

All that did was remind the pond how it had watched on YouTube The Rest is History mob do over Enoch Powell's infamous Rivers of Blood speech, (it's 74 minutes long so that's the day taken care off), wherein the former University of Sydney classics prof moved on to a form of racist bigotry that would have seen Kemi kicked out of the country

Then it was on to the final burble of Lord Downer, and how proud the pond had felt not to indulge in its usual visual slander ...

Sorry, but not really sorry, what with His Lordship not acknowledging Count Binface ...

Kemi Badenoch and her team know they have a huge task to win back sufficient support to win an election, but they have to campaign to achieve that, not speculate on what would happen in a hung parliament. Or worse still, to talk of forming some kind of electoral pact or even a coalition with Reform. The Conservatives know that is a path to disaster. For its part, Reform talks of eliminating the Conservatives from the electoral map, so it too can see the dangers of talking of an alliance with the Conservatives.
There’s a lesson here for the Liberal and National parties in Australia. If they want to win back the sorts of voters they have lost in teal and other metropolitan seats, then a sure way of failing to do that, and losing even more soft centre-right voters, is to talk of an alliance with One Nation. On the other hand, to win over working-class voters who might be planning to abandon Labor and vote for One Nation, those people might stick with Labor rather than vote for One Nation if they think One Nation is to form an alliance with the dreaded Liberals.
The challenge for the Coalition is simple. It needs to define its objectives for the country and explain the policies it will pursue to achieve those objectives, and, having done that, not waver in the teeth of attacks from the so-called progressive left. Be bold and be brave.

All that meant the pond couldn't talk about another movie it saw over the weekend, perhaps the most terrifying show it's seen since Weapons...

And now because so many had been ignored by the pond and the Caterist had last been sighted burbling away on 27th July, ‘Progressive’ Labor ditches workers for social moralising, the pond decided on a rare offering of simpleton Simon, though he's always keen to help ...

The header: Victoria is first true test of Liberals in the post-1925 One Nation world; Rarely, if ever, has the outcome of a state election been so critical to the fortunes of the federal Coalition. That is how grave things are for Angus Taylor.

The caption for a collage which saw copycat Emilia repeating her homework with a beyond predictable outing: Anthony Albanese, Angus Taylor and Pauline Hanson have much riding on November’s Victorian election. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

Simplistic Simon took a dire and tedious four minutes to say his piece, but the pond was intrigued.

What on earth was a post-1925 One Nation world?

What did 1925 have to do with anything?

Talk about a hook, talk about a way to create a sense of deep intrigue ...

Rarely, if ever, has the outcome of a state election been so critical to the fortunes of the federal Coalition.
That is how grave it is for Angus Taylor. He is relying on Victorians to reinsure the future prospects of a national brand.
If the state Liberal Party can’t win Victoria, against inarguably the worst government in Australia, the obvious question arises: Where exactly is the pathway back to federal government for the Coalition?
The search for an answer, should Jess Wilson fail, will inevitably land on Taylor’s desk.
It is hard to know just yet how much the replacement of a deeply unpopular Labor leader with an unknown in Ben Carroll affects the equation.
But the outcome is not just about the future of Victoria. The consequences of a defeat could be significant for Taylor as well on a number of levels, including a renewal of factional blame.
A failure to perform in Victoria would deliver a significant psychological blow to the federal Liberals, not to mention a denial of potential political infrastructure delivered through a local party being in government in the second-most populous state.

Once again the reptiles interrupted to show the beefy boofhead still looking like a startled rabbit, Mr Taylor needs to see that the Liberals can prevail against the populist tide.

Or should that be a startled 'roo, because simple Simon seemed to think he might be close to becoming some form of roadkill ...

Spoiler alert. That's the last you'll be hearing about 1925, somehow it had become a post-2025 world (AI, are you there AI?) but credit where credit is due, simplistic Simon managed to scribble this whole piece with just one mention of comrade Dan, which came in this gobbet ...

The party is already denuded of this sort of ballast in South Australia and Western Australia, and is facing another term in opposition in NSW after next year’s March election, which leaves it with Queensland and the Northern Territory as the only Liberal parties in government in mainland Australia – and one is a country party and the other a hybrid.
So Victoria provides the first useful electoral test of whether the Liberal Party at any level can survive in a post-2025 world with One Nation.
While the South Australian election demonstrated the level of threat posed by Pauline Hanson, where a sitting Labor government was never under threat, Victoria will reveal whether the Liberals have an answer to this in a contest where a Labor government is deeply unpopular.
South Australia proved the One Nation phenomenon was real rather than a vestige of polling. Its primary vote was higher than the Liberals and it took four lower house seats off the party in an environment made for a conservative protest vote. The Liberals lost 11 seats in total, finishing with just five seats, one more than One Nation.
Victoria will tell us something even more compelling. As a forerunner of what we might expect in the federal campaign, this is it.
The principal question is whether One Nation can actually prevent the Coalition winning government when Labor should otherwise be unelectable.
A Liberal win is far from assured. The swing required is about 6 per cent and there is a mountain of seats the opposition must win.
While the change of leadership from Jacinta Allan to Carroll may assist Labor, there is no sense yet this will make a difference in washing away the Andrews-Allan decay.
And anyone trying to make predictions about what might happen based on the polls needs to do so with caution. According to Liberals in Victoria, this election will be a case of a very different story in each seat, with the effect of One Nation unknown. Some recent polls predicting a swag of One Nation wins across the state have as few as three voters per seat in their sample sizes.
The most recent Newspoll has One Nation coming off the boil in Victoria, and if this continues to happen, the Coalition will be in with a good shot. As The Australian’s Anthony Galloway reported last week, this is what a consequential vote looks like in a poll with an election looming.

How the reptiles are rooting for Jess to win, because if that happens might not the beefy boofhead dare to dream?

Another collection of figures did little to relieve simplistic Simon of his sense of impending doom, Pauline Hanson, Jess Wilson and Ben Carroll are all vying to make an impact in the Victorian election.

Were all those simple Simon signs of a nervous tic wrong?

Were the tea leaves not falling into the right patterns to sweep away the suppurating decay? Could the runes provide at least a sign of some hope?

Simpleton Simon knew how to do a Tarot reading and send the hive mind home happy ...

Does this suggest some tactical thinking among conservative voters? This theme will no doubt start to feature in the Coalition messaging over coming months; a vote for One Nation is a vote for a continuation of Labor in government.
And this is where there may be some hope for Taylor.
A win in Victoria, or close enough to it, will afford Taylor the benefit of being able to argue that it is possible for a federal Coalition to win government too against a rising tide of populism. Anything less than this, and the implications for Taylor and the federal Coalition become dire.
With the polls calculating two-party, or two-candidate, preferred results with the Coalition in front, expectations are now being set. A failure to convert this would make it impossible for the federal party to dismiss Victoria as simply an unwinnable state using the well-worn political artefact that there is no crossover when it comes to state and federal elections.
This becomes harder to sustain if One Nation performs well, considering it has next to no local policies.
Victoria is particularly important because of how the metropolitan seats will play out. This is where the implications for Taylor become more interesting than the headline result.
Victoria is a critical piece of the jigsaw if the road to recovery for Taylor runs through the outer suburbs of the east coast capitals. A state Liberal campaign that can start to win back outer-suburban electorates would give Taylor and the federal party machine some sort of template from which to work.
While a narrow loss might avoid a deeper angst among federal colleagues, if the Victorians are deemed to have underperformed – by whatever measure they might choose – it will simply emphasise what is probably true anyway: the Liberals have lost their persuasive ability to channel anger at a Labor government into forming one themselves.
Victoria will be the first major test of whether the Liberal brand can recover outside Canberra but will also provide a road map as to how it might recover nationally.
Either that, or it will reveal how structurally broken the Liberal and Nationals parties truly are.

Oh dear, it seemed so strong, and then he had to fling in a dire billy goat butt of the "it will reveal how" kind, with talk of the beefy boofhead's team being structurally broken?

That uncertainty, that doubt, that lingering fear isn't the reptile way.

Cheer up, it could be worse ...

And as Lord Downer talked of England, how's Old Blighty going?

Beware, the dog botherer is infatuated with Gina's pet, and Polonius succumbs to comrade Dan syndrome ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:00:00 +0000

The trouble with being inundated, completely saturated by the lizards of Oz, as the pond was yesterday, is that the pond is unable to draw attention to positive, upbeat, uplifting news ...

Extreme heat breaks temperature records in central and eastern Europe

Slovakia reaches new high of 42C as authorities in Poland forced to shut down Kozienice and Połaniec power plants

Wow, all the fun of the climate science denialist fair. Talk about bringing joy to reptile hearts.

Could there be anything more exhilarating and exciting? Just like that extended drought in Puerto Rica. Has somebody got a bunch of toilet rolls handy?

And yet sadly early in this weekend the pond couldn't sight hyde nor hare (hair only reminds the pond of mad king Donald's latest styling) of a standard bout of reptile denialism.

Instead there was the usual bingeing on catastrophism, as with this reheated serve of gloom from Dame Groan ...

There was the usual awesome and utterly meaningless graph gesturing downwards, and the pond only offers an intermittent archive link because it's aware there are dedicated Groaners always searching for a fix.

Labor lobs an economic time bomb into the market
Real estate prices are falling, investors are fleeing and many first-home buyers remain locked out. It’s a correction more damaging than Labor wants to admit.

The old biddy offered what she seemed to think was a rousing finale ...

...In the meantime, investors are fleeing from the housing market, with the withdrawal of self-managed superannuants adding to the retreat. One effect is already showing up in the form of higher rents as investors try to adjust to the less favourable tax regime as well as higher interest rates.
For those tenants affected by crippling rents, the dream of home ownership may be further in the distance. Government meddling in the market has this habit of harming those who should benefit.
Rising house prices may create some political problems but falling house prices are potentially toxic. If there are significant negative effects on the wider economy and unemployment rises, the Albanese government’s salad days will be truly over.

Why did the old biddy revert to an "If"?

Why isn't she bold and bloody? Why does she only hint? Why not "there will be significant negative effects", and "the salad days are truly over", and we'll all be rooned by Xmas, and there will be blood.

And speaking of that movie, will the pond ever see Dame Groan embark on a lyrical triumphalism?

Offer her version of salad days? Celebrate what the beefy boofhead down Goulburn way might offer the masses ...

...Now something else, uh... and please don't be insulted if I speak about this - bread. Let's talk about bread. Now to my mind, uh, it's an abomination to consider that any man, woman or child in this magnificent country of ours should have to look upon a loaf of bread as a luxury. We're gonna dig water wells here and, uh, water wells means irrigation. Irrigation means cultivation. We're gonna raise crops here where before it just simply wasn't impossible. You're going to have more grain than you know what to do with. Bread will be coming right out of your ears, ma'am. New roads, agriculture, employment, education - these are just a few of the things we can offer you, and I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that if we do find oil here - and I think there's a very good chance that we will - this community of yours will not only survive, it will flourish.

All done without a furriner in sight. (So they say).

Nah, have a 'toon to celebrate the information future, with the Emeritus Chairman holding his own:

Moving right along, and right in to the middle of a bog standard pond dilemma.

The pond has already passed on sundry weekend reptile offerings, and that left very little left in the larder, and for reasons which will become obvious down below, the pond felt compelled to demote Polonius to last cab on the rank.

And that's how the pond ended up with the dog botherer talking of Gina's pampered pet, as the pair went to and fro.

The header: Democracy under siege as ugly protests force candidates into a security bubble; I wonder if our politicians and activists have learned much at all since the initial rise of ‘Hansonism’ in the late 1990s.

The caption for the stirring image: Little has changed since demonstrators vented their spleen at Pauline Hanson in Adelaide in June 1997.

The dog botherer thankfully was only rated a five minute read, but the pond was also keen to provide evidence for a theory the pond has been thinking of turning into a thesis.

The pond has long contended that the lizard Oz reptiles are deeply sympathetic to Pauline, and if she hadn't come along, they likely would have had to invent here.

Not so deep down - right there on the surface really - the dog botherer is keen on Pauline and hot to trot a ways down the garden path with her.

Please allow the pond to provide the evidence:

As I walked away from Pauline Hanson’s event at a Hawthorn pub in Melbourne on Monday night, the remnants of a rowdy protest mob were hanging around behind police lines despite the drizzling rain.
“Make sure you don’t bump into any black or brown people, racist,” yelled one woman.
It gave me pause for thought, much pause, as it turned out, as I didn’t flinch or turn but pondered as I kept walking.
Across the 30 years since Hanson first burst on to the scene, through some tumultuous times and challenges, I had at least learned a few useful lessons. One was not to respond to feral public abuse. I remembered how as a television reporter in Adelaide in 1996 I was standing on the roof of a TV broadcast truck doing live crosses from outside a Hanson event where the protesters seemed to outnumber the attendees.
At that time, I was pretty appalled by Hanson’s rhetoric, but I too was a hate figure for the political left because my reporting had exposed the fabrication of the so-called secret women’s business of Hindmarsh Island.
When a couple of thugs from the crowd below yelled abuse at me, I snapped back, and the technician running the TV equipment counselled me with some wise advice about how things would get ugly if I didn’t learn to let such barbs go.
He was right (thanks, Wayne), so 30 years later that approach has become second nature.

You see? Once upon a time he was appalled by Hanson's rhetoric, but then he realised he was just like her.

It's straight out of cornball movie lines... "We're Not So Different, You And I"

Put it another way:

If you prick me and Paline, do we not bleed? Possibly a greenish acid in the veins, but if was good enough for predators and aliens. If you tickle us in a woke way, do we not scowl? If you poison us with talk of multiculturalism, do we not die? Or at least blather endlessly about monocultures. And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? Ah, yes, revenge, always the revenge.

And once that notion's established, it's easy to share the humanity ... oh the humanity ...The lessons learnt from the early days of Pauline Hanson in the mid-1990s remain to this day. Picture: Brenton Edwards

This is the way a reptile bonds with Gina's pet ...

I walked quietly from the event amazed that Hanson was back, bigger than ever, stirring up the same antagonism, and I smiled to myself about the ignorance of the protesters as I considered how avoiding people of colour would up-end my social life, family relationships and my marriage.
Hatred and division are back in what is left of the public square and it seems more worrisome than ever. I wonder if our politicians and activists have learned much at all since the initial rise of “Hansonism” in the late 1990s.
Earlier on Monday Hanson held a media conference to launch One Nation’s first batch of Victorian state election candidates at a hotel near Spencer Street station.
Melbourne’s CBD has been hollowed out, to be sure, but still it was surprising to see police officers outnumbering pedestrians on the block surrounding the venue and there were another dozen or more police officers inside.
Across 40 years or more I have been caught up in protests, emergencies and security scares as a journalist, political operative and citizen, and the level of security at Hanson’s Melbourne events was noteworthy. It suggests police intelligence considered there was the risk not only of protesters but also of violence.
For the evening event in Hawthorn, two streets and a major intersection were blocked to traffic so no vehicles could drive on either side of the venue. The main group of protesters was kept 30m from the hotel entrance behind temporary barricades.

After all, if the reptiles stir fear and loathing, it's just the same as Pauline's suffering, which roughly approximates to the treatment doled out to Jeanne d'Arc...Police monitor the anger surrounding Ms Hanson's Adelaide launch of One Nation in June 1997.

From such dire treatment a phoenix rose from the ashes, and conquered reptile hearts, and moved the dog botherer to a weird empathy.

It's because Pauline espouses the approved lizard Oz policies on all sorts of matters, and she offers the chance to once again deny any ethnic cleansing is taking place in Gaza...

This is a new era for Australian politics with a highly polarised political debate playing out after almost three years of hateful pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests. We have had ugly attacks and protests launched by the far left and far right, and Victoria’s state election in November will be the first post-Bondi election campaign on the east coast – it already looks tense.
Hanson told me Melbourne was the only place in Australia where she did not feel safe walking the streets. She feels comfortable in regional Victoria.

Could it be a reptile piece without a "whatever", because it's not about the policies, it's a chance to feel the vibe and celebrate Gina's pet as a political force ...

Whatever your views about One Nation and its policies, this does not bode well for our democracy. Here is the leader of a party that leads national opinion polls, has outpolled the Coalition in the South Australian election and the Farrer federal by-election, and is polling above 20 per cent in Victoria, yet she is forced to campaign behind a security force-field. Just how Victorian police will deal with this through to November will be an enormous challenge, with implications for the other parties too. This is a state with an unprecedented crime crisis, yet it must devote vast resources now to political protection. Police and political leaders in NSW (where there is an election next March) and federally will be watching closely. Threats have been reported and prosecuted against the Prime Minister and others in recent times.
When I joined Hanson and her SA leader Cory Bernardi for an impromptu street walk in Adelaide’s CBD just days out from that state’s election in March this year, the reaction from the public was positive and there were no security issues.
But when we stopped for a coffee afterwards a group of socialist protesters turned up to chant abuse at Hanson, and Bernardi and I had to shepherd her safely into a car.
Just how One Nation candidates can press the flesh in the Victorian election campaign will be anybody’s guess, and the way NSW and Victorian authorities have failed to curtail hateful pro-Palestinian protests during the past three years does not inspire confidence. This chilling of democratic campaigning and debate is bound to hinder the Coalition and Labor too, although probably to a lesser degree.
The vitriol directed at Hanson and her team will not harm her politically; the more she is subjected to unreasonable attacks, the more some voters see her as their champion challenging the establishment.

Indeed, and the more she's subjected to devotional texts from devoted reptiles who never question her policies - "whatever" - and who willingly pander to her and parade about with her in the streets, sharing her perils, the more she'll be seen as an approved member of the reptile establishment ...A wall of police hold back protesters outside Newcastle's Civic Theatre during Ms Hanson's rally for One Nation supporters in May 1997.

It is, of course, all the fault of the ABC. Some ruffians insist that she should engage with all the media, but that's not the reptile way ...provided they have access, who cares about the cardigan wearers and the Graudian.

That's not the real story, the real story is that she's a reptile-approved winner, and all she's doing is conducting dinkum vigorous debate (and any furriner who disagrees can just get the hell out of here):

Yet aside from being totally intolerant of intimidation and threats of violence, most of us, I presume, do not want politicians campaigning from within a security bubble – we want them to be accessible and directly accountable to the public.
In Melbourne this week most of the media focus was on Hanson banning the ABC from her events. The real story was that the party shaking up the looming election contest was doing so within a security cocoon normally required only for a visiting (and controversial) head of state.
It must be said that the ABC’s demonisation of Hanson and its habitual normalisation of violent imagery against right-of-centre figures (Gina Rinehart being the latest example) does nothing to defuse a toxic situation. Its commentators have suggested that One Nation is immoral and illegitimate, which only fuels the nutters, just as its demonisation of Israel throws fuel on the fire of antisemitism.
The secret of democracy is that it has enabled vigorous debate and respectful disagreement to replace physical combat. Conducted properly, democracy allows ideas and advocacy to replace swords and guns.
I guess it follows then that when debate is curtailed and political correctness conspires to shut out some voices and demonise others, hot tempers can replace hot takes.

Indeed, indeed, who wouldn't want to replace swords and guns with democratic ways ...

The reptiles ran an AV distraction featuring the suffering of Gina's pet, almost as bad as the arrows that pierced St Sebastian: Pauline Hanson has been met with protesters as she arrived at the Tower Hotel in Hawthorn

How dare that unruly mob think that protesting a politician is unseemly and wrong?

Don't they realise they should sit down and shut up, and take whatever swill they're offered? Reptiles at the lizard Oz do, and they're like hogs in high heaven...

In an increasingly polarised political and media environment, I fear we are losing the benefits of a robust public square as the pressure valve that a free society needs.
On my television program I love discussing issues with people I disagree with, even if sometimes my audience objects. But it has become almost impossible to get Labor, Greens or teal politicians on to the program unless it is to discuss a point of mutual agreement.
They know I will not shout at them or harangue them, but it seems they would just rather not have their views challenged. I guess there is no need.

There's no need because changing the dog botherer's far right mind on anything is a task beyond Hercules or Sisyphus ...

And now for the moment of conversion, the epiphany ...

When I first had the chance to enlist Hanson as a regular guest I baulked at it because I disagree with some of her ideas and believe her rhetoric has been too harsh and intolerant on some issues. Besides, One Nation had become largely a fringe player.
But now I am glad to have been convinced because while we have agreed and disagreed on air, the discussions have been worthwhile.
And if 20 to 30 per cent of the population agrees with her, then a democratic society should hear and test her views.
Those who demonise and physically intimidate Hanson and One Nation have failed to learn the lessons over the years and are delivering two detrimental outcomes. First, their tactics only boost her momentum, which is the opposite of their intent; and second, they are undercutting our democracy by making political engagement more risky and remote.

The pond has a fair idea of who's undercutting democracy, and it isn't those who've wandered into Pauline's camp and discovered that her ideas have been poached from the lizard Oz.

Golding summed up pretty much where the dog botherer's line about fair and reasonable arguments took him, and while the pond has run it once, there's no harm running it again:

And so to Polonius, and it will be clear from the get go why the pond shunted him down to the bottom of the page:

The header: How 40 years of Labor has damaged the Garden State; When I left Melbourne in 1984, Victoria was known as the Garden State. Now the appropriate number plate slogan might be the pothole state.

The caption for the snap that explained everything: Then Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews with his deputy Jacinta Allan after being re-elected in November 2022. Picture: Ian Currie

Polonius had succumbed to comrade Dan syndrome, a very common reptile ailment, and even worse it had happened on a weekend when most of the reptiles were in recovery from the condition, but that often happens with Polonius, because he's routinely late to the scene:

Every Australian has a vested interest in the economic and social success of Victoria, our second most populous state.
When I left Melbourne for Sydney in early 1984, Victoria was known as the Garden State. It appeared on vehicle number plates from 1977 when the Liberal Party was in office.
In 1985, under John Cain’s Labor government, the slogan was temporarily changed to Nuclear Free State. This move said much about the political direction of Victorian Labor governments. For the change was delusional, since anyone driving around Melbourne would pass a hospital that practised nuclear medicine.
There were various changes through the years. When Labor’s Daniel Andrews became premier in November 2014, Victoria became the Education State.
Following the legacy left by the Andrews and Jacinta Allan governments, the appropriate number plate slogan might be the pothole state. It is no exaggeration to say that those who live in or travel to Victoria constantly complain of dangerous potholes, even on main roads.
Labor prime minister Bob Hawke used to say, with respect to the Coalition, that “if you can’t govern yourselves, you can’t govern the country”.
Today the opposition impressively led by Jess Wilson might say to new Premier Ben Carroll: “If you can’t fill in potholes you can’t govern the state.”

That's a laugh. When the pond regularly visited south Gippsland, the cockies kept on voting in useless National party dingbats, who did nothing about the parlous state of the potholed roads. It took them years and years to come up with a proposal to do something about it, and in the meantime, they kept on arguing with the likes of Moira Deeming about the meaning of headlocks.

With that sort of opposition, the cockies got the government they deserved ...Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson has much to ask Labor about. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

At this point Polonius embarked on one of his notoriously one eyed histories ...

It used to be said that Victoria was the jewel in the Liberal Party’s crown. This was true at the federal level after Robert Menzies established the Liberal Party in late 1944.
At the state level, however, the political conservatives were divided while Labor was unsuccessful.
The first majority Labor government came to office under the leadership of John Cain Sr in December 1952. But it fell apart in mid-1955 following the split in the Labor Party. In the mid-1950s the breakaway Democratic Labor Party gave its preferences to the Coalition and Labor did not return to office until 1982 under John Cain Jr.
Between mid-1955 and early 1982, Victoria was governed well under Liberal Party premiers Henry Bolte and Rupert Hamer. But, over time, the party ran out of steam, particularly in the final year under Lindsay Thompson.
Then it was Labor’s turn. After a while the Cain Labor government lost touch. Cain stepped down for Joan Kirner, who lost the October 1992 election to a Coalition government led by Jeff Kennett.
The problem with the Cain-Kirner Labor government was that it spent and borrowed too much. The result was a financial disaster. Victoria was saved by the intervention of the Hawke Labor government with Paul Keating as treasurer. But the State Bank of Victoria was sold to the Commonwealth Bank in 1990 (before it was privatised). In other words, Keating’s intervention saved the Victorian economy but not its leadership.

Cue a snap embedded in the past ... much like Polonius, Victorian Premier John Cain with Bob Hawke in June 1985. The problem with the Cain-Kirner Labor government was that it spent and borrowed too much.

The pond let it pass, but then Jeff came into the picture ...

The Kennett-led Coalition won the October 1992 election but lost narrowly seven years later. The Kennett government restored Victoria as a strong economic performer. And number plate slogans changed to On the Move. The state certainly was.
Victoria continued to perform relatively well under the Labor governments led by Steve Bracks and John Brumby that followed.
The Coalition won office in November 2010 under the incipient leadership of Ted Baillieu. He was replaced before his first term ended by the non-charismatic Denis Napthine.
And then along came Daniel Andrews of Labor’s Socialist Left faction who led his party to big victories in 2014, 2018 and 2022 before he stepped down for Allan in September 2023. Alas, it was a throwback to the Cain-Kirner years, with the Andrews and Allan governments spending, taxing and borrowing to finance big projects and expand the public service.
Just as the failure of the Cain-Kirner governments in Victoria contributed significantly to Australia’s recession of 1991-92, so has the failure of the Andrews-Allan government contributed to the weakness in the national economy.
Moreover, Andrews’ obsession with his Big Build plan – the spending of large amounts of money on sometimes dubious projects while allowing the militant CFMEU trade union to control project sites – has had deleterious effects.

The reptiles reminded the pond of a premier best forgotten ... Jeff Kennett with his wife Felicity in October 1992. His government restored Victoria as a strong economic performer.

Jeff as the restorer of the state's fortunes?

Now it's true whenever the pond visits Melbourne that it's reminded of Jeff:

The Zipper is known by many names in Melbourne, most commonly The Cheesestick and The Carrot Patch. It is an artwork that adorns the CitiLink bypass from Tullamarine Airport to Melbourne which nods its head to two main sources of wealth and income for Victoria, gold (the big yellow pole) and wheat (the smaller red poles). When the tollway originally opened in 2000 the 70-metre ‘bar of gold’ and the 39-metre ‘wheat straws’ created the illusion of a zipper opening as you rounded a bend in the road and caught sight of the site.
So why do we hate it? Well, for one thing, many Melburnians have long forgotten what it represents or didn’t know/care to begin with. Another reason is that when soundproof walls were installed on either side of the road they removed the view of the moment when the zipper opens. Melburnians now loathe it so much that less friendly nicknames have been given to it such as eyesore, boom-gate and ribcage (which mostly refers to the sound tunnel adjoining the artwork). Our state Premier at the time when the road and artwork were built was Jeff Kennett, which has led to even less polite nicknames such as Jeff’s Erection (the yellow pole) and Jeff’s Condom (the sound tunnel). (here)

And there were reasons that Jeff was sent packing, as explained by Dr Paul Strangio: Jeff revisited: it was the best of times, the worst of times

...To some extent, Kennett became victim of his own success. As the economic clouds lifted in the second half of the 1990s, what the public had tolerated in a climate of crisis gradually became intolerable. In its second term the government did shift emphasis to metropolitan-focused infrastructure projects, albeit with the participation of private enterprise.
Yet Kennett's overbearing leadership was unreconstructed. He failed to appreciate that his modus operandi was growing out of tune with the return of benign times - or more likely he was incapable of changing his leadership spots.
Unbound leadership has a habit of ending in fatal overreach, and so it was at the 1999 election campaign. Kennett banned ministers from speaking on policy, inspiring a devastating Herald Sun front-page image of government members with mouths gagged, and he refused to answer questions during a testy appearance on Jon Faine's ABC morning radio program.
The Liberal Party campaign celebrated the ''cult of Jeff'': it launched a jeff.com website and commissioned a radio advertisement that featured a youthful male supporter exuberantly declaring, ''Jeff, yeah, he's a legend … Jeff f---ing rules!'' Little wonder the electorate - particularly neglected rural and regional voters - decided to cut the premier down to size.
Viewed against the long-run history of Victorian state politics, the Kennett era is an outlier. Its neo-liberal adventurism was alien to a state that had been the nursery ground for a tradition of (social) liberalism that supported a substantial role for government in economic and social life. Similarly, in a polity that at least since Henry Bolte's era has favoured moderate, consensual leadership, the swashbuckling Kennett stands out as an exotic.

He was a bully and a preening braggart, an upstart peacock who eventually had his feathers plucked, and he was the prime reason that the state went to Labor for such a long time - anything to avoid a repeat of the horrors - with only the unfortunate, hapless Ted Baillieu and the even more unfortunately comatose Napthine breaking the run.

Polonius then moved into a litany which luckily left the conservative free ABC off the hook:

Across the past 40 years Victoria has developed into Australia’s most left-wing state by far. In the process it has become a mendicant, being rewarded through the GST by receiving a greater amount of payments from the scheme than it would be entitled to if it were performing at the level of, say, NSW.
The continuation of a strong left-wing government and, until recently, a soft opposition, has led to hostility to mining as a means of raising revenue through excise and company taxes. Sure, Victoria has raised money through international students but its minerals, manufacturing and rural industries are relatively small. A state cannot live by education alone.
Then there are the all-pervasive regulations and high state taxes and charges along with an obsession to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 irrespective of the cost.
The Covid-19 pandemic restrictions hit especially hard in Victoria because of an obsessive desire of the Andrews government to lock up healthy adults and children. This was particularly harmful to lower socio-economic Victorians who lived in smaller homes with fewer amenities. The Andrews government even denied public play areas to children.
Four decades ago, the level of violent crime in Victoria would have been roughly the same as in other states, taking into account the different population in numbers. Not any more.

Really? Why do they keep grinding away on that old saw because the stats for 2024 shriek that the toads are worst of all ...

And more recent data shows that crime stats are whatever you want to make of them ...

Ebike thefts soar in NSW as Victoria’s crime rate drops for first time in four years
Theft rises in both states, even as Victoria’s crime rate decreases 1.9% on the year before

Victoria has recorded its first drop in crime in four years and fewer young people are offending, but a surge in theft is bucking the trend – mirroring concerns in New South Wales, where a sharp rise in ebike theft has helped drive stealing rates higher.

The Victorian Crime Statistics Agency (CSA) on Thursday released data for the 12 months to March 2026, which showed there were 625,426 criminal offences recorded in Victoria – a decrease of 1,524 or 0.2% on the previous 12 months.
The crime rate, which factors in population growth, also decreased by 1.9% compared with the previous 12 months. It marked the first drop in the crime rate since 2022...
...Meanwhile, data released on Thursday by the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research in NSW showed crime has mostly remained stable in the state over the past two years, with the exception of shoplifting and stealing offences.
The data showed shoplifting increased by 9.1% in the two years to March 2026 and other stealing offences increased by 3.1%.
The rise in shoplifting was driven by a 17% increase in the theft of clothing and footwear and a 13% increase in the theft of alcohol, while the rise in stealing was driven by a 27% increase in the theft of ebikes, which accounted for more than a third of the 2,080 incidents.
Meanwhile, the number of adults facing court in NSW increased by 10% in the two years to March 2026,
with a third of the growth related to domestic violence.
The data found the overall increase in charges resulted from greater police enforcement rather than a growth in offending.
This includes domestic violence, with the data showing charges for domestic violence assault increased by 13% over the two years despite the number of recorded incident remaining stable.
In recent months, the state’s prison system has broken numerous records, despite crime remaining relatively stable.
NSW’s total prison population is a record high, at more than 14,000 people in March. The most recent data from Bocsar also shows a record number of Indigenous adults in custody, and a record number of DV offenders, which now make up almost a third of the prison population. Last year, there was a record number of Indigenous deaths in custody

Any crime is crime too much, but superficial comparisons between states regarding crime never helps, not when it's just cheap point scoring.

There's damned lies and then there's Polonius's damned use of statistics.

All that was left was a Pellist bleat, and the notion that Victoria's justice system was now a swamp of Socialist Left thinking...

Also the Victorian legal system appears to have deteriorated over the decades. Take the case of Cardinal George Pell, for example. His convictions for historical child sexual abuse were quashed in a unanimous judgment of the High Court. In the proceedings, the Victorian prosecution failed to establish how the crime could have taken place.
In 1984 Victoria had a strong economy, a stable political system and a respected legal system. Moreover, Victorians could travel to Melbourne on weekends without having to confront militant intolerant protesters.
The harsh message is that Victoria has been damaged by the Socialist Left, which has been in office for a long time. New Premier Carroll was a key player in the Andrews and Allan incompetent governments. But at least he is not from the Socialist Left faction.

If comrade Dan was a leftist in government, then the pond doesn't have a clue what "leftist" means...

Just because someone makes a nod towards "socialism" doesn't mean they are that way inclined.

Take it from real lefties ...Andrews saved lives, but was no socialist

The likes of Andrew Bolt (and poor old copycat Polonius) ranted that Andrews was a “global warming extremist” and a member of the Socialist Left faction of the ALP. But despite a veneer of social progressiveness around issues such as abortion rights, gay conversion therapy and the decriminalisation of public drunkenness, Andrews was far from heading some left-wing, pro-worker government.
There is nothing in the least radical, let alone communist, about the ALP Socialist Left or Dan Andrews. The ideological differences between the Labor factions are virtually non-existent. Labor’s so-called left and right these days are simply rival machines fighting to carve up the spoils of office.
The supposed leftist Andrews worked very closely with billionaire property developers and with toll operator Transurban, awarding them lucrative contract after lucrative contract. Labor has also long been in bed with Crown Casino and the gambling industry.
Andrews is best mates with right-wing trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, one of only ten Australians who have appeared in every Financial Review Rich List, or its predecessor, the BRW Rich 200, since it was first published in 1984.
After former Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett ravaged vital public services, Andrews privatised virtually everything left standing, including public housing, the Port of Melbourne, VicRoads, disability services and the Public Records Office.
The Andrews government presided over the running down of the healthcare system and enforced a harsh wage cap that savaged the real wages of nurses, teachers and other public sector workers.
Andrews spent big on rail and road projects but also on prisons and police numbers. His law-and-order agenda of increased police powers and tougher bail laws led to a surge in prison numbers largely for very minor offences. For all the talk of Labor’s progressive approach to Aboriginal rights, it was disproportionally young Aboriginal people that were being locked up.

Well yes, but the point about this age-old socialist slur, as recycled by Polonius?

With a bit of mangling of words the pond can get there:

The ideological differences between the Liberal and Labor state factions are virtually non-existent. Sure they talk up the differences, but they end up sounding the same once their extreme elements settle down to enjoy the perks of the job. These days the reptiles deploy the notion of catastrophic differences so they can get behind the right kind of Liberal machine, fighting to carve up the spoils of office.

The pond has never seen a property developer or a gambling industry both the Liberal and the Labor parties can't love.

C.f. Wilcox:

And with that time to celebrate the many ways it could be worse ...

The usual debrief on the madness ...

Forget the facts, just the lies ma'am, and just the bromancer and "Ned" ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:26:54 +0000

The pond has taken to covering the lizard Oz's daily jihads as an entrée but there's nothing to whet the appetite in gossip about Mike Cannon-Brookes and a standard beat up about secret reports and Australian war crimes in Afghanistan - especially as the reptiles never look in the mirror and wonder about their many crimes in encouraging a war which resulted in such dismal outcomes for Afghani women.

On the upside, the reptiles had briefly forgotten their comrade Dan jihad.

But that was no consolation, so it was straight into the main courses, and who wouldn't salivate at yet another serve of the bromancer?

The header: Far left, far right: the Weimar Germany shadow looming over US politics; JD Vance’s friend, writer Rod Dreher, sees in the US the same crisis that characterised Weimar Germany when gangs of Nazis and communists did furious battle in the streets.

The caption for the collage so awful that no reptile put up their hand to claim it: The mood in the US is similar to that of the Weimar Republic period in Germany (background picture) in 1925 author Rod Dreher warns. Divisive figures in the US include far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, left, Israel-demonising Abdul El-Sayad, second left, antisemite Candace Owens, third left, and MAGA media darling Tucker Carlson, right. Pictures: Getty Images/AFP

This was a bromancer 9 minute read opus, wherein the bromancer tried to cope with all that Faux Noise has wrought on the American political and cultural landscape, though naturally without a single mention of Fox or the Emeritus Chairman.

Instead, as the header indicated, the bromancer did what comes naturally to reptiles down under - turn to a barking mad American fundamentalist as his guide.

Now there are many better guides to the American scene, in diverse American publications, and freely available on the intertubes, but please, indulge the bromancer in his ramblings ...

It is the season of hatred in the US. The rise of extremism, left and right, and the bitter polarisations in politics and society mean the threat of an American civil war is not entirely far-fetched.
Not a conflict ranging army against army but street-fighting thugs, murderous extremists, violently fixated individuals of the far left and the far right. The FBI has 10,000 open intelligence files on individuals who pose a potential threat to public figures.
The triumph of far left, Israel-demonising Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, following the example of far leftist New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who recently made the top issue in New York his desire to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he passed through, shows the creeping takeover of the Democrats by dangerous ideological extremists. This is terrifying for many ordinary people. Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the New York Board of Rabbis believes Mamdani’s relentless demonisation of Israel, Israelis and Zionists could well lead to mass casualty violence against Jews in New York.
But the same thing is happening on the American right. The same antisemitism is sprouting on the right as has long disfigured the left. It’s not just antisemitism, of course. It’s a whole swirl of identity politics hatreds, mimicking the identity politics of the left, and a degradation of the mind in thrall to a seemingly infinite online offering of conspiracy theories and violent enmities.

The solution?

Turn to a month old outing by Dreher in the both siderist NY Times, in consort with Ross Douthat, who has already scuttled off to CBS, as if that network wasn't already in freefall: No TV experience? At CBS News, that’s no problem

Here's the transcript in the intermittent archive:

‘ I’m Worried About Weimar America’
“It may not be Hitler 2.0. It may not be Stalin 2.0. It might be something all American, but it’s not going to be what we’re used to,” the author Rod Dreher argues.

In that outing a couple of useless Xians yammered on about Xianity, and naturally that appealed to the useless Xian side the bromancer routinely parades:

Rod Dreher, one of the most brilliant conservative Christian writers in the US, tells me that he sees in contemporary America the same social breakdown, the same crisis of meaning and purpose, the same rise of extremism especially among the young, especially among young men, as characterised Germany in the 1920s and 30s, in the decadent, corrupt, ineffective and tragic Weimar Republic.

The reptiles promptly posted a snap of Dreher that might be considered defamatory, considering it revealed the sort of company he likes to keep: Rod Dreher with US Vice President JD Vance. Picture: Supplied

What's comical about this? Well the bromancer via Dreher reverts to that hoary old device, that ancient metaphor, wheeling out Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, as a way of avoiding dealing with the madness already naked in the land, courtesy mad King Donald (aided and abetted by Faux Noise):

Dreher has been a close friend of US Vice-President JD Vance but now rebukes his friend for failing clearly to condemn the rise of antisemitism and broader extremism among substantial sections of the right. This includes the work of well-known American media figures such as Tucker Carson, who invites and respectfully interviews well-known antisemites on his programs, and Candace Owens, but also particularly in the horrible and obscene statements of perhaps the leading influencer and streamer of the far, far right, Nick Fuentes.
Far left and far right have become a grotesque mirror of each other in contemporary US politics.
Season of hate
Dreher, whom I’ve known for a decade and admire, tells me he fears his nation is becoming Weimar America. This doesn’t mean an inevitable rise of an American Adolf Hitler. It does mean a collapse of purpose and effectiveness in institutions and society.
One more note on the eerie similarity of the far left and far right. El-Sayed’s campaign was a classic “green-red alliance”; that is, a yoking together of left-wing activist critiques of the US and all its works, of campus radicalism, with an obsessive hatred of Israel and Zionism, which appealed to a sizeable chunk of Michigan’s Muslims.
A similar dynamic works on the right. The nativism inherent in “America First” becomes a hostility directed not at geo-strategic rivals such as China and Russia, or even Iran, but at Israel on the pretext that Israel and “the Jews” keep entangling an innocent but naive Washington into endless destructive wars. The appreciation of the role of Christianity in American history transmogrifies into a hatred of Judaism itself, drawing on medieval Christian prejudices, long repudiated by all decent Christians, to animate a deformed and hate-filled version of racist Christian nationalism.
Sometimes the parallels between far left and far right are eerie. El-Sayed enlisted one of the most influential far-left influencers and streamers, Hasan Piker, to help him connect to radical university audiences. He campaigned side by side with Piker. Among a torrent of obnoxious pronouncements, Piker has declared that America deserved the 9/11 terror attacks, that the terrorist group Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel and that the murderous dictator Chairman Mao Zedong was a great leader.

After that classic bout of both siderism, the reptiles flung in a snap of Nick: Nick Fuentes, the leader of a Christian-based extremist white nationalist group speaks to his followers, 'the Groypers'. Picture: Getty Images

Here's the problem. You don't have to look over there, you just have to look at the leader.

A few days ago BuzzFeed produced yet another collage:

16 Really, Really, Really Weird Things Donald Trump Posted This Weekend
I’m surprised no one has asked him about his Elvis thing yet.

Just a few samples:

That's just scratching the surface.

Those are just a few examples of the sort of visual pollution that streams out into the ether on an almost nightly basis, as the mad king stays awake and indulges in his meme fetish, yet no one notices or bothers to comment on the madness.

Deeply, deeply weird. It's as if they just want to ignore the crazy uncle in the attic, and sure enough the bromancer does ...

Compare Piker with Fuentes. Amid a blizzard of insanity, Fuentes has declared that “Adolf Hitler is f. king cool”. This was not some exercise in bad taste irony. Fuentes has repeatedly defended his statement, claiming Hitler represented a time “when white people didn’t give a f. k!”
You can see a similar idiocy, a similar quest for notoriety, for clicks, by saying the most offensive thing possible, in both men. What’s frightening in this moment is the wide following and influence both these extremists enjoy. Both far left and far right are consciously working, especially via social media, to bring ideas of hatred and countless old lies into the centre of the public square, to turn the crackpot into the mainstream.
Far left and far right get to their extremism by alternative roads, but, in Dreher’s analysis, the same social and cultural crisis gives rise to both.
First a word on Dreher. He is astonishingly prolific and influential in a way that is at first elusive. He worked for a decade for The American Conservative and Vance, in his recent spiritual memoir, Communion, attributes the take-off of his first book, Hillbilly Elegy, to an interview he did with Dreher.
The first of Dreher’s books to make a big splash, The Benedict Option, was a serious, intensely honest effort to come to grips with how Christians could sustain and renew their faith and their community in a hostile Western culture. One of its core messages was that Christians couldn’t profitably seek salvation in politics.
Another work, Live Not by Lies, examined the psychology of the “soft totalitarianism” embodied in woke orthodoxy. It did this in part by exploring the psychological strategies of Christian dissidents in the Soviet Union.

It wouldn't be a true comedy without Candace: Candace Owens speaks on a Conservative Political Action Conference in Washinton. Picture: Getty Images

The bromancer thought at last he should put in a minor billy goat butt:

His last book, Living in Wonder, explored the miraculous in everyday life and sought to redress the long cultural project of “disenchantment” in the West.
I greatly admire Dreher’s writings, but naturally I don’t share all his opinions.
His new and original analysis comparing the US cultural malaise to that of Weimar Germany is powerful and offers a coherent explanation for the rise of dangerous extremism on left and right.
The US crisis today has many dimensions, Dreher, these days based in Texas, tells me during a long telephone conversation: “There’s an economic crisis. Large numbers of young people can’t hope to own a house, hold down a stable job, form a family, all the normal parts of a middle-class life.

He's living in Texas?

But let's not ignore the way he found time to settle down in company with Viktor Orbán and the Danube Institute, home for lowlifes of the onion muncher kind, providing much fun to Reddit users: Rod Dreher decides he is bravely running away from Hungary! It’s the end of an era.

And so to the barking mad Xian bit ...

The loss of ‘logos’
“There’s also a crisis of social solidarity. There’s been talk of a generation gap since the 1960s. Now the generation gap’s a Grand Canyon. Baby Boomers and Generation X have so much difficulty understanding the world as seen through the eyes of young people.
“The different generations live in their different information silos. Young people have grown up in an environment where everything is fluid. They don’t believe in the traditions and institutions of their society. Because of artificial intelligence and the internet they may not even know what truth is. The core weakness of Weimar Germany was the loss of ‘logos’.”
This term logos deserves a little unpacking. It’s a Greek word meaning word or reason or structure. In Christianity, the person of Jesus himself is the logos, the plan of creation and salvation.
Dreher continues: “By logos here I don’t mean mainly a religious faith exactly but more a sense of the foundational reality on which the physical universe is built.”
Dreher seeks wisdom in the deepest insights of Hannah Arendt, the great scholar of totalitarianism, whose work focused in part on Weimar Germany. Dreher says: “Hannah Arendt says the biggest factor (predisposing a society to breakdown and extremism) is social atomisation. People attracted to extremism often don’t have close friends or family, or life partners, or attachment to any tradition like Christianity.
“They become free-floating particles with overwhelming existential anxieties.”
This leads, in Dreher’s view, to destructive mental compulsions, to “friend-enemy thinking” that divides the world into a small number of friends and a vast number of enemies. It leads, too, to conspiracy theory thinking.

Remember this is in the context of Dreher's own divorce, and then the bizarre news that he was off to Vienna to be close to his son ...

He supported Orbán? He sucked on Orbán's teat? That's an instant disqualification.

But then the onion muncher was a Franco admirer, just like his mentor B. A. Santamaria ... and here we are again ... Orthodox Christian, conservative author and journalist, Rod Dreher says the extreme left and extreme right actually resemble each other. Picture: Hollie Adams/The Australian

And not just Orbán, for a time it seemed that mad King Donald was the answer, because of a bizarre fear of the "woke" ..

So mad King Donald was the answer?

In distrusting all institutions, the isolated and most easily radicalised young people fall prey to belief in conspiracies, which abound online. And whether you’re a nutter on the left or a nutter on the right, when you embrace conspiracies you’ll ultimately embrace the scapegoating and hatred of Jews, if for no other reason than they have been at the centre of conspiracy theories for thousands of years.
This is one reason extreme left and right resemble each other so much.
“When Donald Trump was first elected many of us hoped this would be the end of wokeness, not only because Trump opposed it but because Democrats would see it was discredited,” Dreher reflects.

Sorry, the pond was triggered ...

And how did investing in mad King Donald go?

“It didn’t turn out like that. The Democratic Socialists of America are absolutely lunatic on identity politics and they’re winning Democratic primaries with the overwhelming support of young people on the left.” They don’t focus on material questions, Dreher says, as much as they do on identity politics. And of course, he might have added, the performative demonisation of Israel and scapegoating of Zionists, a thin disguise for rank, acrid antisemitism.
People caught up in such madness, Dreher suggests, “come to value transgression for its own sake. Fuentes revels in saying outrageous things.”

And heading off to Hungary to suck on the teat of an authoritarian wasn't outrageous?

Cue a snap designed to terrify the hive mind: Michigan Democratic Senate primary winner Abdul El-Sayed. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

More drivel followed:

All this takes place, Dreher argues, in a vacuum of meaning and authority in the lives of so many young people. The internet enables and accelerates this, as did the experience of Covid lockdowns and social isolation.
“What is happening on the right now is the same as what has been happening on the left for the past 10 or 15 years.”
Dreher has opposed identity politics for a long time: “At the time of (Barack) Obama’s rise I wrote that you can’t valourise identity politics for non-whites without calling forth identity politics for whites. You will call forth demons you can’t even imagine.”
In Dreher’s view, Republicans responded almost as poorly as Democrats: “The Republican Party did a very poor job of trying to understand and respond to the legitimate concerns of young people.” This failure was especially acute regarding young men: “They were told that all men were the problem. It’s impossible to over state how much that has contributed to the resentment of these men. The left presumed that all white men were as weak as the weak white men they saw on campus. They were wrong. They implemented anti-male and anti-white hiring policies.”
Genuine conservatives should never see people primarily in terms of race. But in the US, across the West, the left has succeeded in establishing a public discourse that focuses on features of identity and eliminates or diminishes individual human agency.
This easily leads to zero-sum contests among warring identity groups.
To some extent, this is what’s happening among a disturbingly large number of young conservative white men in the US. The defining quality on far left and far right today is anger, often irrational anger directed at scapegoats. That is very much a Weimar Germany quality, in which street gangs of Nazis and communists did frequent and furious battle. That disorder in the streets was the rationalisation many accepted for Hitler’s assumption of power.
Spectre of the Groypers
In November last year, Dreher was returning to Washington, from his then base in Europe, when a friend told him that perhaps 30 or 40 per cent of young conservative staffers and activists in Washington DC were so-called "groypers".
Groyper is one of the ugliest terms in modern politics. After Christian publicist and campaigner Charlie Kirk was murdered, his widow, Erika, said Kirk’s mission had been to “save the lost boys of the West”.
Fuentes and his ilk had universalised their dislike of Jews and also had come almost to a nihilist view of modern life and politics.
The New Yorker magazine earlier this year quoted a representative rave from a Fuentes follower: “I feel we’ve all been robbed of our innocence. All our buildings are these hideous rectangles. We’ve watched hundreds of hours of hardcore porn before we’ve had our first kiss. Why the f. k did that happen? Do our (Republican) leaders care?”
Fuentes, Owens and others popularised the bizarre idea that Israel had been behind Kirk’s murder. Some of their weirdest musings even implicated his widow. There is no limit to the derangement of this stuff.

Projection, but it always happens when the deranged speak of others being deranged.

Behind all this? The eternal refusal of the reptiles to acknowledge there's an ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza, with that broken clock at least right on that one point, Tucker Carlson with Nick Fuentes. Picture: Facebook

The bromancer seemed startled at just how mainstream all this had become, apparently not realising how loons are constantly attracted to Elvis impersonators:

Yet several years ago Fuentes was an honoured dinner guest with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. And Carlson last October gave Fuentes a respectful two-hour interview was ultimately seen by millions and millions of people. Vance won’t criticise Carlson for that interview or so many other similar performances. Vance, like Trump, seems to have a “no enemies on the right” disposition.
Fuentes and his followers named their Jew-focused group of campaigners Groypers, which they illustrated as a slug-like frog.
At first Dreher couldn’t believe the Groyper phenomenon was so widespread.
And of course it must be remembered that there is a great big mainstream in America, including vast numbers of Christians and many other folks of goodwill, who stoutly reject the extremism of left and right.
Finally Dreher asked: what do these Groypers actually want? The answer is they just want to blow everything up.
That’s nihilism. Without verballing Dreher, I think he is arguing that for nihilism to be replaced in the lives of young people it must be answered with the offer of authentic meaning. That’s one of the jobs ahead for our civilisation. Do we still have the resources we need to do this?

Authentic meaning? You won't find it here, and likely you won't find it in the sweet bye and bye ... but you will find evidence of what News Corp has wrought ...

It's easy to see why the pond gave up the entrees.

Nine bloody minutes of Xian-inflected drivel.

And as a result, there was no time for the likes of Rosemary, doing her own version of the bromancer's dance with Dreher ...

EXCLUSIVE
White, male, female, straight or city-based? You are privileged now
National arts body deems ‘whiteness’ and being male or female a privilege
Australia’s peak visual arts body also considers speaking English and not having caring responsibilities privileges under its taxpayer-subsidised ‘safer spaces’ policy.
By Rosemary Neill

The pond knew it was privileged from the get go by the way that Aboriginal people were sent off to get their education in portables across the oval, safely out of sight ...

But no time for that, and no time for Jennings of the fifth form, over on the far right, rabbiting on in his usual way ...

We need to act on growing threat from far-left extremism and its influence on young people
Australia’s domestic norm against the use of violence to achieve political objectives is eroding.
By Peter Jennings
Contributor

Sorry vulgar youff, you'll have to spend some quality time with your Jennings saviour on your own ...the pond doesn't even have time to expose you to far-right extremism of the Jennings kind.

The pond is loyal and had its "Ned" Everest to climb, and look this day, he was the third cab off the rank early in the morning ...

There are intermittent links for the first two, as the pond donned its snow boots and mittens and readied for the climb ...

The header: How Labor failures on immigration opened the door to Hanson; The Albanese government is scrambling for an immigration reset as social cohesion crumbles and One Nation’s populist campaign gains ground.

The caption for the wretched collage, with Emilia putting her hand up to cop the blame: Multiculturalism vs. monoculture is the debate tearing Australia apart, with from left, Pauline Hanson, Anthony Albanese, Tony Burke and John Howard all weighing in on an immigration crisis years in the making. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella. Sources: supplied and iStock.

Eleven minutes of "Ned"...after 9 minutes of bro!

That's 20 minutes down the drain, never to be recovered, as "Ned" attempted one of his grand "vision" thingies, edicts issued from on high, while the pond struggled to get past base camp in the climb ...

The Albanese government is belatedly attempting to address Australia’s immigration crisis that has been mounting for years – a crisis of numbers, skills, temporary migrants, overstayers and a decline in social cohesion – with Labor long mired in political and policy misjudgment and complacency.
There is one certainty – Labor’s reset won’t constitute an adequate response to the full scale of challenges and problems. That is almost certainly beyond Labor’s political vision. The government should have acted far earlier and is caught by underestimating the political reaction to the multiple defects in immigration policy.
With Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke being forced to delay his new immigration policy announcement amid concerns at the top of the government, Labor has intensified the pressure on itself as it tries to get greater control of the system, keep driving down net overseas migration numbers, tackle overstayers, eliminate abuses and inoculate itself against Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigration campaign now damaging the ALP vote.
The nation faces a dilemma about the basics of immigration policy and how Australians should live together. It comes amid justified alarm about the high intake, the transformation of the program into a temporary worker model, a decline in government control of the agenda and a deepening conflict over how Australia should successfully manage its exploding diversity – with political leaders sinking into dispute over this issue.

Marvel at the way that "Ned" manages to avoid mentioning how News Corp has spent the past decade or more demonising furriners and claiming assorted migrants were rooning the country, doing the spadework for Gina's pet ... Police monitor protesters outside a One Nation event attended by Senator Pauline Hanson in Melbourne on August 4. Picture: The Australian / Luis Enrique Ascui

"Ned's" institutional blindness was on parade ...

Labor now faces difficult competing agendas – business groups warning against damaging cuts to the program, a public hostile to the numbers and now sceptical of immigration at a time of prolonged cost-of-living and housing pressures, and the need to revise policy on temporary migration, visa hopping and appeal rights. Expect much of Labor’s focus to be on people exploiting the system.
Given that Anthony Albanese has recently shifted ground and taken the political offensive on taxation, negative gearing and management of artificial intelligence, the test on immigration is whether he opts merely for cosmetic incrementalism or backs significant policy change.
Don’t think this will deter Hanson. She will double down and exploit any Labor policy change.

‘We don’t need more Uber drivers’

We don't? But that's straight out of the Dame Groan playbook, as when she talked with the dog botherer on what was Sky Noise ...

The Australian Contributing Economics Editor Judith Sloan says “everyone,” including migrants, believes the rate of migrant intake has been “too high”.

Naturally Sky Noise down under, rebranded to steal the ABC's thunder, provides a ready home for that sort of carry on ...

Such actions will need to be balanced by Labor’s embedded political identity – the need to retain the voting support of ethnic communities, honour its pro-immigration progressive ideology and ensure that Labor retains the scope to repudiate Hanson.

Hanson wants to keep immigration as her spearhead issue, so expect a polarising contest. If Labor’s changes are seen as too modest, Hanson will say this confirms Labor is incapable of a genuine reset.

She can dial up the rhetoric with impunity; witness her remarks on News24: “We don’t need any more Uber drivers, nail technicians, dog walkers. These people – gone. Stop all that. There’s between 75,000 and I’ve heard 100,000 people that are in the country illegally at the moment … The taxpayers have had enough of this.”

One Nation’s immigration policy is one of its most radical and dangerous. The written policy involves capping visas at 130,000 – sure to throttle the economy – deport 75,000 illegal immigrants, withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention, impose an eight-year waiting period for citizenship and welfare, deny migrant entry from nations that promote extremist ideology, crack down on student visas and limit the powers of the Administrative Review Tribunal.

The orthodox pitch against Hanson – relying on the traditional support for an immigration program that has long worked in the national interest and enjoyed public support – is weaker than before because of Labor’s complacency. In truth, Labor’s policy failures have opened the door to Hanson.

It's Labor? Oh come on "Ned", credit your fellow reptiles because much credit is due ...Pauline Hanson has been met with protesters as she arrived at the Tower Hotel in Hawthorn

After that AV distraction, safely reduced to a cap, "Ned" got into extensive navel gazing, and the pond just let him rip and riff ...

During the 21st century Australia has conducted a near unprecedented bipartisan experiment in population growth driven by immigration. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show from 2000 to 2024 our population grew by 43 per cent, nearly three times the average growth of OECD industrial nations, with immigration contributing 60 to 70 per cent of total growth and peaking at more than 80 per cent during the post-pandemic surge.
With our 43 per cent growth running at around twice that of the US and Britain, this is the macro story atop a series of astonishing micro figures that suggest the only surprising feature of the current trauma is that it isn’t even more contentious. For instance, about 10 per cent of the nation’s population, or around 2.9 million people, are temporary migrants.
Immigration policy has been transformed in ways most people don’t understand but that only guarantee further division. The current permanent migration program set at 185,000 (roughly split 70-30 per cent between skilled and family reunion), with much of the intake coming from people already onshore, is sidelined by another model with temporary migrants now an indispensable part of our economy.
In the process immigration has becoming essential to our GDP growth since it substitutes for the absence of productivity, but at the moment we suffer from both weaker GDP growth and far weaker GDP per capita.
The critical emerging dilemma is the decline of social cohesion and the loss of confidence in Australia as a unified nation bonded with shared values. Labor and the progressive establishment have turned diversity into an unqualified good – almost a secular faith – seeding an inevitable collision between their ideology and a more balanced view of the national interest. Australia is now divided over what diversity means and how to manage it.
Who are we?
The standard refrain from diversity’s champions is best put by Albanese in his repudiation of Hanson, with the Prime Minister declaring that multiculturalism is “who we are”. That’s clear – multiculturalism is not just a policy, it’s an identity.
For Albanese, it’s also a badge of unity because, apart from the Indigenous peoples, “we’re all either migrants or descendants of migrants in some ways”. The message: in the past we had Ned Kelly, the First AIF, Don Bradman and Paul Hogan – but multiculturalism is forever. Got it?
Usually attacked for his lack of vision, Albanese was filled with vision on this issue: “I think we can be a microcosm for the world at our best, that shows that people of different ethnicities, different faiths, different backgrounds live overwhelming in harmony.” In short, Australia as a model for the world. Albanese happily declares that being multicultural means “we’re loyal to Australia”. That apparently defines the erosion of social cohesion out of existence.
Labor is kidding itself, deceived by its own propaganda.
Nobody has got this right
The current dispute – utterly futile – over whether Australia is a monocultural or a multicultural nation is a flawed debate in a country in danger of losing its way. Here is the grim conclusion: no leader and no party has got this response right.
Given a fertile field for her campaign, Hanson has provoked progressive rage with her declaration that Australia could not be a “multicultural society” but must instead be “monocultural” and live under “one umbrella”. What this means is imprecise, with Hanson later saying our diverse Socceroos team constituted her vision of a “monocultural Australia” with the players united under one nation and one flag.
But Hanson leaves no doubt about her real target: “One Nation is dedicated to fighting against radical Islam and the obvious threat it represents to the peace of our country” – a statement most Australians would endorse – while saying she seeks to prioritise traditions, the English language and the Judaeo-Christian heritage.

... which is exactly what the pond reads daily in the lizard Oz, you known endless interminable blather about prioritising traditions, the English language and the Judaeo-Christian heritage, to the point where the pond has had more than a gut full or three, but do go on, ...

The claims that Hanson hasn’t changed in 30 years miss the point. While still exposed to the accusation of racism, she now pitches to a country where social cohesion is declining and the reality of Islamist threats, intolerance and antisemitism create a mood more susceptible to her appeals.
‘Mr Practical’ joins the debate
This week John Howard entered the fray. He came as Mr Practical, saying the current debate was “pointless”. Howard said people didn’t really know what “monoculture” meant given our long accepted diverse immigration program, but he still felt the word “multicultural” had the uncomfortable connotation of “a nation of tribes”.
Howard conceded his government did not completely abandon its use by preferring the term “Australian multiculturalism”, saying this stressed “the unifying elements of Australian citizenship irrespective of ethnic origins”. In effect, this was a patch-up compromise that did the job. But it seems to have left the Liberal Party in a current state of equivocation when, given the contradictory boldness of Albanese and Hanson, conceptual clarity is needed from the Liberals on how Australians should live together.

The lying rodent has been reinvented as "Mr Practical"?

The man who lost not just government but his own seat, is now a font of wisdom? John Howard and Pauline Hanson. Howard says the current debate on multiculturalism is ‘pointless’.

Here's the real problem for the reptiles.

Labor might have had its problem, but Gina's pampered pet (nine hundred bucks for a hotel room) has stolen the beefy boofhead's thunder ...

Angus Taylor has pledged to cut numbers and lift standards to enforce Australian values. But the Opposition Leader faltered when pressed on Hanson’s assault on multiculturalism, initially refusing to support the concept much to the alarm of many Liberal MPs, before backing a “version of multiculturalism” but not Hanson’s monoculture. How the Liberals define and would enforce Australian values is not fully explained.
Deputy leader Jane Hume said Australia was already a multicultural society and took aim at the opposing sides: “I reject the politics of identity of the left on multiculturalism but, my goodness, I also reject the policy of cultural fear on the right.” It reminds of the middle position the Liberals must try to sell.
Labor’s inability to contain the number of arrivals has only accentuated the mono-multi misleading debate. The government keeps overshooting its targets – net overseas migration reached 538,340 and 429,000 in the two years post-Covid and Labor’s aim to cut the numbers to 225,000 still remains a forlorn goal.
One of multiculturalism’s principles – that the animosities of the originating nation cannot be transplanted to Australia – is trashed almost daily. The tensions from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are about identity, existence and religion and are being played out globally, including in Australia.
No respite from antisemitism
The breakdown of the social order reveals a changing Australia. The Bondi massacre with its 15 victims was the worse killing of Jews in any Western democracy since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the upshot being a royal commission to investigate antisemitism and its drivers, and to recommend on measures to counter rising ideological and religious extremism in Australia. But since Bondi there has been no respite from antisemitism, with its prevalence more apparent than ever across educational, cultural and community institutions.
Incredibly, it is still not recognised that antisemitism, while sui generis, is partly driven by a re-coding of progressive political morality that demonises Jews by falsely casting Israel as a white, racist, colonial-settler nation – and that similar ideological arguments are already invoked from within to undermine Australia’s legitimacy, self-identity and cultural unity.

Hang on, hang on, what about a respite from ethnic cleansing? C.f. Haaretz ...

Israel's 'Total Victory' Means Endless War
Faced with failure, Israel has embraced Vietnamization – entrenching itself in newly occupied territories and calling it victory
Zvi Bar'el

Inter alia ...

...Israel has taken control of about 600 square kilometers in Lebanon and another 235 square kilometers in Syria since the fall of the Bashar Assad regime. It occupies about 70 percent of the Gaza Strip and the entire West Bank is de facto occupied territory. This system has lengthened the country's borders and expanded and deepened the areas of friction and conflict with a hostile population, international organizations and foreign armies. It only creates the illusion that security is within reach.
The truth is this is neither the result of a military doctrine nor a temporary operation intended to ward off an immediate threat or as a step toward a diplomatic solution.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about staying in Lebanon or Gaza "as long as needed," and Defense Minister Israel Katz "orders" the construction of a base in Lebanon "as if we're going to stay there for 50 years," they are formulating an ideology that reduces Israel to a logistical center whose purpose is to supply soldiers and maintain the occupied territories forever. That, in turn, is closely connected with another principle, which holds that the destruction of the foundations of democracy and the elimination of the political, economic and cultural horizon of its citizens are only collateral damage. After all, the state is the sum of its territories, not the sum of its citizens.

And again ...

A Year After a Settler Shot Awdah Hathaleen, His Village Still Can't Mourn in Peace
'Since Awdah was killed, there has been no place for joy in our lives. The joy in our hearts has gone out'
Abby Seitzand Nagham Zbeedat

Israeli army and police forces disrupted a memorial ceremony held in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair on Tuesday to mark one year since Awdah Hathaleen, a 30-year-old father of three, was shot dead on the basketball court by an Israeli settler standing 30 meters away.
The Palestinian Bedouin village, located in the South Hebron Hills region, is familiar with being robbed of its ability to mourn. Last summer, more than 60 women from Umm al-Khair held an 11-day hunger strike to demand that Israel release Awdah's body for burial, which the state complied with – on the condition that the funeral be limited to 15 attendees and conducted at night away from the village.
The community of 200 people, roughly half of whom are children, this year intentionally planned a small ceremony, extending invitations to only a few dozen longtime friends of the village from Israel and abroad, out of the thousands of people who Awdah welcomed to visit the village over the years.
"Ultimately, we live under a brutal occupation that respects neither memorials nor death, loss or any human right, so we tried to keep it small," Awdah's cousin Tariq Hathaleen, 31, tells Haaretz.

And so on and on and on, but look at how "Ned" shamelessly skews it ...

The conflicts over antisemitism and Islamophobia are just related to the Jewish and Muslim communities. The issues at stake and the politics being deployed affect the entire Australian nation. This is not a story in isolation. It is revealing the inadequacy of our multiculturalism theory and practice. There is genuine public concern about a minority arriving hostile to Australian core values and living in religious tribes that are sceptical or hostile to such values.
The upshot is obvious: a schism in the country between ideological advocates of diversity and ideological fears that Australia’s character and values are being eroded.

Being troubled by meaningless deaths in Gaza, or by meaningless deaths in Bondi, is eroding Australia's character and values? Mourners lay flowers at Bondi Pavilion to honour the 15 victims of last Sunday's attack. Picture: Tom Parrish

And so to "Ned's" "solutions, and the pond again let him rant ...

Amid all these contentions, the shape of the fundamental reforms needed are not hard to discern.
Immigration urgently needs to be restored to the national interest in terms of lower numbers and priority skills; temporary migration demands better planning and revised policy; the “monoculture” slogan – never an accurate post-1788 label for this country – needs to be thrown into the bin; the reality of being a multicultural society is here to stay and efforts to cancel the concept won’t work; but champions of diversity for its own sake should grasp their driving ideology is flawed and will increasingly undermine Australia; and, above all, advocates of the status quo – strong immigration tied to multiculturalism – need to recognise this agenda works only when linked to promotion of a civic-minded Australian unity and patriotism that, these days, seems improbable given the embedded “black-armband” view of our history.
Unless it surprises, Labor seems hostage to progressive culture that prioritises diversity over unity and also hostage to ethnic support as pivotal to its election survival. As my colleague Henry Ergas has written, the forces in Australia promoting integration as opposed to separatism are now weaker than ever: “Thanks partly to the miracles of modern communications, it is now entirely possible to live in separate communities, completely immersed in one’s culture of origin and hostile to the culture of the country in which one has chosen to actually live.”
Ergas quoted the late, great American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset identifying an eternal truth: “Wherever the social structure operates so as to isolate individuals or groups from contact with those who hold different views, the isolated individuals or groups tend to back political extremists.”
The Scanlon Foundation 2025 Mapping Social Cohesion report, based on 8000 interviews, found strong support for multiculturalism at 83 per cent, with 67 per cent saying accepting migrants from many countries made Australian stronger. But attitudes varied according to the religion of migrants. A total of 35 per cent had negative attitudes towards Muslim migration as opposed to only 16 per cent being positive. In relation to Christian migrants 38 per cent were positive and 18 per cent negative.
National pride’s retreat
Significantly, people don’t want official support to help migrants maintain their original culture, with only 33 per cent agreeing with this idea. The conclusion: the public expects migrants to accept the norms of Australian life. Herein is the problem with multiculturalism: it has been relentlessly recast over the years to legitimise diversity over unity, raising the danger of Australia becoming a nation of subcultures.
National pride in Australia is in distinct retreat. The survey showed only 46 per cent of people felt a strong sense of belonging in Australia, with only 34 per cent taking pride in the Australian way of life and culture. These numbers have fallen sharply across the past five years. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) with a strong sense of belonging fell from 64 per cent across 2010-12 to 34 per cent in 2025.
One of the most penetrating surveys on attitudes towards migrants was published in 2025 by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times, finding that politicians “have become misaligned from the public on immigration and integration”. On the question “immigrants should be required to adapt to the customs of this country”, public agreement ran at 87 per cent in Britain, 75 per cent in Germany, 74 per cent in the Netherlands and 61 per cent in Sweden. Yet the numbers for politicians on the same question were respectively 47 per cent, 33 per cent, 43 per cent and 34 per cent.
The Gulf between the political class and the public in Australia is probably not as large – but the gulf is still real. Australia has long been a standout for acceptance of large-scale immigration based on legal entry. As an island nation Australia, unlike most developed nations, can impose border controls, thereby avoiding the current plight of Britain facing mass illegal arrivals by boat. Yet Australia, dealing only with legal migration, has still managed to leave itself exposed in economic and social terms.
Politics in the coming decade will see strong populist forces on both the right and left with immigration policy often trapped in the middle. The future will also be shaped by how Muslim political identify will evolve both inside and outside the established parties.
As astute politicians, Labor leaders would know there is a rising tide for national identity. It is driven by a more dangerous world, the emphasis on state power and citizenship, higher defence spending, a priority on national security, a rising mood of patriotism and the realisation that a civic culture bonded by share values is an essential condition for a nation’s success. Thinking diversity is enough and an unqualified virtue won’t work in this world.

The pond's sense of national pride was soiled the moment that the Emeritus Chairman took the title of The Australian and used it as a home for a bunch of far right ratbags, endlessly rabbiting on about a faux kind of patriotism which promoted division and discrimination, down there with the likes of Viktor...

To be fair, there were others who helped the reptiles in that mission, and isn't karma a fine thing ...

Elbows up Canada, as the pond calls it a Sharri day ...

In which the Killer Kreighton Kovid Kult makes the kut, and so does Our Henry, but don't expect any joy ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:28:20 +0000

Still with the comrade Dan obsession?

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
‘No more backroom deals’: Victorian Premier slams Andrews era in ‘big reset’
New Premier Ben Carroll attacks Daniel Andrews era in ‘big reset’ for Victoria
Ben Carroll says he will draw a line under the Andrews years with tougher cabinet processes, a more business-friendly agenda and a promise there will ‘never ever’ be another hotel-room deal.

And how does Ben think he's going to win the punters over by appearing in the lizard oz looking like some drongo high above the masses in an undertaker's suit?

Really Ben? That's the hill you're going to die on, trashing the brand and pandering to the reptiles, while looking like a corporate hack peering out at the world from BHP's offices? (What a nice view that was).

Meanwhile, in that other place. Two very different leads:

Exclusive Political expenses

Empty 5-star room: Hanson paid for $900-a-night hotel with party funds

Perrottet was eyeing the exit. Then came the tapes

Jean-Claude Perrottet arrives at the ICAC on Thursday.

Tapped phone calls should remind the public – and politicians seeking to undermine the ICAC’s work – of the grave nature of this latest probe.

What else? Still think mad King Donald and his minions offers protection?

Apparently, with a different Ben packing it twice, just below that other Ben early on Friday morn ...

EXCLUSIVE
US to deploy 2300 troops to WA under ‘base’ arrangement
US establishes military base framework in Western Australia for AUKUS submarines
The Albanese government insists it is not a US base, but defence experts say Washington’s new Naval Support Activity Stirling tells a very different story.
By Ben Packham

COMMENTARY by BEN PACKHAM
A braver government would be more frank about nature of pact
Four US submarines and 2300 Americans are to be stationed in Western Australia, yet the government insists it will not be a base – a distinction critics say defies belief.

...For Australia, this means gaining the experience of operating and maintaining nuclear submarines before we get our own, and enjoying the long-term deterrent effect provided by the close proximity of the US’s apex undersea predators.
The US, for its part, gains access to Australia’s prized strategic geography, placing its Submarine Squadron 3 at much safer distance from Chinese missiles than it would be if it were based in the Pacific Ocean at Hawaii or Guam.
Labor struggles to speak clearly about any of this because it is desperate to avoid a backlash over the submarine pact from within its own left faction, which has a strong anti-US streak.
A braver government would be open to a frank conversation about the need for a long-term US submarine presence in Australia, and the true nature of the agreement.

A braver government would admit to thinking mad King Donald is a winner? And we're on board the AUKUS gravy train?

You mean we'll get all the stunning benefits on display in the ongoing war in Iran? And all the help offered to Ukraine up against Vlad the sociopathic invader? And a serve of the peace bequeathed to Gaza?

That's bravery Ben? Or just another form of madness?

Thanks, but no thanks, the pond will keep its distance ...

And if lizard Oz drivel is what's required, where's the bromancer when he's needed?

The pond then looked nervously over on the extreme far right and sadly the bromancer was nowhere to be found.

Sure the reptiles kept peddling the notion that Cape York was the solution to it all, as if a "one size fits all" routine would sort out diverse Aboriginal communities around the land ...

Drop the pilots: make Cape York reform agenda standard framework
Education key to converting reform policies into real change for Indigenous communities
We have learned enough to know that if family responsibility is backed by real opportunity, the gap can close within a generation.
By Fiona Jose and Kirstyne Davis

A Voice bringing diverse groups together might have helped, but if the pond learned anything from its time in Alice Springs, peddling the Cape York mob as the solution would sink in Todd river sand like a stone.

Oh, and the meretricious Merritt bobbed up to join a pretty standard jihad bashing the cardigan wearers...

ABC apology exposes a media watchdog that fails ordinary people
Gina’s win over ABC highlights untouchable nature of the national broadcaster to everyone else
After weeks of vacillation, the ABC mea culpa to Gina Rinehart over an offensive segment highlights that only those with financial clout can achieve what ACMA should have the power to do.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor

It takes some fair cheek for the reptiles to berate ACMA, what with that completely useless body, that toothless tiger, routinely giving the Murdochians a free pass, but whatever ...

Speaking of the ABC, the pond rarely notes their contributions, but just knew this clip would drive the reptiles into a frenzy ...(there are graphs!)

And that was backed up by the infallible Pope...

Why save all that up for the next bout of climate science denialism?

Some days when the lizard Oz is fully in the pits the pond has to make its own fun.

Things then took a turn for the worse when the pond discovered that the pond's usual Friday outings were both dismal

Killer took to Victoria and sheesh, there was comrade Dan again, this time imitating a startled rabbit ...

The header: New Premier Ben Carroll confronts legacy of waste and debt left by his predecessors

Victoria’s public sector executive ranks have nearly tripled in a decade, with a new $400,000-salary role emblematic of the waste Premier Ben Carroll must now confront.

The caption for the uncredited collage, and oh noes, there's the comrade and Jacinta too, and that shameless spiv is in the middle ... Jacinta Allan, Ben Carroll and Dan Andrews.

Sure, it was only a three minute read, but the pond got the sulks, especially as the pond couldn't help wondering if Killer ever worked from home?

And did his definition of productivity include wankers scribbling propaganda for the IPA and getting it into the lizard Oz?

Sitting on the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s website is a job advertisement for a Multicultural Co-ordinator General with a salary of $344,616- $400,741, excluding superannuation.

The new Premier, Ben Carroll, deserves credit for slimming down the number of minister jobs by two to 20 and announcing a royal commission into the state’s corrupt construction sector.

He’s even flagged scaling back his predecessor’s productivity-destroying working-from-home laws and the monstrously wasteful Suburban Rail Loop – about the only infrastructure project whose ultimate cost would put Snowy 2.0 to shame.

The reptiles flung a bit of artwork which strangely looked quite good ...An artist’s impression of the Suburban Rail Loop’s Box Hill station.

Killer then took to bashing all his pet peeves, a bog standard jihad against multiculturals and pesky, difficult, uppity blacks ...

Whoever becomes multicultural co-ordinator won’t be short of colleagues: the number of Victorian public sector “executives”, on between around $250,000 and $800,000 a year has almost tripled from 691 a decade ago, two years into Dan Andrews’ first term, to 1902 last year, during which time the state’s population rose 18 per cent. No wonder annual employee costs of the Victorian public sector, which now employs one in 10 Victorians, have jumped from $26bn in the year to June 2020 to $41bn this financial year.

Carroll must know how offensive these highly paid, pointless public sector jobs would be to the sort of people he grew up with in working-class Melbourne and worked with at Kmart for eight years, while he was a high school and university student.

But he’s unlikely to make much progress given what he’s up against. The shameless, brazen waste of public money right under the new Premier’s nose signals just how extreme and arrogant the public sector, especially at the top, has become.

Carroll has exceeded expectations in his first fortnight only because they had plumbed to such low depths. His predecessor, Jacinta Allan, couldn’t even bring herself to accept Helen Silver’s review last year to trim 2000 bureaucratic positions from a total public sector headcount of around 393,000 last year.

The longer Carroll remains silent on public sector bloat and the vast array of other destructive policies Andrews and Allan have saddled the state with, the more disappointing he’ll become, and the bigger political opportunities he’ll present to the Coalition and One Nation.

Dumping the costly and divisive First Nations Assembly known as Gellng Warl (which no one even knows how to pronounce) should be a no-brainer for two powerful reasons at least.

There you go, a sort of smarmy condescension and wilful ignorance of the kind that typifies Killer's contributions (no one knows how to say the less than admirable Crichton)... and pause for an image of actual black people designed to shock the hive mind ...Chairs of the First Peoples Assembly of Victoria, Premier Jacinta Allan and Treaty Minister Natalie Hutchins and cabinet ministers gather for a day of ceremony and celebration of the start of Treaty negotiations. Picture: Justin McManus

Killer was outraged, and promptly went into a litany ... and yes, he took to brooding about Covid for the umpteenth time...

Around 60 per cent of Victorians voted specifically against such a racially divisive body only a few years ago in the voice referendum. Moreover, it’s expected to cost more than $70m a year in a state where even net debts are approaching $200bn and annual interest payments are about to soak up a quarter of the state’s own tax revenue by 2030.

Cutting taxes in our most heavily taxed state should be as sensible politically as it is economically. Why are Victorian businesses still being forced to pay an annual Covid levy? Why must they also pay a mental health levy, which no other state has?

Dumping the Andrews Gas Substitution road map, which will ultimately prevent Victorians using the energy form in which their own state is most rich, should be another easy one. Allan herself had to back down on forcing dwellings to replace their gas stoves and hot water heaters from next year.

But all new dwellings must not use gas – which many households prefer to cook with – in any way from January 2027. Carroll should go further and dump the whole thing, giving Victorians and developers with foresight the option to use gas if they want.

The policy is so stupid the government isn’t even following its own road map, having approved two LNG import terminals at Geelong and Vopak while simultaneously trying to reduce long-term gas demand. It’s also walked back from an earlier blanket state ban on all gas exploration, allowing the conventional onshore type once again since 2021. There are quite a few low fiscal cost actions Carroll should ponder too, such as apologising for Labor’s treatment of Victorians during Covid.

Most numerate and intelligent people now understand what happened in Victoria for hundreds of days in 2020-21 was an obscene and immensely destructive violation of fundamental human rights with no scientific basis, which also wrecked Melbourne’s international reputation, perhaps forever. A sorry, even without compensation, would be nice.

Privately assuring the police they had the government’s full backing to aggressively enforce the law – in a state enduring an obvious increase in theft and youth lawlessness – would be a cheap way to score a political win.

The Liberal, National and One Nation parties would have been privately disappointed Labor’s new Premier promptly called a by now obviously worthy royal commission last week. But they shouldn’t be too worried. So far it seems Carroll doesn’t have the skill or power to dump the entirety of Allan’s economically insane policy of giving workers the right to work from home two days a week at their employers’ cost.

If he can’t do that, then the rest of the recommendations in this column are theirs for the taking!

Adam Creighton is the chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Remember, dying from a virus is a fundamental human right.

Made it through that? Have a 'toon.

Talk about setting a tone Ms Wilcox, because things then got even worser (the pond even felt the need to abuse the English language)...

Our Henry returned to his favourite jihad like a Tamworth dog seeking out its vomit.

The header: Islamism has exploited our culture of political confusion; Our aim should be social cohesion, secured by effectively preventing the importation or perpetuation of ancient hatreds and forging common bonds strong enough to sustain diversity.

The caption for the artwork, which is frankly appalling, even more appalling than Frank's usual rank offerings: The clash of ideologies has resulted in a perceived failure of Australia's multicultural society. Art: Frank Ling

Frankly execrable Frank, but the pond does look forward to you doing the same for barking mad Jewish fundamentalists some day (and throw in some white nationalist Xians on another day while you're at it).

Frank aside, imagine if you will a headline that proposed "Judaism has exploited our culture of political confusion".

There'd be an uproar in the lizard Oz, and wild-eyed talk of anti-Semitism ...

Our Henry might disingenuously propose that his slur wasn't directed at Islam or Islamics, but instead at "Islamism", but in reality it's cultivating a standard kind of Islamophobia.

And yet if you dared to mention another sort of word ...

Enough already and for a moment the pond thought the hole in bucket man might have been distracted from his jihad because he began by rabbiting on about Pauline and monoculturalism, and in classic style, managed to show another facet of his endless bigotry ...

When Pauline Hanson told the National Press Club in June that Australia “cannot be a multicultural society. We must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella”, she sparked a political bushfire.

Anthony Albanese answered emphatically: “Modern Australia is not a monoculture, and it never has been … It’s really a nonsense argument to go back to (a monoculture) that was actually never there.” He offered the Socceroos – a 26-man World Cup squad from 15 cultural backgrounds – as proof of Australia’s “rich culture”.

But Hanson reached for the same example to prove the opposite: “When we actually go to the Olympics, we represent our nation, like the Socceroos. It’s all under one flag.”

Meanwhile, the Coalition was at sixes and sevens. Angus Taylor said he did not know what “monoculture” meant, then called it “vague” and conceded he believed in “a version of multiculturalism”.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan admitted he had never heard the word “monoculturalism” before Hanson used it, and reached instead for “a common culture that unites us all”.

Liberal MP Garth Hamilton denounced monoculturalism outright: “I celebrate the cultural divide of my Irish Catholic side as much as my Scottish Protestant side. I will not deny either.”

Yet none of the warring parties paused to define the word on which the whole argument depended: culture. That matters because every position in the dispute shares one buried assumption: that culture is a fixed object – something a society can possess in the singular or plural, count, add or subtract.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a snap seemingly designed to help Our Henry's cause ...The Socceroos were cited as a prime example of multiculturalism.

The hole in bucket man avoided Thucydides but reverted to Latin and Arendt, as only this kind of pompous pedant does, anything but admit that team was a fine example of multicultural players coming together in common purpose...

Hanson wants one cultural object for everybody. Albanese counts 15 on a football roster and calls the result “rich”. Hamilton finds two within his own inheritance and celebrates them both. Taylor and Canavan cannot say what kind of object they mean at all, which is at least honest.

Nobody in this argument is wrong to think culture matters. But everybody is wrong about what culture is.

The correction is embedded in the word itself. “Culture” descends from the Latin colere – to cultivate – and Hannah Arendt pointed out that cultivation was traditionally understood as the opposite of “fabrication”. A carpenter fabricates a table according to a fixed design. A farmer cultivates a field in accordance with its capacity to grow, and the process is never complete. What is cultivated grows; it is not manufactured.

The pond had to interrupt. That's monstrously absurd, a kind of perverse twist on Rousseau's desire to organise society justly ...

Forget all that "the answer lies in the cultivated soil" nonsense.

Culture can be manufactured, in fact culture, as Brian Eno is alleged to have said, is anything you can get away with, or is what you tolerate, or what you love or embrace, orwhat you can manufacture, as artists and entrepreneurs do on a daily basis ...

But in his usual perverse way, the pompous pedant will have none of it ...

Yet political argument has increasingly made “culture” mean almost the reverse: a thing, complete on arrival, to be protected beneath a single umbrella or arranged, item by item, in an ever-expanding exhibition – in the Prime Minister’s image, tallied on a roster. Each is a picture of fabrication masquerading as cultivation.

That is what makes the Socceroos such a good example – just not for the reason either side supposes. The team does not vindicate Hanson’s umbrella, clamped over everyone regardless of what lies beneath it; still less does it vindicate Albanese’s tally of 15 backgrounds. A roster is merely a list until its members train together, submit to common rules and disciplines, and, without losing their individuality, unite around a shared goal. Only then does co-operation become second nature.

The roster can be assembled; the team must be cultivated. Nor is the result ever final. Without ceasing to be that team, the team changes as it encounters new opponents and as new members learn to work and strive together respecting the rules they have inherited.

First you do the multicultural thing. Then you get the team together.

And there's the heart of that thing.

At no point does Our Henry pause to consider that this team was made up of people coming from different cultures, and also consisted of many people who were of a different colour - the kind that suffer abuse from the mob on the hill - and the usual suspects wouldn't even turn up to speak - though that collage clearly showed it, and in a way that made talk of a "monoculture" a patent absurdity, and required Gina's pet to attempt all kinds of obfuscations.

How does Our Henry try to get out of that dilemma, that pretence that he's colour blind in a dinkum way? In the usual way, by parading a couple of big names...

Tocqueville, asking what sustained American self-government, found the same pattern at the level of an entire nation. It rested not on a possession but on “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people”: its “habits of the heart”, absorbed rather than proclaimed. Ludwig Wittgenstein, asking what makes shared understanding possible at all, called it a form of life – the “bedrock” guiding the flow of a people’s myriad purposes, yet one that slowly but incessantly shifts, like a riverbed beneath the current.

The nearest word for the process by which such a bedrock takes shape among people who did not all inherit it is neither monoculturalism nor multiculturalism. It is acculturation: the reciprocal adjustment of habits and expectations that sustains a cohesive, diverse society.

That process, rather than any official doctrine, is what built modern Australia.

Nah, sorry, multiculturalism might have been peddled by politicians, but it was always more than an official policy.

You only have to look at ancient notions peddled by the pond's old history prof, a certain Russell Ward ...

...The findings of revisionist historians present a strong argument in favour of a reconsideration of the Australian Bush Legend. Richard Waterhouse comments that despite being one of the most multicultural countries in the world, ethnic diversity is not featured. Likewise, women are not represented by the image of the Bushman. On the contrary, the Bushman’s values are ‘explicitly defined in opposition to a feminine domesticity’. Grimshaw traces these ‘feminine’ values back to the writers of the nineteenth century initially responsible for the creation of the Bush Legend, asserting that women represented conservatism and respectability ‘which the young bohemians condemned.’ Aborigines too were excluded from the concept of Australian nationalism. Jeannie Gunn’s autobiography, We of the Never Never, a recommended school text until the 1960s, portrayed aborigines as loveable and entertaining, ‘but outside the real story of Australia – the romance of pioneering.’ Thus despite the contribution of various groups to the development of Australia’s history, the Bush Legend is characterized by a single human image which reflects a narrow strand of white, rural men. Such an image is undeniably incomprehensive and out of touch with any contemporary understanding of egalitarianism. (here)

"Incomprehensive"?

Never mind, the point is that many origin stories carefully exclude certain minorities, or even half the population, in the case of women.

Our Henry went on to commit the same thought crime ...

The English, Scots and Irish, and later successive waves of migrants, did not automatically become a people who could plausibly say “we”.

Hang on, hang on, what about the Welsh?

What about the Africans and Americans in the first fleet? What about other European minorities there at the get go?

He scribbles glibly, in a tripping but deeply exclusionist way.

The achievement was partly the spontaneous result of mixing. But it was also deliberate: equal rights were extended and enforced, common institutions built and defended, a shared national story taught and sectarian provocations contained. It demanded hard, reciprocal work, and it succeeded.

Yet the present debate has ceased even to acknowledge that work, for two equally damaging reasons.

Our Henry's slur became the caption for a snap, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese abandoned the expectation that a shared civic life must be cultivated and sustained. Picture: Matt Turner

The pond paused to wonder yet again.

Has there ever been a more divisive, a more fracturing, a more destructive force in Australian life than News Corp?

It's hard to think of one.

And then to prove the point, Our Henry turned to stoning the Islamics ...

The first is a multiculturalism that measures its success as the Prime Minister measured the Socceroos – by the length of the list – while quietly abandoning the older expectation that a shared civic life must be cultivated and sustained, not merely tallied.

The second is an intellectually incoherent cultural relativism. If stoning adulterers and amputating thieves’ hands are barbaric, then a culture that has abandoned those practices is, in that respect, better than one that retains them.

He does realise that stonings were a stock in trade for Jews and Xians, as memorably celebrated in Life of Brian?

He does realise that a good hand cutting was also a part of the bible?

When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets:

Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her. (KJV, Deuteronomy 25:11-12)

Don't get the pond wrong. The pond is all for telling the Jews and the Xians (and the Islamics) to piss off, but does Our Henry realise what he's traducing?

Nah ... it's just nonsense out of the Baden-Powell playbook ...

To deny even that turns humility in judging other cultures into a prohibition on moral judgment – and therefore on moral progress, which necessarily implies that some ways of life are preferable to those they supersede.

Relativism exacts a further, even steeper, cost. Reflecting on French society, Lucien Febvre observed that successful acculturation requires a “complicity of sentiment” – an aspiration by newcomers to belong. But a society trained to claim no more for its own way of life than that it is one option among equally valid others has little with which to attract that aspiration. It can still compel obedience to its laws. It cannot credibly ask to be joined. And now that the “tyranny of distance” no longer forces newcomers to adapt, joining must be chosen – and choice requires compelling reasons.

Yet instead of providing those reasons, multiculturalism has supplied powerful incentives to remain apart: subsidising organisations devoted to preserving separateness and then hailing its persistence as evidence of the policy’s success. The result is utterly predictable: the roster Albanese glorifies masquerading as a team, increasingly at war with itself.

That is the ground on which Islamism has become entrenched: present in Australia’s largest cities in the census sense, but resident in Beirut in every sense that matters, and organised around social norms that reject acculturation as a matter of principle. It is a way of life deliberately constructed to keep its adherents at odds with the wider society while drawing on that society’s welfare state.

Our aim, in the end, should be not stifling uniformity but social cohesion, secured by effectively preventing the importation or perpetuation of ancient hatreds and forging common bonds strong enough to sustain diversity. Achieving that requires an exit from the mono/multi argument, not a new position within it: a return to vigorously promoting, rather than undermining, acculturation and the civic habits that once turned arrivals from everywhere into a nation. Culture was never something Australia could own or count. It has always been, and remains, something Australians have to do.

So long as the reptiles keep on with this pompous pedant, there will never be any kind of social cohesion in the land ...

Meanwhile, the Australian soccer team should count the blessings that allowed skilled players of all kinds in country, in much the same way that many other countries like to build a team and make life grand for the error-laden Infantino

And now as Our Henry began by talking of Gina's pampered pet, a few 'toons ...

The immortal Rowe doubled down ...

Did the immortal Rowe just defame Gould and Bin Chooks?

Quite possibly ... Threskiornis Strictipennis. White Ibis John Gould (1804 - 1881)

Some days doing herpetological studies really gets the pond down. Some might think this some kind of metaphor for difficulties in life, but it perfectly encapsulates the difficulties of being a herpetology student ...

In which only the bromancer in a state of terror, and Jennie nuking renewables made the cut ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:56:27 +0000

The saga of comrade Dan living rent free in the hive mind of the lizard Oz continued apace this day ... just look at him glowering away in a fabulous collage which had the pond calling out "artiste, artiste", only for no one to be credited ...

For those that might care ...

INSIDE STORY
‘C-bombs, f-bombs and secrets’: the deal that landed Andrews and Marshall in IBAC
Intercepted phone calls, text messages and secret hotel meetings … here’s how IBAC tracked Dan Andrews and Peter Marshall.
By Damon Johnston

DAMNING VERDICT
‘Intolerable’ stench of Dan Andrews pollutes new Victorian Premier
As Daniel Andrews insists he has been vindicated, Victorian Premier Ben Carroll has labelled his predecessor’s conduct ‘intolerable’ and pledged sweeping integrity reforms following IBAC’s eight-year investigation.
By Damon Johnston, Anthony Galloway and Lily McCaffrey

How could petulant Peta resist howling at the moon?

How the reptiles yearn for at least one state election victory ...

COMMENTARY by PETA CREDLIN
State Labor’s integrity crisis deepens
Victoria’s new Premier has vowed to restore integrity, but his response to a landmark IBAC corruption report proves nothing has changed under Labor.

Meanwhile, in another place, with fancy numerical rotating graphic...

Analysis Operation Rosny
From ‘Nun Runs’ to factional funds: ICAC’s unholy six degrees of separation
The extended Perrottet family.
A small group of people from a number of large families feature prominently in a bombshell inquiry into branch stacking and illegal donations.
By Kate McClymont

And there was a Wilcox to go with that ...

It seem that the reptiles ability to indulge in selective blindness has now reached the level of the United States, where it's Faux Noise against the world, with coverage of inquiries here limited to whatever panders to the base.

The pond stepped past all that - comrade Dan is but an ancient memory, even for his ardent followers within the extended family - with that lesser member of the Kelly gang setting the pace on more interesting matters.

Progressive triumph in Democrat primary, but a gamble come November
Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic primary is a key progressive win, but his greater challenge is showing progressive politics can prevail at a statewide general election
By Joe Kelly
Washington correspondent

The reptiles were terrified ...

KEY PRIMARY
Progressive candidate wins Michigan Democratic Senate nomination
Out-spent nine-to-one and written off by the party machine, Democratic socialist Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan’s Senate primary in a result that could cost Democrats control of the chamber.
By John McCormick and Anthony DeBarros

The bromancer leapt in to the fray, and that, of course, made the pond's day ...

The header: Far-left’s Abdul El-Sayed defeats party favourite in major blow to Democrats; The victory of far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for November’s Senate race is an earthquake in American politics.

The caption for the snap of a candidate whose very appearance would send a shiver down the spine of any dinkum white Xian: Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Democratic Senate primary winner Abdul El-Sayed. Picture: Finn Gomez, AFP

The bromancer could only muster three minutes of hysteria, but how sweet it was.

Some might think the real earthquake was the second coming of mad King Donald, but not in bromancer la la land ...

Extremism rules!

The victory of far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for November’s Senate race was narrow in the end, but it’s an earthquake in American politics.
It opens up a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon between normal, progressive, centre left Democrats and the wild new radicals mounting a far-left insurgency against the party’s values, traditions, history and policies.
El-Sayed beat four-term congresswoman Haley Stevens to become the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s Senate seat in the November midterm elections.
Stevens was supported by the retiring Democrat senator Gary Peters, the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer. She’d been a strong election winner before, taking a seat from an incumbent Republican congressman.
El-Sayed, who if elected will be the first Muslim in the Senate, was supported by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far-left activist base beyond the Democratic Party.
Some of El-Sayed’s campaign was standard progressive populism – tax the rich, expand healthcare, all perfectly respectable.
But a lot of his positions, the ones which got the young activists’ juices going, were extreme, intolerant and plain horrible.
As with all these far-left insurgencies, hatred of Israel and hostility to Jews were at the heart of things. El-Sayed says Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza and rejects Zionism, the idea of a Jewish state in Israel, as illegitimate. He condemns Israel as an “ethno-state”.
Of course he wants to end US military aid to Israel, but also to Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Presumably this is to keep the Middle East safe for Iran.

Of course he's wrong about Israel being an ethno state. It's just an old fashioned fundamentalist theocracy, intent on ethnic cleansing, and carrying out the task with passionate conviction.

But steady on bromancer, credit where real credit is due, the main man who has kept the middle east safe for the mad Mullahs of Iran is mad King Donald: Iran and Oman agree on coordinates of route through strait of Hormuz, says Iranian foreign ministry

Has anyone done more to help the repressive regime stay in power, and perhaps score a new revenue stream, while mad King Donald indulges in stolen valour?

It used to be that stolen valour was a crime in the US, not least for a draft dodger who used the cheap ploy of bonespurs to get out of doing time, but mad King Donald can get away with pretty much anything, and the bromancer will never show the slightest sign of interest.

Instead the reptiles decided to insert another snap designed to terrify the hive mind...El-Sayed beat Hayley Stevens to become the Democratic candidate for Michigan. Picture: Finn Gomez, AFP

Is it wrong for the pond to enjoy the sight of the bromancer writhing in agony and terror?

He has previously condemned US police forces as “standing armies” and called to “defend the police”. Naturally, he wants to abolish immigration enforcement agencies. Some of these positions he moderated slightly during the campaign, and unlike a lot of the left insurgents he’s not formally a member of the Democratic socialists of America.
But he was proud to campaign alongside the influencer Hasan Piker who hates modern America and has called the Chinese dictator, Mao Zedong, one of the world’s great leaders. Worse, Piker said America deserved the 9/11 terror attacks. He’s also said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel.
This is the company El-Sayed chooses to keep, indeed sees as useful to his political campaign. It’s the left-wing equivalent of a Republican campaigning alongside neo-Nazis.
El-Sayed’s primary victory is thus a deeply disturbing sign of the polarisation and growing extremism of American politics.
It’s not so clear that he will win the Senate seat in November. Michigan is a peculiar state. Donald Trump won it in 2016 and 2024. Joe Biden won it in 2020. However, Democrats dominate statewide elections. It has a large white working class but it also has the biggest Muslim population in the US.
The actual American working class has very little time for the uber-left identity politics, hatred of Israel as the first issue, anti-American rhetoric, gross radicalisation and all the other twitches and pathologies of the far left.
That is much more a movement of college-educated young people, awash in ignorance of basic facts of geopolitics, and indeed of much of life.
That means Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who in 2024 came within 20,000 votes of being the first Republican senator elected in Michigan since 1994, has a stronger chance against El-Sayed than he would have had against Stevens.
The Democrats need to win four seats in the Senate and hold all their own seats to have a chance of taking control of the Senate. If they lose Michigan, that will be a huge setback for them, and massively help Trump.
But Michigan’s large Arab minority greatly disliked Biden’s residual support of Israel and many of them sat out the 2024 election. They, like the college educated junior bourgeois Bolsheviks, will be full of enthusiasm for El-Sayed.
Whichever way you cut it, this was a dark day for American politics.

How about recent dark days for America in battle, with General Bonespurs throwing everything at Iran?

What else?

Just to keep the indigenous fuss alive, the reptiles dragged in Mandy from some distant void, so she could yammer away ...

Skip go-betweens, go straight to the remote community
Governments don’t need to give Indigenous Australians a voice – they simply need to listen to the one they already have.
By Amanda Vanstone

Yet again that'd be the voice, not the Voice.

Did the pond need to heed this ancient? Nah, with the pond at last turning off its VPN - d'oh - it could send this Noel Pearson devotee off to the intermittent archive.

That done, some will enjoy it, especially this line ...

I’ve got three-quarters Irish blood (incidentally, potato-farming stock, not lace curtain). I don’t wear green on St Patrick’s Day nor do I blame the English today for the famine that drove so many away from Ireland. I have Irish heritage. Full stop.

Full weird, full pathetic, and who might she blame for the famine that drove so many away from Ireland if not the English? Not so much to mount a culture war, but just to observe reality...

Sure, there was the blight and a number of other factors, but as the Great Famine's wiki also noted, there was this ...

...Longer-term reasons for the scale of the famine's impact included the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. Initial government actions to alleviate famine distress, which were constructive but limited, were ended by a new Whig administration in London that pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine. Additionally, some members of the British government believed that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character. Aid resumed only to some degree at a later stage. Large quantities of food were exported from Ireland during the famine, and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy. This controversy contributed to the exacerbation of the Irish issue in British politics, the intensification of anti-British sentiment, the intensification of Irish nationalism and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in the eviction of tens of thousands of households, a situation exacerbated by a provision that forbade access to workhouse aid for those possessing more than one-quarter acre of land.

There's your saviour at work, indigenous Australia, scribbling away and showing what a fabulous historian she is ...

Mandy really is a silly old chook. Full stop.

The pond also walked around Geoff chambering another round.

The poor lad had dropped down the page because of the way that comrade Dan occupied the hive mind ...and the pond felt a little pity, what with him trying hard every day ...

Minister’s no-show exposes Labor’s over-reliance on PM
Labor’s long-awaited immigration crackdown has collapsed in Anthony Albanese’s absence, handing the opposition free hits on one of the election’s most explosive issues.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Credit where credit's due, he did try to stir the pot and help the beefy boofhead and Gina's pet ...and the opening uncredited art work was a major zinger ...

That's the best the reptiles could do? Are they as enthralled with gambling as the Labor party is?

All in all, the pond rates this a better reptile Thursday than most, despite Jack's attempt to introduce some sense of normalcy ...

Have you taken complete leave of your census?
Refusing to complete Census 2026 will cost Australians far more than skipping an election – and the gap reveals exactly where the government’s priorities lie.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Come on Jack, how could you hope to compete with the pond's favourite mad aunt, who routinely loses her senses whenever renewables are mentioned?

The header: Chris Bowen’s absurd plan neglects our energy security, Australia remains the only G20 nation banning nuclear energy while its Energy Minister urges the world to abandon the fossil fuels that still power 90 per cent of the country’s economy.

The caption for the snap, which takes comical portraits of the villain to a new level, and if it's not AI, why on earth would a minister provide the reptiles with this sort of heaven-sent air of quizzical stupidity? The Hon. Chris Bowen MP, Minister for Climate Change and Energy, speaks at the National Press Club. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Sadly the reptiles thought so little of Jennie's rant that after the splendid opening snap, they didn't bother with any visual distractions for what they rated a four minute read, though it really only deserved a one minute noodle skimming:

During his recent visit to Australia, the head of the International Energy Agency warned us “that the dark and long shadows of geopolitics are all over the energy sector now”.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, on the theme of Energy Security in an Uncertain World, was perfectly timed, coming on the eve of a possible breakthrough in the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
However it turned out to be an opportunity lost. Instead of an energy policy reset, integrating energy security with national security, Bowen remained steadfast in his support for a transition to an intermittent, weather-dependent renewables energy system. His announcement extending financial support for the installation of solar systems on commercial rooftops was an admission that the government would not meet its 82 per cent renewables grid by 2030.
Bowen defended the renewables transition, sticking by his earlier comments that “no war can impede the flow of sun to Australia” and “no sanctions can be applied to wind”. He claimed “no one had said we need more fossil fuels … it was not a conversation being had anywhere around the world”.

Would Jennie mention the recent burnings of Europe and Canada?

Of course she wouldn't.

Would Jennie go the coal, gas and oil route?

Of course she would ...

Bridging the deepening divide over energy policy is a necessary first step. The energy crisis made clear the importance of fossil fuels, with coal, gas and oil accounting for about 90 per cent of Australia’s primary energy mix. Diesel, the industrial fuel, is indispensable for freight, transport, agriculture, mining, defence and emergency services. When diesel stops, the economy stops.
Bowen appears oblivious to this reality and from early days has refused to recognise gas as a transition fuel. He continues to promote an anti-fossil fuels agenda, even in international forums.
As COP31’s president of negotiations he made media headlines at the recent UN climate meeting in Bonn, urging “we need to get off fossil fuels”. It has been his constant theme since COP28 in Dubai in 2023. Speaking on our behalf, he argued that “we don’t need to phase out fossil fuel emissions, we need to end the use of fossil fuels … they don’t have a future in our energy system”. It was an astonishing statement coming from the minister of one of the largest exporters of fossil fuels.
Bowen well knows that achieving consensus about fossil fuels at COP31 is problematic. Even the agreement struck at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly and equitable manner” was short-lived. It collapsed last year at the gathering in Brazil. Undeterred, along with 24 nations, Bowen signed Australia up to the Belem Declaration, pledging to pursue the issue outside the auspices of COP and the UN.
Australia was one of 57 nations that participated in a recent Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference in Colombia. The conference’s decisions, including support for a fossil fuel treaty, will be considered at the coming COP31 in Turkey. Australia’s delegation extended from climate groups to Fortescue and was led by an official from Bowen’s department. We still are to learn what Australia signed up to.
A new electrification target of 35 per cent by 2035 is also on the agenda. A catchy slogan shouldn’t mask the impacts domestically on manufacturing, minerals processing and all forms of transport.
There’s bound to be lively debates in Turkey, testing Bowen’s “middle-power diplomacy” as COP’s president of negotiations.
Bowen has never explained how he reconciles his opposition to fossil fuels at COP with Labor’s Future Gas Strategy. It explains that gas “will remain an important source of energy through to 2050 and beyond”, needing “continued exploration, investment and development” and plays “a crucial role supporting our economy … and our export partners”.

Would Jennie go the nukes? Of course she would.

Would she ignore recent events in Europea relating to climate change, including but not limited to, Hungary avoids nuclear shutdown by 'millimetres' as Danube rises, Hungary's prime minister said on Tuesday that the key EU waterway runs dangerously low

Of course she would ...

Nuke away, Jennie, apparently to solve a problem that's not a problem for the hive mind, what with climate science a hoax and/or a religious cult, though the pond must confess to some disappointment that she didn't go full SMR:

While these debates will continue in international forums, at home there’s growing support for an energy plan that aims to secure energy independence. The recent uranium deal with India gives momentum to this ambition. We are the only G20 nation with a ban on nuclear energy, dating back nearly 30 years.
In a country blessed with energy resources, people rightly question why we are fuelling the future prosperity of other nations but not our own. It makes no sense, particularly now that energy policy can no longer be separated from geopolitics. Nuclear power is not just another energy technology but would also provide sovereign capability. The nuclear ban should be lifted and the market tested for next-generation micro and modular reactors. They could make a positive contribution in meeting the energy demands of data centres.
Bowen will have the opportunity to see the benefits of nuclear energy while at COP31 in Turkey. One unit of Turkey’s first nuclear plant will be operational soon. It’s the first step in its plans for 7.2 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2035 and 20GW by 2050. The plan is for an energy mix using nuclear, domestic coal and gas as well as renewable solar, wind and hydropower. It’s a useful case study, considering Turkey is a late adopter of nuclear energy.
Our national interest is best met by securing our energy independence. We have all the means to make it possible. It just needs an acceptance of reality and the political will to make it happen. We didn’t find this in Bowen’s contribution on Wednesday.
Jennie George is a former federal Labor MP and a former president of the ACTU.

Splendid stuff, and Jennie has almost reached the exalted status of the Bjørn-again one, so monomaniacal, repetitive and obsessive are her contributions to the hive mind...

And now this, because who doesn't enjoy a flutter?

It could be worse ...

In which the pond finally settles on a nattering "Ned" sermon about the dangers of Gina's pampered pet (squillionth version) ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:13:32 +0000

The reptiles relentlessly pursued assorted jihads early this morning.

(1) The Victorian government ... or should that be, ghosts of Victorian governments past ...

EXCLUSIVE
Former Victorian premier Jacinta Allan’s water bombshell: Secret Labor privatisation plan
Confidential cabinet documents have revealed the Victorian Labor government secretly explored privatising Melbourne Water for five years to rescue the state’s deteriorating finances.
By Anthony Galloway

Top of the digital reptile world ma ...

Jacinta's gone, but just like comrade Dan, she'll live on forever in the reptile mind ... just check out the artwork by Debbie at the top of the yarn, as well as in that splash...

Age might weary comrade Dan, but he'll always make an appearance in the Oz.

The pond deemed the lead worth only a Golding ...

(2) For the umpteenth time, renewables and solar provided a peril ...

Renewables
Solar panel peril? Bowen hits roof to prop up target
Businesses offered 20 per cent solar discount to help fix faltering renewables target
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen will unveil a 20 per cent solar discount for businesses, farms, schools and hospitals as Labor’s 82 per cent renewables target faces mounting pressure.
By Geoff Chambers

The pond was shattered when it clicked on Geoff, chambering his usual round, to discover that thumb portrait of a demonic orange yellow monster had been abandoned at the head of the story ...

Still waiting for a story featuring the ongoing destruction of Europe by the impact of climate change? Keep waiting ...

(3) The Australian Daily Zionist News went about its business...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Should be answering questions, not asking’: Matilda’s dad slams ‘hijackers’
The father of the 10-year-old Bondi victim has condemned pro-Palestine groups for attempting to hijack the antisemitism royal commission.
By Bimini Plesser

ANALYSIS
Leadership comes from witness box as Jewish leader pushes back
David Ossip leads from witness box to prevent royal commission veering off course
On an intensely sensitive day, the inquiry come perilously close to being hijacked by questions on Israel’s military actions.
By Lachlan Leeming
NSW Political Correspondent

Wondering if you'll ever read a story about the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza in the lizard Oz? Keep wondering ...

(4) The important business of keeping the pesky, difficult blacks arguing about points of order took another step forward ...

Pearson’s ‘blue dot’ proposal far from Langton-Calma plan (updated archive link. Hot tip: turn off your VPN when using the archive)
Marcia Langton and Tom Calma seem to miss an altogether bigger issue. Their report is not the same as Pearson’s calls.
By Eddie Synot

Sorry Eddie your opening line put the pond right off ...

Noel Pearson’s speech at Garma is a welcome intervention in the sorry situation that has followed the 2023 voice referendum.

That's Voice, Eddie, not voice ...and if you can't stand up to the reptiles, what use are you?

(5) Dame Slap was on hand to berate Alan, a reliable target over the years, not just for being a wanker, but for being a gay wanker ...

Sorry, Alan Joyce. We want CEOs talking growth, not social crusades (updated archive link)
We’d be infinitely happier with CEOs who just look after the store.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Sorry, Dame Slap, the pond isn't interested in journalists conducting social crusades against alleged social crusaders ...

Joyce was just there as a straw dog, a convenient prop for the usual reptile devotion to the ways of mad King Donald and his minions, which happens to include SCOTUS ...

...The corporates-as-social-engineers jig is on the nose. In the US the Supreme Court has essentially killed the business case for DEI, while in Australia the virulent bullying by corporate Australia in favour of the voice proved counter-productive. If that disaster hasn’t taught corporate Australia a lesson about its role, then it is on a hiding to nothing.
When it comes to campaigning, corporate CEOs should be lobbying for economic reform with the same verve as the union movement lobbies for productivity-killing privileges. And to be fair to Joyce, he did his fair share of that, where others cowered in corners.
Ten years ago, outgoing CEO of the Business Council of Australia Catherine Livingstone said: “The BCA doesn’t want to campaign, it should not have to campaign because the integrity of its policy positions should speak for themselves.” No doubt Livingstone meant well but the failure of corporate Australia to get interested in issues where they really did have a business case (for example, on tax and industrial relations issues) is damning.
They now bitterly regret their indolence and preference for what they thought were soft and easy pickings of a social justice nature during the first two decades of this century. It meant when a genuinely left-wing government came to power in 2022, business had no credibility and no track record in defending policies that truly did have a business case.
They had wasted all their ammunition on social fripperies for 20 years and had been MIA on the hard issues they should have been working on. So no, Alan, the last thing we want is more CEOs crusading for social justice. We’d be infinitely happier with CEOs who just look after the store.

Just the usual far right drivel, and that was as much of it as the pond could take ...

Meanwhile, with that Oz listicle done, the real fun was taking place elsewhere ...with the fun disappeared to the cornfield by the reptiles of Oz, but dammit there has to be some joy in the world...

Analysis Operation Rosny
Leaks, lies and Liberals: The closing minutes of Damien Tudehope’s ICAC evidence were a disaster
Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane surely won’t want one of the Liberal Party’s faceless men showing his face any time soon.
By Bevan Shields

That ongoing saga, disappeared by the reptiles, inspired John Hanscombe to pen a few words for The Echnida, The Canberra Times' newsletter (which also boasts of supplying cartoons each morning, including the infallible Pope, and so is worth a subscription):

The hatred was visceral. A loathing so deep, so mutual, there was no way the two would ever be reconciled. On occasions it manifested itself in public outbursts so shrill, witnesses were left speechless. They were bitter political rivals out to destroy each other. But they weren't from different parties. Instead, they belonged to warring factions within the one party.
I'm reminded of their poisonous antics daily, as the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption's Operation Rosny lays bare the scheming and chicanery behind another bruising factional war within the NSW Liberal Party.
The public hearings are delving into the way money from prohibited donors financed the efforts of a conservative Christian group called The Reformers to stack local branches and influence preselections.
Newly minted federal president of the Liberal Party Tony Abbott, himself a seasoned right-wing factional warrior whose best days are behind him, tried to dismiss the ICAC probe into an internal party squabble as a factional hit job.
Abbott's dismissal papers over the role allegedly played by fugitive developer and banned donor Jean Nassif in financing The Reformers, which ICAC is also investigating. Phone taps revealed Nassif, now hiding out in Lebanon, gloating about the influence he believed he had over the NSW government.
The branch-stacking, the backstabbing, the blind ambition of young milk-fed Liberals are all depressingly familiar. A few years ago I watched it play out on my own turf as Gareth Ward, now in jail for sexual assault, went to war with John Howard's Class of 96 veteran federal MP for Gilmore Joanna Gash.
Ward enlisted the support of a coterie of well-groomed, similarly milk-fed Young Liberals to erode support for Gash. Gash, in turn, relied on the backing of the local Liberal gerontocracy. It was a bitter contest that endured long after Gash resigned from federal parliament. Her successor and close friend, Ann Sudmalis, also resigned after the local branches elected a hostile executive after a concerted campaign of leaks and white anting.
It should have ended there but in 2019, then prime minister Scott Morrison staged his own intervention, parachuting Warren Mundine as a candidate into the seat of Gilmore over the locally preselected Liberal Grant Schultz, son of Alby who held the seat of Hume now occupied by Angus Taylor.
The Liberals lost their once blue ribbon seat to Labor, which has held it ever since.
As the 1969 Motown hit asked, "War, what is it good for?" Not much, when it comes to what Abbott calls internal party squabbles. The Liberals lost their seat, the protagonists their careers, and the electorate their faith that the people they elect are there to represent their interests, not those of their factions.
More broadly, the factional warring within the Liberal Party has only hastened its decline and headlong slide into irrelevance. The ICAC hearings expose just how destructive it's been.

Milk fed.

So true, so apt, and you won't be reading that sort of stuff in the lizard Oz. (Not that the pond has got anything against milk).

And the accompanying infallible Pope?

The pond lives in daily fear for the cockies, maggies and kookaburras of the mighty 'Gong, but not so much for Gina's pampered pet.

And after all that winnowing, ducking and weaving, the pond was left with just one early morning reptile.

Come on down nattering "Ned" ...

The header: An alliance with Hanson? Don’t forget Gillard’s fate; Any Liberal-National Coalition that included Hanson would have a short shelf life. The chaos and crisis on the centre right would be far worse than now.

The caption for the overly familiar snap: Angus Taylor and Pauline Hanson.

Right at the get go the pond had a problem.

That risible opening snap, featuring a downcast beefy boofhead, and an ascendent Gina's pet, seemed familiar, and so it was ... it was there for when Geoff had chambered another of his rounds, proposing the exact opposite to "Ned"...

Time for Angus Taylor to invite Pauline Hanson for tea and unite against Anthony Albanese
Angus Taylor faces mounting pressure from colleagues to engage with Pauline Hanson as the Coalition’s primary vote languishes at 19 per cent.

And that's how the reptiles do business.

First one proposes something, and then another comes along to stir the pot, though when "Ned" gets to stirring, it's a dull old affair, his usual wandering back in time, so admonishments can be made in his usual ponderous way, and lessons can be learned...

On September 1, 2010, prime minister Julia Gillard signed a formal written agreement creating a governing alliance between the minority Labor government and the Greens political party – a vital step in ensuring Labor would remain in office after the general election 10 days earlier.
The agreement was followed by two subsequent written agreements Gillard reached with independent MPs that turned Gillard’s floor minority into a 76 to 74 majority over the Tony Abbott-led Coalition – an apparent triumph of coalition building by Labor.
But the reality was far different. These agreements doomed Gillard as prime minister. The deal with the Greens, in particular, was ill-advised with irreparable consequences for the Labor brand.
Gillard’s flawed tactics constitute a case study in how not to run a minority government and are relevant today given the confused claims about whether the Liberals should form an alliance or a coalition with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation after the next election.
Gillard’s story provides a definitive answer. She made three mistakes. First, she assumed she needed a formal alliance with the Greens when the Greens had no option since they were never going to make Abbott the PM over Gillard. Second, once committed to a formal deal Gillard had to make concessions and the concession she made – consent to a carbon price (known as the carbon tax and not part of her election agenda) exposed her to claims of “betrayal of the Australian people” in Abbott’s words, an accusation from which she never recovered. Third, by entering into formal alliances Gillard compromised the Labor brand for the rest of her government.

It's almost as tiresome and as tedious as the reptile obsession with comrade Dan, this desire to live in the ancient past.

Speaking of Alan Jones - much in the fondling news of late, if not in the lizard Oz - does anyone have a chaff bag to hand? Former PM Julia Gillard speaks during a press conference. Picture: Alan Porritt / AAP Image

They say that history arches towards irony and in the case of the parrot the pond is prepared to believe it. Remember the good old days?

Back to "Ned" as he reaches the "lessons to be learned" phase ...

One of Gillard’s most competent ministers, Greg Combet said later: “The problem is the community felt we were running agendas that were not our own. They were seen as somebody else’s.” The core lesson Chris Bowen drew from the Gillard experience was that Labor must govern “alone or not at all”.
This is Anthony Albanese’s assessment, having lived through these events. He has previously made clear if Labor was forced into minority government he would not seek a governing coalition with the Greens. That is obvious. Albanese, moreover, wouldn’t need to since the Greens would never support a Coalition government. Yet the current debate seems not to grasp the power realities in these minority government situations.
Of course, the Liberal-National Coalition is unlikely to be in a position to form a minority government after the 2028 poll – that would require a huge loss of seats by Labor and, in addition, the Taylor-led Coalition could call the shots only if it had more seats than One Nation.
Yet this contingency seems to be consuming both centre-right politics and the related media coverage, with senior Liberals from Angus Taylor down repeatedly being asked whether they would variously strike a deal or agreement or coalition with the Hanson party to create a minority government.
What is pivotal in this debate is the distinct difference between a formal governing alliance or coalition with One Nation that gives Hanson’s party official entry into executive government decision-making as distinct from merely having One Nation agree to give a Liberal-National government support on supply and confidence. That latter does not make One Nation a party to executive power. The difference is fundamental.

The reptiles flung in a snap of a man almost as arcane as the parrot and Flinty in that cartoon ... Greg Combet

Stout-hearted "Ned" stayed loyal to the cause, no matter what the fiends might fling at the beefy boofhead, or what he might do to himself ...

Unsurprisingly, Labor runs a political scare campaign with Albanese saying: “In every way that matters the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation are already a coalition. It’s not just that they need each other to form government. They agree with each other about what they want to do in government.”
The implication is that the only way the Liberals can govern from a minority position is with a coalition or formal alliance with One Nation. This is obviously wrong. If the Liberals post-election have the potential to form a minority government then Hanson’s party must give confidence to Liberals or Labor – and having Hanson king-make Albanese into a third term is nonsense.
Indeed, the disastrous branding consequences for Taylor, as head of a Liberal-National government that would be triggered by opening the executive door to One Nation, would be far more lethal than the grim fate that befell Gillard.
Recall that Gillard was deposed by a desperate ALP caucus in June 2013 with internal research showing its coming defeat would be worse than those of Gough Whitlam in 1975 and 1977. Gillard’s tenacity was vital in her surviving as long as she did against Kevin Rudd’s political assault when the polls had long shown she was doomed.
Her political adviser, John McTernan, said: “All the flak of minority government was sucked into her prime ministership because she was so central to the deals and maintaining the deals.” The further lesson is that any minority government arrangement must be drama free, based on genuine concord.

And here "Ned" explained the single reason for voting for the beefy boofhead. Think of the entertainment value!

That makes any coalition with Hanson impossible. Can you imagine the perpetual disruption and dramas having Hanson involved in any alliance or coalition, given that personal grandstanding and fanning grievance is her modus operandi?
Any Liberal-National Coalition that included Hanson would have a short shelf life. The chaos and crisis on the centre right would be far worse than now given it would be governing. If Taylor tried this, he would be lucky to last three months as PM, let alone Gillard’s three years. The damaging legacy would be hung around the neck of the Liberal Party for years.

There came another grim reminder, featuring the onion muncher and that woman ... Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott in Question Time in the House of Representatives, Parliament House in Canberra.

The pond couldn't think of a single reason to feature a Golding, but did it anyway ...

Kill joy "Ned" brought his sermon to a close ... (if we can't see a coalition government in abject crisis, what's the meaning of life?)

Taylor and his deputy, Jane Hume, have no viable political option but to dismiss any notion of a coalition with One Nation. Apart from being unnecessary, it could never work. It’s not just that Taylor and Hanson don’t trust each other to contemplate such a deal but their policies, starting with the economy, are too far apart anyway, a point Taylor has put on the public record.
The day after Gillard announced her five-page 2010 written deal and concessions to the Greens, I wrote on page one of this paper: “This deal puts Gillard’s leadership on the line” since it was an act of “strategic folly”. It got Gillard into minority government but doomed her leadership.
With Hanson, this is a debate about an issue that won’t happen. But Labor’s rhetorical campaign and repeatedly false signals sent by Liberal and Coalition MPs probably mean the media will keep its focus on an issue that won’t happen – much to Labor’s benefit.
The real challenge for the Liberals is not what happens post-election but what happens pre-election. The imperative for the Coalition is to have a higher primary vote than Hanson, thereby reclaiming its status as the superior party on the centre right. It seems the Victorian election is heading in this direction, with Newspoll showing the Jess Wilson-led Coalition on 31 per cent compared with Hanson’s party on 19 per cent.
As Gerard Henderson has written, the persistent claims that the choice at the next federal election might be between a Labor and a Coalition-One Nation government is a fantasy. That won’t be the choice. The inexplicable irony is that many figures on the centre right are promoting this idea. They should reflect upon Gillard’s fate.

Waddya kno, "Ned" in that last line linking to prattling Polonius, dogs chasing their tails, tortured by the notion that the beefy boofhead might form some kind of alliance to gain power, and knowing deep in their pounding hearts, that he'd do anything to get into the Lodge ...

The more they protest, the more the pond suspects it to be true ...

The pond has already been there and done that, and rather than end on the unsavoury sights and sounds of Dan "the man" Tehan, here's an immortal Rowe ...

The pond is aware of the inspiration ...

... but how much better that Hockney would have been if there'd been some tats ...

Another moment missed in the reptile coverage ... more talk about an ongoing comedy related to a scheming clown who flew too close to the King Donald sun ...

And talk about the many forms the American nightmare takes, with the pond realising there's yet another reason to catch a train ...

In which the pond gives in to distractions, but still finds room for a bromancer bleat and a jolly good denialist Groaning...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:04:38 +0000

The pond woke to more news that Europe was in a bad way, and not just from wildfires.

Big rivers like the Rhine and the Danube were way down, and landlocked Hungary's nukes were struggling.

The pond knew that none of this would mentioned in the lizard Oz, but could at least note Rhine falls to record low levels as drought strains Europe's rivers.

Bear it in mind, those dismal record levels will come in handy when we get to groaning ...

The pond also knew it wouldn't be reading this kind of report, the sort that appeared in another place yesterday, starring the onion muncher and his friends, and noted by correspondents...

‘No corruption’: Abbott says ICAC a factional hit job as Taylor faces questions (*intermittent archive link)

Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party president and close ally of Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, has accused the Independent Commission Against Corruption of overstepping its remit by becoming involved in an “internal party squabble”.
Abbott, whom Taylor picked as federal president in May, described the religious-right Reformers group as a group of enthusiastic young Christians with a strong sense of mission, and argued there was no suggestion of self-enriching corruption.
Taylor’s long-time friend and supporter, Catholic schools boss Dallas McInerney, is among those being investigated by the ICAC for funnelling Catholic Schools NSW funds to the hard-right Reformers through lobbying companies as illicit donations.
Abbott acknowledged the Reformers, whose key members provided evidence in the first week of Operation Rosny’s hearings, “might have let their enthusiasm get the better of their judgment.”
“There seems to be a level [of] incredulity directed against people’s Christianity, but my main problem is the factional weaponisation of what’s supposed to be an instrument of justice,” he said.
“I’m surprised that ICAC has allowed itself to be caught up in an internal party squabble that involves no conceivable ‘corruption’ in the sense of people gaining an unfair advantage for themselves, especially this close to a state election.”
The probe into his allies has already been a distraction for Taylor, who remains behind One Nation in the polls. ICAC’s hearings are due to continue for another seven weeks.
The inquiry last week produced a message from McInerney to Reformers members saying he planned to “shake down Angus for 10k”, while another witness said McInerney boasted of securing a pledge for $15,000 from Taylor. Taylor has repeatedly insisted no payment was made.
A key Reformers operative told the commission last week that Abbott, a former prime minister, featured in the group’s first event, in February 2018.
Abbott’s statement represents the firmest defence of the bid to install up to 5000 right-wing members to fight the rival centre-right faction, led by MP Alex Hawke, and generate a more conservative stance on social and cultural issues.
His remarks go further than the limited responses from Taylor to questions last week about the claim that he donated money.
While Taylor has not been called by ICAC and is not accused of wrongdoing, some of his federal colleagues have held informal talks about the process for changing leaders if he was implicated more directly.
The MPs and factional opponents of Taylor, who asked for anonymity to discuss the live inquiry, are not necessarily expecting more damaging revelations about the opposition leader. But they are questioning why he has not distanced himself more forcefully, and are on guard in case there are further claims.

And there's more this day from Kate McClymont ...

Betrayals, backstabbers and rats: Inside the ICAC’s Game of Thrones
The ICAC has lit the fuse on an explosive inquiry that will examine the behaviour of (from left) Jean-Claude Perrottet, Dallas McInerney, Jean Nassif and Charles Perrottet, among others.
Day six of the ICAC’s blockbuster inquiry was reminiscent of the fantasy TV series, including allegations of backstabbing at former premier Dominic Perrottet’s wedding. (*intermittent archive link)

Barking mad Xian fundie rats everywhere, but the reptiles of Oz know how to disappear that sort of gossip in a trice and so it was today, as they led with this at the top of the digital edition ma ...

EXCLUSIVE
Going, going gone: ALP’s $230bn hit to property values
ALP’s policies of ‘fear’: $230bn hit to property values
Australia’s property market has shed $230bn in four months, with a developer warning Albanese government policies have created a ‘sentiment of fear’ threatening to deepen the housing crisis.
By Mackenzie Scott and Noah Yim

Get 'em coming, get 'em going.

Bleat about young potential home owners being locked out of the market, bleat about inflation, then bleat about struggling property investors ... but why the square quotes on "fear", what with fear being the daily serve the reptiles offer the hive mind?

Well played team.

Over on the far right, Geoff chambered another of his rounds, weeping at the fragility ...oh the fragility.

Labor plays roulette with fragile house markets
An assistant minister charged with defending Labor’s housing policy has offered a definition of negative equity that economists say is simply wrong.
By Geoff Chambers

Political editor

Here, have a 'toon to celebrate ...

Back across the way and moving a little further down, having set up Noel for a fall yesterday, the reptiles delivered today ...

EXCLUSIVE
Marcia Langton and Tom Calma call out Noel Pearson on remote Indigenous takeover: good idea … but you rejected it
Indigenous leaders Marcia Langton and Tom Calma have declared Noel Pearson’s remote communities proposal is identical to the reform he rejected five years ago.
By Paige Taylor

(Intermittent archive link updated)

Paige was just regurgitating the source, in the usual reptile way in a bald faced 3 minute summary in the usual reptile way ...

The intermittent archive eventually got around to saving the source (link updated)..

Commentary by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma
Pearson has found his way back to the voice he refused
Where do we go from here, Noel? Back to the blueprint. It has been waiting for five years.

Whatever, both are only noted to show how the reptiles love to feature fussing, feuding black people, especially when it's about the voice, not the Voice (when it comes to caps, the lizard Oz can sometimes be almost Graudian).

How the reptiles would love to return to the glorious days of their Voice jihad.

Over on the far right there was a splendid array of offerings, rare for a Tuesday.

The pond had to exercise some discretion, so walked on by this offering...

How Islamists have weaponised migration to overwhelm Europe
Since the Arab Spring, Morocco’s Islamists have struggled to offer a credible governing agenda. Instead, they’ve spent years convincing young Moroccans their country has no future.
By Zineb Riboua
Contributor

The alarmist, terrified header is more than enough to set the tone, and her credit sealed the deal ...

Zineb Riboua is a research fellow at Hudson Institute’s Centre for Peace and Security in the Middle East. This piece was first published on her Substack, Beyond the Ideological.

It was, of course, profoundly ideological, but it did at least give the pond a chance to reference Anne Applebaum's latest work for The Atlantic ...

The Far Right Is Distorting Ceuta
We’ve seen this before. (here's hoping that guest link works)

Inter alia ...

...This would not be the first time that a migrant wave has been boosted on social media in order to create a political crisis. In 2021, the Belarusian government imported planeloads of people from the Middle East, brought them to the Polish border, and told them to cross, provoking a political crisis in Poland. The Moroccans themselves are accused of having done this too, in 2021, when they allegedly relaxed border controls to express their annoyance with Spain.
But the most important precedent was in 2015, when the Russian destruction of Syria produced a massive wave of migration that also was filmed and photographed, especially after Germany declared that it would accept hundreds of thousands of war victims as refugees. Social-media posts showing migrants walking toward Europe, some amplified by the Russians who destroyed Syria, then played a major role in the Brexit campaign in the U.K., as well as the rise of the far right in Germany. The scars left by this memory are so deep that several European leaders, including the social-democratic prime minister of Denmark and the nationalist prime minister of Italy, this week accused Sánchez of endangering the Schengen Area even though, once again, the integrity of the zone was never threatened.
Readers can be forgiven for feeling a strong sense of déjà vu. For more than a decade now, European and indeed American politicians have known that real, fake, enhanced, or context-free pictures of migrants jumping fences will immediately create a wave reaction. Military rhetoric will be used—attack or invasion—and, to quote Vance, “radical left-wing globalist policies” will be blamed. Hardly anyone will ask why it is that so many people are so desperate to move that they will risk their lives. Few will mourn the dead.
Instead, far-right and MAGA politicians, influencers, and podcasters will immediately use the most divisive language possible in order to make voters as angry as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of what actually happened. Almost everyone else will be intimidated by their fury. As it turns out, it’s harder to stop the wave of anger than it is to stop the migrants themselves.

Well yes, it's the far right lizard Oz way, and after all that, the pond had to pay attention to its long time favourites.

First the bromancer, desperate to distract from mad King Donald ... and while updating links, the pond couldn't fail to notice how the reptiles had dressed up his hit piece with some splendid artwork and a pride of place position... (the pond couldn't be bothered checking the text to see if it had also been fiddled with).

The pond was bursting with pride that the bromancer was so honoured, knowing he'd explain that there was nothing wrong with AUKUS, except perhaps the UK and the US ...

Such incredible art, and yet so uncredited. So subtle and nuanced ...

AI, you've done it again.

Compare and contrast the original dullard illustration as the bromancer set out on his journey, where all the reptiles could come up with was a shouty shouty snap ...

The header: Defence for dummies? Marles and Conroy certainly fit the bill; One day Albanese government defence policy will be studied in universities around the world as the Platonic ideal of disastrous policymaking.

The caption for that angry man shouting at clouds: Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy talks about the AUSKUS submarines at the Osborne Naval Shipyard. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

Where would the country be without its very own Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches, always standing by to deliver his advice in language most genteel...

What an absolute fuster-cluck, to use the precise technical term, the Albanese government’s defence policy is at every level. It’s the perfect mannequin dummy, with neither brains nor balls. It’s so incoherent it’s almost impossible to follow. Amateur hour on steroids.
John Howard shrewdly observed that the immigration discussion is blighted by a pointless debate about abstract nouns – monoculturalism and multiculturalism – which could mean almost anything. He might have made the same point regarding the debate about AUKUS, another abstract noun with a wildly elastic range of meanings. Certainly, the statements of Defence Minister Richard Marles and Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy range from implausible to contradictory to ridiculous a good deal of the time.
The latest almost comically implausible mess seems to have been all Conroy’s work. Under AUKUS, from next year, American and possibly British submarines will rotate through Perth in an arrangement called Submarine Rotation Force West. They won’t be permanently based in Perth, but will visit sometimes for months.
The Albanese government has consistently sold this as contributing directly to Australia’s security, contributing to allied deterrence, giving the US a useful regional access point, and allowing deep maintenance of both US, and eventually Australian, nuclear submarines. This would relieve some of the congestion in the US maintenance program and thus free up more sailing days for US nuclear subs. So would reducing the time for US subs transiting from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean side of the Indo-Pacific.

Still with AUKUS and the subs? Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles, left, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, Chief of the Nuclear Powered Submarine Task Force and South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

Still with the notion that mad King Donald and his minions were of any interest at all?

Did that 'toon mention Gaza?

The ethnic cleansing continues apace, and What We Can Learn From Trump’s Short-Lived “Historic Breakthrough” in Gaza, This is what happens when you bring in amateurs to negotiate peace in the Middle East

But you can't expect the bromancer to go there ...

All this was predicated on the idea that Canberra thinks it benefits us, and the world, for more US nuclear submarines to be at sea more often. But then former Defence Department deputy secretary Mike Pezzullo noted that from 2032 on, US policy planned to have some Virginia-class nuclear-powered subs armed with short-range nuclear weapons.
This sent a frisson of worry through the Albanese government, as it has never succeeded, largely because it’s never tried, in selling AUKUS in principle to its activist base. An infinitely superior generation of Labor leaders, Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley, convinced the Labor Party to support the welcome of US naval ships to Australian ports even though the US had a “neither confirm nor deny” policy regarding whether any particular ship carried nuclear weapons.
But the Albanese government is not only incompetent, it’s cowardly. It’s frequently caught in an unmanageable vortex of conflicting imperatives from conflicting impulses of cowardice.
In any event, on July 29, in an interview on the ABC’s 7.30, Conroy said: “Submarine Rotation Force West is due to come to an end in the early 2030s.” He repeated this point several times, specifying the year 2032. The context is important. Sarah Ferguson was asking him if, after Virginias began potentially to carry nuclear weapons, their presence in Perth would cause a problem. Conroy chose to answer this by saying the arrangement would come to an end in 2032. In that interview, he at no point suggested any ongoing arrangement to replace it.
Ferguson herself, in her promo for the interview, was under no doubt in interpreting Conroy’s statement. She said: “(Conroy) said for the first time that the American Navy submarine rotation would end in 2032.”
This would have been astounding news to Washington. It’s hard to know, too, why so many naval personnel berths are being built in Perth if we’re only going to have the minuscule Australian crew there after 2032. Gone too, apparently, are all those arrangements about long-term maintenance.
For a couple of days no one could get any reaction from the Pentagon. Then on July 31, Marles gave an interview in which he repeatedly said: “Submarine Rotational Force West is intended to be an enduring feature of that American force posture in Australia and it’s a really important part of the AUKUS framework.”

At this point the reptiles introduced an AV distraction ...Former Labor MP Michael Danby says the AUKUS submarines have the opportunity to “deter” the aggressive Chinese fleet. Mr Danby told Sky News host Jaimee Rogers that drones are the “future” of modern warfare. “These drones are unbelievable. “We should just be importing vast quantities of this stuff; it’s incredibly cheap.”

The pond wasn't just distracted by having a host called "Jaimee".

What's this talk of Faux Noise down under?

Hasn't there been a rebrand?

Will the reptiles ever become aware of it?

And will the bromancer continue to burble about the joys of being in bed with mad King Donald? You betcha ...

The Pentagon itself then issued a statement noting the “enduring” nature of the arrangements. Then Conroy himself issued a social media statement, bizarrely on X, without defence portfolio or even personal ministerial letterhead, which said: “Submarine Rotational Force West is intended to be an enduring element of US Force Posture in Australia.”
That, and Conroy’s initial 7.30 statement, cannot both be true. What seems to have happened is that the Pentagon slapped Marles into line, and Marles slapped Conroy into line. Conroy could attempt some kind of verbal sleight-of-hand defence that the name under which US submarines rotate through Perth might change. But that’s not what he said on 7.30. He just declared the arrangement would end.
It seemed for a minute a government minister had announced a major shift in policy but people were right to assume that because these ministers so incessantly talk such implausible rubbish that it was just another gaffe. My interpretation of this baffling but typical Albanese government defence mess is that it was Conroy attempting to make some response to the Pezzullo intervention, to help the government among Labor branches and activists.
One interpretation is that the government was exercising leverage against the Americans. If you don’t sell us a Virginia on schedule in 2032, we might kick you out of Perth. That is either implausible or it shows the government in an even more foolish light than we have yet imagined. If we don’t get a Virginia in 2032, and as a result we kick the Americans out of Perth, we would then end up with neither our own subs nor the presence of allied subs, a result so wholly ridiculous and against our national interests it must be beyond even the compass of Albanese defence policy. Then again …
The AUKUS debate is mostly a clash of conflicting fantasies. Of course it will be great for Australia to have nuclear-powered subs. The real problem with AUKUS is that it’s going to take so long and the government is doing almost nothing else in defence in the meantime. It’s as though you were building a new rugby league team to enter the competition in 2032 and you recruited Bulldogs captain Stephen Crichton, the best player in the league, as your star player for the new club, but then forgot to add the other 12 members needed to make up a team.
One day Albanese government defence policy will be studied in universities around the world as the Platonic ideal of disastrous policymaking.

And that done and dusted, and speaking of ongoing disasters, will the bromancer ever get around to scribbling about the disastrous policymaking conducted by mad King Donald and his minions?

Some within the tent, such as the WSJ editorial board, are able to manage it...with a recent offering beginning with the piquant joke “A friend quipped the other day that President Trump truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because he has already ended the Iran war eight times.”

Sheesh, another distraction, but what the hell Archy ...

Trump’s Latest Iran ‘DEAL’ (sorry, the intermittent archive isn't currently in save mode, but what follows is the text)
He again calls off the military escalation he threatened, with little detail disclosed.
By
The Editorial Board

Why is it that the bromancer never goes, though it seems clear enough who's the real fuster-cluck (so clever, so witty):

Indeed, indeed...

And here's a few other things not mentioned by the lizard Oz...

Actual gambling reform? Gina's pet banning the media?

Nah, none of that, and so to the regular Tuesday treat, wherein old biddy Dame Groan explains why we're all rooned ...

Did the pond mention the way that climate change is currently stuffing Europe?

What we need is even more stuffing, perhaps by way of a bigly gassing, a sure fire way to conduct a holocaust ...

The header: Will El Presidente have time to fix our shoddy gas policy? As the air goes out of the net-zero tyre, it would’ve been preferable for Chris Bowen to focus on the energy issues we face at home.

The caption for the snap of that eternal villain: Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.

Did you like that jibe about El Presidente?

That's a sign Dame Groan is in top form, and so the old biddy spent a bigly four minutes dissing renewables and wind and batteries (she hates wind as much as mad King Donald) and so on, because what climate science?

Our Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, surely has his hands full, what with his additional job of president of COP negotiations leading up to and including the climate conference to be held in Antalya later in the year. A pre-meeting is scheduled for Fiji, although it’s proving difficult to get heads of government interested in attending.
It’s not entirely clear what Australia stands to gain from the minister’s overcommitment. There are numerous problems emerging in relation to the difficult – probably impossible – transition of the electricity grid away from fossil fuels that need urgent attention.
Large-scale wind projects have become almost unbankable, and we have the bizarre possibility that an expensive new transmission system will be built in the New England region without any new renewable energy projects.
The early bidders into the federal government’s Capacity Investment Scheme are having second thoughts and are seeking to renegotiate terms to push up the degree of subsidisation. These bidders, largely overseas companies, are also seeking assistance under state schemes, although in these instances the costs are directly borne by energy users via higher prices rather than taxpayers.
Talking about fleecing taxpayers, the federal government’s Cheaper Home Batteries program really takes the cake. It was originally expected to cost $2.3bn over four years. But a design glitch meant “the actual average battery support was 75 per cent higher because households chose to install higher average battery sizes”. At one stage, the cost of the scheme had blown out to $14bn but has now been wound back to $8.5bn.

There came another snap of the two main villains, posed together, Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen hold a press conference in Sydney. Picture: NewsWire/ Nathan Smith

Dame Groan ploughed on in her inimitable way, in the style that has made her much cherished by pond correspondents ...

But here’s the thing: our very busy Climate Change and Energy Minister thinks this scheme is a great success because it is reducing demand for dispatchable large-scale electricity – mainly coal – at the end of the day, in particular.
But a recent event in South Australia clearly demonstrates why expensive household batteries are not really the answer to our prayers. A wind drought – it was described as the worst wind lull in SA since 2019 – meant that virtually no power was being generated from wind sources for a period.
While batteries, both household and larger-scale, were useful for a while, they soon ran low. The maximum wholesale price of $20,300 per megawatt hour was reached on two occasions and gas-fired power was required to meet demand.
What this episode clearly demonstrates is the fragility of the system and the need to cover all events, not just events on average. The required redundancy in the system is one of the reasons for our extremely high electricity prices.
In turn, this feature feeds into the appalling loss of productivity in the utilities sector, as noted by the Productivity Commission.
“Productivity growth in the utilities industry, of which the electricity sector is a part, has been poor. In fact, from 2000-01 to 2023-24, the utilities industry was the worst-performing industry in Australia (falling nearly 40 per cent). The electricity sector itself did not fare much better.”
In the meantime, Bowen has been spending some of his scarce time devising a gas reservation scheme, having vigorously opposed such an arrangement during the last election campaign. Recall that the Coalition promised to introduce a gas reservation scheme to reduce east coast prices. The expectation was that an additional 50-100 petajoules would be made available to the domestic market, with east coast demand totalling around 500 petajoules.
Bowen labelled the proposal a “scam-phlet”, referring to the document outlining the Coalition’s proposal. But that was then, and now he is all aboard a national reservation scheme even though there are effectively three gas domestic markets in Australia: the east coast, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Bear in mind, WA has had a gas reservation scheme for many years. While there are some issues about the way it works, it’s hard to make the case for disturbing that arrangement.

Who better than the Ughmann, devoted former seminarian and renowned climate scientist, to add to the debate, in discussion with petulant Peta ...

News24 political contributor Chris Uhlmann says the world is moving towards prioritising energy security, warning Australia’s current policies risk making the nation poorer. “There is undoubtedly a shift which Chris Bowen refuses to acknowledge,” Mr Uhlmann told News24 host Peta Credlin. “Right around the world, the world understands now that energy security trumps everything else. “What Chris Bowen says and does is somewhat a sideshow. “We continue to pursue policies which will in the long run make us a poorer nation.”

Say what? There has been a rebrand/

Sky Noise down under now goes by another name?

But nobody bothered to tell Arthur or Martha or the lizard Oz until now?

And speaking of Martha, Dame Groan offered a final gobbet, grandly climaxing in a triumphant dissing of net zero, because there's never been a better time to gas the planet ...

Economists have no problem with resource reservation rules if they are agreed prior to investment in projects. They should preferably apply for the duration of a project rather than each year.
What is now being proposed by the federal government doesn’t fit into this mould. A very large tranche of gas is to be reserved – around 250 petajoules, or 20 per cent of the total exports of LNG – and this must be sold to users each year, not just offered. This is absurd and would basically force most small domestic gas producers to the wall.
There is very little domestic demand in the Northern Territory and yet the proposal is that the reserved gas must be sold before any residual can be exported. This is completely unworkable. Given the prospects of the very large Beetaloo project coming to fruition, the last thing the country needs is this sort of impediment to stand in its way.
The basic idea is that downward pressure should be placed on the domestic price of gas and this would help industrial users of gas as well as gas-using households. The trouble is that a much lower domestic price will kill the incentives for exploration and new developments because the anticipated risk-adjusted returns will be simply too low.
There is also the possibility that the LNG export contracts entered into by the three producers operating out of Gladstone will not be fully honoured. Not only would there be important implications for our trading relationships, but there could also be a threat to the security of our liquid fuels sourced from Asian refineries.
The consultation process for the proposed gas reservation scheme – at least there has been one – has drawn stringent criticisms from a wide range of participants. Apart from some gas users, who are still wary about long-run price and supply sustainability, the scheme is essentially friendless. It partly reflects the complete gutting of the bureaucracy in terms of expertise and experience in the field.
There really is no choice but to return to the drawing board. A much smaller quantity of gas should be nominated; it will need only to be offered to users, not sold; Western Australia and the Northern Territory should be excluded; and specific commitments must be made to the facilitation of the opening up of new gas fields, including support for the required infrastructure such as additional pipelines.
As the air goes out of the net-zero tyre globally, it would have been preferable for Bowen to focus on the various pressing energy issues we face at home. These COP conferences come and go, but they won’t solve our domestic energy problems.

Let's hope this summer isn't as good down under as Europe's has been up there, because if it turns out that way, Dame Groan blather about climate science coming and going will be the least of our problems.

And so to the immortal Rowe, wrapping up all that's going down ...

Beware of dark alleys full of unsavoury types.

Finally, the kid does well in this tribute to Alex Jones, down there with mad King Donald ranting about Jeanine Pirro.

The humour might be heavy handed, but was Alex ever subtle?

In which the reptiles disinter the lying rodent from the cornfield, and Gina's pampered pet creates turmoil in the lizard Oz and the Major...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:15:40 +0000

What gets the pond on a daily basis is the way that Faux Noise is responsible to a remarkable degree for the folly of installing mad King Donald, producing many, many absurdities along the way, from that former Faux Noise employee, the drunk Pirro, and the reflecting pool debacle, to that former Faux Noise employee Pete Kegsbreath and the major inflationary debacle of the Iran war...

A more fitting name for the lizard Oz would be "An American family presents", but none of the reptiles holding down sinecures would ever contemplate acknowledging reality.

That's how you get the likes of the fatuous Major Mitchell scribbling ...

Journalists look to the left as nation’s economy tanks
Media’s epic fail: why economic pain, not immigration, is the true driver of One Nation’s support
The inability of most political journalists to prioritise economic reform over social policy has given politicians a leave pass to fritter away our national prosperity, and social cohesion with it.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

More on the Major anon, but that will mean reducing Ben packing it - in an EXCLUSIVE - must be reduced to a teaser trailer...

EXCLUSIVE
Trump battleships put AUKUS subs at back of the line
Trump-class battleship ‘threatens AUKUS timeline’ amid reactor bottleneck
Donald Trump’s plan for a new class of gigantic namesake battleships has emerged as the latest risk confronting the $368bn AUKUS pact.
By Ben Packham

How could the pond resist showing the sketch at the top of Ben's panic, as remote as an AUKUS sub, as crude as those digital games that haunt the pond's logarithms?

Golly gee Ben, you don't mean that Faux Noise's favourite Prez might stiff more than a former Olympian, while in pursuit of another gilt-gold laden folly?

Meanwhile, the Major's feeble attempt to blame the media and "political journalists" for the rise of Gina's pet surfaced in other ways this day in the lizard Oz.

It was a measure of the size of the threat that the reptiles decided to wheel out the fossilised remains of the lying rodent with an EXCLUSIVE and a wild-eyed commentary by the bouffant one ...

EXCLUSIVE
Howard maps migration middle path for Coalition
Pauline Hanson’s monoculture push is ‘pointless’, John Howard declares in key intervention
Taking Pauline Hanson’s monoculture campaign head on, John Howard advocates for a conservative path for ‘Australian multiculturalism’.
By Dennis Shanahan

Again with the teaser trailer for the intermittent archive listing ...

The bouffant one could only manage a two minute regurgitation, like a mama bird shoving masticated food down the hive mind throat?

Commentary by Dennis Shanahan
Former PM provides solution to ‘pointless’ monoculture
John Howard has a commonsense solution to ‘pointless’ Hanson monoculture debate

John Howard is a career-long opponent to One Nation and a leader subjected to allegations of racism by the Left. Now he has a simple formula for multiculturalism.

Indeed he could ...

It's a living, albeit a pathetic one, but why bother with the bouffant one repackaging and regurgitating the lying rodent, when little Johnny himself was to hand over on the extreme far right of the rag's digital edition?

How could it be any worse than the onion muncher routinely stealing the limelight, in his narcissistic way, from the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way?

The header: Frankly, I do not know what ‘monoculture’ means in Australia; Most Australians will regard the ‘multiculture’ versus ‘monoculture’ identity debate as quite pointless.

The credit for the astonishingly awful image that opened play, which on the upside avoids yet another snap of the lying rodent: “By any measure, post-World War II migration has been a resounding success,” writes John Howard. Artwork: Frank Ling

What with the lying rodent having paved the way for Gina's pet's parade of bigotry, fear and loathing about uppity, difficult furriners - a theme taken up with gusto by the lizard Oz hive mind - the little desiccated coconut could manage only a three minute attempt to defuse his very own time bomb ...

Preparations for the bicentenary of British settlement in Australia began when Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. He conceived a description for the celebration that was ideal in every way. That description was The Australian Achievement.
Regrettably, the Hawke government abandoned this description in favour of the limp, banal moniker of Living Together.
Fraser was right. In every way Australia had been an achievement. Oddly, though, one feature of that achievement had been an inability on occasions to recognise national successes.
Migration was a case in point. By any measure, post-World War II migration has been a resounding success. This is despite it having taken a long time to get rid of the White Australia policy – for which a Liberal, Harold Holt, deserves most credit.
Despite this, much political discussion of immigration today is beset by a pointless debate about whether we should call it monocultural or multicultural.
Most Australians regard this as quite pointless, simply because they have long favoured a steady immigration stream subject to it not imposing too great a strain on our infrastructure, especially housing. The other important constraint has been that existing citizens did not want new arrivals bringing their homegrown hatreds and enmities to this country.
I was powerfully reminded of how strongly most Australians felt on this issue by the reaction to remarks I made in my 2001 policy speech to the effect that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

The pond was powerfully reminded of how a cynical politician used a captain merely trying to honour the laws of the sea to feather his own nest, and set off decades of bigotry.

As much to the point, how much is this a sign of a desperate attempt by the reptiles to keep living in the past?

How much is this a sign that the reptiles have absolutely no confidence in the beefy boofhead, and so must resort to the little Bush to produce some decorative Bonsai?

As if to prove the point, the reptiles wheeled out a snap of a man who in later times and in his guilt-stricken dotage made the average Oz leftie look like a raving capitalist...Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser in his Melbourne office in April 2013.

At some point, it was inevitable that little Johnny would wheel out "Judaeo-Xian" ...

Despite differing political views, most Australians thought this encapsulated their feelings.
I, frankly, do not know what monoculture means in the context of immigration. To some it apparently means a mixture of people of different ancestries bound together by a common Australian citizenship. To others it can mean an uncompromising refusal to accept any deviation from a pre-established Australian identity.
For decades the friendly expression New Australian was extended to newly arrived immigrants, whether from the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, the Baltic countries, Vietnam or elsewhere. It was meant as a welcome and most new arrivals saw it as such. Yet it fell into disuse and even attracted some criticism when the more politically correct expression multicultural began to be used.
As is well known, I have always felt uncomfortable with the expression multicultural. In my eyes it connoted a nation of tribes, which was the very antithesis of what most saw migration as having created in Australia. It suggested conflict and differences rather than overwhelming success and co-operation.
I have little doubt that the genesis of the expression multicultural lay in a desire for political advantage. The argument advanced by the proponents of multiculturalism (of which Al Grassby and Gough Whitlam were prime movers) was that the then protocol of assimilation obliterated traces of national origin and culture. This was never the case.
My experience had been that most new Australians happily combined absorption into the Australian mainstream with affection for the country of their birth or background. They had chosen Australia because of who we were, not because of what they might have wanted us to become.
Culturally, the Australia of 1985 was different from Australia of 1955. What had remained constant were the underpinnings of our society: the fundamental equality of men and women, the Judaeo-Christian ethic, free speech, the rule of law, scorn for distinctions based on class or any concept of aristocracy, and parliamentary democracy.

Say what?

the Judaeo-Christian ethic, scorn for distinctions based on class or any concept of aristocracy

Is anyone going to tell King Chuck, the GG, and assorted bunyip aristocrats? Or the onion muncher when in a knighthood mood, down there with Billy Wentworth ...

At this point, the lying rodent reverted to the usual way of dealing with implicit notions of condescension ... by wheeling in a token furriner ...

Our habits and customs had been influenced and shaped by the multitude of migrants who had come to Australia in that 30-year period. I have never met a multicultural person. Yet I have met many bicultural people. One of them was my revered chief of staff when I was prime minister.
Born in Newcastle (Australia), Arthur Sinodinos is as Australian as the gum tree. Simultaneously he is proud of his Greek heritage and retains many connections with the Greek community in Australia. He has had an outstanding career in public life having served in the Senate, was a cabinet minister and Australia’s ambassador to the United States.

Sounds like multiculturalism to the pond, it being possible to embrace several cultures in the manner of chewing gum, and rubbing tum ...Arthur Sinodinos is as Australian as the gum tree despite his proud Greek heritage.

And so to wrap up with a mixed message typical of his braying when in power ...

Although I personally little used the expression multicultural when I was prime minister, my government did not abandon its use completely.
It did, however, redefine it as being Australian multiculturalism. This involved an emphasis on the unifying elements of Australian citizenship, irrespective of ethnic origin.
In my time as prime minister I often invoked the expression “the things that unite us as Australians are infinitely stronger and more enduring than those that divide us”. Better than any other expression, that encapsulated the successful assimilation or integration of millions of new arrivals into our national life.
It was a reminder that a special character of our achievement as a nation had been immigration from many parts of the world.
John Howard was prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007.

What an offensive man he was, and continues to be ...

Here, take a break with the infallible weekend Pope, evoking how the pond felt after that read, badly in need of an injection of peptides like some vulgar youff in search of eternal life ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were in an ongoing state of panic at another betrayal ....

EXCLUSIVE
James Ashby to be One Nation party boss as former Scott Morrison aide becomes Hanson’s chief of staff
One Nation has tapped a former top adviser to Scott Morrison to run Pauline Hanson’s office as James Ashby moves into a new role.

Great. Gina's pampered benefit will benefit from the same exceptional skill as shown when SloMo was in charge of proceedings.

Meanwhile, the reptiles decided that they'd have two indigenous folk argue with each other ...

Torment of powerlessness in remote communities must end
Pearson reveals how to end ‘torment of powerlessness’ in remote communities
Cape York leader Noel Pearson urges the Albanese government to cut ties with vice industries. Read the full speech here.
By Noel Pearson
Columnist

The hapless Pearson, always a sucker for a lizard Oz platform, ended with a question:

After the rejection of the Voice, the conversation about structural reform of the federal arrangements governing Indigenous affairs, must resume. If not a Voice, then let us ask the question Dr King asked in two years after Civil Rights and one year before his assassination: where do we go from here?

Nowhere Noel, you're in the lizard Oz, deep in the hive mind, where it's usually the voice, with the capital V and the concept driven into the wilderness, and an annotation always at hand ...

Structural reform is the only way back: A response to Pearson’s Garma address
The reality is that while the referendum did not succeed, the status quo has continued and the same problems plague Indigenous communities.
By Megan Davis
Contributor

What an honour they paid Pearson, because the Voice again became the voice ...

Pearson says after the rejection of the voice, the conversation about structural reform of the federal arrangements governing Indigenous affairs must resume.
The Productivity Commission’s bleak report card and Pearson’s address is a good place to start.
Megan Davis is scientia professor and Balnaves chair in Constitutional Law, UNSW Sydney.

So we can have an endless argument over whether it was the Voice or the voice?

Enough already, time to head back to the Major, also obsessed with Gina's pampered pet and who to blame, provided it's not the lizard Oz setting out a policy platform for her - climate science denialism (praise be to Lloydie of the Amazon and the Bjørn-again one), hatred of furriners ruining everything (where are you Dame Groan?) and bloody Islamics disrupting the social fabric (how many reptiles can you name, the Zionist Major being just for starters?)...

The header: Media’s epic fail: why economic pain, not immigration, is the true driver of One Nation’s support; The inability of most political journalists to prioritise economic reform over social policy has given politicians a leave pass to fritter away our national prosperity, and social cohesion with it.

The caption for the image of Gina's pet, the lizard Oz's policies creation now haunting the reptiles and the Major: Pauline Hanson is viewed by her support base as anti-establishment.

The Major spent a bigly five minutes having at ... the ABC, which along with furriners and Islamics, is responsible for all the thought crimes that have rooned the country.

On the upside, it wasn't his usual Zionist-inflected rant, so the pond realised it could probably cope ...

The failure of three Coalition prime ministers from 2013 to 2022 and Labor’s Anthony Albanese since to lift Australia’s economic performance has created the fertile electoral ground One Nation’s Pauline Hanson is now tilling.
The corresponding inability of most political journalists to prioritise economic reform over social policy has given politicians a leave pass to fritter away our national prosperity, and social cohesion with it.
ABC Afternoon Briefing host Patricia Karvelas seemed puzzled when Liberal deputy leader Jane Hume criticised Labor’s planned new Fair Work Court on July 23. Hume referred to the court several times as a “brand new bureaucracy”.
Karvelas ignores how much damage Labor’s pro-union economic reforms since Tony Burke was minister for industrial relations have done to national productivity.
This newspaper on July 27 said the court would add “another layer of complexity and regulation to the nation’s convoluted IR system”.

Cue an image of someone the reptiles fear even more than Gina's pampered pet, ABC Afternoon Briefing host Patricia Karvelas. Picture: X

What is it with the reptiles? It's not just Polonius who spends far too much time watching and listening to the cardigan wearers, and talking back to the TV screen like some superannuated pensioner, it's the Major as well ...

On Tuesday, ABC Radio National breakfast host Sally Sara interviewed retiring ACTU president Michele O’Neil the morning after O’Neil and ACTU secretary Sally McManus revealed plans to retire.
The Australian’s workplace editor, Ewin Hannan, quoted Albanese about O’Neil and McManus: “Working families are in a stronger financial position today than they otherwise would be because of the tireless advocacy and strong leadership of Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil.”
It is untrue. What amounts to an unwinding of the IR reforms of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments has made the union movement stronger at the expense of workers.
RN was having none of that. In nine minutes and 19 seconds, Sara asked nothing about whether the re-regulation of the labour market was destroying national productivity and creating per capita GDP stagnation. She allowed O’Neil to judge her time at the ACTU by a 12 per cent increase in union membership that still sits at only 13 per cent nationally across the public and private sectors.

The Major turned to a current revanchist to help him with his revisionism ...

It should have been easy for Karvelas and Sara given former reforming ACTU secretary Bill Kelty the previous week delivered a paper to the Senate outlining what needed to be done to kickstart productivity and growth.
Kelty, in a written submission to a parliamentary inquiry on July 21, said there was something really wrong with economic management nationally when living standards were falling at a time of high commodity prices in a nation that is a major commodities exporter.
He criticised governments that “pay for quarantine centres that are never used, Commonwealth Games that are not held in the country, infrastructure costs that are the highest in the world”.
Our productivity performance was the third lowest in the OECD, investment too low, and growth per capita “non-existent”, he said.
“But our taxes are increasing, government expenditure is rising faster than prices. It does say something is wrong with this place.”
Australia was second only to Italy in having the biggest reduction in real wages since 2021, the Australian Financial Review’s Phil Coorey reported Kelty as saying.
While journalists like to portray growing support for One Nation as a moral failure based on voter racism, as Nine newspapers’ political editor Peter Hartcher has argued several times this year, Kelty’s paper points to a better explanation for the “pox on both your houses” attitude shown by One Nation’s soaring support.

They even flung in a snap of Bill ...Former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty delivered a paper to the Senate outlining how to kickstart productivity and growth. Picture: Aaron Francis

The Major was keen to establish that Pauline's success had nothing to do with racism or bigotry or furriners, even though there'd been so much bigotry on parade that it had earned its own wiki listing... Pauline Hanson burqa incidents

You know, just a standard visualisation of a typical lizard Oz column bemoaning furriners and/or Islamics...

After all, she's just reflecting the lizard Oz's anti-Islamic jihad that has been a feature of the rag for many years, with the Major a major proponent, but don't expect the Major to look in that mirror.

Little wonder he wanted to look elsewhere...

Polling published by the AFR on Tuesday suggests while many One Nation supporters share Hanson’s position on cutting immigration, that is not their main driver.
Tony Barry, a director of RedBridge Polling, said: “Pauline Hanson’s biggest political asset is that her base sees her as their anti-establishment outsider and their wrecking ball against a political model that they feel no longer works for them.”
While most One Nation support comes from the Coalition, the forgotten history of the party – discussed in this column on February 8 and April 6 – suggests Labor governments can manipulate debate about preference exchanges with Hanson to turn elections into referendums about racism.
Journalists on the left are only too happy to reflect such spin from Labor governments, as Sara did last Wednesday morning when pressing Victorian federal Liberal MP Dan Tehan on the possibility of a Coalition-One Nation preference exchange at the upcoming state election on November 28.
Tehan said Sara was simply repeating the lines of new Victorian Premier Ben Carroll, who had said the previous day that Labor was facing the Coalition and One Nation.
This is exactly the strategy former Labor premier Peter Beattie used to topple the Coalition in the June 1998 Queensland election. Expect ABC, Guardian and Nine papers journalists to run hard on the idea that the Coalition faces a moral imperative on One Nation preferences.

Will the lizard Oz also face a moral imperative?

Not likely, because they simply can't let go of their bashing of multiculturalism, with the Major proposing it was time to let the notion go, though he did the standard cunning reptile ploy of palming that trick off onto another player...

History offers other One Nation lessons.

Hanson’s apparent prevarication on domestic violence last month was nothing new. Right back to her 1996 election in the Queensland federal seat of Oxley, the state’s Men’s Rights Agency was one of her strongest backers.
Nor was Hanson called out by journalists or Coalition politicians for her claim in a podcast with UK far right figure Tommy Robinson that multiculturalism and the end of the White Australia policy were the work of Labor’s Gough Whitlam.
Both had more to do with the Coalition in the late 1960s, and especially former minister for immigration and later prime minister Harold Holt.
Journalists have also conveniently forgotten that it was during Hanson’s first incarnation that Polish Australian intellectual Jerzy Zubrzycki, the father of Australian multiculturalism, said the term may well have passed its use-by date. He believed the policy was being misrepresented as antithetical to social integration.

So it was the father of the concept that said the concept was dead? Reptile case closed. How to back that up? Drag in another loon retrieved from the dustbin of far right history ...

Former NSW Upper House MP David Oldfield discussed One Nation’s core beliefs in a piece published in The Australian on July 23.
He suggested that without a clearer policy positioning beyond immigration and patriotism, Hanson would not win the number of federal seats suggested by the published polling.
Oldfield thought One Nation would win up to seven Senate seats and some Lower House seats federally, “but not enough to make a difference”.
Labor has other ideas and will do its best to pump up the One Nation threat, as Albanese did last week in Adelaide at the party’s national conference. It will use Victoria as a testing ground.

Yes, the excesses of the far right, daily on parade in the Murdochian press, are all the fault of leftists, and it will all be the fault of Albo for pumping up the threat ...Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during day 3 of the ALP National Conference at the Adelaide Convention Centre. Picture Matt Turner

And for a concluding irony, the Major, offered a retirement sinecure so that he could come in from the golf course to indulge in a weekly Zionist rant, offered this as his closing gobbet ...

Journalists of the left will try to create a media storm portraying opposition to high immigration as a racist moral failing rather than the entirely foreseeable result of economic pain that the media really should be doing more to expose.
It’s easier for highly paid journalists in secure jobs at the national broadcaster to posture about their own values than to empathise with working class people who simply feel that Australia’s social contract with them is broken.
As The Australian’s Paul Kelly wrote last Wednesday, “Hanson is a political gift to Labor with the government now enshrining One Nation at the heart of its re-election pitch.”

That's how weird it's got, how incestuous, with the Major ending by referencing "Ned", as a way of proving he was clueless as to how to handle Gina's pet, as if it was impossible to see that bigotry and economic hardship might run together ... (and might even explain how the uneducated might be manipulated into a MAGA frenzy).

Cue a teaser trailer for "Ned" peddling the same line...

One Nation is a thing of beauty for the Labor Party
One Nation will give Labor the electoral exemption it needs to dodge proper accountability for its flawed agenda

Been there, done that, and all it did was remind the pond what a thing of beauty mad King Donald still was to Faux Noise and Murdoch HQ... no matter that it was on again, off again, on again, off again, on again, off again ...

And so to this, because the pond had made a promise to run this the next time blather about Judaeo-Xian nonsense reared its ugly head ...

In which the pond goes in search of bonus reptiles, and ends up starting with Jensenism and Polonius ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:00:00 +0000

The pond hasn't thought about Jensenism (or Pellism for that matter) for many a long year, and yet suddenly there was a rush of fragrant memories that came tumbling into the noggin, discovered as the pond went looking for a bonus for its Sunday meditation.

How could the pond resist bumping up a leading Jensenist to top of the page, with talk of lads gone fishing?

Alas, the pond then discovered that the intermittent archive was feeling out of sorts, and so it was impossible to save the rest.

How could the pond leave the Jensenism in mid-stream without showing another young lad?

There was a homily that followed after that last snap...

But perhaps the boys themselves have sorted it out. Fishing isn’t organised. It isn’t run by adults. It isn’t even very competitive, as far as I can see. There are no grades, no likes, no followers. There’s no pretence. You either catch a fish or you don’t. And if you don’t, so what?
There’s something wonderfully honest about that.
Perhaps this little revival of boys fishing is telling us something hopeful that we shouldn’t miss. Left to themselves, absent the adult panic, boys can figure it out.
I wonder if that’s also why we are beginning to see young men drift back towards church. At its best, the church offers many of the same things that fishing does: not entertainment but purpose; not instant gratification but patient formation; not isolation but togtherness; not endless choice but a demanding way of life.
Perhaps the instincts that make for good fishermen are not so different from the instincts that make for men of faith (and women too). Both require patience, humility, teachability, perseverance and hope. And maybe those instincts were never lost. We simply forgot to believe they were there.
Michael P. Jensen is a writer and the rector of St Mark’s Darling Point, Sydney.

Bizarrely, a hot link attached to "absent the adult panic" led straight back to the very same piece of Jensenism.

Sadly there was no indication that Michael P. had written anything else for the reptiles, but the pond does encourage the reptiles to repeat the dose, even if the angry Sydney Anglicans seem to have lost a little of their bite.

Such stupefying banality is the sort of soporific the pond needs when confronted by the challenge of getting out of bed on a Sunday.

Dissidents might murmur at the way the pond favoured Jensenism over Polonius's prattle, but rest easy, this lad never goes fishing. He prefers hunting green elephants ...

The header: Green elephant in the room: political focus on the wrong minor party; Journalists hold the Coalition to a standard rarely applied to Labor when it comes to minor party alliances.

The caption for the stunningly meaningful and insightful snap that sets Polonius on his journey: The unintended consequence of One Nation’s apparent success could be a return to a Labor government, in Victoria and nationally, on the back of Greens preferences. Picture: NewsWire/ David Crosling

Polonius offered his standard 4 minute read, and the pond immediately knew what the problem was.

Polonius, often inclined to indulge his obsession, had been watching the ABC yet again, early in the morning, and it had set off his bile juices and compounded his jaundice...

In earlier times the cry “What about the workers?” could be heard in the labour movement across the land. A more relevant question today is: “What about the Greens?”
It’s understandable why Labor Party leaders at federal and state levels claim, because of the increase in support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, the Coalition can form government only if it is in coalition with One Nation. But is it true?
Last Wednesday Sally Sara interviewed opposition frontbencher Dan Tehan, one of the better performers in the Liberal Party-Nationals Coalition, on ABC Radio National Breakfast. The Coalition has been in operation at the federal level, with only a few breaks, for a century.
The program ran an audio of Ben Carroll, the new Labor Party Premier in Victoria, stating opinion “polling says Victoria is on track for Australia’s first Liberal-One Nation government”. He did not mention the Nationals.

Naturally the reptiles followed up with a snap of Dan "the man": Senior Liberal frontbencher Dan Tehan. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

That vile ABC hussy sent Polonius spiralling out of control ...

Sara threw the first question to Tehan: “In your view would it be better to have a Coalition slash One Nation government or another Labor government in Victoria?” This question followed Carroll’s claim that “a Liberal-One Nation government will cut … services Victorians rely on”.
Tehan responded: “Look that’s just Labor Party spin”, and said Labor had been “cutting services in Victoria”.
But Sara returned to her original point about whether “it would be better to have a Coalition government in coalition with One Nation than to have another Labor government”. Tehan stuck to his point that the Coalition’s aim was to attain a majority of seats in its own right.
Sara implied that one or the other was the only possible outcome of the Victorian election in November. But this is not the case. The most recent Newspoll for Victoria, published in these pages on Tuesday, has the Coalition at 31 per cent, Labor at 28 per cent, One Nation at 19 per cent, the Greens at 13 per cent and others at 9 per cent.

Where would the reptiles - and its hive mind readers - be without a reminder of where their allegiances lie ... Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, Victorian Liberal Party state president Brian Loughnane and Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson.

Polonius dared to dream a One Nation dreaming ...

If the Coalition won more seats than Labor without attaining an absolute majority it could possibly govern with the support of One Nation and/or some independents. That’s called a minority government. This would not require any formal link with One Nation MPs, only a guarantee to support a Coalition government by passing supply and not supporting votes of no confidence.
It’s the same with Labor. If Labor did not win enough seats to govern in its own right, it too might get support from Greens or independent candidates if they happened to win seats.
In other words, a Coalition government, led by Jess Wilson, comprising Liberals and Nationals would not need a formal alliance with One Nation to govern. No surprise that Labor is running the opposite line, but journalists should know better.
The states show how this can work. In Tasmania, the Liberal Party holds 14 out of 35 seats and Labor holds 10 seats. The crossbench consists of five Greens, five independents and one Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP. The Liberal Party has enough guarantees of confidence and supply that it can govern in its own right.

You see? It would be an alliance, but an informal alliance, not a formal alliance, and that makes all the difference. Just look at Tasmania for how tremendously effective it can be ... Jane Howlett resigns as Tasmania's Racing Minister amid questioning over publicly funded legal bill

And then there's Minnsie (Minnsy?), busy bulldozing public housing ... NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns. Picture: NewsWire/Monique Harmer

Everybody's doing it, but it's just not fair the way they look at it. They need a set of patented, unique Polonial glasses ...

It is sometimes overlooked that the Chris Minns-led Labor government in NSW does not hold a majority in the Legislative Assembly. It has 46 out of 93 seats, one short of a majority. There are nine independents and three Greens on the crossbench. One independent serves as Speaker.
There is a difference between a formal capital-C Coalition government between the Liberals and Nationals and a small-C coalition government that would bring together two parties with significantly different policies. Neither the Coalition nor Labor like this.
The likes of Sara who ask a Coalition frontbencher about whether it would form a coalition government with One Nation seldom raise a similar questions with Labor leaders about the Greens.
It would be reasonable for journalists to ask Minns if he would go into government with Greens MPs who happened to win seats to form a minority government after the election. The answer almost certainly would be similar to Tehan’s response to Sara.
Namely, that Labor intends to govern in its own right but would form a minority administration. Labor MPs dislike the Greens much more than some Coalition MPs dislike One Nation. No Labor MP in NSW would be likely to advocate a coalition with the Greens. Yet the question is relevant for a journalist to ask, if only to avoid being accused of double standards.
Nor are the opposition’s leaders – the Liberal Party’s Angus Taylor and the Nationals’ Matt Canavan – likely to concede that they would form a coalition with One Nation.

Sheesh, just at the moment the pond thought it had spotted a rebrand, the old brand surfaced yet again, courtesy simplistic Sharri ...Veteran Broadcaster Ray Hadley says Opposition Leader Angus Taylor needs to “stop bagging” One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson. Mr Hadley told Sky News host Sharri Markson that all Angus Taylor is “promoting her” every time he talks about One Nation. “If you want to beat Labor, there’s a Coalition to be formed.”

And after all that, Polonius dissolved into his usual state of uncertainty, a blank void of unlikies, suggestions and possibilities ...

In any event, the next federal election is not scheduled until May 2028. Anthony Albanese is unlikely to call an early election. For starters, there is no reason to do so. Moreover, Albanese is a cautious politician disinclined to take unnecessary risks. Then there are his parliamentary colleagues. It’s unlikely that all Labor MPs will hold their seats at the next election. Most of those in marginal seats will want to hang on to their positions for as long as possible.

The latest national News24 Pulse/YouGov poll, conducted between July 21 and July 28, has Labor at a primary vote of 28 per cent with One Nation at 25 per cent, the Coalition at 22 per cent and the Greens at 13 per cent.
This suggests the Taylor-led Coalition is narrowing the gap between it and the Hanson-led One Nation. As mentioned in these pages not long ago, the essential task of the Coalition is to get ahead of One Nation. Then it could benefit from One Nation preferences – provided they go to the Coalition at the same high rate as Greens preferences go to Labor.
This is possible but far from certain since some One Nation supporters are former Labor voters. Which leads to the tentative conclusion that the unintended consequence of One Nation’s apparent success could be a return to a Labor government on the back of Greens preferences. Both in Victoria and nationally.

Why it was almost as bland and as soporific as a burst of Jensenism, or watching the ABC ...

If Polonius had to feature simpleton Sharri, why not the full deal?

At this point, the pond went looking for that bonus, and became terribly distressed ...

Following on from the bromancer's assault yesterday on the conduct of the war on Iran by mad King Donald and minions of the Pete Kegsbreath kind, it seemed his fellow reptiles were just as down on other mad king schemes.

Stewie was in a real stew ...

Endless hurdles ahead in fragile plan to disarm Hamas
Hamas agrees to disarm but major obstacles lie ahead
For the first time Hamas has agreed to a plan to lay down its arms – but the devil is in the detail of a plan riddled with obstacles.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

A teaser trailer should suffice for this treasonous attitude ...

Outrageous. As if the pond hadn't seen it clearly set down in print...

There, done and dusted, a rolled gold proclamation, sorted and solved. When has anything the mad King so ordered not come to pass?

Who are these provincial bums to question His Majesty or the thinking of state regime media, aka the Emeritus Chairman's Faux Noise.

And yet, outrageously, the pond must report that Jennings of the fifth form was in the same camp as Stewie, and he was pulling the same stewed prune face ...

‘I want to believe’: Why Trump’s disarmament agreement with Hamas will fail
It is more believable the US is hiding aliens than Hamas will lay down its weapons in favour of peace and property development.
By Peter Jennings

Why are all the reptiles so down on mad King Donald?

Could it be that maybe Benji wasn't too keen on peace before those elections, what with being on a war footing a handy way to rustle up a few more votes?

Could it be that Benji might shaft mad King Donald yet again?

After all, it was Benji who facilitated Hamas as an alternative power base, a way of ensuring that factions would be riven and there'd never be a Palestinian state, not that any of that much troubled Jennings of the fifth form ...

Of course, it's all the fault of Hamas, because Benji would do anything to help out the mad King.

After that extended detour, the pond kept looking for a bonus that might appeal, but came up short.

The pond has always found snappy Tom to be Dame Groan lite ... never willing to go to the heart of the apocalyptic chaos that will surely erupt before Xmas...

RBA and Fed wait, but inflation beast has not been killed. Who is to blame?
Most Australians blame the RBA for causing inflation. But the central bank says most believe the cure for inflation is actually making it worse. And that confusion makes its job harder.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

Even the uncredited collage below the header looked very low rent ...

Enough already with these teaser trailers!

Why had the Angelic one let down the pond when she was badly needed?

The pond decided on a desperate strategy.

It was time to turn to the lizard Oz editorialist for a summary of the key issues the reptiles had confronted this weekend ...

There was simplistic Sharri and the Fauci matter ...

Roll that last line trippingly around on the tongue ...

His failure to do so will leave citizens in the US and around the world more hostile to health authorities, including in the event of future crises. Many citizens, for good reason, became more sceptical as the Covid crisis unfolded. Their reluctance to trust health authorities in future could bring its own problems.

Say what? Their reluctance to trust health authorities in future

This in the age of Robert Kennedy and mad King Donald?

And then there was the Lloydie matter, that nuking of the country, not to mention the planet, in order to save the planet from the ravings of a climate science cult ...

Say what? The lizard Oz editorialist felt the need to start that last sentence with an "If"?

If you can fill the unforgiving nuke

With sixty seconds’ worth of energy run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a reptile, my son!

Dare to dream ... and talk of that climate science cult, that hoax, will melt in the noonday sun.

And lastly there was the fertilizer matter, which had been a weekend lizard Oz EXCLUSIVE ...

Yet again there was no mention of the masterminds behind all this fuss.

Yet again the reptiles had failed to understand the wisdom of tariffs, or the need for the mad King to make out like a crypto bandit, or the need for the US government to forcibly acquire shares in corporations ... or arrange for chips to be shipped forthwith to the middle east, so that they might be forwarded on post haste to China, facilitated by appropriate crypto deals.

Yet again they failed to understand how their kissing cousins in regime state media had opened them up to suspicion and derision ... what with the Faux Noise approved war still surprisingly resilient and going swimmingly well ...

And so to the usual weekly debrief ...

In which the bromancer is in dire straits, but Lloydie of the Amazon is full of hope, nuking the planet to save the planet ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:59:19 +0000

The reptiles are nothing if not inventive, daily devising new EXCLUSIVE ways to launch invective on hapless Albo and his mob ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘It stinks’: Labor’s fail on fertiliser firms rescue
Labor’s big stink: import scheme ‘cost us millions’, say fertiliser importers
It was meant to keep the nation going through the Iran crisis but Labor’s $7.5bn fuel and fertiliser scheme has cost some companies millions while distorting the market, amid conflict and governance concerns.
By Matthew Denholm

Might not mad King Donald also stink because he started the ruckus?

Meanwhile, Fergo scored top billing with an apocalyptic headline ...

State of chaos: Can anyone stop Victoria’s rot?
Victoria faces line-in-the-sand poll as both leaders back reset
There will be a dramatic shift away from spendathon politics, regardless of who wins office on November 28.
By John Ferguson

The pond was almost beguiled and tempted to indulge, not least because of Emilia's stunning collage atop the piece ...

Why bother with AI when Emilia can do the job?

Fergo went on and on and on, for a bigly 11 minutes, but the immortal David Rowe summed it all up in a single image with shades of St. Kilda...

Besides, the pond is extremely loyal to its stars, and how could it walk around the bromancer, top of the world ma over on the extreme far right?

The header: Iran moves decisively against its greatest enemy – Donald Trump; Lyndon Johnson will be remembered for Vietnam, George W. Bush for Iraq and Trump for the strategic disaster that Iran has become.

The caption for the only snap to relieve readers mired in the bromancer's suffering: US President Donald Trump faces escalating Middle East tension and severe political headwinds ahead of November elections. Picture: AP

Please allow the pond to begin at the beguin ...

Way back in March, the bromancer was cautiously optimistic ...

Trump’s Iran campaign aims to reverse the revolution
If Donald Trump produces a more normal government in Tehran the whole world benefits. But every outcome, including the worst, remains possible.

The bro began that piece with sublime hope and a dash of saucy doubts and fears ...

In launching his military campaign against Iran, Donald Trump has made his boldest play at history yet. This is his biggest attempt to bend decisively the planet’s geo-strategic arc.
The instant reactions give you some the clue. Around the Western world, perpetual demonstrators of the left, and pro-Islamist demonstrators, are in the streets denouncing Trump. Ethnic Iranians in the West, long subject to co-ordinated intimidation from Tehran, danced in the streets, as did Iranians at home, at the end of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rule.
Trump has the right enemies, the right friends. That’s not to say he’ll succeed. His operation is intensely risky, involves huge human cost, and is unpredictable in its consequences. Nonetheless, when Trump declared: “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight”, he was for once telling the truth.
Whether previous US presidents were constrained by wise prudence, or an unwillingness to face strategic necessity, is a matter of judgment.
The Albanese government is right to endorse Trump’s action and deserves some recognition for this. Deciding that in a war between Iran and the US, Australia backs the US, is not exactly rocket science – morally, strategically or electorally. Nonetheless, the government has made the right call. That the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, is strongly opposed to the US action is a further sign that it’s probably more good than bad.

But since that glorious start, endorsed by stout-hearted Albo, the bromancer has progressively become more disheartened and disillusioned, the vision growing darker and darker, the outlook getting gloomier, the result looking bleak, and today saw the bro in a grumpy mood ...

There’s now a good chance Iran will totally destroy Donald Trump. The Iran war is the biggest challenge Trump has ever faced in a long and eventful life.
This past week saw a critical inflection point. With attacks in both directions halted, and Trump claiming negotiations were proceeding and Iran wanted a deal, Tehran decided to escalate with direct missile strikes at US bases and allies. That the Iranians can do this, even after Trump repeatedly declared their military destroyed, demonstrates their determination, Russian and Chinese help, and the asymmetric drone warfare they’ve mastered.
Iran also activated key proxies – militia in Iraq and Houthis in Yemen, who announced a blockade against Saudi Arabia transporting oil via the Red Sea. Among other effects, this raises US gas prices. America retaliated militarily. That was inevitable. The Iranians knew this. That’s what’s so striking. Iran, though vastly weaker than America, initiated escalation, knowing the consequences.
The Iranians themselves are divided, more than capable of overplaying their hand and making big mistakes. They could yet unravel. But this week it looked as though Tehran calculated its moves, acting deliberately and confidently. Whatever you think of Trump, it’s infinitely better if the US prevails. But this week shows us the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the mullahs think they’re winning and want to deny Trump any way out. They sense huge historic, strategic gain and the chance to cruel Trump’s presidency. The Iranians hate Trump. They’ve tried to kill him more than once.

The pond knew at once what the bromancer needed.

As the reptiles had refused to offer him any visual distractions, it was up to the pond to supply some light-hearted 'toons ...

That should have cheered the bromancer up, but he seemed inconsolable ...

The US and Israeli military campaigns have damaged Iran, wiping out its navy and air force and damaging its economy. But Americans don’t credit, can’t really understand, the intensity of Iran’s Islamist ideology. The state burns to oppose America, Israel and women’s rights (an agenda bizarrely adopted by the Western left). In light of their ideology, the Iranian calculation they’re winning isn’t irrational. They willingly sacrifice their economy. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first revolutionary leader, famously declared: “Economics is for donkeys.”
Trump now has no chance of securing a meaningful nuclear deal. Trump says he needs Iran to commit to no nuclear weapons. But the Iranian leaders make that pledge (dishonestly) routinely. The struggle is no longer really about nukes. The US and Israel have done all the damage they can to Iran’s nuclear programs.
The struggle now is over the Strait of Hormuz. So far, Iran is decisively winning that struggle.

Oh come now ... it's not that bad, everyone has a Verne moment now and then ...

Still more gloom?

Consider the following facts, which convince Iran it can decisively defeat, humiliate and even perhaps destroy Trump.
The US Air Force and navy are deployed in the Middle East in overwhelming and unsustainable numbers (at huge expense). Yet even with all that American military muscle in the region, and even after six months of battering, the US cannot secure the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping.
After six months of intermittent warfare, the US is running out of several kinds of missiles. As long ago as April, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies issued a definitive report, Last Rounds. It detailed US use of seven key munitions: Patriot interceptor missiles, THAAD missile defence systems and five attack missiles – Tomahawks, JASSM, PrSM, SM-3 and SM-6. For four of these, the US had used more than half its pre-war stock, including more than 1500 Patriots and more than 1000 Tomahawks. The report suggested they could take three or four years to replace. Many more have been used since.
The US military industrial base needs massive reform. It needs competition and a premium on designing cheap, plentiful munitions, as well as exquisitely hi-tech, perfection weapons it produces so well but so expensively. That this hasn’t happened is an indictment of both Trump and Joe Biden.
Iran’s asymmetric warfare has been technically brilliant and exposed this US weakness. The US Air Force recently announced it would scale back Pacific exercises because of Middle East needs.
That’s a huge constraint on Trump waging war indefinitely in Iran or even pursuing heavy, temporary escalation. But such escalation is anyway politically and morally impossible for the US.

Constraints? Nah ... no way ...

The bromancer kept sagging into the swamp of despair ...

Trump has threatened to destroy Iranian civilisation. But increasingly his threats are manifestly hollow. Would the US military really commit massive war crimes against Iranian civilians? Or create millions of new Islamic refugees for Europe? And to what end? A few hundred Iranian fighters with drones could still keep the strait shut. Iran’s leaders seem confident they can withstand whatever Trump throws at them. It’s like the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman rope-a-dope fight in 1974. Foreman was bigger and stronger and seemed to throw all the punches. Ali dodged or absorbed them all, then knocked the exhausted Foreman out. Being bigger and stronger doesn’t guarantee success.
In any event, Trump faces much stronger, more immediate constraints. The American people hate the Iran war. The latest CNN poll shows 72 per cent of Americans oppose the war. This is not some rogue CNN poll. All the polls show the same thing more or less. A Politico poll from late July shows the war has lost support even among Trump’s base. Only 37 per cent of MAGA Republicans now support the war. Trump’s own personal approval ratings are diabolic, just 34 per cent in the latest CNN poll, worse than his position at this stage in his first term.
The Republicans will almost certainly lose the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate in November. The reason is Iran.
The Republicans face three bad headwinds going into November: inflation, the war and lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters. Inflation, especially of petrol and diesel prices, is caused by the Iran war. So is lack of voter enthusiasm. Trump promised no more forever wars. The dearth of Republican voter enthusiasm also arises from Trump and Republicans being unable to prosecute any significant domestic agenda as their efforts are concentrated on Iran.
Iran has hurt a lot of American presidents in the past – Jimmy Carter with US hostages in Tehran, Ronald Reagan with the Iran-backed terror bombing in Beirut in 1983 that killed more than 200 US marines, the terrorists Iran supported who hurt George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, the weak nuclear deal that so discredited Barack Obama. They follow US politics minutely. Now they think they can have their greatest triumph over Trump, their greatest enemy.
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency is remembered for the Vietnam war, Bush’s for Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran will be Trump’s legacy, for better or worse.

But there's still hope, surely, if mad King Donald turns out to be wily ...

Eventually the bromancer ran out of steam ...

Another critical inflection point over the past six months is the deepened military integration of the West’s enemies. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea (the CRINKS) are now much more intimately linked, militarily, strategically, technologically, than ever. Former US State Department heavyweight Philip Zelikow argues powerfully that they’re more integrated than the Axis powers were in World War II.
Trump has weakened America’s alliances, once a decisive US advantage, while the anti-American alliance has strengthened. Bush would have had the Europeans with him in Iran. On Trump’s watch America’s enemies have evolved into much more of a genuine military alliance. US economic sanctions can never finally bring Iran to its knees while it has Russian and Chinese backing.
The Democrats give Republicans a chance in November by embracing far-left candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America. Nonetheless a big anti-Republican wave is still the most likely result. Just as congress prevented Richard Nixon from ending the Vietnam war decently, left-wing congressional Democrats and fed-up Republicans could well combine to end the Iran war, to de-fund it, no matter the strategic cost.
That would leave Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Trump would try to camouflage a surrender with some pseudo deal and endless bluster and distractions. The Iranians look like they won’t give him anything. This would be a humiliating tragedy for Trump, and pretty bad for the world.

Oh surely not, surely it's all good, surely Faux Noise will triumph, and surely the immortal Rowe has evoked the current state of play ...

For the bonus, the pond gingerly trod around simpleton Sharri, full disrespect ...

‘America’s doctor’ fails to come clean on Covid fiasco
The world’s most trusted doctor privately suspected a lab leak while publicly branding the theory a conspiracy – and Anthony Fauci has now pleaded the Fifth 111 times.
By Sharri Markson
News24 Host

The pond knows that silly Sharri is much loved by correspondents, and so this teaser trailer might send them off to the intermittent archive ...

The pond decided if it could help out the bromancer, it could do the same for Sharri ...

The only exciting bit came down at the very bottom of Sharri's piece, with news that the reptiles look like they've brazenly decided to pinch the ABC branding ...

Sharri Markson is the author of What Really Happened in Wuhan and the host of Sharri on News24, Monday to Thursday at 8pm.

Herpetologists who look up News24 might well stumble on a South African digital news platform...

For once the pond broke its rule of not linking to reptile sites, because correspondents would probably like to marvel at the way the actual "au" website is a tragic, wretched thing...

https://www.news24.com.au/

The pond also avoided that dill Dillon, pandering to the reptiles in the most pathetic way imaginable ...

‘Racist’ cartoon made vital point we still ignore
Bill Leak’s legacy: Why fear of being called racist is failing Aboriginal children
Maybe on this 10th anniversary of Bill Leak’s ‘Righto, what’s his name’ cartoon, we make it our goal not to be silenced.
By Anthony Dillon

He gave the reptiles yet another chance to recycle that racist cartoon at the top of the piece, so the pond walked on by ... (no scare quotes needed for racist).

But the pond didn't need any of them because Lloydie of the Amazon was making a rare appearance ... and it was nukes all the way ... and the pond just knew that this would be a marvel and a triumph that would send correspondents away feeling fully sated ...

The header: Nuclear power on the back of a truck moves closer to reality in the US; Australian Bobby Gallagher is pinning his hopes on a very small nuclear reactor that could change the future of global energy.

The caption for the snap for a device the pond has already placed an order for, so it can be installed in the pond's backyard by Xmas: The 1 megawatt Unity Battery is a microreactor that can run for five years without needing to be refuelled.

A bloody ute, and it looked like it was all put together with a bit of barbed wire, a stocking, string and some sealing wax!

What's more, Lloydie came back with a full-blown bang, an 11 minute read which the pond knows will just blow away its correspondents.

Lloydie was all in on sorting out reducing carbon emissions, though the pond didn't have the first clue why, what with everything the pond has ever read in the lizard Oz leading the pond to believe that climate science is a religious cult, a hoax, a fraud, and very silly:
Bobby Gallagher is a no-nonsense Australian from Brisbane who wants to make a big impact on the global energy future with a very small nuclear reactor that he jokes looks like a trash can.
On July 1 his company’s Unity Nuclear Battery was wheeled into the Idaho National Laboratories test facility in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where it became the third new US reactor to achieve criticality as part of a moonshot program launched by Donald Trump in 2025. Criticality means a chain reaction has been achieved. The next step is to add the hardware to allow it to be turned up to produce the heat required to drive a steam turbine to generate electricity.
As Australia grapples with decarbonisation and a booming demand for electricity from data centres, Gallagher says his technology could be transformative, “enabling the data centre boom, reducing carbon emissions at scale, providing stable long-term energy security as well as the ability to re-industrialise and reshore industrial capacity back to Australia”, he tells Inquirer.
The technology has a first-of-a-kind target cost of 15c a kilowatt hour with next-of-a-kind cost steadily coming down to 5c/kWh by the mid-2030s delivered to the customer end-user site. The key is mass production and Gallagher means business.
The heart of the Unity reactor was delivered to INL on the back of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. When complete, the whole package will fit into a shipping container. It has all happened at breakneck speed and if all goes to plan commercial deployment will start by 2028.

Aw, so the pond will have to wait until Xmas 2028 to place its backyard order, as the reptiles produced a snap of an assortment of mad Kind Donald heavies which gave the pond exceptional confidence in everything Lloydie was scribbling ... Bobby Gallagher with US secretary of the interior Doug Burgum, US energy secretary Chris Wright and US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on July 24. The Trump administration sees nuclear reactors as a key source of power for data centres and economic growth. Picture: UPI/Bloomberg

It was all mad King Donald, all systems go ...

Gallagher was a fourth-generation soldier with the Australian Defence Force, and his journey is a big story that stretches from war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Timor to making his millions in the oil and gas sector inventing an “air bag” to stop a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Last month, Gallagher was posing with Trump in the White House as a pioneer of the nuclear future.
Unity Battery is a 1 megawatt microreactor that can run for five years without needing to be refuelled. It is easily transportable and can be run in series to power a single industrial facility, a ship, an island or a mine site, or be scaled up further to underpin a small city or a major data centre.
A fleet of reactors can be used depending on whether you need 1MW, 10MW, 100MW or 1000MW of power. It does not require water for cooling, can be buried underground, can replace gas to back up renewables and uses only a tiny fraction of the land needed for other power sources to generate the same output.
Gallagher’s company, Deployable Energy, boasts its microreactor has been designed to use standard fuels, materials and industrial processes already available at commercial scale. The result is a system that can be produced in volume, deployed quickly and operated reliably across a wide range of applications at what the company says will be a competitive cost.

It's a bloody miracle, and at this point the reptiles wheeled out an innovative montage of images, which managed to completely confuse and conflate what was being shown under a generic caption, A mobile nuclear reactor built in 150 days

The pond couldn't replicate the profound insights offered by the montage, but can report the images which quickly followed each other ...

After that, it was back to the central theme of the needs of AI...

“We think it is going to fundamentally change the energy complex,” Gallagher says.
The timeline from here includes full power operations under US Department of Energy authorisations at the INL in 2027, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval of a commercial licence in 2028, with 1GW of manufacturing capacity annually from 2030 and initial production facility essentially booked through 2035.
Gallagher says the company has more than $100bn in commercial interest.
Deployable Energy is not alone at the pointy end of a global race for nuclear that has taken on a new dimension with the advent of power-hungry data centres and artificial intelligence.
Having spent years making energy more expensive and our grid less secure, Australia is now faced with a surge in demand we cannot afford to ignore.
Energy planners everywhere are asking how to power data centres that can each consume the same amount of electricity as a small city and demand it without interruption. Australia is being targeted as a politically stable location to host mega data centres for the Asian region. It is a bet on the future that could define the nation, like mining before it, or see us left behind.
The Albanese government is embracing the future with caveats. It wants data centres to provide their own electricity by underwriting deployment of renewable energy projects. It is a big ask given the problems that federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has encountered in the existing energy revolution, where renewable energy and batteries backed by gas are expected to replace coal-fired power stations as they are forced out of business.

The reptiles quickly helped Lloydie change tracks, from nuking the country to tales of the urgent needs of AI ... The Goodman SYD01 Data Centre is a major 90MW digital infrastructure project being built on the former ABC television studios site in Artarmon in Sydney. Picture: Corbis via Getty Images

How Lloydie of the Amazon wept at the suffering of AI ... and how he loved to offer hope ...

The problem is not ideological but practical. Costs are rising and time frames are blowing out. Even projects that have won government guarantees under the Capacity Investment Scheme have not been able to make it to financial close. New data shows only 6 per cent of government-backed wind farms have reached financial sign-off. The cost of developing onshore wind has roughly doubled since 2022. The situation is further complicated by the slow pace and high cost of new transmission lines that are needed to link up a widely a dispersed spread of wind and solar projects across states.
There are slow planning and environmental approvals, rising construction costs and increasing pushback from local communities with environmental and social concerns. Energy users are told repeatedly that renewables are the cheapest form of energy available but savings in generation costs are being swallowed up by more elaborate networks and higher connection charges. The data centre industry worries it will not be possible to develop large-scale renewable energy projects on time. And even if data centres do agree to go with renewables, it is likely the power grid and data centres will be sweating on the same projects, not additional supply.
The federal government is facing pushback from state and territory governments as well as business. The Northern Territory has joined Queensland in rejecting Labor’s national green vision for data centres that mandates data centre operators to find new renewable energy supplies and pay grid expenses so costs are not passed on to consumers.
Queensland Treasurer and Energy Minister David Janetzki said this week while Queensland wanted to attract data centres, it was concerned about forcing uneconomic investment into the electricity system and raising household power bills.
Australia’s biggest data centre operators have warned Labor’s proposed AI power rules could prove difficult to meet. Major data centre developer AirTrunk has said there must be a level of flexibility to reflect the difficulty of perfectly sequencing new clean energy supplies with data centres that can be delivered in just two years.
It is not ideological, it’s technical. Data centre developers are big investors in renewable energy globally but they want backup.
In Australia, they are looking to the vast gas reserves in the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory for security. The NT government has met them with open arms to the dismay of environmental groups.

The NT government? What could possibly go wrong?

What Lloydie of the Amazon needed was an artist's impression which could set the NT on a magical journey to being the capital of the world, and the reptiles obliged in spades ... An artist's impression of the Beetaloo data centre, which could start the NT on its way to being the “data centre capital of the globe”. Picture: Jazz Pedder/Gabbert Design

A truly dazzling and splendiferous vision, up there with growing rice at Humpty Doo.

Mad King Donald and NT's Lia, what more could a pond correspondent want?

NT Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has voiced ambitions for the Territory to become the “data centre capital of the globe” underpinned by the region’s ample renewables and gas resources, access to land and water, and its high-speed fibre-optic cable links with Southeast Asia.
According to Greenpeace, the NT proposal “marks a dangerous escalation in the AI data centre industry’s expansion, which threatens to entrench fossil fuel infrastructure for decades and put immense pressure on the region’s fragile water resources while continuing to be unregulated”.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific head of climate and energy Joe Rafalowicz says: “This disaster proposal for a 2GW gas-powered AI data centre in the NT is a shocking example of the unchecked expansion of hyperscale data centres in Australia.” He says it is “more evidence for the urgent need for a moratorium on all new data centres until strong, binding regulations are put in place to protect our communities and climate.”
“While Beetaloo Energy and the NT government prepare to bulldoze ahead with this climate and water disaster, the Prime Minister is asleep at the wheel, promising to legislate a vague set of standards next year,” Rafalowicz says. “Next year is too late, and anything less than mandating data centres cover their own energy demand, and then some, with new renewable energy is not enough.”

Oh poo poo, alarmist greenies.

Listen to Lloydie of the Amazon, hearken unto his song ...

Whatever Greenpeace may wish, gas unquestionably will be a big part of the future energy mix. But the contest has been set between the new frontier of joining the tech race with AI and sticking with existing government policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Which is why in the US the world’s biggest tech firms are investing billions of dollars restarting closed nuclear reactors, writing power purchase agreements with those still operating and funding what many hope to be the new era of nuclear, small modular reactors.
That story has been updated to include microreactors – essentially nuclear batteries – that are smaller again in scale but are quickly showing their potential.
There is another step change taking place in manufacturing. On July 22, the US Department of Energy put artificial intelligence at the centre of its nuclear build-out strategy, awarding $US60m ($85.4m) across three years to Prometheus, an INL-led project that will use AI to design, license, manufacture, construct and operate reactors.
Prometheus partner X-energy says the world is at the edge of one of humanity’s great technical evolutions. AI money is moving beyond the chat window and into the physical world.
The big nuclear investments involve a who’s who of innovation: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google parent organisation Alphabet and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Trump may have famously said “drill, baby, drill” but he is also betting big on AI and nuclear.

And whatever mad King Donald bets on, he always wins ... just ask the bromancer.

Besides, is there any better way to produce confidence in the reader, than to bring in that "meta"man, and the wedding in Venice man, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are central to Donald Trump’s AI and nuclear energy plans.

It was go, go, go with mad King Donald ...

In May last year the US President signed executive order 14302 in which he said: “The United States originally pioneered nuclear energy technology during a time of great peril. We now face a new set of challenges, including a global race to dominate in artificial intelligence, a growing need for energy independence, and access to uninterruptible power supplies for national security.”
Trump said “swift and decisive action is required to jump-start America’s nuclear energy industrial base and ensure our national and economic security by increasing fuel availability and production, securing civil nuclear supply chains, improving the efficiency with which advanced nuclear reactors are licensed, and preparing our workforce to establish America’s energy dominance and accelerate our path towards a more secure and independent energy future.”
A little more than one year later, the program is bearing fruit.
In June last year the US Department of Energy announced its new reactor pilot program to expedite testing of advanced reactor designs under the department’s authority. The target set by Trump was for three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4 this year.
One of the developers chosen was Deployable Energy, which was described as an Australian concept, now a Houston-based company developing the Unity Nuclear Battery. Deployable Energy was selected in April this year, a reactor was transported from Houston to INL in May and on July 1 the unit achieved full core criticality at INL, the third new US reactor to do so.
Since the breakthrough, Gallagher has been opening up about his journey and management style across the specialist nuclear media. Gallagher’s reactor is far from being developed in a back shed; he has assembled a team of leaders from venture-backed deep-tech energy start-ups, the commercial, research and naval nuclear sectors, traditional energy companies, the military, the US Department of Energy and national laboratories. His management skill is to get people to think outside the box, ask the right questions, prioritise repeatability and efficiency, and see nuclear as a production line product at scale.
“We combine entrepreneurial speed with deep technical and regulatory experience to solve one of the hardest problems in energy: delivering affordable, reliable power at scale,” Deployable Energy’s website says.
Deployable Energy was founded last year on a simple idea: nuclear energy should be a product, not a project.
“The modern US industrial base is built to manufacture products – repeatable, scalable systems that can be deployed quickly and affordably,” the company says. “We are building nuclear systems in the same way the energy industry builds everything else – through world-class engineering, manufacturing and supply chains that already operate on a global scale.”
Gallagher says Houston was chosen on purpose.
“Detroit, that means automotive. If I was to say Silicon Valley, that means software. If I was to say Taiwan, that means chips. Houston is all about energy infrastructure that’s deployable to sites. That’s what Houston does better than anywhere else in the world. That’s why we’re located right in the heart of the energy corridor where a good portion of the world’s energy infrastructure is design built, deployed, and ensures the lifestyle that we live right now,” Gallagher told one nuclear energy podcast.

A podcast! So it must be true!

The pond was dazzled by the dreaming and the dreamers, Deployable Energy chief executive Bobby Gallagher says nuclear energy should be a product, not a project. Picture: AFP

Lloydie of the Amazon wrapped it all up with a final gobbet that had the pond wild-eyed with excitement ... a startling pitch for nuking the country to make it safe for AI ...

Gallagher says he likes the “fire to fission” route where natural gas is switched over to small-scale nuclear. He says it is a “hybrid option where the customer doesn’t take on a lot of risk”.
Back in Australia, nuclear engineer Tony Irwin, technical director of Australian company SMR Nuclear Technology, has been monitoring the progress of the SMR program and says Deployable Energy has achieve a breakthrough success that represents another technology loss for Australia. He tells Inquirer SMR projects are finally making it to production and deployment.
The first of four GE Hitachi BWRX-300 SMRs is under construction at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site in Canada. Each unit will generate 300MWe and the four units will power 1.2 million homes.
There are also plans for deployment of the BWRX-300 in the US, Finland, Sweden, Poland and Britain. Rolls-Royce, which has built all the reactors for British nuclear-powered submarines, has designed a complete nuclear power station and signed a contact with Great British Energy-Nuclear to allow work to start immediately on delivery of three Rolls-Royce SMRs at Wylfa in Wales, an existing nuclear site that has old shutdown Magnox reactors. Each Rolls-Royce SMR will produce 470 MWe.
Rolls-Royce is also deploying its SMR in the Czech Republic and signed an early works contract in April this year. Several other countries, including, Sweden are also interested.
The microreactor space is considered to be a game changer of its own. Irwin says microreactors “will be an economic option for strategic installations including data centres and for replacing diesel fuel to supply electricity, heat and other energy needs for remote communities, islands and mine sites in Australia”.
He is not surprised that it is an Australian leading the way but disappointed that there is another great missed opportunity for domestic manufacturing. The big question is: Will Australian learn from its mistakes and embrace the new frontier of nuclear technologies that can offer solutions to the obvious problems being experienced in the decarbonisation puzzle?
Gallagher says Australia’s bans are “misguided and a relic of misconceptions about nuclear power and atomic weapons”. He says it has been clearly demonstrated globally that nuclear power is one of the cleanest, safety and less environmentally impactful forms of energy. “The next generations of reactor technology will continue to build on that record, whilst reducing costs and construction lead times,” Gallagher says.
“It’s time to lift the ban, set appropriate regulations modelled off world-class nuclear regulators in other jurisdictions and allow the market to determine demand and Australia to enjoy the economic and environment benefits.”
AI offers new complexity but also a great opportunity to get with the global program. Small nuclear is a new frontier that was once considered too good to be true but now looks as if it finally could be an opportunity that is too good to miss.

Indeed, indeed, and it was purely by chance that this week Tom was all in on genius inventors and innovation and entrepreneurs and governments picking winners...

And this one's for Sharri ...

Breaking: watch this as prep for Killer's Klassic Kontribution below ... it explains everything ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:03:28 +0000

In which it's just a dose of Our Henry and a vax of Killer, same same, same as it ever was...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:31:22 +0000

Thank the long absent lord, the lizards of Oz have briefly got over their comrade Dan obsession.

Golding provided a faint echo of those golden days ...

Instead the reptiles reverted to an ancient and revered jihad, a traditional bashing of the federal government in the lead story of the day ...

The only notable thing about Brownie's EXCLUSIVE was the dreadful collage at the top of his piece, attributed to a certain Debbie Schipp.

The pond refused to make a Schipp joke, and shipped the lot to the intermittent archive.

EXCLUSIVE
Senior moment: States rebel over Labor’s health insurance plans
Three state health ministers have publicly revolted against the plan to scrap higher private health insurance rebates for over-65s.
By Greg Brown

Anyone wanting real cockroach fun, namely mad Xian fundamentalists at play in NSW, would have to head off to the opposition ...

Exclusive Operation Rosny
Liberal frontbencher captured on ICAC wiretap tipping off Reformers (*intermittent archive link)

The "Reformers"? Anything but ...

Operation Rosny: What we know about the blockbuster ICAC inquiry (*intermittent archive link)

That's the trouble with getting fitted out with the blind ideological blinkers worn by members of the lizard Oz hive mind, you miss out on a bigly part of the fun, and the set-up for Wilcox:

Over on the extreme far right at the lizard Oz, there was the usual assortment pursuing the reptile agenda ...

Indigenous hopes have fallen into Canberra’s credibility gap
Anthony Albanese is on annual leave but, to be honest, I would not have attended Garma if I was the leader of the nation facing that report.
By Megan Davis
Contributor

Odd that the reptiles should turn to an out of town prof ...Megan Davis is Bok Visiting International Professor, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School ... but there you go, it's well known that anyone locally based outside reptile circles are completely clueless.

Megan was backed up by the lesser Leeser, with the reptiles still insisting on the diminutive lower case for the Voice.

In post-voice world, PM goes MIA on Indigenous affairs
Since October 2023, the government’s policy on Indigenous affairs has been adrift.
By Julian Leeser

Should there be a rule about not pandering to those who refuse to give a Voice to the Voice?

The pond also put aside Cameron pretending that AUKUS was still a 2032 thing ...

Submarine warning shot at Washington
Australia has used US submarine visiting rights in Perth as quiet leverage to pressure Washington into delivering its first Virginia-class submarine on time in 2032.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

The pond suspects it won't be around in 2032 - any interest in another six years of herpetology studies waned long ago - but otherwise would have bet the house on the notion that the first sub wouldn't be around either, and turned up to collect...

As for the usual suspects, Our Henry was in full Australian Daily Zionist News mode ...

It was only by chance that the pond could preface Our Henry's outing with yet another example of ethnic cleansing at work ... Gaza's babies suffer deadly chickenpox outbreak

Okay, the pond is distressed, now for Our Henry to add to the distress ...

The header: Hypocrisy, duplicity and Islamophobia: A toxic mix; Despite pairing ‘Islamophobia’ with antisemitism in the ALP’s national program, the government refuses to tell us what the term means or what legislation to ‘combat’ it would prohibit.

The caption for the snap of a man always the target of reptile jihads: Anthony Albanese delivers the closing address to delegates during day three of the 50th National Labor Conference at the Adelaide Convention Centre. Picture: NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

Our Henry showed just how to do hypocrisy and duplicity ...

It took the Bondi massacre for the government to dare mention antisemitism without immediately pairing it with Islamophobia. But only seven months after the deadliest terror attack in Australian history, the ALP national conference reverted to form, behaving as though Bondi had already been forgotten and its stain on the national conscience washed away.

How could anyone forget the massacre? The reptiles bring it up daily, making of it a baseball bat with which to pummel the country into never-ending shame and guilt.

Such things are never easily forgotten in any case.

It was with great pleasure that the pond noted that the fundamentalist who'd shivved Salman Rushdie copped another sentence, and the prospect of an even longer jail term ... Man who stabbed Salman Rushdie in 2022 convicted of federal terrorism charges

But before the pond could both sider Our Henry, the hole in bucket man came out with a classic billy goat butt ...

To say that is not to downplay anti-Muslim animus or condone the louts who harass young women for wearing a hijab. But there is a world of difference between despicable behaviour and the cold-blooded murder of people whose only offence is to be celebrating a Jewish holiday.

And what of the cold-blooded murder, by an Australian no less, in Christchurch, that saw 51 killed and 89 others injured?

Sure, it happened across the dutch, but it has to count as despicable behaviour and cold-blooded murder, and the way that the Murdoch press rabbits on about how dreadful Islamics are has been a daily incitement to violence...

For once a little 'both sidering' wouldn't go amiss, but Our Henry is never for swaying ...

It would be easy to dismiss Labor’s wilful blindness to that difference as merely another instance of the opportunism Anthony Albanese calls “balance”. However, the incessant repetition of “Islamophobia” also reflects its ever-growing role in the rhetoric of the left, where it serves both to minimise the extreme gravity of the attacks that have targeted the Jewish community since October 7, 2023, and to deflect attention from the left’s now deeply entrenched antisemitism.
But much more than rhetoric is involved. “Islamophobia” is the organising principle of a far-reaching policy program set out in the government’s response to the report submitted last year by the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik.
That response, issued immediately before Malik’s submission to the antisemitism royal commission, is organised around four themes. Most amount to little more than handing out yet more taxpayer funding to Muslim organisations. It is the last – “accountability and responsibility: holding individuals and institutions accountable for hate speech, discriminatory actions and policies” – that goes to the heart of the matter.

When dealing with Gaza and Palestine, it's always important to have an image to hand that terrifies the hive mind, Pro Palestinian protesters march towards Elizabeth Street in the Sydney CBD. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Our Henry was shocked, neigh startled, that anyone should blather on about Islamophobia, but it was a handy distraction from definitions of anti-Semitism that shut down criticism of the current government of Israel, and its sociopathic "from the river to the sea" Messianic greater Israel approach...(is Benji really the earthly king from the line of David who will usher in an era of global peace?)

In practice, ensuring “accountability” means extending the e-Safety Commissioner’s take-down powers to “Islamophobic material”, reinforced by a legislated digital duty of care; convening a meeting of the Standing Council of Attorneys-General to consider co-ordinated national responses to “combat Islamophobia”, with appropriate legislative frameworks “under ongoing consideration”; and creating Australia’s first Islamophobia Index.
The commonwealth, in short, proposes to measure the thing, police its expression online, and legislate against it. Yet while the government’s response uses the term “Islamophobia” 96 times, it never tells us what it means. Nor do Malik’s reports, which are barely less prolix in throwing the term around. And there isn’t the skerrick of a definition in the submissions Muslim and Palestinian organisations made to the royal commission.
The shyness is not accidental. Leaving “Islamophobia” undefined makes it an all-purpose weapon: easy to deploy, impossible to rebut. Any definition would also have to specify the conduct it captures – and, in particular, whether mere criticism of Islam (as distinct from hatred of Muslims) is “Islamophobic”.
That ambiguity is why the Swedish government has dropped the term from its official vocabulary. Our government lacks the courage to address it. However, in his submission on the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill, Malik obliquely reveals what prohibiting “Islamophobia” would encompass.
Malik’s submission does not say what should be forbidden. Instead, it identifies what would remain permissible: “rigorous debates on complex elements of theology”, undertaken by competent authorities “on matters that require a thorough understanding of such religious texts”. The reason, Malik explains, is that “ill-equipped individuals who lack any bona fide credentials misinterpret the Koran and hadith” and thereby “betray the authentic teachings of Islam”.
Who, then, decides what is rigorous, which elements are complex, or whose understanding is sufficiently thorough? Ultimately, a court would – measuring the accused’s words against Islam’s “authentic teachings”.
Figuring out the consequences does not require enormous insight. Theology seminars led by Islamic scholars would be exempt from the prohibitions on “Islamophobia”. Arguing in a newspaper column that ISIS’s murderous hatred of Jews and Christians was not unrelated to contemporary Islam would, by contrast, be risky at best, illegal at worst.

And what of the deep flaws in definitions of anti-Semitism that are doing the rounds?

Why Australia’s public broadcasters were right not to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism

Inter alia ...

...The blurring of the categories of antisemitism and criticism of Israel acts as a brake on public debate. It narrows the language Australians can use to describe what is happening in Gaza, where they have watched entire neighbourhoods destroyed and tens of thousands of civilians killed. It tells Palestinian Australians and Arab Australians, many of whom have family members killed by the Israeli military, that to describe their own families’ experiences is to commit a hate crime. It tells all Australians that the sermons, vigils and protests through which their communities have processed mass civilian death are presumptively antisemitic. It tells students at Australian universities, where critical scholarship on Israel and Palestine is now described by some as creating a “hostile environment”, that there are subjects on which inquiry is not welcome.
This message carries an echo of the post-9/11 securitisation of Muslim communities, when entire populations were positioned as a “fifth column” whose loyalties had to be policed. We have spent more than twenty years trying to undo the damage that framing did to Australian multiculturalism. To recreate it now, with Palestinians and Muslims as the suspect community and criticism of Israel as the disloyal speech, is to repeat a mistake we should have learned from.

But if you just keep on demonising the Islamics, no need to worry about any of that ...

Cue a snap of the subject of Our Henry's ire, Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik speaks to the media at the Sydney Commonwealth Parliament Offices. Picture: George Chan

How to distract from the outrageous limitations proposed by various definitions of anti-Semitism doing the rounds?

Forget Thucydides for the moment and keep on bashing the Islamics, in a way that made the pond pray for a pox on all religious houses...

We have, of course, been there before. Blasphemy in English law did not prohibit all criticism of Christianity. It prohibited words “so scurrilous and offensive as to pass the limits of decent controversy”. The offence lay not in disagreement but in crossing a threshold of permissible discourse, policed by judges against an accepted orthodoxy.
Malik, in proposing to revive that long-defunct offence, has merely shifted the threshold from decency to official accreditation. And the other Islamic submitters would go further still.
The formulation advanced by the Australian National Imams Council – whose members would be both the proposed prohibition’s primary beneficiaries and, on the envoy’s own test, among the few with the “bona fide credentials” to express a view – seems designed to silence criticism of Islam in any form.
When it comes, however, to ensuring that the definition of antisemitism leaves criticism of Israel and Zionism entirely untouched, these same organisations are positively obsessive. Their submissions mention the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition 150 times – nearly twice as often as they refer to Islamophobia – and attack it on six distinct grounds: that it is vague, that it conflates criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews, that it chills academic freedom, that it suppresses legitimate speech, that it is unfit as a policy instrument, and that a better definition exists.
Thus, the Imams Council demands “a clear distinction between antisemitism … and legitimate criticism of governments, political ideologies such as Zionism, or international conflicts”, while the Alliance Against Islamophobia insists that public policy “should define antisemitism clearly and robustly”, preserving “space” for “lawful criticism of states, governments, military action and political ideologies”. They have strong views, then, on why a definition matters, and exactly what a carve-out must do. Yet they invoke Islamophobia 83 times and define it not once. Nor in their 190,000 words of text does a single line protect criticism of Islam. And it is this undefined term they would have parliament write into the criminal law. What is unacceptable for Jews is, it seems, absolutely permissible for Muslims.

As always, the reptiles wheeled out their trump card ... Mourners gather by floral tributes at the Bondi Pavillion in memory of the victims of a shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney. Picture: Saeed Khan / AFP

But the actions of a couple of fundamentalist loons shouldn't be the reason for any religious group to seek special privileges (don't get the pond or the NSW police started on the notion that vigilantes should be armed and allowed to roam the streets, NSW police deputy commissioner says letting Jewish security group carry guns could be seen as ‘favouritism’. It's bad enough having the odd trigger happy cop in the streets, let alone Jewish groups and then Islamic groups demanding equal time and an equal right to a Glock).

Back to Our Henry, and yes, he wants that IHRA definition ...

The same permissiveness applies, apparently, to blatant inaccuracy. Three of the submissions describe Kenneth Stern, who is now a critic of the IHRA definition, as its “lead” or “principal” author, which he demonstrably wasn’t. Even more important, in attacking the definition for its breadth, they carefully refrain from quoting the phrase the IHRA’s drafters inserted to limit its reach: whether statements are antisemitic depends “on the context” – a carve-out none of the sweeping prohibitions they propose provides for criticism of Islam.
Meanwhile, Malik’s own submission asks that protest against “what the International Court of Justice has deemed a plausible genocide” not be characterised as antisemitic – footnoting the court’s order, which, in reality, held only that the rights South Africa asserted were plausible, not that the allegation was. As Judge Joan Donoghue, the court’s then president, bluntly stated: the ICJ “did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible”, leaving that question to be determined in the court’s final judgment on the merits.
Misleading a royal commission should be an extremely serious matter. But the silence around the grievous errors, inconsistencies and contradictions speaks for itself. For this much was clear at the ALP national conference. There are, in today’s Australia, protected species. And then there are those who simply don’t count.

Not plausible?

How's this for plausible?

...battling an outbreak of a debilitating skin disease in Gaza has been made harder due to a lack of sanitation, summer heat and overcrowding.
Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes throughout Israel's bombardment of the strip.
They have been forced to relocate, some multiple times, and find new places to live in tent camps in the shrinking area in Gaza not under the control of the Israeli military.
Israeli strikes on some of those camps continue, despite a ceasefire technically being in force since October last year.
Gaza's health authorities say more than 1,200 people have been killed in Israeli attacks during that period, although it does not specify which are Hamas fighters and which are civilians.
The chaos has all combined to create a perfect storm of conditions in the areas for such diseases to spread.
"This is alarming and a red flag," Dr Ahmed Al-Farra, head of paediatrics at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, told the ABC.

And so on, and then came an invitation the pond could easily refuse ...

Henry Ergas will be speaking at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney on Thursday, August 13.

After that it was time for a break with the infallible Pope, going where the reptiles hadn't gone...

Meanwhile, poor old Killer had been triggered.

Some might think it was shameless simpering Sharri, full disrespect, wot set him off ...

COVID
‘He clearly has a lot to hide’: Markson slams Fauci’s silence
Anthony Fauci pleads Fifth 111 times in fiery US in
Anthony Fauci’s congressional appearance, where he refused to answer a single question, shows he is ‘disinterested in accountability or transparency’, says the Australian journalist.
By Georgia Palgan

Or maybe he was trying to avoid an actual criminal trial, maybe he thought jolly Joe's "autopen" pardon might not be enough if mad King Donald's minions went at him full tilt.

Sadly Will Saletan's effort for The Bulwark was behind a paywall, Here Are the Republicans’ Biggest Lies From Their Fauci Show Trial, In their retelling of the COVID story, the doctor was the bad guy, the vaccines were deadly, and Trump did everything right.

But the bit on public view was more than enough to set the tone...

Yesterday’s Senate hearing on COVID—which saw Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the government’s response to COVID, subjected to hours of lies and insults—showed that the GOP has now fully embraced the other revisionist story: the one about the pandemic. In this twisted narrative, the villain isn’t Trump, China, or even the virus. It’s Fauci.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the second-ranking Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, insisted that the COVID vaccines were “experimental gene therapy.” (They aren’t.) As evidence of their putative lethality, he cited a poll in which 24 percent of Americans supposedly claimed to know someone who had died from the vaccines. That’s 82 million people. Hiding such a colossal death toll would be, to put it politely, impossible.
The committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), claimed that Fauci’s advice to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—or tens of thousands of people.” Paul referred to the elderly, making it clear that he was talking about Cuomo’s disastrous practice of sending infected patients back to nursing homes. Paul’s numbers were wildly off—the real death toll was about 6,400—and his attempt to blame Fauci was completely backward. Multiple reports found that Fauci had no role in the nursing-home policy. In fact, Fauci had recommended the opposite.
Paul accused Fauci of having denied the plausibility of the lab-leak theory, which holds that the COVID virus developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s not true, either: Fauci didn’t buy the theory, but he routinely said it was plausible. Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida repeated another Republican talking point: that Fauci’s change of advice on masks—first opposing their use in the general population, then encouraging it—was based only on the availability of masks, not on evidence that they worked. In reality, Fauci has consistently explained that such evidence was a major factor in his decision.
Meanwhile, Johnson spewed conspiracy theories. He suggested, with no apparent basis, that a pulmonary infarction suffered by Fauci in 2021 was caused by COVID booster shots. The senator also claimed that harm from the vaccines was vastly undercounted because a government “algorithm” systematically hid the evidence. But Johnson’s vigilance was selective: He dismissed the known risks and side effects of his favorite drug, hydroxychloroquine.

The pond has never pretended Fauci is a saint, see Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic for evidence, The Revelatory Cringe of Anthony Fauci, The private notes of the man who oversaw COVID policy are deeply embarrassing—and surprisingly instructive. (*intermittent archive link)

...I can’t claim that Fauci’s thoughts (both serious and silly) will have any lasting literary merit. In fact, I’m definitely not claiming this. But his now not-so-secret musings do tell us something about the reality of the pandemic that he, and the rest of us, lived through—the frenzy and panic of it, and even the nervous exhilaration of living through what we all understood to be a sudden rupture in time. One day, historians might use this diary to help figure out what happens to a society under such pressure. They might see more clearly the way that people can become desperate for a savior, and realize what a fantasy it is to imagine that such people exist.

Even as vaccines and other preventative measures kicked in - not useless horse pills - some 1.2 million + lost their lives in the United States, producing the kind of hysteria and panic and conspiracy theories befitting medieval times ... and they're still going down.

You might think some lessons would have been learned, yet here we still are, with Ron and Rand ...and Killer ...

The header: Anthony Fauci was no ‘voice of science’, Whatever damage the CFMEU has done, it’s minuscule in comparison to the damage wrought by the nation’s wannabe Faucis.

The caption for the snap of a man designed to make the hive mind have a mask-burning bonfire, and rush out in search of horse pills: Former NIH Director Anthony Fauci listens during a hearing with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Picture: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

The pond was surprised that Killer could only manage a three minute rant on the matter of Fauci.

The pond has many times recorded Killer's deep fear of masks, and his anti-vax curious ways, and his notion that Covid was a minor blip that should have been treated as a severe cold or a mild flu, or whatever.

Let's do it yet again ...

The question of which government official has caused the most socio-economic destruction in history appears to be resolved: Anthony Fauci, the disgraced former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a US congressional hearing on Wednesday.
Fauci, who became the most influential health bureaucrat in the world during the Covid pandemic, wouldn’t even answer what day it was in Washington.
His silence suggested he doubted the autopen pardon delivered by Joe Biden’s staffers in the former president’s final days – for anything Fauci did since 2014 – would protect him from perjury charges given the vast gulf that’s emerged between his public and private statements.
The 1000 pages of his private diaries, released this week by Republican senator Rand Paul, have only added to the mountain of evidence that his carefully curated reputation as the selfless voice of “science” was always a joke.
He has emerged as a vain, manipulative apparent liar who whipped up global hysteria about a new coronavirus that prompted governments to unleash the most socio-economically destructive peacetime mandates in history.
The volume of references to favourable media portrayals in his diaries is genuinely shocking. The word “press” appears a staggering 641 times, “award” 80 times and “hero” 49 times, while “peer review”, “meta-analysis”, “risk-benefit”, “learning loss” or “mental health” never got a mention at all, according to Grabien Media founder Tom Elliott’s analysis.
“It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous … person in the country,” Fauci beamed in May 2020. Yet far more incriminating was his February 2020 diary entry that he and a former CDC director both agreed the new virus was “acting like a bad influenza” and “had a case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 per cent rather than 2.0 per cent”.
Yet only a few weeks later in March 2020 he told the House Oversight Committee under oath the mortality rate was “about 3 per cent”, which would have been far worse than the early 20th century Spanish flu, which killed millions. Mass global panic ensued.

Killer and the reptiles then turned to Brittney... Independent Journalist Brittney Hopper says the revelations in Anthony Fauci’s diary entries should be a wake-up call to the media. “I hope this is somewhat of a wake-up call from news organisations around the world,” Ms Hopper told News24 Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. “There are so many questions left unanswered.”

Brittney? Now there's a piece of work ...

Speaking to Australia’s News24, Hopper reflected on her time "on the front lines" of pandemic reporting.
She claimed, "I remember after a couple of years of dealing with hearing this man and interviewing this man, and having to wear masks and having our kids out of school for years, I remember questioning what he was doing. And I got in trouble and pulled off air for a couple of days because I started questioning him."
After she allegedly "apologized," Hopper was allowed back on the air. However, she left the news organization permanently in 2022. "As I've mentioned before on here, I was their puppet on mainstream media for so many years," she claimed. (AOL)

She was a puppet and now she's seen the light, and should immediately be a Bari re-hire?

And it's that mask thingie again, and it always makes the pond recall the first time on a Japanese train, long, long before Covid, where it was considered polite to wear masks to avoid air borne transmission ...

(It's not just the reptiles that can do stock shots).

The pond thought it had stumbled on a kind of nirvana of civilisational politeness and care for fellow travellers.

But back to Killer, rabbiting on about how many should die, and if it was under 1%!, wot the hell Archy, that was a more than reasonable culling of the herd ...

This was the same month Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, whom Donald Trump appointed head of the National Institute of Health last year, showed the actual mortality rate was indeed around 0.2 per cent. It was the same month John Ioannidis, arguably then the world’s top epidemiologist, said he’d reached the same conclusion from the Diamond Princess ship.
Even President Trump publicly said in March 2020 the rate was “well under 1 per cent” once those cases not presenting at hospital were factored in, according to his own conversations with experts. None of that mattered to Fauci, who recorded how he personally “convinced” New York mayor Bill de Blasio and California health officials on March 15, 2020, to shut down schools, bars and restaurants before claiming on TV in July 2022 that he “had nothing to do” with any school and business closures.
Almost all nations took Fauci’s lead, causing unprecedented disruption and destroying the lives of a whole generation who weren’t even remotely at risk of dying.

And at this point Killer's fear of vaccines kicked in ...

Fauci was also a powerful advocate for Covid vaccine mandates too. Yet a diary entry from July 2021 suggests he suffered some sort of vaccine injury but “kept it buried while aggressively pushing mRNA mandates on millions of people”, according to American epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher.

Enough already, the vaccines worked, and kept the multitudes, including the pond, out of trouble.

As for conspiracy theories and unresolved (and likely forever unresolvable when it comes to Covid's origins, not helped by the Chinese government), trust Killer to revel in them ...
We already knew that Fauci aggressively played down the Wuhan lab-leak theory, which was always the most likely and reasonable explanation. He sought to destroy the reputation of doctors and scientists who dared criticise a totalitarian health response that was never part of standard public health practice even for far more deadly viruses.
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry at prestigious Rutgers University, repeated on social media this week that Fauci had been indirectly responsible for 20 million deaths globally because he allowed and funded dangerous gain-of-function research in China, which ultimately led to a likely accidental leak of SARS-Cov2.

Just as he was hitting top gear, Killer decided to slam on the brakes.

Fauci deserves condemnation and humiliation but not prison. That his shoddy analysis and obviously ridiculous mandates were so enthusiastically embraced by the vast majority of supposedly educated voting publics and other so-called experts illustrates how primal humans can remain when scared.

Between Killer and the flawed Fauci, a trip maskless in a train, and a serve of horse pills the pond will take Fauci, and still occasionally wears a mask on public transport, if only to lessen the impact of some loon sneezing in the pond's direction, if only to reduce the chance of transmission by a modest amount ... and let the germs fall on Killer how they may ...

At least the US has had a debate. It’s highly unlikely as many US states would imitate their previous response should a similar virus emerge again. In Australia I’m not so sure. Our health officials and political leaders parroted the same nonsense yet sailed off into retirement with national honours and even state governorships!
The new Premier of Victoria, Ben Carroll, is being rightly praised for calling a royal commission into the state’s corrupt construction sector. But whatever damage the CFMEU has done, it’s minuscule in comparison to the damage wrought by the nation’s wannabe Faucis who all remain comfortably in their sinecures.

Tell that to the millions that died. A shoddy building might kill you in an earthquake, but that's a longer shot than Covid in its hey day ...

And this medical advice, brimming with ways to respond to a pandemic, was brought to you by a man who passes himself off as an economist ...

Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

He's not much of an economist, so heaven help those in the hive mind who follow his medical advice.

And with that dose of Our Henry and Killer, both offering up ancient jihads, the pond feels inclined to moan yet again how it's over reptile jihads, how it yearns for the reptiles to revert to the kind of quality entertainment the disunited states is offering these days ...

So many ways to avoid the Epstein files.

And now how are the sociopathic Ruskis of state regime media going? Must order what they've been drinking from Wildberries...

In which the pond does much reptile winnowing, and ends up chambering a dismal round ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:59:46 +0000

So the war in Iran lurched back to life yet again, despite the complete obliteration of the Iranian military, and displaying the same interest as they do in climate science, it disturbed the reptiles of the lizard Oz not at all.

Sure, you could find Cameron in full war monger mode buried away from the front page, several clicks away from the hive mind action...

Onus on Trump to act with conviction
Iran has launched an unprompted ballistic missile attack on US forces in the Middle East, intensifying pressure on Donald Trump to respond.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

In typical fashion, he could only mount a two minute outburst, though possibly that's more than mad King Donald can reliably manage these days ...

Come on Cam, what's really going down?

Forget all that nonsense.

What was really top of the digital edition early this morning?

No prizes for guessing.

That unshakeable comrade Dan obsession, with the lizard Oz jihad on full parade ...

EXCLUSIVE
Labor braces for Dan Andrews inquisition
Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan face being hauled before Victoria’s royal commission as Ben Carroll vows no political figures will be shielded from the probe.
By Damon Johnston and Anthony Galloway

The pond quietly cursed the intermittent archive, which had only saved an earlier iteration of the yarn, but decided the beat up was only notable for the awesomely awful collage provided by a new name, a certain Matt Cotton, at the start of the show trial.

It's not all Matt's fault that the pond didn't cotton on to the story.

All that - there was a full five minutes - for a possible appearance before a yet to be formed Royal Commission?

The pond knew that this jihad was on in earnest because just below petulant Peta made an appearance ...

Commentary by Peta Credlin
You’ve got to take pity on Victorians, don’t you?
Whether Ben Carroll can shrug off his history or be forced to own it will all come down to how well Liberals can frame him.

Here the intermittent archive came good and all the pond needed to offer suffering Victorians was a teaser trailer for yet another burst of insufferable cockroach-laden condescension ...

Five minutes of petulant Peta slagging off?

The infallible Pope tried to help ...

Nah, sorry, infallible Pope, if you're on the right side, you can always consider scribbling for the reptiles.

The pond quickly moved over to the extreme far right of the digital edition, only to discover Jack had joined the jihad.

Jack began with an awesomely awful - and uncredited - collage, which reeked of AI, while Jack reeked of standard jihad platitudes ... and his use of "pike" only spiked the pond's interest, Jacinta’s band of loyalists have already marched on, Freshly minted Premier Ben Carroll is attempting the technically demanding reverse Kirner with Carmen Lawrence pike.

Hapless Victorians wanting an alternative read? Why not cross state lines? And change publications ...

Dark arts and dirty tricks: How the ghosts of ICACs past haunt Libs (*intermittent archive link)

A sickening feeling of deja vu from the ghosts of ICAC past is likely to be haunting some Liberal Party figures tuning in to the daily drama of the Operation Rosny corruption inquiry.
For the second day in a row, Dylan Whitelaw, 25, a former member of an ultra-conservative right-wing faction of the party called the Reformers, had difficulty recalling crucial events.
When shown a “sh*t sheet” on then-Liberal police minister David Elliott, which Whitelaw was allegedly involved in compiling, he replied, “It doesn’t refresh my memory. There’s components in there that I have zero recollection of.”

Or lie back and enjoy a cartoon ...

Not to worry, the same ability to ghost and disremember and discombobulate afflicts the lizards of Oz, and with the usual blather about respect, the pond also had not the slightest interest interest in the latest contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News...

I was shot at Bondi. Then my attack turned into fodder for conspiracy theorists
Today, a lie doesn’t simply travel faster than the truth. It travels at the speed of an algorithm.

By Arsen Ostrovsky

How do you help talk of conspiracy theories? Best done by failing to pay attention. That usually turns the logarithms off ...

But all that winnowing and culling left the pond in a truly dire situation.

Had the pond come to this?

Had the pond arrived at Geoff chambering yet another round, offering sage advice for the beefy boofhead?

Yes, it was time for Geoff to urge the beefy boofhead to go full Pauline, and embrace Gina's pampered pet ...

There wasn't even a question mark in the header, which was more an order than a commentary: Time for Angus Taylor to invite Pauline Hanson for tea and unite against Anthony Albanese; Angus Taylor faces mounting pressure from colleagues to engage with Pauline Hanson as the Coalition’s primary vote languishes at 19 per cent.

The caption for the snap, a feeble uncredited collage (Matt? Matt? where are you) which co-joined a triumphant bright red and orange Pauline, and a downcast, downtrodden, grey and despairing beefy boofhead: Angus Taylor needs to have a cup of tea with Pauline Hanson.

What was truly remarkable was the way the reptiles tried to inject some life into this two minute proposal to run up the flag and surrender was the way snap after snap kept appearing to try to add some weight:

The longer he refuses to pick up the phone and chat with the One Nation leader, the more pressure he faces from colleagues and supporters who want clarity over how he intends to forge a working relationship with Hanson.
With the federal Coalition’s primary vote languishing at 19 per cent in Newspoll and core support for One Nation sitting equal with Labor’s at 30 per cent, many conservatives believe Taylor needs an open dialogue with Hanson.

Open dialogue? Is that what the chambering one calls embracing Gina's pampered pet, and her embrace of the most far right lizard Oz policies? Pauline Hanson. Picture: NewsWire/Philip Gostelow

Get it on, beefy boofhead, the reptiles of Oz have spoken and the hive mind is on board ...

The weekly news cycle featuring Coalition MPs and party figures talking about whether or not the Liberals and Nationals should work more closely with One Nation is untenable. There are those in the Coalition who believe a tight conservative bloc is required to defeat the second-term Albanese Labor government at the next election. Others, mainly moderates in metropolitan areas, want to tip-toe around the question.
Anthony Albanese is banking on the three conservative parties, and others such as Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, not getting their acts together.
While One Nation and the Coalition play predictable political games, Taylor late on Wednesday finally replied positively but vaguely to Hanson’s good faith offer about working with the Coalition on strengthening national security laws.

Time now for fear mongering of a patented lizard Oz kind, Australian doctor Tareq Kamleh calls for violence in an ISIS video.

The Islamics, the Islamics! Quick, rush to the side of Gina's pampered pet ...

Public anxiety is rising about the returning ISIS brides, and potentially fighters, in addition to ongoing concerns about Islamic extremist threats following the Bondi Beach terror attack targeting Jewish-Australians. This feeds into the broader debate over immigration and its impacts on housing, infrastructure and taxpayer-funded supports.
Hanson’s move for One Nation to draft its own Protecting Australians from Foreign Terrorist Fighters Bill and lobby support from crossbenchers ahead of parliament returning on August 11 indicates the right-wing party won’t stand still and wait for the Coalition.

Eek, even more Islamics, ‘ISIS bride’ Janai Safar arrives at a Sydney police station after being escorted from the airport on her return to Australia. Pictire: Will Seitam

Quick now, a preference swap! Maybe even a coalition? Thought about having Pauline as the new minister for immigration?

She'd put those damned Islamics in their place.

At the end of the day, even if One Nation’s primary vote slips ahead of the next election, the Coalition will desperately need preferences from Hanson’s party. That scenario will play out at the November state election in Victoria. For Victorian Liberal leader Jess Wilson to win, she will need strong preference flows from One Nation.

Time to bring in a nobody, Outgoing opposition home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

But what of that terrifying dragon, evoked by the immortal Rowe?

No time for that, time for another reptile anxiety attack.

Leading on national security matters should be bread and butter for the Coalition.
It is a concern that Jonno Duniam remains in the role of opposition home affairs and immigration spokesman almost seven weeks after announcing he was quitting politics. Duniam, who is expected to remain in the role until the end of the year, is ready to leave the parliament and his other job as manager of opposition business in the Senate. Taylor will need to replace him and appoint an acting finance spokesman when Claire Chandler goes on maternity leave within weeks.

Quick, drag in the beefy boofhead, Angus Taylor. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

And now for the reptile orders.

Quick step, march, look lively now, you must follow the orders, you will obey ..

Taylor must take control of the critically important portfolios and lead the narrative around the Coalition’s national security and immigration policies. While the Coalition and One Nation tout similar policies, One Nation currently has greater cut-through with conservative voters.
The Liberal leader has waged a strong case on the economy and warned about the perils of One Nation leading a government, but he needs to strengthen his messaging on immigration and national security.

A brief promo for the Vics, so that the hive mind will recognise more than a snap of Moira Deeming in a headlock.

Come on down Jess, you're lucky snap number seven in a two minute chambering, Victorian Liberal leader Jess Wilson. Jason Edwards

Now for the wrap.

Follow orders and there's redemption. Fail, and there's only doom ...

Wilson, who followed a long list of failed Victorian Liberal leaders, has shown her federal colleagues there is a pathway back through hard work, grit, ruthlessness and consistency. David Crisafulli and Lia Finocchiaro did the same in Queensland and the Northern Territory, respectively.
The Coalition needs to present as a viable and credible alternative government. The Liberals and Nationals must keep repeating messaging that connects with voters who are seeking real action and support in their lives, rather than “pie in the sky” slogans and Canberra-driven policies.

Just do it ... just get into bed with Gina's pampered pet and all will go well. What could possibly go wrong?

As for those European wildfires?

Again the pond can proudly boast that there's not a single mention of Europe or wildfires on the front digital page of the lizard Oz.

Correspondents know where to go, anywhere but the lizard Oz ...

And while travelling enjoy a Wilcox ...

The pond apologises for producing such a dismal outing, but is always unnerved when petulant Peta makes a return.

She'd last been sighted in the lizard Oz way back on 4th June, and the pond had almost forgotten she existed ...

Speaking of reprobate, deplorable, reprehensibles, it would be remiss of the pond not to note a guest appearance by shameless Sharri, full disrespect, with her come hither look designed to stimulate the loins of the aged hive mind demographic ...

FARCICAL HEARING
Fauci referenced Markson’s Covid reporting, invokes fifth amendment over 100 times

Dr Fauci’s journals show he followed reports by The Australian about Covid
Diary entries of America’s top pandemic adviser reveal he was angered by an investigation in The Australian that exposed his funding of risky research in Wuhan.
By Tia Clarkson-Pascoe

Again the pond failed the test.

The sight of this unholy visual conjunction, Fauci up against the simpering one was simply too much ...

And in any case, for that, there was this ...

In which the pond can only cope with a "Ned" natter and a serve of reheated Dame Groan, and of course we'll all be rooned...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:13:37 +0000

The pond woke this morning determined to step around the shark-feeding frenzy the reptiles were destined to offer ...

CARROLL'S POLL SCRAMBLE

Victorian ALP’s bold new vision: clean up its own mess after Ben Carroll replaces Jacinta Allan as Premier
New Victorian Premier Ben Carroll has been sworn in, pledging a royal commission into CFMEU corruption and declaring he is ‘not Daniel Andrews’ and ‘not Jacinta Allan’.
By Anthony Galloway and Lily McCaffrey

Who could blame them for there ongoing comrade Dan fixation when Ben himself mentioned the ogre?

What a feeding frenzy it was ...

FANTASY VICTORIA
The truths behind Jacinta Allan’s delusional farewell
Jacinta Allan failed to mention corruption, debt and crime in delusional farewell speech
It’s what the outgoing Victorian premier chose not to mention that reveals her farewell as a giant episode of self-serving delusion.
By Damon Johnston, David Tanner and Lily McCaffrey

INSIDE STORY
Bad blood: the Dan Andrews and Jacinta Allan era is over
Ben Carroll dumps on Dan Andrews and Jacinta Allan, seizes the leadership
New leader Ben Carroll says it’s a fresh start. Make no mistake: this was a brutal Labor reset. The Andrews-Allan show ended with a political execution.
By John Ferguson

Over on the extreme far right, the baying of the hounds - or should that be the chomping of the reptiles? - continued apace ...

Can Carroll survive the Allan-Andrews retribution?
Jacinta Allan, Daniel Andrews and their dwindling band of loyalists will make Kevin Rudd look like a saint based on Tuesday’s events.
ByAnthony Galloway
Victorian political editor

The reptiles tried to inveigle the pond into the storm by proposing a flicker of hope, as if the pond remotely cared a jot or a whit...

Can Ben Carroll save Victorian Labor? It’s possible
Victorians aren’t pleading for a grand vision. Grand visions are how governments end up buying tunnelling machines and hosing money at mates.
By Toby Ralph
Contributor

The reptiles even dragged in the craven Craven as a way of tempting the pond ...

For departed Allan, the only real question now is legacy
Will she be dismissed by history as Andrews’ untalented sidekick who failed to keep the show on the road? It’s unlikely.
By Greg Craven
Columnist

But the pond could have written the craven Craven's offering in a hive mind sleep, as this excerpt shows - spoiler alert, it's the last few lines:

...For the now departed Allan, the only real question left is her legacy. Will she be dismissed by history as Andrews’ untalented sidekick who just could not keep the show on the road?
Unlikely. Allan will benefit from Labor’s female sacrifice theory. Failing Labor governments certainly have a record of putting in female leaders once a government is in its death throes.
This includes Joan Kirner in Victoria, Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia, Kristina Keneally in NSW and now Allan in Victoria. The argument goes that after the men had stuffed it up, innocent and compassionate women were forced to carry the can. This is complete rubbish.
Take Kirner. She was no bystander in the Cain government. She was its long-term deputy premier and education minister. She was as much mired in the disasters of that administration – the forced sale of the State Bank of Victoria, the Pyramid Building Society disaster and the catastrophic misinvestment of government funds – as John Cain. She also was a vicious and effective political operator. She may have worn frocks, but she always had a knife up the sleeve. Yet she now is remembered by Labor groupies as some sort of progressive angel.
Allan falls into the same category. She was chief facilitator of the Andrews government. Her hands have as much dung on them as Dan the Man. But doubtless she will be remembered by many progressive Victorians as a feminist martyr. The truth is, she was just as complicit.
Greg Craven is former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

Joan Kirner? John Cain? If he's into ancient history, why not John Bannon and notables of the Bob "Slippery Sam" "run the bastards over" Askin kind?

Is it any wonder that the pond settled for a few 'toons so it could move on ...

Sheesh, Mr Golding, you're as bad as the craven Craven.

Does anybody remember having a good lie down, let alone taking a Bex, except perhaps for the pond's dead uncle's failed kidneys?

As for those wildfires in Europe?

The pond can proudly report that there wasn't a single mention on the top page of the digital edition early this morning.

Not one. Zilch, nihil, nada ...

They'd been disappeared, and anyone interested in the world would have had to turn to the Graudian to read Almost 4,000 people evacuated from tourist sites near Bordeaux as wildfires rage in France and Spain and Past fires suggest effects of Europe and North America wildfires may linger for years.

Inter alia: ...Lara Schwarz, an environmental health scientist at UC Berkley who led the research, said: “As wildfires become more frequent and severe in the context of climate change, with California being at high risk, understanding how these harmful wildfires will affect us in the long term is critical to informing better public health action and response.”

Fergetit ... is it any wonder that the pond settled down to the quiet life with a dose of "Ned's" natter?

The header: One Nation is a thing of beauty for the Labor Party; One Nation will give Labor the electoral exemption it needs to dodge proper accountability for its flawed agenda.

The caption for the collage for which there was at last a credit, though the pond didn't linger long looking at it, so wretched it was: “Pauline Hanson is a political gift to Labor with the government now enshrining One Nation at the heart of its re-election pitch,” writes Paul Kelly. Artwork by Frank Ling.

"Ned" spent a bigly five minutes moaning about Gina's pampered pet and her implications for the beefy boofhead ...

How does Anthony Albanese view the eruption of support for Pauline Hanson? Hanson’s surge is a threat to Labor, as its tacticians recognise. But she is something else – Hanson is a political gift to Labor with the government now enshrining One Nation at the heart of its re-election pitch.
Outgoing former ALP federal president Wayne Swan’s speech told the party the mantle on the conservative side had now passed to One Nation. Hanson’s party was the new enemy. Swan said Labor’s history had been a series of battles – against Malcolm Fraser, John Howard, Tony Abbott and now “a new battle awaits” against Hanson.
His contempt was undisguised: the conservatives had chosen to “confer legitimacy on a charlatan who walks into the Senate wearing a burka for shock value”. Warning that “the stakes are high”, Swan said Labor was now engaged in a new struggle, aware Hanson directly threatens some Labor seats. Indeed, Labor’s loss of primary votes has flowed heavily to Hanson.

The reptiles for some reason inserted a snap of the Cold Chisel man ...Outgoing ALP President Wayne Swan

Perhaps unable to discern the social relevance of Don Walker's lyrics, "Ned" kept on brooding, determined to play down the impact of Gina's pet ...

Like dude, get real, the way that "Ned" gets real, a real Fonz, or mebbe, in the Craven spirit, a real Kookie, eh daddy-o?

But let’s get real. Hanson is not a Fraser, a Howard or an Abbott. She doesn’t have the authority of being a PM with a proven record of electoral success over a sustained period. Making Hanson the prime threat has many consequences – it vests Labor with a new demonic opponent unacceptable to a majority of people; it highlights and perpetuated the fracturing of the centre-right; and it helps to solidify the unity of Labor as a fighting force seeking to hold its wavering voters inside the ALP tent.
In Albanese’s keynote address to the national conference he offered a startling account of Labor’s strategy to win the 2028 election: “In every way that matters, the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation are already a coalition. It’s not just that they need each other to form government. They agree with each other about what they want to do in government.”
Albanese said the differences between Labor and its political opponents were now greater than ever. It didn’t matter who led the Liberal Party; it didn’t matter that One Nation would be plagued by “personality clashes, policy confusion, conspiracy theories and candidate chaos” – the Liberals and One Nation were tied together.
Albanese seizes the logic from the current opinion polls. With the centre-right vote fracturing, neither the Coalition nor One Nation has a sufficiently strong primary vote to form federal government in their own right.
For Labor, this polling situation is a double bonus – not only can’t the Coalition win but it can be depicted as needing One Nation to govern.
No imagination is needed to predict Labor’s 2028 election message: “A vote for the Liberals is a vote for One Nation – and a vote for One Nation is a vote for the Liberals.” The more that message resonates, the more forlorn is the Liberal prospect of winning votes in urban Australia.

Just to rub salt into "Ned's" bleeding wounds, the reptiles flung in another snap, Anthony Albanese during day three of the ALP national conference at the Adelaide Convention Centre. Picture: Matt Turner.

That only compounded "Ned's" grief at the unfairness of it all ...

The real role of One Nation is more obvious than ever – as Angus Taylor almost daily rebuts any suggestion the Liberals would govern with Hanson’s party, Albanese invokes this as an inescapable reality. The bottom line is apparent. Both Taylor and Albanese work from the same assumption: the more One Nation is inexorably tied to the Liberal Party, the more damage is done to the Liberal-National election winning prospects.
There is a further devastating consequence. As Labor’s economic policies are increasingly seen to fail the country over the next 18 months, One Nation can deliver political immunity for Labor from full electoral accountability for its failures. The more the centre-right looks illegitimate, the more Albanese can purchase an exemption from a public backlash at the 2028 poll.
The extent to which Labor has already redefined the next election was revealed by ALP national secretary and campaign director, Paul Erickson, in his interview last week with News24. Erickson said: “At the next election, the choice will be between a Labor government that’s delivering real change … or an alternative of a chaotic and divided Coalition-One Nation government. That’s the case that we have to build and set out over the next two years.”
Albanese is busy on the job. He contrasted Labor’s commitment to practical action and social cohesion with a Hanson-driven agenda that rages against the system, blames people who can’t defend themselves, but represents a movement that can’t build anything, can’t change anything and doesn’t help anyone “find a job, pay their bills or put a roof over their heads”.
This is now the embedded Labor mantra. What justification did Victorian deputy premier Ben Carroll offer when challenging Jacinta Allan for the premier’s post? It was no surprise he said: “The stakes at the upcoming election are simply too high. The prospect of a Liberal-One Nation government that will cut schools, health and frontline services is simply too high a risk to ignore.”

Well yes, after all, Gina's pet is just espousing the policies that have been at the heart of the lizard Oz these past few decades, and it's a bit rich for "Ned" to try to row this back ... and blame the Labor party for seizing the moment ... Labor national secretary Paul Erickson

In desperation, "Ned" reverted to a litany of despair about wayward lefties...

This pitch won’t work in a politically bankrupt Victoria where Labor has run and controlled the state for too long. Labor has governed for nearly 12 years, defined by its left wing, its trade union movement, its institutional corruption courtesy of the CFMEU, its massive state debt, fiscal profligacy, high taxes and economic mismanagement. No distractions or scare campaigns deserve to save Labor.
But there is a wider lesson for the Labor Party from its crisis in Victoria. The longer this state government survived the more it was exposed as dishonest, incompetent, obsessed with state power and governing in the interests of the party, not the Victorian public. Herein is the trap for modern Labor.
Across America, Britain and Australia the parties of social democracy are moving decisively to the left, often driven by activists who seem to replicate the tactics of Donald Trump.
Consider the ALP national conference. While Albanese was proud of its unity, this conference was a trip into a grassroots Labor fantasy land where activists promoted their pro-Palestinian obsessions, public ownership in the energy sector, strategic distancing from the US, extending euthanasia provisions and backing even more powers for the union movement. At a time when Australia is facing unprecedented national challenges, the conference operated as a left-wing fringe pressure group, an insight into the Labor heartland.

Palestine?

There's been some action of late.

A reading from Haaretz ...

Trump's Irritation, Netanyahu's Desperation: White House Smiles Mask Growing Rifts
At yet another meeting, Trump and Netanyahu – both facing critical elections – found themselves indispensable to each other, even as their visions for the Middle East increasingly diverge (*intermittent archive link)

And another one, as the ethnic cleansing goes on apace ...

Israel's Defense Minister Orders IDF Takeover of Refugee Camp, Expulsion of Palestinians
Defense Minister Katz's statements followed Friday's clashes in the village of Tell that left two Israelis and four Palestinians dead. Earlier on Tuesday, Palestinian media reported that the IDF carried out raids in several West Bank communities, including Nablus, Hebron and Bethlehem (*intermittent archive link)

And so on and on, and there's nothing like an ethnic cleansing to be way more interesting than "Ned", especially when it's a reminder that there are many areas of the world ghosted by reptile coverage, as they keep insisting the hive mind, and the pond, should stay focussed on Gina's pampered pet, and the beefy boofhead ... One Nation leader Pauline Hanson; Liberal leader Angus Taylor

Disclaimer: the pond didn't co-join Gina's pet, and the beefy boofhead, the reptiles did, and it was the reptiles that selected the snap that showed him looking like a startled ferret...

Why are they always so cruel? Easy to be hard, easy to be cold. How can reptiles have no feelings?

"Ned" granted himself one last sob into his teacup ...

Albanese Labor looks trapped between adverse global events and its stubborn doubling down on flawed ideological attachments. Labor now owns a low-growth economy, persistent inflation, weak productivity, falling real wages, high social spending, rising taxes and a deep faith in state power. Unless the situation is reversed, the evidence points to the failure of Labor’s economic model.
The Liberals now see rays of hope coming from Victoria, where party leader Jess Wilson is gaining votes and stature, now leading One Nation 31 to 19 per cent, with the One Nation vote expected to fall further before the state election.
This highlights, yet again, the conundrum for the pro-Hanson political, cultural and media warriors still calling for more co-operation, even a coalition or partnership of sorts, between the Liberals and the Hanson party. This is the perfect message for Albanese and Erickson. It plays seamlessly into Labor’s song book and declared strategy to win the next election.
It is a truly beautiful and rare thing when your opponents validate your strategy.
Its deeper beauty lies in giving Labor the electoral exemption it needs to dodge proper accountability for its flawed agenda at the next election.

Oh I know, I know ...

And that's almost a wrap.

The pond will be aware some might be outraged at the pond passing by yet another manifestation of the Lehrmann matter (always re-labelled by the reptiles as the Higgins affair), especially as it had the Rice boiling over yet again ...

The 55 times Labor told Fiona Brown: ‘We don’t know’
The Albanese government fought Fiona Brown every step of the way
Labor’s treatment of Brittany Higgins and Fiona Brown could not have been more different. Higgins got $2.4m. Brown was forced into the fight of her life.
By Stephen Rice

Sydney Bureau Chief

The pond has always avoided the Lehrmann matter, even when Dame Slap hasn't teamed up for another frying of the rice ... even when there's an easy chance to take a snip at SloMo, who started the government mayhem surrounding the mess (as if Liberal staffers were worth all the fuss).

Instead the pond thought it should offer up Dame Groan, a day old and reheated to a tepid level of squawking ...

The header: Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock warns further interest rate rises needed to tame inflation, Australia’s economy has shrunk per capita for eight of the past 11 quarters – yet the Labor conference celebrated its economic record as if the good times were rolling.

The caption, without any kind of credit for that masterly visual concoction. Come on down AI, let the planet die so you can perform miracles for the reptiles and keep mad King Donald in meme heaven: The economic conundrum that now faces economic policymakers such as Treasurer Jim Chalmers and RBA governor Michele Bullock is how to fix the problem of unacceptably high inflation

Dame Groan only spent three minutes explaining that we'd all be rooned, but there was some fine entertainment to be had in the rooning ...

As the triennial Labor Party national conference wound up last week, it occurred to me that there was probably more debate in the meetings of the Politburo in the heady Soviet Union days than during those carefully stage-managed sessions.
Rose-coloured glasses were universally in use as the Labor Party congratulated itself on achieving better outcomes for everyone, as well as unravelling the evil effects of the unfortunate time when the Coalition was in government.
Here’s the thing: it requires the verbal gymnastics of Jim Chalmers to cherrypick the data to show that the Australian economy is travelling well. Concentrating on absolute economic growth – enlarged by excessive immigration – only gets you so far.
The real facts are that per capita GDP has declined in eight of the past 11 quarters, and real wages are more than 4 per cent lower than in the first quarter of 2021. Bear in mind that some other economies have been enjoying higher real wages – Korea and the UK, for example – and the average for the OECD is slightly positive. Living standards in Australia are clearly slipping, even if the Treasurer prefers to deny this.

Here the pond must interrupt to note that reference to the "real facts". Some might think this tautological, but in reality, it's important to distinguish "real facts" from "unreal facts" or even "alternative facts" of Kellyanne fame ... and perhaps only Humpty Dumpty has the time to explain "surreal facts".

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, and all the pond could wonder was when the Sky Noise down under rebranding might come to pass ...On tonight’s episode of Paul Murray Live, Sky News host Paul Murray discusses the RBA’s warning of government spending, political polls, Iran war and more. Mr Murray said RBA Governor Michele Bullock “spoke truth to power” about government spending. “She’s not afraid of displeasing the government in order to keep her job.”

For a moment the pond thought Dame Groan might mention EVs - for some reason she thinks that we're less dependent on oil - but no such luck ... her reasoning must remain arcane and mysterious ...

The major economic conundrum that now faces economic policymakers, including Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock, is how to fix the problem of unacceptably high inflation in the context of an increasingly sclerotic economy in which supply constrains the feasible rate of growth lest higher inflation emerges.
In her speech to the Annika Foundation Fundraising Lunch, Bullock outlines the impact of supply shocks on the economy and the way in which inflation can be controlled. She makes the obvious point that in days gone past, external shocks often made a strong impact through the economy, particularly before we had a floating exchange rate.
Our lower dependence on oil also means that we are less susceptible to oil price shocks than we once were – although we shouldn’t assume that we are immune. We are potentially about to enter a new round of higher oil prices, with countries’ reserve supplies partly depleted and the trick of lower excise rates unlikely to be repeated.
The key message of Bullock’s speech came at the very end: “It’s important to remember that inflation and capacity pressures in the domestic economy were already too high prior to the recent shock … Against a backdrop of ongoing capacity pressures, the board remains focused on preventing elevated cost pressures from entrenching inflation. This does mean that some further easing in the growth of demand is likely to be required.”

At this moment the reptiles inserted a series of Bullock moments, a bit like inserting a Hitchens speech on atheism into a sermon from the groaning papal mount:

Those dire intrusions forced Dame Groan into dot point form.

How else to explain the complete and utter ruination of the country no later than Xmas?

Stand by for a kicker or four ...

And here’s the kicker: “The board is prepared to act as required to achieve its mandate, including increasing the cash rate further if needed.”
The bottom line is this:

The Reserve Bank can’t do anything about the supply side of the economy but is very worried about the low/zero rate of productivity growth.
Demand continues to grow too quickly given the spending activities of the federal and state governments – OK, this is written in invisible ink but it’s a clear implication.
It’s not clear whether the three increases to the cash rate implemented this year have done enough to slow the economy and dampen the rate of inflation.
The board will not hesitate to further raise the cash rate, which will quickly flow into higher mortgage rates.

Four kickers, four bottom lines!

That must be something of a bottom line record, as Dame Groan wrapped up with a final word on the country's utter roonation ...

Whether Anthony Albanese and Chalmers take the hint and address sluggish productivity and restrict the growth of spending is uncertain, but it would be unwise to bet the house on it.
The one area that should be carefully watched is the current wealth effect on the economy. Falling house prices and lower real estate activity can have quite widespread negative economic consequences as people become spooked by the uncertainty.
The combined effect of higher interest rates and the budget tax changes may end up spreading well beyond the real estate market. The end result could be the dreaded stagflation – rising unemployment with unacceptably high inflation.

Yep, it's a disaster, and even worse for the pond, there's no escaping the Victorian saga by way of a relieving 'toon ...

Hang on, hang on, the pond knows where the infallible Pope is going with that one ...you just have to look at the small print down in the bottom right corner.

Fond, fond memories, back in the days when the ABC was what saved Tamworth folk from running down Peel street in a foaming frenzy of madness ...

It's a tribute to the Goodies and to the ecky thump man ...

And this one's an "in memoriam" for anyone as old as the pond and who can remember the good times when the Goodies offered a cross between Python and Benny Hill ...

It seemed funny at the time ...

In which the pond skates over other reptiles to get to the bromancer, Killer and Dame Groan, and is unrepentant about doing the triple pike ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:13:07 +0000

The pond means no disrespect to Victorians, but the way their political class lives in the minds of lizard Oz hacks is tedious beyond belief ...

The pond could sort of cope with the Jacinta fuss and the revival of a meaningless "faceless" tag at the top of the digital edition ...

EXCLUSIVE
Faceless Ben coup: Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan Victorian Labor era implodes
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has refused to resign despite a cross-factional Labor revolt and a record Newspoll dissatisfaction rating, daring colleagues to ‘blast her out’.
By Anthony Galloway

The pond could even understand why the reptiles wanted to pretend comrade Dan was still in charge, and could play a disinterested bystander at a train wreck, as Fergo went feral ...

ANALYSIS
Worst I’ve seen: Allan devoid of ethics and talent
John Cain stands guard over Jacinta Allan’s odd take on accountability
A hypocrite who takes the moral high ground, the Victorian Premier is the worst Labor leader I’ve covered in 41 years of journalism.
By John Ferguson

John Cain? That pretty much defines the reptile demographic. Stop a vulgar youff on the street in Melbourne and marvel at the blank stare that name produces.

But ancient Cain phobia is mild compared to the way that comrade Dan still lives rent free in the hive mind ...

Ghost of Teflon Dan haunts Jacinta Allan
Jacinta Allan chose to ‘stand with Dan’. It may cost the Premier her job
A lack of political courage and a blind loyalty to Daniel Andrews leaves Jacinta Allan on the brink as Labor rips itself apart just 124 days from the election.
By Damon Johnston

Actually comrade Dan haunts the reptiles. ...

MARGIN CALL
Dan Andrews’ business connection with PM’s mega donor Felix Lee
Australia’s most secretive ex-premier has gone from the Socialist Left to advising billionaires – and almost nobody knows who is paying him.
By Will Glasgow

Uh huh ... just as it's always been, what with the pond's father convinced for years that Victoria had been the ruination of the country, what with their fancy airs, their aerial ping pong, and Ming the Merciless ...

The pond knew Dame Groan would have words to say - but the pond put her aside for the moment to wonder if the reptiles were aware what was happening in Europe.

You had to hunt like a seagull at an outdoor restaurant to discover a small peck of grain way down the page ...

FIRES RAGE
Hundreds of thousands flee as wildfires threaten cities
Bordeaux authorities are planning to evacuate the entire city as fires spread and the region faces soaring temperatures.
By David Chazan, Shanti Das and LaraBowman

This time it was a pick-up from The Times and this time it dared to mention "climate" twice ...

“Our whole town was evacuated. About 20,000 people left after we got alerts warning us to go late on Friday,” said Mr Lafitte, 52. “My son is with my parents in Pau. He’s lucky not to be here.”
He said the authorities had been ill-prepared for the wildfires. “With climate change, this is happening every year now. Our firefighting planes are made in Canada but France should be making its own.”

And again ...

...More than 150,000 hectares have burned across Spain this year alone, six times the area destroyed during the same period last year, requiring “a major public pact on the climate emergency” that would align central government and regional administrations, he said.
King Felipe VI said the wildfires had caused “incalculable” damage to the nation’s natural heritage during a visit to one of the reception centres for evacuees from the affected zone, where he spoke with people spending their second or third night sleeping in sports centres.
“Some have had a very bad time, some have been away from their homes for four days now, some have lost many possessions. Collectively, we have lost an incalculable amount of natural heritage,” the King told reporters.

Uh huh... as if the reptiles down under cared ...

And with that the pond turned to the far right of the digital edition for a little relaxation and pleasure.

First up came the bromancer ... always a treat, and here producing a splendid blend of both siderism and McCarthyist-1950s-red scare scribbling ...

The header: If you think the populist right is bad, wait until you meet the populist left; Many analysts see the rise of left-wing populism answering right-wing populism, but this left-wing populism is much worse.

The caption for an image designed to terrify the hive mind: Zohran Mamdani arrives at the NBC studios to participate in a Democratic mayoral primary debate.

Please admire the way that the bromancer ignores mad King Donald to invoke that terrifying commie threat, coming straight at you from the 1950s ...

Donald Trump has taken to calling some of his US political opponents communists. This has led to a slew of tut-tutting articles from the bien pensants, accusing Trump of fomenting a red scare and once more paltering with the truth, if not outright lying.
There’s one problem. Some of the people Trump’s talking about are communists. Surely the most under-reported story in Western politics today is the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and their incredible success in Democratic primaries, getting extremist candidates up at the expense of mainstream Democrats.
The whole world, it seems, is distressed by right-wing populism – Nigel Farage in the UK, Pauline Hanson in Australia and many analogous figures across Western Europe. But Farage and Hanson are Eleanor Roosevelt reincarnated compared with the DSA. This column readily agrees Trump lies. But here’s the thing: a statement can be true even if Trump says it’s true.
The DSA itself is not purely communist but it is extremely left. However, structurally it’s a coalition and several members of its ruling soviet, I mean committee, are self-declared communists, members in good standing of communist organisations.
The communist label is not a Trump slander, it’s self-description. Hasan Piker, an influencer and social media star central figure in the far left’s surge among Democrats, recently declared that communist dictator Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the death by state famine and slaughter of tens of millions of innocent Chinese, “one of the great leaders of this world”.
It’s a tragedy of the political illiteracy of our age that communism’s staggering crimes against humanity are now little known. They hardly figure in school or university education.

In this context, Gina's pet seems like a blessing sent to relieve the huddled masses, Pauline Hanson meets up with Nigel Farage in the UK. Picture: Facebook/ Pauline Hanson

After that opening flourish, some might think that the bromancer had hit his stride, but he was just getting started on his rant.

He donned his special McCarthy garb and went full tilt ...

Yet communism is an ideology fully as evil and murderous as Nazism. Nazism was purely evil, communism was its moral equal, though at times less explicit about its grotesque intent.
Communism killed more people than Nazism. The Khmer Rouge, authors of the Cambodian genocide, were mainstream communists.
The DSA is associated with left-wing senator Bernie Sanders and also radical New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. Candidates the DSA has backed have won primary after primary in the Democratic Party.
The DSA is conscious that while it’s having great success, especially via social media, it’s also generating opposition. So it recently published a manifesto to show how warm and cuddly it is. But this is the most radical document to have mainstream political influence in America in decades.
It calls for an end to capitalism. It wants the abolition of the presidency and the Supreme Court, with a new executive to be chosen by an elected congress. It wants a 32-hour work week with full pay and benefits, universal free housing, nationalisation and permanent state control of all the biggest corporations, an end to all student debt as part of an end to all debt, and an end to US sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
It wants ultimately to abolish the police and defund the military. And of course it has the usual stuff about climate change, demonising Israel and demonising America itself.
In New York recently, three congressional candidates backed by Mamdani and the DSA defeated more mainstream Democrats, including two sitting members of congress. The DSA has not had universal success but a slew of candidates backed by it have won important Democrat primaries.

Who knew that the Bernie bros would get the bromancer so wild-eyed and delirious, but here we are, Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally for Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan.

Even though he's disappeared from the scene, Platner still lives in the bromancer's mind ...

Yet in any normal age, association with a platform as clinically insane and monstrously wicked as DSA’s would be the kiss of political death. Many analysts see the rise of left-wing populism answering right-wing populism, but in my view this left-wing populism is much worse than much of the right-wing populism it seeks to combat.
Nonetheless, there is certainly an element of the dynamic of two extremes feeding off each other at work.
The far-left populists clearly want to ape many of Trump’s tactics: a concentration on social media, the absolute demonising of their opponents, a reliance on conspiracy theories, talking directly to voters – in this case often the young, which mainstream media has difficulty reaching – promising impossible benefits etc.
They don’t want to convert the middle. They want to anger and energise a base.
A fascinating case was Graham Platner, who until recently was the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Maine. Platner was discovered and recruited by a political agency. He was a former marine and oyster farmer who wore a beard and spoke with an attractive roughness. And espoused far-left positions.
The Democrats, aware of how they’ve lost the working class, have recruited a number of working-class hero candidates. Yet Platner’s working-class identity was essentially performative. He won most of his support within the Democratic Party not from working-class voters but from the college-educated elites who liked his left-wing policies and wanted to demonstrate how cool and hip they were by voting for someone who was a bit rough.

The reptiles were also determined to keep Platner alive in the hive mind.

Conjure up a triptych: Platner, arts, university, and say no more! Graham Platner speaks at the Collins Center for the Arts on the University of Maine.

And stand by for a familiar litany, and you guessed it, as Europe burns, the bromancer disses climate change yet again ...

But in this attempt to create a Democrat version of Trump, the Democrats went too far. Platner had a Nazi tattoo on his chest. He was the subject of countless serious allegations from his past. Finally a rape charge from a former girlfriend led to Platner withdrawing his candidacy.
Sadly, today both sides of US politics are terrifically hypocritical. Democrats who would have excoriated any Republican with this many skeletons in his past supported Platner all along until it became literally impossible.
Of course, the fact that Democrat politicians embrace the DSA rhetoric and enjoy its support doesn’t mean they will try to implement its grotesque platform.
But they will trend in that direction. The DSA told Mamdani not to increase the size of the New York police force and he complied.
Democrats will likely score gains in the November congressional elections because of inflation and because the Iran war is so unpopular. DSA types will falsely claim this vote as ideological vindication. The DSA is already exerting a big and destructive influence on the Democrat mainstream. It is concerned with Gaza, climate change, identity politics, LGBTQI, inclusion.
Sounds something like the ALP national conference.

You see? Why would a reptile be concerned with climate change or any of that other stuff, it being incredibly destructive.

How dare anyone take away the pleasure of persecuting minorities? That's what the bromancer's god put them on this earth for, endless persecution ... and by golly, the bromancer is Her messenger.

And after that bromancer rant, the hive mind could completely forget all about what's really going down in those disunited states ...

Ah, the bromancer, ironically retro, and in constant fear of the filthy commie menace.

And so to the bonus, and the pond did think for a nanosecond about the indefatigable Geoff chambering yet another of his rounds ...

Lessons for Taylor: get back to basics, beat One Nation
One Nation could walk away from the Victorian election on November 28 without winning a rump of lower house seats, or potentially any.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

It was a potent rallying cry for Jess and the beefy boofhead ...

... but the pond had to make room for Killer, and Dame Groan was still waiting in the wings, always ready for a good groaning...

The header: Sorry to say, for the young, super won’t be a golden ticket; It’s fashionable to beat up on Boomers, but actually it was their parents and grandparents who enjoyed the most salubrious investment conditions.

The caption for the truly hideous and thankfully uncredited graphic atop the Killer piece: ‘It turns out every generation since the Boomers has experienced progressively lower-risk adjusted investment returns,’ writers Adam Creighton

The pond can't rate this outing as a top class killer Killer outing, but it only runs three minutes, and remarkably Covid returns to haunt him yet again.

If only generations Y and Z were as exercised about compulsory superannuation as they are about housing affordability. Losing 12 per cent of their wages and salaries every week to untouchable accounts obviously makes buying a home or renting ever harder.
But it turns out it’s worse than that: the consumption and investment they’re giving up when they are raising families and fit enough to enjoy their incomes won’t necessarily deliver the vaunted honey pot of retirement savings they’ve been led to believe will come, which their parents and grandparents enjoyed.
It turns out every generation since the Boomers has experienced progressively lower risk-adjusted investment returns.
That’s according to a recently released landmark analysis of 150 years of Australian asset returns by four Bond University finance academics. “Consistent with current discussion around generational inequity, we document higher returns for prior generations of investors, notably for Baby Boomers in relation to equity and bonds and the Silent Generation for property,” the authors found in their paper, Long-Term Comparative Performance of Australian Asset Classes, published in April in the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal.
Baby Boomers, whose investment period was defined as 1975 to 2019, earned about 2.6 percentage points a year more on property than Generation X (investing from 1992 to 2020) and about 4.6 percentage points a year more than Generation Y (from 2007 to 2020).

At this point the reptiles had to explain a term which was completely mystifying to the reptile demographic, A teenager holds a banner with the words OK Boomer, a popular phrase among Generation Z to dismiss or mock Baby Boomer generation.

Um, so why didn't it say OK Baby Boomer?

Never mind, the pond understands vulgar youffs are completely clueless, not attuned to the fine nuances of meaningless attempts to define events by birthdays ...

Please allow the pond to take a break ...Generations and Generational Differences: Debunking Mythis in Organizational Science and Practice and Paving New Paths Forward ...

What a bunch of killjoys ...

Killer wouldn't have a word said against Boomers, what with them being the entire lizard Oz demographic ...

The ranking was the same in the sharemarket, where Boomers enjoyed nominal returns of 14.7 per cent while generations X and Y earned four and seven percentage points lower on average, respectively. Inflation narrowed the differences only a little.
“Existing public policy tacitly assumes that the ability of an individual to prepare for retirement is not impacted by their generational circumstances, and therefore the asset class returns … are similar over time,” the paper’s authors write. But clearly the returns aren’t, and these are vast differences across a 40-year working life.
It’s fashionable to beat up on Boomers, but actually it was their parents and grandparents who enjoyed the most salubrious investment conditions. Across the whole period equities averaged 8.4 per cent a year after inflation and property 6.2 per cent. The so-called Missionary Generation (investing 1891 to 1935) lapped up 9.6 per cent a year on average in the stockmarket, while the Greatest Generation enjoyed 7.7 per cent a year after inflation in property across the 40 years to 1976.
“Almost every generation earned lower risk-adjusted returns than the generation before them,” the authors conclude.
The double-digit average past returns big Australian super funds like to advertise to their “members” – as if joining were optional – are before inflation, remember, which is steadily rising, as are interest rates, which also tend to reduce property and sharemarket values.
Moreover, the world has just lived through one of the greatest bull markets in history, thanks to falling interest rates, huge strides in technology stocks and relatively low inflation. In Australia the steady ratcheting up of the compulsory superannuation rate across the past 30 years to 12 per cent itself has probably boosted property and especially sharemarket values, which younger generations are now forced to buy every pay packet. The only sectors generations X and Y could have done best in were government and corporate bonds, which averaged about 5 per cent a year after inflation from 1992 to 2020 (the last year of data in the paper), much higher than any period since 1870.

At that point came a snap of a man who would play a minor role in the final gobbet, Historian John Hirst

Just like an acid flashback, Covid returned to haunt Killer. Not a mask, anything but a mask, and as for vaccines...

The Covid experiment would have up-ended that short-lived first prize, given governments have showered trillions of units of currency on their populations since then that will continue to push up asset and consumer prices for years. What else could explain the secular decline in returns, a result probably shared throughout developed nations broadly?
Certainly the genuine private sector here and around the developed world has been shrinking as the formal and de facto government sectors continue their inexorable growth.
Australia is one of the worst offenders in this regard and has produced some of the worst economic statistics in the OECD across the past few years. Perhaps the only good decision the federal government has made in more than four years is to align (as of June) payment of mandatory “employer” super contributions with payment of wages and salaries. The insidious genius of Labor’s system has been that employees have never paid attention to their own savings or typically misunderstand that their gross pay would be more than 12 per cent higher were the whole system abolished.
Even the government knows people are being forced to save too much. The Treasury’s 2020 Retirement Income Review projected that by 2059 $1 in every $3 paid out of the super system would be inherited compared with $1 in $5 then. The best thing the Abbott government ever did was delay the increase in the superannuation guarantee.
The next government should make at least part of it optional, amid uncertainty about future returns and the obvious need for income when workers need it most.
Something one of our greatest historians, John Hirst, said has always stuck in my mind. In a crisis he expected superannuation money, by now trillions of dollars tied in a legally distinct bow, to be nationalised or at least forced into government bonds.
Imagine how bad the returns would be then!
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute for Public Affairs.

So we'll all be rooned yet again, or at least vulgar youff will be, as if the pond cared.

The pond can't help thinking Killer might have been better off going full Hirst, and for those wondering about Hirst, he has a wiki here, and there's more than a whiff of some of his quaint notions at The Conversation.

Now be warned vulgar youff, back into your bunkers, no travel for you ...

And so Killer had paved the way for Dame Groan, and the rooning filled the air with despair ...

The utterly despairing header: No Labor leader can fix Victoria’s catalogue of failures; Replacing Jacinta Allan with another Labor stooge won’t make any difference.

The caption for the opening snap proving that Comrade Dan still lived rent free in the hive mind: Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan tour the Burwood Suburban Rail Loop. Picture: Jay Kogler / Newswire

It was way back in September 2023 that comrade Dan abdicated, but how the reptiles still fear and loathe him.

The reptiles rated this Dame Groan rant as a five minute read, but the pond reckons it's really a classic 'we'll all be rooned' outing, which even found time for Dame Groan to mourn the loss of the Commonwealth Games.

Who knew the old Groaner was the sporty type, keen to see squillions spent on a bunch of minor former British colonies, arranged so that Oz athletes could rule them all, at least until an Olympics or world games produced some real competition...

As leadership speculation consumes Spring Street, it appears the Victorian Labor government is on borrowed time. Replacing Jacinta Allan with another Labor stooge won’t make any difference. No matter the result, it’s a long road to recovery for Victoria.
It’s worth remembering that, had everything gone to plan, regional Victoria currently would be hosting the series of events that make up the Commonwealth Games. But the only thing the state has to show for the reckless proposal of the Labor government to stage the Games is a bill close to $600m, with $200m simply handed over to the grateful Glaswegians.
The initial cost of staging the Commonwealth Games in Victoria was put at $2.6bn. This figure has been criticised by the Victorian Auditor-General as understating the total costs and the risks. At the same time, the benefits were massively overstated by the key department.
According to the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, the relevant public servants “did not advise government to delay a decision on hosting until a fit for purpose business case could be provided”.
But bear in mind the event was to be perfectly timed to meet the political objectives of the Labor government. Months out from the 2026 election and located in wavering regional electorates, the Commonwealth Games would have provided the perfect springboard for the government’s re-election campaign.

It was a conspiracy! And yet here we are, as the smirking comrade Dan haunts the reptiles, Commonwealth Games Australia boss Craig Phillips has warned Dan Andrews’ ‘rubbery’ cost figures have spooked state governments from hosting future Games.

And so to more pleading for the fun of bunging on a Commonwealth do ...

When Dan Andrews finally decided to pull the pin, he staged a further stunt by declaring the cost of the Games had blown out to $6.9bn. Let’s be clear here, this figure was simply invented or, in the more polite words of the Auditor-General, “overstated and not transparent”. It included sums of money that were already recorded as contingencies as well as items that had nothing to do with the event.
The obvious purpose was to convince Victorians that such a ludicrously large sum of money meant it would be irresponsible for the Games to proceed.

And with that springboard, Dame Groan leapt into the air like an artistic gymnast intent on demolishing Victoria, carrying off the Nagornyy triple pike in style ...

The saga of the Commonwealth Games is illustrative of the appalling quality of governance in Australia’s second largest state by population. A politicised bureaucracy, inadequate attention paid to policy and project development, and the wanton handing out of favours to politically favoured groups – these are the core features of the way Victoria is governed. Add in the high and rising tax burden placed on Victorians and it’s not a surprise that the Victorian economy is lagging the rest of the country.
According to the most recent labour force figures, unemployment in Victoria is 5.1 per cent compared with 4.4 per cent nationally. The rate of underemployment – people wanting more hours of work – is 7.3 per cent in Victoria and 6.5 per cent Australia-wide.
In 2024-25, output in Victoria per capita fell by 0.8 per cent compared with a fall of 0.3 per cent in Australia. Across the past decade, per capita output in Victoria has fallen from 93 per cent of the national average to 88 per cent. It’s not even clear that Victorians are still richer than Tasmanians.
The ongoing revelations of gross mismanagement and cost blowouts of Victoria’s Big Build infrastructure projects are simply excused by the Allan government as the result of inflation. No one is buying this as the examples of favouritism and pay-offs to preferred unions, as well as extortion on the part of organised criminal gangs, pile up. The fact Allan refuses to call a royal commission is really all you need to know. The power to compel witnesses to testify and to extract vital documents is essential. It is only through a royal commission that the full facts will ever be known.

How badly are the reptiles haunted by comrade Dan? Beyond badly, Street artist Jarrod Grech unveils his artwork near Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, spray-painting the word Dictator across the face of former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NewsWire / David Geraghty

Sheesh, did the pond mention that Melburnians are rooned? If only there was a way to stop comrade Dan continuing as premier of Victoria ...

There is scant evidence that the current Labor government has learnt any lessons from the mistakes made during its terms in government. Pressing on with the vastly expensive Suburban Rail Loop is an act of sheer madness, but the Allan government is intent on locking in future elected governments to the project. At the same time, it will keep the unionised workforce in highly paid jobs for years to come.
For example, a lucrative maintenance contract involving unionised workers has already been signed a decade into the future. This is the sort of depth to which this government is prepared to stoop. Contracts worth billions of dollars also have been signed involving a Chinese-owned construction company.
This is notwithstanding the fact the Suburban Rail Loop has not met any transparent business case or been recommended by any infrastructure authority. The first stage linking Box Hill and Cheltenham, a route that is rarely travelled, makes little sense.
At one stage, an attempt was made to market the SRL as a housing project, with Melbourne becoming a city with centres. There was even a naive view that some of the vast costs could be recouped by capturing some of the enhanced value of these centres for property developers. It’s now back to being a transport project.
One astonishing aspect of the SRL is the financial support given by the federal government. It is part of a broader under-the-table bailout of the state, although the Allan government has promptly spent more than the value of the additional money received from the federal government. Victoria is now a net recipient under the GST distribution given its parlous situation.

What a relief. An open mouthed villain who isn't comrade Dan, Jaclyn Symes at the Victorian State Labor Conference at Olympic Park in Melbourne. Picture: David Crosling

And so to the final gobbet, and Dame Groan reverting to a couple of her favourite fear and loathing topics.

Regular correspondents will know immediately what they are...

State government debt is rapidly approaching $200bn, with the rate of deterioration in the fiscal position of the state setting an unwelcome record. The Department of Treasury and Finance provides unconvincing cover for the fiscal profligacy of the government by assuming low rates of expenses growth in the outyears of the forward estimates and optimistic forecasts of state output.
In this way, the inexperienced Treasurer, Jaclyn Symes, claims that the ratio of government debt to gross state product will level out and then fall. The notion that the state can grow its way out of debt is unpersuasive. The ratings agencies are watching carefully. In any event, net interest payments will account for at least 10 per cent of government outlays by the end of the decade.
It’s also worth mentioning the damaging energy policy implemented during Labor’s terms in government. Based on a great deal of wishful thinking and the determination to decarbonise the state, the result has been a patchwork of subsidised renewable energy installations coupled with the hidden costs of taxpayer support for the continuation of coal-fired plants.
Gas was demonised until it wasn’t. Offshore wind farms were praised but have failed to progress. Energy-intensive manufacturing plants have shut, with barista and Uber jobs replacing those jobs lost. Opposition to intrusive transmission lines and renewable energy projects has grown but has been largely ignored. Draconian laws have overridden the rights of private landowners.
Victoria, in effect, has become a laughing-stock, a crime-ridden place with falling living standards. Its main distinguishing feature is high population growth based on excessive immigration. It is overtaxed, overregulated and extremely poorly governed. No new Labor premier is capable of fixing this sorry mess.

Damn you climate change, and damn you filthy vile furriners for ruining everything.

But hang on, damned if the cockroaches will allow those deep southerners to snatch away the title of the crime state...

The total number of police proceedings recorded in 2024–25 were:
197,902 in New South Wales
146,690 in Queensland
114,432 in Victoria

Go cockroaches! Watch out for the deep north toads! (And for those keen to do a per capita calculation, NSW's population at the end of 2025 was 8,641,1000, while Queensland had 5,712,100 and Victoria 7,121,900)

What Victorians need this summer is a healthy, enjoyable European experience, say Rutherglen transformed into Bordeaux ...

And so the way is paved for the fundamentalist far right TG bashing Xian nationalist Liberal party to seize the moment and return the state to the glorious days of Jeff ...

Great days indeed...

Thought about becoming a bear instead?

In which the pond decided to offer a Monday smorgasbord of reptiles, with only Lord Downer fully present, and therefore fully absent, in a Schrödinger's stocking way...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:18:46 +0000

Anyone interested in world events had to scroll way down the digital edition of the lizard Oz this morning to discover this yarn...

... but if anyone scrolled down to the bottom of that tale of the apocalypse, they'd discover it was a pick up from the Sunday Times, with not a single mention of climate change, ghosted in a way worthy of the local reptiles ...

By way of contrast, there were a number of mentions of the climate crisis in Graudian coverage, including in the header, Pedro Sánchez says Spain is suffering effects of climate crisis as firefighters battle wildfires in France, Blazes near Madrid coming under control but efforts to contain huge fire near Bordeaux hampered by windy conditions

... including these lines...

Speaking at an advance firefighters’ command post west of Madrid, the prime minister warned that Spain and Portugal were experiencing the varied consequences of the climate emergency, from fires and storms to heavy snowfalls. “The entire Iberian peninsula is suffering the effects of the climate emergency in a very specific way,” he said.

And this ...

...The blazes are the latest episode in a summer of wildfires that threaten to burn an unprecedented expanse of land. Europe has endured a series of heatwaves since the spring, fuelled by the climate crisis, including the hottest-ever June, leaving vegetation tinder dry.
The EU commissioner for crisis management, Hadja Lahbib, told the BBC it was likely that damage from wildfires would exceed previous records. “Last year, one million hectares burned during the summer and so we are expecting to face another historic, sad record because the season has started earlier in the year,” she said.

If assorted European countries followed the lead of mad King Donald, Faux Noise's favourite leader, it'd be tariffs at ten paces for all.

Please stick with the pond, because eventually Lord Downer will provide a payoff to the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, at the top of the page, the Australian Daily Zionist News went about its usual jihads ...

EXCLUSIVE
Policy flawed: Marles’ private admission on Hamas stance
Richard Marles knew Labor’s Israel-Palestine platform wording was flawed before throwing his factional weight behind it, as the daughter of a Bondi massacre victim slams the wording of the platform.
By Greg Brown and Noah Yim

They really do their best to ensure the pond will privately allocate its vote elsewhere ...

Even this sobbing about data centres - won't someone think of the tech bros? - dropped a mention of the main Daily Zionist News business for the day ...

EXCLUSIVE
Revealed: the radical policy demands Labor kept behind closed doors
Secret files reveal Labor faction demands: data centre tax, union-run companies, people’s bank
Labor’s tightly scripted national conference hid a far more radical agenda – with unions pushing to strip CEOs of power and tax AI data centres.
By Noah Yim

... with link back to the lead yarn to make sure the hive mind didn't miss it ...

These same documents revealed the depth of anti-US, anti-AUKUS, anti-Israel, pro-Palestine sentiment in the party’s rank-and-file.
The Australian can now reveal the radical left-wing policies that party delegates argued for at the national conference that leadership killed off before they could be presented on the conference floor.

... and which in one iteration began with a wild-eyed Ed terrifying the reptile readership ...

Meanwhile, over on the extreme far right, simpleton Simon added to this reptile chorus.

Why the major parties are driving a despairing country in the wrong direction
In recent weeks three pieces of research have sought to examine how Australia’s political establishment is under siege.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

Crosby Textor?

Nah ... not Crosby Textor, so it's the intermittent archive for him ...

Meanwhile, also over on the extreme far right, the usual reptiles were hard at work expanding the jihad in the usual way ...

Hamas ‘journos’ fool usual media suspects
The terror groups spoke. The journalists didn’t. Hamas has admitted some of its dead ‘reporters’ were fighters, yet the world’s biggest newsrooms have refused to correct the record.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

By this time the pond was fully into sampling the smorgasbord and quickly moving on ...

A lesser member of the diaspora of the Kelly gang decided to add to the Major's jihad ...

Labor’s integrity requires rigorous moral clarity over terrorism
Labor Friends of Israel co-convener Mike Kelly has sounded the alarm over extremist ‘entryism’ threatening to corrupt the ALP from within after last week’s national conference.
By Mike Kelly

The pond couldn't take it, and had a massive hissy fit, followed by a major sulk.

As usual, when the reptiles get in this mood, the pond always turns to Haaretz for an alternative ... Even if Israel Cracks Down on Violent Settlers, The Violence of the Occupation Will Remain (sorry, paywall)

With the paywall limiting the intermittent archive, the pond felt the need to show more data and a handy graph tracking the ethnic cleansing ...

And having used up all that space serving up the smorgasbord, the pond decided it only had room for one full appearance, and luckily that was Lord Downer himself ...

The header: We’ve turned against the beliefs that made us a rich country; Everybody has their own pet theory for why Australia has performed so poorly over the past two decades. There are two key factors.

The caption for the snap: Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

His Lordship spent a bigly four minutes rambling through a golden past, as ancient warriors are wont to do, and the pond found it all quite soothing and relaxing ...

It’s easy to ascribe Australia’s poor economic performance over the past two decades to a broader malaise throughout the Western world. We were all affected by the global financial crisis and Covid. We were also affected by the Ukraine and Iran wars.
In the wake of the global financial crisis, the West abandoned liberal economics and retreated to the sclerotic policies of the 1970s: heavy taxes, an expanding welfare state, public, not private, investment, and the return of trade union power. Needless to say, this has led to a decline in the growth of productivity and slow economic growth. In many cases, there has been a decline in real living standards. No surprises there. If you adopt the policies of the 1970s, you’ll get the same results. And so we have. This is a global phenomenon.
But what is particularly chilling is the relative weakness of Australia. Let’s remember that through the first decade of this century, Australia’s economy was seen globally as an outstanding example of success.
From the mid-1980s until the mid-2000s, we deregulated our economy, scrapped tariff protection, privatised government enterprises, reformed the tax system, paid off all government debt and ran budget surpluses.
Everywhere I went in the world as the foreign minister during the first decade of the century, people wanted to know about the Australian economic miracle. We had economic growth rates of between 3 per cent and 4 per cent. Our unemployment rate by 2007 was around 4 per cent. Inflation was negligible and real living standards were growing.

Please, fawn on His Lordship, though for some terrible reason, the pond decided to interrupt the Adelaide hills loon with a snap of bloody lefties, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating during Premiers Conference. Picture: Chris Pavlich

Enough of all that - there's not a single mention of Hawke or Keating in His Lordship's text - and back to Lord Downer waxing full lyrical, in a way which might be described as Dame Groan-lite...

By 2010, Australia’s per capita GDP was slightly above that of the US. We were fractionally richer than the Americans. We were some 20 per cent richer than the countries in the eurozone, and around 30 per cent richer than the UK. What is alarming is to see how we have done relative to those countries over the past 15 years.
Let’s start with the US. We have gone from being slightly richer than the US to our per capita GDP being just over 70 per cent of America’s. In 2010, America’s per capita GDP was around $US48,000 and Australia’s was $US52,000. By 2025 the US per capita GDP had grown to $US90,000, yet Australia’s had only grown to $US65,000. The point is a very simple one. America’s economy has performed much better than Australia’s over the last 20 years.
So what about the eurozone? In 2010, Australia was approximately 20 per cent richer than the eurozone countries on a per capita basis. By 2025 it was only 9 per cent richer. So, for all the talk of slow growth in Europe and its lack of economic dynamism and entrepreneurship – which is by the way completely justified – Australia has been performing less well than the eurozone.
But surely you’re thinking we would have done much better than the UK. We’re always being told that the UK’s economy is broken, that it is in permanent crisis, that it was devastated by Brexit and that immigration has plunged the country into penury. Well, don’t be too hasty in drawing that conclusion. In 2010, we were approximately 30 per cent richer per capita than the UK, but now that gap has been reduced to around 13 per cent.

The reptiles had a solution. If only the mug punters in the hive mind were lured in by this fabulous collage to break out the purse and tip in a few shekels ...

PREMIUM
'Nobody’s interested in Australia anymore': Inside the war reshaping global power
Become a member to access our premium video content

With a mad King Donald sighting, how could the pond resist a 'toon celebrating the WSJ shaking hands with their persecutor?

His Lordship then decided to have an argument with himself, much as the pond finds itself shouting at the TV on occasions ...

Now you can argue with these figures. You can claim, for example, that the Australian dollar has weakened substantially over the past 15 years, and that distorts comparisons.

Oh don't be silly, of course that was only so His Lordship could produce a billy goat butt or three, dressed up as an "However":

However, even if you make the comparisons on the basis of purchasing power parity, you will find that Australia’s economic performance per capita has been substantially worse than that of the US, the eurozone, and, incredibly, the UK. On a PPP basis, we were 15 per cent richer than the UK in 2010, and now we are about 9 per cent richer. I think this is a shameful thing.
After all, Australia is richly endowed with resources and energy; there is no excuse for its weak economic performance. We have also benefited substantially from the economic rise of China and, more broadly, the Indo-Pacific region. Despite all of that, we are performing less well than America, Europe and the UK. Yet 20 years ago, we were admired for our outstanding economic performance. Well, maybe you think there’s some upside to this. Australia, perhaps, has become more egalitarian as private sector investment declines and public sector investment soars.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case either. The measure of inequality is known as the Gini coefficient. Over the past 20 years, it demonstrates that inequality based on household wealth has increased. This is almost certainly a function of the rapid rise in house prices throughout that period.
No doubt everybody will have their own pet theory for why Australia has performed so poorly over the past two decades. There are two key, if not sole, factors.
The first was the reaction to the global financial crisis, which led to a loss of confidence by the establishment, as well as the general public, in the liberal market. It is a model that had served Australia so well in the previous two decades.
This model has been replaced with a social democratic model, which involves huge increases in unprofitable public investment and a rapid expansion of the welfare state. All of this has been funded by a combination of increasing taxes and heavy public borrowing. Common sense tells you this is not a formula for rapid economic growth.

As a sign that the reptiles thought His Lordship was off in cloud cuckoo land, they flung in a distracting snap ...A visitor walks past a giant Euro sign inside the headquarters of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt am Main.

And that's the only mention of the European Central Bank you'll find in His Lordship's offering ... and right on cue, as the perfect follow up to the massive apocalyptic destruction currently being wrought in Europe, His Lordship came up with these noble lines ...

Secondly, the overall obsession by the political class with climate policies has been crippling for Australia. Not only has there been eye-watering amounts of public money pumped into the so-called energy transition, but by establishing a dual system of renewables and conventional fossil fuel electricity generation, there has been a pronounced decline in productivity in the energy sector and a commensurate substantial increase in electricity prices. According to the Productivity Commission, investment in electricity generation since 2001-02 has grown by 126 per cent, and output has grown by 14 per cent, so it’s hardly surprising there has been an astronomical increase in electricity prices.

How's that rain not falling on the plain in Spain? Fancy a smoke-laden Bordeaux?

And so it turned out that His Lordship is as obdurate and as sublimely stupid as he ever was ...

So, it’s as simple as this: if Australia wants to return to high rates of growth and improvements in living standards, it has to re-embrace liberal market economics. People tell me the public are resistant to that. I’m not so sure. Once it’s explained to them it is the only path to rising living standards I think they can be persuaded. After all, we’ve tried the present economic formula in the 70s and 80s, and look where that got us? We tried the liberal market formula in the late 80s to the mid-2000s, and that was a glittering success. We should learn from history.

What did the pond learn from history? His Lordship was a frivolous twat ...

... and nothing has changed.

But what of the quarry whispering Caterist, the pond can hear some correspondents cry?

Sorry, by this point in the early morning, the pond was well over it.

Surely there was enough blancmange in the smorgasbord, and besides, the floodwater whisperer's Labor bashing was too tedious to contemplate.

The pond suggests that a teaser trailer, and an intermittent archive link, personally arranged by the pond will have to do ... ‘Progressive’ Labor ditches workers for social moralising

Not Bill Kelty and the Voice yet again?

And why is it that the reptiles are always moralising about moralising, in essence acting as a kind of tedious thought police for anything outside their monoculture world?

At least the pond now understands why the reptiles wanted to insert a snap of Hawke and Keating in His Lordship's piece ... talk about a pair living rent free in the hive mind.

Besides, for those disappointed this cavalier treatment of the Caterist, be consoled - there's nothing in the quarry whisperer's piece that couldn't be summed up in a few 'toons, because they always disappoint ...

And speaking of security, this one's just for fun ... though if you happened to be an Iranian interested in regime change, you might think it a quadruple bogey ...

And speaking of mad King Donald and state regime media, there's always a rant to be found ...

In which the pond has its usual quality Polonial time - this is a conservative-full zone - and gives the Angelic one and the lizard Oz editorialist a jolly good capping ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:00:00 +0000

The pond is again getting very tired of the monocultural diet inflicted on it by the lizard Oz hive mind.

It never takes long for the ennui to set in - it's a bit like being made to swallow Hollywood swill.

Yesterday the pond was forced to endure Spielberg's Disclosure Day, a film set in a purported present, but determinedly back in the 1980s, with endless amounts of fake lens flare and a plot about as credible as the UFO files released by mad King Donald in order to distract from the Epstein files.

Apart from the usual (ye ancient cats and dogs, not Roswell, not a crop circle), the pond objected to the portrait of the greys, what with any viewer of People of Earth knowing that the greys are inclined to human abductions and anal probes.

Instead we're supposed to believe that a Catholic nun represents the people of earth in welcoming an alien invasion, because of "empathy", perhaps meant as a Spielbergian retort to mad King Donald.

Benevolent Catholics always make the pond nervous, and after a risible train crash stunt the pond lost all interest, especially as the big reveal happens in a replica of a small town Norman Rockwell type house - so E.T. Spielberg - and on broadcast television, as if the internet and social media hadn't been invented. That way too long routine perfectly suited the film's 1980s feel, but enough already. (Okay, maybe it was more 1977 given the visual references to Close Encounters).

When are we going to see a real movie, funded by a real man, with real stars and oodles of creatives behind the camera? Must we wait until Xmas?

Speaking of empathy, the pond feels entirely righteous not having it when it comes to the hive mind.

The pond found it extremely difficult to compile enough reptiles for its Sunday meditation, not helped by Bernie carrying on the lizard Oz TG jihad ...

The trans lobby says it saves kids. The evidence says otherwise
Australia still offers puberty blockers to children as countries like the UK, Finland and Sweden restrict them, and our national review remains unfinished.
By Bernard Lane

The pond never goes there, and is still haunted by a TG friend's anecdotes about the way she was tortured with electroshock treatment, and suffered much abuse at the hands of the Catholic church, called in to cast out her demons by way of "empathetic" exorcisms.

She was only saved from all this when she ran across a sympathetic shrink, and thereafter managed a varied and successful career, but still hasn't come out, because there's still so much "empathy" to hand in the land.

So what's Lane's credentials for rabbiting on about TG folk?

Bernard Lane is a former senior journalist with The Australian and publishes the Gender Clinic News Substack.

Oh he was a journo and now he publishes a substack obsessed with TG folk. Say no more. Just right for the lizard Oz TG jihad.

So much empathy.

Perhaps "empathy" should be the theme of the day, because this day Polonius's prattle displays much empathy towards Benji's barking mad theocratic culture and none at all to those Palestinians being ethnically cleansed from Gaza and the West Bank (not to mention the Lebanese being kicked out of south Lebanon, and the ones being bombed elsewhere):

The header: How the ABC and top universities turned a blind eye to antisemitism; Evidence exposes how Australia’s public broadcaster and elite universities allowed a culture of denial and ideological groupthink to fester.

The caption for the man with the furtive air of a devious prevert, or so the portrait would suggest: University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott offered apologies during senate and royal commission hearings for failing to dismantle antisemitic campus encampments earlier. Picture: NewsWire / Josie Hayden

Polonius spent a bigly four minutes rabbiting on in his prattle in a way entirely consistent with the current Australian Daily Zionist News jihad, and with not another visual interruption for the rant ...

The ABC and the Group of Eight universities (Adelaide University, Australian National University, University of Melbourne, Monash University, University of Queensland, University of Sydney, University of NSW and University of Western Australia) like to present themselves as the leading intellectual and cultural institutions in Australia.
Yet evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, along with other sources, indicates that both the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster and taxpayer-subsidised major universities have failed to act to thwart or reduce antisemitism in their areas of responsibility.
As I wrote in these pages before the terrorist attack on southern Israel by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas on October 7, 2023, antisemitism was rapidly increasing in Australia, particularly in the capital cities of Melbourne and Sydney.
On October 9, 2023, an unauthorised march to the Sydney Opera House witnessed what American writer Mark Levin has termed the Marxist-Islamist Alliance chanting “Where’s the Jews” or perhaps “Gas the Jews”. There is scant difference. This was before Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza.

Mark Levin?

The pond decided to break a long standing rule just for the comedic effect ...

Okay, it's more Ben than Mark, it's more broken clock syndrome, but you could waste an eternity of time watching barking mad far right fundamentalists go at each other over the ethnic cleansing of Gaza ..

Back to Polonius, as he builds to an incredible suck:

And then, on December 14, 2025, there was the Bondi massacre where it is alleged that radical Islamists killed 15 innocent civilians who were celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Australia will never fully recover from this massacre of the innocents. Nor will many Australians ever feel safe again.
What has been notable about events in Australia since October 7, 2023, is that so few Australians publicly stood up for the Australian Jewish community. It happens to be a small group of over 100,000 but it has brave and articulate leaders.
Needless to say, the News Corp print media stood up – as did Sky News.

What a classic suck, as if conducting a never-ending jihad of their own was more than a match for a funded-by-Benji Hamas jihad (look it up)...

But the rest of the mainstream media was relatively quiet – at least until the Bondi massacre – as synagogues were firebombed and bollards were constructed outside Jewish schools and childcare centres.
What about Australia’s academics? Many who might have spoken up were silent while others were supporting the Marxist-radical Islamist demonstrators.

It being a Polonial rant, eventually it transpires that it's all the fault of the ABC. Connoisseurs of Polonius-speak might wonder if it will lead to one of his classic lines, always present thanks to his keyboard shortcut:

What about the ABC? Four Corners – which presents as Australia’s leading current affairs program – did not devote one episode to antisemitism. Although it did cover the neo-Nazi movement, which is a minor part of the antisemitism problem in Australia.
I first met Mark Scott, vice-chancellor of Sydney University, many years ago. He is a nice, decent person. And that may be the problem.
In September 2024, Scott admitted he had failed Sydney University students and staff. Appearing before the Senate committee, Scott said that testimonials by Sydney University students and staff who were victims of acts of antisemitism on campus “were heartbreaking and unacceptable” and added that he was “sorry”.
Last week Scott gave evidence to the royal commission headed by former High Court judge Virginia Bell SC. He again declared his sorrow that he had not acted sooner to remove the encampment from the university campus. But Scott remains in office.
Compare and contrast Jennifer Westacott, the hands-on chancellor of Western Sydney University, which is not one of the Go8. She is the stand-out university administrator in thwarting antisemitism on the university’s campus. She is both nice and strong.
The problem with the Scott-managed university in recent years, apart from the antisemitic violence, is the lack of viewpoint diversity. Supporters of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders were silenced, including vocal opponents of antisemitism, physically or by intimidation.
For 10 years before he took up his present job, Scott was the ABC’s managing director and editor-in-chief. When he started this position, Scott let it be known that he intended to bring about greater diversity with respect to the public broadcaster’s news and current affairs coverage. He said as much when he addressed The Sydney Institute in October 2006.
But nothing happened. Like many of his ABC predecessors and successors, Scott was seduced by the fashionable left-wing culture that pervades the organisation. He inherited a media organisation that lacked viewpoint diversity and when he departed nothing much had changed.

"Viewpoint diversity"?

How incredibly disappointing.

Everyone knows that the mantra should be a reference to a "conservative-free zone", as in ...

The fact is that over the years the ABC has lost many of its traditional social and political conservatives to other media outlets – including Sky News. That’s the inevitable fate of a conservative-free zone media outlet in a democracy. (Inevitable fate of ABC’s conservative-free zone: boring)

It goes without saying that the most crucial conservative the ABC lost was Polonius himself, with the bitterness likely never to leave him.

Now back to praising the hive mind and deploring the cardigan wearers.

This was evident when current ABC chairman Kim Williams was interviewed last week on Sky News’ The Kenny Report. When asked by Chris Kenny to name some right-of-centre presenters on the public broadcaster to match the plethora of left-of-centre ones, Williams said “from time to time” there had been some. But he could only think of Tom Switzer, who has not been an ABC presenter for two years.
John Lyons, the ABC’s Americas editor, set the tone for the organisation’s coverage of the US-Iran war. On March 1 this year he said Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “driven” US President Donald Trump to initiate hostilities. We now know, courtesy of the book Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, that the final decision was made by Trump.

Point of order muh lud.

Trump might have made the decision, but Benji pushed him to it.

Here's a quote from the both siderist NY Times, written by none other than Haberman and Swan ...6 Takeaways From the Story of Trump’s Decision to Go to War With Iran

Netanyahu made a detailed pitch for war to Trump and his team in the Situation Room.

Sitting across from Mr. Trump in the Situation Room — a venue rarely used for in-person sessions with foreign leaders — Mr. Netanyahu made an hourlong presentation to the president and his top aides on Feb. 11. He argued that Iran was ripe for regime change and that a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign could bring down the Islamic Republic. At one point, he played a video that included a montage of figures who could lead Iran if the theocratic government fell. Among them was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah.
The Israeli leader and his advisers laid out what they portrayed as near-certain victory: Iran’s missile program destroyed in weeks, the Strait of Hormuz kept open and minimal retaliation against American interests. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, could help foment an uprising inside Iran to finish the job.
Mr. Trump’s response was swift and appeared approving to most in the room. Sounds good to me, he told the prime minister.

U.S. intelligence officials called Netanyahu’s regime-change scenarios “farcical.”

U.S. analysts scrambled overnight to assess what Mr. Netanyahu had presented. Their conclusions, delivered the next day in another Situation Room meeting, were blunt.
The first two objectives laid out in the Israeli pitch — killing the ayatollah and crippling Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors — were achievable, U.S. intelligence officials concluded. The second two goals presented by Mr. Netanyahu and his team — a popular uprising inside Iran and the replacement of the Islamic government by a new secular leader — were not. The C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, used a single word to describe the regime-change scenarios: “farcical.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio translated, “In other words, it’s bullshit.”
Mr. Trump absorbed the assessment — and moved past it. Regime change, he said, would be “their problem.” His interest in killing Iran’s top leaders and dismantling its military remained undimmed.

And given this inaccurate Polonial reporting, it takes incredible chutzpah for Polonius to berate the ABC for inaccurate reporting, but that's our Polonius ...

The unintended consequence of such inaccurate reporting by a critic of contemporary Israel is to play into the hands of the increasing number of antisemites in our midst. Lyons is not an antisemite but he is an Israel antagonist. There is no counterpoint to Lyons within the ABC.
It’s the anti-Israel ethos within the public broadcaster that leads to mistakes. The royal commission has heard that it took the ABC more than a week to correct (only online, I understand) a report it ran claiming 14,000 babies “will die” in Gaza within 48 hours unless the UN could reach them.
I heard this live on May 21, 2025, and just knew it was false. But ABC producers ran this BBC report because they believed what they wanted to believe. Once again, such false reporting has the unintended consequence of increasing antisemitism.
ABC management invariably goes into denial when defending its patch. This was the case when ABC editorial director Gavin Fang appeared before the royal commission on July 9 – although he did acknowledge some mistakes. And when Williams spoke to Kenny on July 16. Williams deserves praise for having the courage to address an ABC critic in the media – a rare occasion. Also, Scott has apologised for his failure at Sydney University.
However, in a sense it’s all too late. When the Go8 and the ABC needed to be heard speaking out for viewpoint diversity against antisemitism, there was silence.

For a man who berates the ABC for wanting to believe, this incredible ability to believe in the lizard Oz jihad in support of a fundamentalist theocracy is a remarkable piece of work.

Here, have a 'toon break ...

With Polonius out of the way, the pond struggled to find a bonus.

The pond briefly thought of snappy Tom...

Economic heavyweights warn Labor is ignoring Australia’s dire productivity crisis
While the rest of the world got richer after the pandemic, Australians got poorer – and Labor’s had almost nothing to say about it.
By Tom Dusevic

But snappy Tom is there in the intermittent archive, and he's really just Dame Groan-lite. Why accept the sardine John West rejects when you can have canned Groan tuna?

Besides, he's running the bog standard reptile line that we'll all be rooned by Xmas (and maybe the way mad King Donald is going with tariffs and the war on Iran we might be, but the reptiles never seem to mention that).

Spoiler alert, this is the end of snappy Tom's piece as he cranks himself up to an hysterical 11, with the pond offering it as a kind of teaser trailer ...

...Former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe this week declared wholesale policy changes were required to revive investment. “Our living standards have stagnated,” he said at a public event to announce new governance rules for securities trading.
Lowe noted there had been no net growth in per capita incomes for seven or eight years. In the previous three decades, or so, per capita income was rising at 1.5 per cent, year in, year out. “This is the fundamental economic problem the country faces,” he said.
In simple terms, while our population had grown, before and after the Covid crisis, our capital stock of factories, machines, tools and computers had not kept pace. “We require businesses to invest,” Lowe said. “We need Australia to be a great place for businesses to invest, expand and hire people. It requires some more fundamental public policy reform.”
Lowe’s prescription sounded a lot like his frequent urgings during his seven years as head of the central bank, a term that ended three years ago. That sage advice was heeded by neither Coalition nor Labor governments.
One intervention by a former RBA board member could be seen as a niggling outlier; two, for a pundit, is a megatrend. Bill Kelty, one-time ACTU secretary, was the third amigo in Labor’s 1980s and 90s Accord-led economic revival with leaders Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. The trio’s political and intellectual thrust could launch a SpaceX Starship.
In a submission to a Senate inquiry examining legislation on the nation’s cash distribution arrangements, Kelty put in everyday terms what the OECD’s latest figuring on living standards meant for workers: two years lost income over a working life of 40 years.
“This is material to working people who are really battlers,” Kelty wrote to the Senate economics committee in his role as a non-executive director of Armaguard, the cash logistics company.
Yet commodity export prices are high and sales volumes have increased, he added.
“We know the underlying malaise,” Kelty wrote. “Productivity change is the third lowest in the OECD. Investment is low. Growth per capita is non-existent.”
But Kelty wasn’t done. “Government expenditure is rising much faster than inflation,” he continued. “The tax on working people is increasing faster than their wages. It is easy to blame the governments of the past and present, but ultimately we are all to blame. Something is wrong with this place and we need to do something about it.”
You feel it in your bones. It is this accursed inflation. Most costs are never coming down. Wages, stuck. And the rising debt’s call on taxpayers. How much longer it takes for younger Australians to get a start. We all live the frustration: our economy operates in fits and starts, like the way Messi meanders, sprints, and is ambling again after he’s called off-side.

Messi's the metaphor?

Try mad King Donald ...

The pond also thought about the Angelic one, but the pond didn't feel the need to swing a hammer at the skull of a dead woman, so decided to do it in caps ...

There you go, there's the reason the pond couldn't be bothered... too much tyke empathy:

At worst she was regarded as a bigot – and a Catholic bigot at that – who opposed gay marriage, abortion and unchecked immigration, a symbol of the modern twin sins of racism and homophobia.

Yes, she was a bigot and a furrinerphobe and homophobe of the worst kind, and that's all that can be said about her, except that she also indulged in the worst forms of showbix exhibitionism, as old bigots are wont to do ...

So much Catholic empathy, just like a Spielberg movie.

So the pond carried on with the caps ...

Save donkeys in the holy land (no caps please, it ain't blessed), and never mind the human casualities?

At least Simpson knew what to do with his donkey.

And this last cap has a line worth repeating ...

Here's the guff the pond found particularly irksome ...

Widdecombe was unlike most politicians, a person whose beliefs really did motivate her action. I have long been an admirer of that extraordinary woman. She first came to my attention through two things. First, her tireless campaign to end mass abortion in Britain, especially when she sponsored legislation to try to lower the gestational age of abortion. Her arguments were always grounded in the starkly rational: “Why use all of medical technology to save one baby born at 24 weeks when another can be put into a bag and thrown away?” Should women be able to do with their bodies as they wish? Her rational reply: “There are two bodies here.”

That's rational? Old biddies telling other women what they can do with their bodies?

So much Catholic empathy.

So we should leave all that to the Catholic priests who theoretically shouldn't be in the business of f*cking at all? (Sssh, no mention of the gay priest in the pond's extended family).

This doing of screen caps became infectious and so the pond decided to bulk up further with the lizard Oz editorialist.

Correspondents might remember that yesterday the pond warned Ahmed that once he appeared in the lizard Oz, he'd be treated as a useful fool, or as a useless tool, a means whereby they could perpetuate their current jihad in support of ethnic cleansing.

For those who missed the reference ...

‘I grew up in Gaza. Hamas betrayed us for its own ends’
Western apologists glorify Hamas as legitimate resistance, but the group serves its own ends – not my people.
By Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

And now let's see how Ahmed plays into the reptiles' Australian Daily Zionist News jihad ...

Sure as sh*t Sherlock, it's tolling for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank right now.

So much empathy, it's almost hard to take.

But wait there's more ...a standard serve of "big government" bashing, a reminder that at heart the reptiles are fully Hansonite ...

Gina's pampered pet is really living rent free in the lizard Oz hive mind, with the reptiles having profound empathy for the policies she borrowed from them.

And what a classic bit of clowning about conspiracy theories, what with the reptiles being the home for climate science conspiracy theories these past few decades.

And then came this weirdness ...

Hang on, did the lizard Oz editorialist just say going nuke didn't offer any cost benefits?

But, billy goat butt, SMRs require enriched uranium, specifically a higher concentration of the U-235 isotope than traditional large nuclear plants. (see here for more). The pond checked that out when ordering one for its backyard (soon to arrive, just like the Trump phone).

And thanks to the Bjørn-again one - scribbling in the lizard Oz Hidden costs of ‘cheap’ solar and wind are too high - we all know that nukes are the way of the future.

If we want to fix climate change, we instead must invest a lot more in low carbon dioxide energy research and development. Only a significant boost in R&D can bring about the technological breakthroughs that are needed – in reducing trash, in improving battery storage and efficiency, but also in other technologies such as modular nuclear – that will make low-carbon dioxide energy sources truly cheaper than fossil fuels.

Sure, mad King Donald immediately nuked the deal by demanding Saudi Arabia kowtow to Benji, like a property developer thinking he might slide a second attic past the council. That's his empathy at work.

And sure, the United States actively negotiated with the Shah to help Iran to move towards nukes, thereby contributing to the current situation ...

...Seeking a huge electrical power generating capability, Shah Mohammad Rez Pahlavi negotiated nuclear reactor deals with France and West Germany and wanted to buy eight reactors from the United States. This nuclear power initiative overlapped with Washington's growing concern over nuclear proliferation triggered by India's "peaceful nuclear explosion" in May 1974. While the Shah had publicly disavowed a nuclear weapons capability, the Iranians declared that they had the "right" to a full nuclear fuel cycle, including reprocessing of spent fuel. Not sure about the Shah's ultimate purposes, neither the Ford nor the Carter administrations would sell reactors without strings attacked.
Washington policymakers tried to use the nuclear negotiations as leverage to minimize the extent to which Iran could develop any of the critical elements of a nuclear weapons capability. The Carter administration would go further than its predecessor in attempting to reduce Iran's freedom of action, but both Presidents insisted on the tightest controls possible over Iran's ability to use U.S.-supplied nuclear technology and fuel for producing plutonium. While the Iranians made nationalist arguments asserting their "rights" to reprocessing and other activities under the NPT, by the summer of 1978, the two sides had reached an agreement, which the Iranian revolution effectively nullified.
Interestingly, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who presided over the negotiations during 1974-1976, has downplayed the role of proliferation during the nuclear negotiations with Iran. In a 2005 Washington Post interview, he said that "I don't think the issue of proliferation came up"; "They were an allied country, and this was a commercial transaction. We didn't address the question of them one day moving toward nuclear weapons."... Certainly no one saw an Iranian nuclear weapons capability as a likely near-term possibility, but Kissinger and the State Department never treated the agreement as simply a "commercial" proposition. First, Ford administration officials wondered whether the Shah of Iran would move toward a nuclear weapons option, should the regional balance of power change. Second, Kissinger and his senior advisers would only sign off an agreement that constrained Iran's capability to use U.S.-supplied resources for producing nuclear weapons material. This was no less true of the Carter administration; both Ford and Carter wanted to ensure that the terms of the agreement met U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals. (Here)

But hasn't all that worked out tremendously well?

Talk about knock down glory and empathy, just like Humpty Dumpty.

And so to a few 'toons...

Always with the Odyssey, and so the Muskian circle is complete ...

And a few AV distractions ...

Good old PBS, funds cut, but still carrying on away, with pale blue double breasters the next best thing to cardigans, and sure to rouse Polonius's ire ...

And the usual, with a twist ...

In which the pond reluctantly offers up the bromancer and the dog botherer because there must be other things to do on the weekend...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:27:05 +0000

Wildfires in Europe?

Vlad the sociopath at work in Ukraine? Ukraine giving Vlad the sociopath a hard time?

A new trade war announced by mad King Donald?

More trouble with Iran? Assorted straits in dire trouble?

Murder in the West Bank?

Sorry, there's a world out there, and things are happening in it, but this is the lizard Oz, and so early in the weekend, this was the headline feature.

Alan Joyce says he’s sorry. But what exactly is he sorry for?
After Qantas: Alan Joyce on his high-flying career and the benefits of hindsight
The former Qantas CEO grounded the fleet, outsourced staff, insulted customers and became a very rich man. Only one of these does he regret.
By Caroline Overington

Nah, not today Caroline, the intermittent archive can take that one.

Sheesh, occasionally it'd be nice to be in contact with times present.

Down below that was a bucket of Labor government stories, with the usual bashometer measuring a high level of bash ...

Read the prolific Geoff chambering a typical round if you must ...

Commentary by Geoff Chambers
Ed Husic embraces his role as chief government whinger, and Anthony Albanese is over it
Albanese had assumed his government’s historic decision to overturn decades of foreign policy and recognise Palestine statehood would placate the Left. He was wrong.

Follow Yim and Brownie if inclined and be astonished by the many and varied ways that the Australian Daily Zionist News goes about its business...

EXCLUSIVE
Labor files revealed: Extremes of party’s dark underbelly
Astonishing extremes of ALP rank and file laid bare on US, Israel and terrorism policy in amendments
Labor delegates have proposed stripping the US’s status as Australia’s ‘closest security ally’ and exiting AUKUS, as senior figures scramble to contain a damaging floor debate over Israel.

Dark underbelly? Aka any hint of noting ethnic cleansing.

Marvel at the many ways that the reptiles pursue a singular path in favour of Benji ...

Um, you do realise that few people glorify Hamas, but in proposing that, all you're doing is serving as a useful tool for the lizard Oz Daily Zionist News agenda?

Noble words ...

Only in a Gaza that evolves to be nonviolent and prosperous and ceases to be a platform for terror, while providing opportunities for its people to attain fulfilment, freedom and enlightenment, can there be hope for a permanent defeat of Hamas and a rolling back of the international post-October 7 appeal of its narrative.
Only when Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza can the violence end and the future begin.

But what an inspired source for the reptiles ...

This is an edited extract from Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib’s Jewish Quarterly essay, Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages, out on Monday. Alkhatib is a Gazan writer and advocate, founder of Realign for Palestine and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC.

Morry Schwartz strikes again ...

Meanwhile...

It was no better over on the extreme far right where simplistic Simon paraded about ...

Coronation, and a broken consensus on pro-Israel past
Having recognised Palestinian statehood, Albanese will preside over ALP party policy that’s now explicitly critical of Israel
Anthony Albanese cements his grip on power, but a shift on Israel alarms Jewish leaders.
By Simon Benson

Political analyst

Pro-Israel past? Aka pro ethnic cleansing lizard Oz Daily Zionist News agenda.

Nothing to criticise the current government of Israel about, right? The reptiles are right, right? Right?

Sorry, the pond should stop watching The Daily Show.

There's nothing like shifting away from ethnic cleansing to alarm the reptiles ...

With a sigh and a sob, the pond knew its duty, because the Brexit-loving bromancer was on parade ...

The header: Labour pain: Burnham’s back-to-the-70s Britain a grim warning for Australia; A personal brush with a decaying NHS drove home a stark truth: Andy Burnham’s 1970s-style policy agenda is a cautionary tale as Anthony Albanese treads the same path.

The caption and credit for a shameless collage attributed to a certain Emilia, who bravely refused to allow AI to take the blame for the meretricious nonsense: A photo comp of Anthony Albanese, right, and Andy Burnham in a 1970s style doctors office. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella. Sources: iStock / PhotoShop Firefly 3 /Supplied

Having proudly spent much time campaigning for the breaking of Britain, from Brexit to Boris, the bromancer had the cheek to whine and whinge about Britain being broken, and for a bigly six minutes and with just one visual interruption ...

Britain under new Prime Minister Andy Burnham provides a grim picture of Australia’s future under Anthony Albanese.
Both Burnham and Albanese are committed to left-wing economic and social policies that replicate the 1970s, the last era of catastrophic Anglophone social democratic failure. Both men bizarrely idealise the 70s. It’s perverse, as though a 12-year-old boy chose cabbage and brussels sprouts for a birthday treat.
Burnham thinks all Britain’s mistakes began with Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Albanese (who has devoted his life to “fighting Tories”) and his ministers take inspiration from the disastrous 70s Whitlam government while determinedly becoming the complete opposite of the successful 80s Hawke government, which they never reference.
What should have been a mundane visit to a doctor in London recently brought home to me just how much Britain has fallen apart, how poorly it now compares with successful societies.
A brush with the NHS
A few weeks ago in London my wife was ill — not with a life-threatening problem — but ill. The emergency care I once experienced in Britain was fantastic but the National Health Service in routine operations is now a sprawling chaotic mess, an intense frustration for British voters.
Britain and Australia have reciprocal health arrangements. In the past, an Aussie could take their passport and Medicare card and secure an appointment with a local GP, no problem. Now, no NHS GP clinic I tried in London would take a visiting Australian. That’s not really discrimination, they weren’t taking Brits either. One clinic’s website told registered patients to outline their problem in an online appointment application. If it was urgent, someone would be back to them within 48 hours.
A famous British cartoon has a couple standing on a mountain peak. One remarks: “They say on a clear day you can see your GP.”
Hotel staff advised us to go to a hospital emergency department. But while British hospitals are good in emergencies, to present there with a regular illness would be a monstrous waste of their resources. Not only that – the wait times! People qualify for retirement, indeed die of old age, waiting to be seen in NHS emergency departments.
The Scandanavian experience
We then spent a couple of weeks in Scandinavia. The contrast was fantastic, especially regarding doctors.
In Oslo, on a Sunday, we asked the guy on the counter at our modest hotel if there was any way to see a doctor. He showed us the website of the Doctor Dropin clinics. Although I got the site in translation it reverted to Norwegian, so he filled out the online form for us, showed me which appointments were available and where the nearest clinic was.
At the clinic there was no receptionist and apparently no danger of vandalism. We entered the waiting room and registered our presence on a computer. At the appointed time the doctor opened his door and welcomed us in. The appointment was scheduled for 20 minutes and was unhurried. The doctor spoke perfect English, was attentive, competent, able to conduct blood and other tests straight away, prescribed medicine and located online the nearest open pharmacy for us (many shops are closed in Oslo on Sunday). It cost about the same as a non-bulk billed GP visit in Sydney.

How much did the reptiles care about this pro forma bromancer bashing? They didn't even bother to provide a graphic for the audio interruption ...

LISTEN NOW: Can new UK PM Andy Burnham save ‘Broken Britain’?

So the pond decided to show what was on offer ...

Nah, what a relief it's just a screen cap.

Meanwhile, the bromancer had turned to a standard form of furriner bashing, as if that explained Britain's dismal situation post-Brexit, and the likes of Boris, and the bromancer's past prescriptions for a very sick patient (and this is the UK in AUKUS we should be relying on?)

Norway and Denmark have successfully controlled illegal immigration. They are placid, co-operative societies. The worst you could say is they’re perhaps a bit dull. As architecture, the Scandi look, which dominates except in historic districts, strikes me as a bit bland. The Oslo Opera House has a water setting as dramatic as the Sydney Opera House, but the building is uninspiring, straight lines and tedious triangles. But, but, but – unlike London, Copenhagen and Oslo are clean, safe, friendly, affordable even. Public transport is cheap, accessible and easy. There’s not much anti-social behaviour. In days of walking we never felt the slightest tension. Unlike London, people didn’t talk constantly of knife crime or having their mobile phones snatched.
Mass immigration has overwhelmed Britain’s NHS. But it’s not just the health system in crisis. Government generally doesn’t work any more. Neither does much else. One in four working-age Brits officially suffers a disability. A million 18 to 24-year-olds are involved in neither education, employment nor training.
The British state has never been bigger or more inefficient. Taxation represents nearly 39 per cent of GDP, higher than at any time since World War II. Just like Australia, seemingly everyone in the government sector works from home, which means they don’t work much at all. An English friend needs a minor update on his passport and has been told this could take six months and cannot be accelerated.

And so to the heart of the problem for the bromancer ... a singular lack of Tories and Tory incompetence ... and a chance to label Albo as a fanatical leftie, as bad as Gough ... Andy Burnham, right, is the most left-wing PM since World War II. Anthony Albanese, left, is second in Australia to Whitlam. Pictures: News Corp / AFP

And what's the point of berating the hapless Poms if you can't use it as a way to bash Labor down under?

Burnham affects a cool black T-shirt and claims he’ll transform politics, creating a whole new style and substance. Economically, he’s the most left-wing PM since World War II. Albanese is second in Australia to Whitlam. Burnham’s ascension was greeted by two dismal sets of figures. Labour didn’t rise in the polls. But the bond markets imposed increased borrowing costs on Britain. The unsentimental markets think Britain, and Burnham, a bad bet and charge it more to borrow money than any other advanced country.

Just like Australia, Britain has a dismal productivity record. Like Albanese, Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, heavily re-regulated industrial relations and empowered trade unions. Both nations follow net-zero obsessions resulting in both having among the world’s highest energy prices. Manufacturing flees both nations. Labour, in neither London nor Canberra, does anything to free up the supply side of the economy.
There are a whole lot of things Burnham wants to do. They all involve spending money he hasn’t got. Reprising Albanese, none of Burnham’s initiatives will accelerate economic growth. Burnham has in the past pledged to make social care for the elderly free, like the NHS. This would cost £18bn ($34.4bn) a year at least. He has said he’ll raise defence spending. If he’s to get anywhere near Britain’s pledges that would cost another £10bn a year, though that’s one ambition he certainly won’t realise. He wants to subsidise public transport, subsidise consumer energy prices, raise the tax-free threshold for low-income earners, renationalise vast swathes of industry and much more.
All this is tens of billions upon tens of billions. Yet Britain already has a national debt equal to 95 per cent of GDP. It borrows more than £115bn a year. The Burnham government has started off by making wonderfully woolly and unreliable fiscal statements. In his first 48 hours as Prime Minister, Burnham spent the odd billion or two providing modest goodies for voters – among them 85 pence a week in electricity subsidies for the average family (about one takeaway coffee a month).
Some of this would be paid for by not proceeding with the digital ID initiative. Some tart Starmerite pointed out the government had not yet budgeted any money for the digital ID initiative. So that explanation was just flim-flam. Sound Canberra familiar?
A bad joke
Indicating how pandering to activists and extremists will go, Burnham made just one foreign policy statement. Ukraine? Russia? Iran? China? No, in a country awash with antisemitism fuelled in part by hate-filled anti-Israel demonstrations, Burnham apologised that Labour had been too soft on Israel, not strong enough for Palestine. Social cohesion is even worse in Britain than Australia.

Ah, the latest reptile riff. "Social cohesion", aka monoculture, and let the ethnic cleansing go about its business without let or hindrance ...

In the 70s Britain was a bad joke, needing an IMF bailout, crippled by strikes, the sick man of Europe. That’s Burnham’s happy time, Labour’s happy time. In Australia, Whitlam’s government was so disastrous more Australians left the country than migrants came in. Whitlam was rejected, twice, in landslide election losses. But in Labor myth Whitlam is the perfect leader. Thatcher’s election led to 18 years of Conservative rule. Brits became wealthier, many more owned their homes, London became the global financial centre, the UK had a powerful military and was central in defeating communism. For Burnham, this Thatcherism was all bad.
Australia and Britain today embody the crisis of social democracy. Burnham and Albanese are left-wing leaders of antique vintage, as though their respective electorates somehow mistakenly bought a Morris Minor or FJ Holden as the new family car. Their economic policies are impoverishing, building structural obstacles to growth. Social policy is woke, foreign policy often fatuous. Only in the vapours of Labor myth is the view today Olympian. For those forced to live in the real world, the outlook is bleak.

Perhaps spending squillions on nuking the submarine force is the real bleakness ...

Remember the bromancer glory days? Some do ...

...Predictably, the Morrison mandarins were largely free to continue implementing the agendas on which they had been working for the previous five years. It seems from the outside, for example, that Secretary Pezzullo continued to press the China war stance from Home Affairs which he had openly pushed since his “drums of war” speech in 2021, and to which he returned as a discredited public servant in a soft ABC 7.30 interview during April 2024 when he talked about the need for a war book.
The ABC under Buttrose was in lockstep with NewsCorp in its enthusiastic backing of AUKUS. Its Sunday morning flagship Insiders having dedicated a March 2023 program entirely to the topic, with Peter Hartcher from Nine offering his usual persuasive take and Greg Sheridan from NewsCorp bending over backwards to debunk anything negative said on the matter by White or Keating. They had contested Sheridan’s mantra of China’s “radical militarism and extreme aggression”, a fixation Sheridan has obsessed about since the days of ‘reds under the beds’ during the 1950s and 60s.
Sheridan projected himself on Insiders as an AUKUS sceptic until it supposedly dawned on him that the Virginia class submarines would fill the gap before delivery of the nuclear-powered subs promise, and so he claimed to see for the first time that that extra element would ensure the wonderful strategy worked by “complicating the thinking of any aggressor”.

The pond deeply regrets that the reptiles didn't provide a segue for the pond so that it might slip in the odd homage to mad King Donald, but whatever ... how about a little bleakness of a Faux Noise kind?

And so to the bonus, and a very reluctant one it is for the pond ...

The header: It’s not about Pauline Hanson – it’s about what she represents to disillusioned voters; The reasons a third of the electorate is drifting to One Nation seem clear and the political establishment ignores them at its own peril.

The pertinent question, surely, is frankly why Frank must bother with this sort of collage: The pertinent question, surely, is why are people voting for One Nation rather than the Coalition parties. Sources: Supplied. Artwork by Frank Ling.

The pond has been well over Gina's pet from the very start, long long ago.

There's something about the voice that grates, the worst sort of Tamworth-sounding shrew with something of a deep north toad overlay.

The pond realises this sort of personal response will be perceived as wrong, a bit like finding RFK Jr.'s voice hard to listen to, when his policies should be considered, but as he's got no policies worth contemplating, it comes back to that voice. (No poo jokes please).

So it's always been with Gina's pampered pet.

Why bother with the dog botherer going on about the wonders of Pauline's voice? Because it's the way she presents the policies of the lizard Oz to the deplorables, that's why, because the reptiles have always loved the bigoted and the stupid.

And that's why the dog botherer spends six minutes scribbling about his infatuation.

It's way more revealing of him and the hive mind than it is about Gina's pet.

Deep down but also on the superficial, allegedly "authentic" surface loved by the dog botherer, she acts as a mirror for sundry reptile fixations and phobias...

Media fascination with One Nation tends to focus on titillating but ultimately unimportant questions. Who paid for Pauline Hanson’s holiday? Who has she met? Why did Barnaby Joyce shout at his dog? What is the latest conspiracy theory endorsed by Malcolm Roberts?
Most of the focus is on Hanson, but few of the issues are new. She has long talked about men as domestic violence victims, flirted with xenophobia and proffered economically dubious policies.
The pertinent question, surely, is why are people voting for One Nation rather than the Coalition parties (as they have done in the South Australian election and the Farrer federal by-election) and why are they telling pollsters they intend to do so in Victoria, NSW and federally? In other words, rather than analysing, critiquing and even demonising Hanson, the political debate might more usefully consider why almost a third of voters are prepared to overlook all of One Nation’s shortcomings and support the party regardless.

At this point the reptiles slipped in an AV distraction ...

One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce has again defended comments from One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson in a bizarre interview on ABC’s 730. When asked about Ms Hanson’s direction for One Nation, Mr Joyce was briefly distracted by his dog and yelled at it to “sit down” before apologising for the interruption. 730 host Sarah Ferguson urged Mr Joyce to answer the question and not focus on the dog, to which Mr Joyce replied “don’t be rude” as the interview took a tense turn.

The pond seized the moment with gratitude. The pond had been wondering if it would ever get a chance to pay tribute to the latest moment for Tamworth's eternal shame ...

What a a relief to be able to pay tribute - get around behind you bloody useless hund!! - and with that out of the way, please allow the dog botherer to explain why he's enchanted by Pauline and what she proposes (and remember for the sake of the argument that well paid hacks labouring for the Emeritus Chairman are never part of a 'leet):

Thanks to our compulsory voting laws even the most disenchanted voters are reflected in our system. Sure, there are informal votes and undecided categories in polls, but in the end we get about 90 per cent of eligible people casting a vote. So unlike most democracies, our electoral politics is a sealed system – the votes have to go somewhere. Think of it like one of those lava lamps so popular in the 1970s: all the blobs of liquid are like voting blocs, constantly changing shape, breaking apart and reforming; every blob must go somewhere, no vacuum is left unfilled.
If an imperfect, inexperienced and barely organised movement in our body politic is attracting high levels of support, why? What has gone missing from the other choices that has caused so many to coalesce around One Nation?
The short answer is that voters are rejecting the political establishment (or even the political class, which includes the major parties, bureaucracies, academics, pollsters and media). Predictably this loose coalition hits back the only way it seems to know how: by attacking Hanson and One Nation for daring to play politics outside its own unwritten rules of engagement.
The critics parse every phrase from Hanson and her team, verbal her endlessly to fuel feigned outrage. The One Nation leader mentions the White Australia policy and they say she laments it or wants to bring it back; Hanson mentions simple facts about domestic violence and is slammed as heartless; and Barnaby’s hilarious live-to-air rebuke of his dog is interpreted as a character flaw.
These attacks tend to be wind beneath One Nation’s wings because they underline the party’s anti-establishment credentials and insult voters by deeming them too silly to comprehend what is really being said – surely Hanson and her colleagues are controversial enough without making stuff up.
These episodes also serve as reminders that One Nation politicians are authentic rather than slick, the reversal of the political class standard.

Just to remind the hive mind of how authentic Gina's pampered pet is, the reptiles slipped in a couple of truly authentic snaps of an awesomely authentic holyday... Pauline Hanson holidaying in Sicily earlier this month. Mining magnate Gina Rinehart cooling off in the pool of the Grand Hotel San Pietro in Taormina.

The dog botherer continued his slow build ...

Writing in The Australian this week, renowned political strategist Lynton Crosby drew attention to part of what is going on here. Crosby, the architect of Coalition victories here and Conservative triumphs in Britain, was writing about UK Labour’s switching in of Andy Burnham as Prime Minister.
Crosby noted that major parties are too often driven by opinion polls and ideology rather than good governance in the interests of voters. “Voters can tell the difference between a party thinking about them and a party thinking about itself,” he noted, “and they punish the second without mercy.”
Most everything voters have heard from our major parties for a decade or more has been insincere, ideologically motivated or ultimately contradicted. Little wonder people have drifted to a rough and ready outfit that has said the same things constantly for decades, even through periods of virulent derision and palpable uninterest.
You do not need to support One Nation to recognise any of this. No one could accuse Hanson of being too timid to say what she thinks, scripted by spinmeisters or controlled by pollsters; her prized political asset is her status as the anti-politician. This makes talk of her as a potential prime minister completely counterintuitive, despite the mathematical possibility.
Hanson needs to avoid discussion of power-sharing arrangements, preference deals and the rest of it – no matter how essential they are likely to be – because they immediately graft One Nation on to the political establishment. It will be fascinating to watch this paradox play out. The mavericks have become so popular they now have to consider how they might become the new establishment.
One Nation’s rise has played out through core policy debates. Hanson has been a hate figure for 30 years because of her strident views on mass immigration and concerns about its sources (“I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians”).

At this point the reptiles offered up a chart which proved hard to cap ... this was the best the pond could manage ...

ONE NATION’S RISE AND FALL … AND RISE AGAIN
Primary vote (%)

Source: electoral commissions

How they love to talk Gina's pet up.

Onwards and upwards for Pauline and the reptile agenda.

And so to the real point.

The lizard Oz is Hansonite, the Hansonites are devoted lizard Oz readers, and what Gina's pet says on topics such as the Voice are precisely what the reptiles say on the voice ...

The numbers and the challenges have changed, especially when it comes to the risk of importing Islamist extremism, but both major parties in government have allowed migration to reach record levels and post-Covid under Labor the numbers became unsustainable, as even Labor has recognised.
The major parties have failed to control immigration and been squeamish about discussing the mix, so they have been peas in a pod compared with One Nation’s harsh and consistent immigration alarm.
Voters concerned about immigration – and the major parties now recognise many of those concerns are legitimate – have drifted to the anti-immigration party. Consistency can pay dividends in politics.
Likewise on Indigenous issues. Hanson was first expelled from the Liberal Party because of her criticism of Indigenous programs and separatism. Almost three decades later when the voice debate divided the nation the Coalition eventually opposed the proposal and won the political battle. But voters exercised by this knew that while other politicians sniffed the wind, Hanson had held this position all along.

There came another interruption, this time with a graphic ..

The Front
Pauline Hanson backs mass deportation

Is the dog botherer troubled by notions of mass deportations?

Nah, not really, the dog botherer is delighted with notions of monoculture and most especially climate change, because what Canadian and European wildfires?

On multiculturalism and Indigenous preferment Hanson has always been a figure of resistance, even resentment, whereas the left has portrayed “diversity as strength” and the Coalition parties have often tried to straddle both streams. With Hanson’s team, whether you agree or disagree, the philosophy is right there in the name – One Nation.
Consistency has been a strength on other issues, in particular net zero. Labor has been fearmongering over climate change and delusional about emissions for more than two decades, while the Coalition has waxed and waned between signing on to Paris, scrapping carbon taxes and then adopting net zero.

There came a reinforcement that Gina's pampered pet isn't really a politician, Pauline Hanson’s prized political asset is her status as the anti-politician. Picture: NewsWire/Philip Gostelow

Surely that deserved a 'toon and while the pond has run it before, why not run it again as a way of coping with that quizzical stare of 'please explain'?

And so to the dog botherer embracing the full One Nation agenda, with a litany of what is apparently true and just ...

Voters worried about electricity prices, national energy self-harm and endless spending on UN virtue signalling know One Nation has had zero interest in net zero from the year zero. Hanson’s steadiness has allowed her to profit from the confusion and lack of conviction displayed by the Coalition.
Then there is honesty. Nobody has accused Hanson or her team of telling political lies – most of the time they get into strife for being too forthright about what they truthfully believe.
Without the responsibility of being in government or being seen as an alternative government, One Nation has not had to make serious promises or abide by them. This makes for an easy and sharp contrast to the major parties that have become parodies of political trust.
From Scott Morrison’s secret ministries to Coalition leadership treachery and flip-flopping on climate policies, to Labor’s secret tax increases and Anthony Albanese’s endless list of broken promises, the major parties have simply broken faith with all but their most hardened supporters. Therefore some see One Nation providing an opportunity to punish dishonesty, to hit back at politicians taking voters for a ride.
Also, One Nation is anti-elite. Voters clearly believe they can teach the political class a lesson by voting for Hanson’s mob – they have told me as much in straightforward terms.
Query such people about One Nation’s ability to govern and they will shrug their shoulders and ask how much worse government could get. Indeed, when I suggested to Hanson some months ago that she likely faced a problem recruiting hundreds of candidates, some of whom were bound to be duds and cause embarrassment, she retorted by asking whether the major parties had done so well selecting high-calibre candidates – touche!
The reasons voters are drifting to One Nation seem clear. While the Coalition has borne the brunt of the trend, Labor needs to be wary too (as Wayne Swan has suggested) as mainstream voters become disillusioned by economic malaise and political lies.

What does this embrace of Gina's pet mean?

No prizes for guessing. It means that the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way must swing way over to the mad hard right - perhaps even follow Malcolm Roberts on the matter of climate science - and what frabjous joy that will produce in the hive mind, and its devoted extreme far right pundits ...

Tell 'em dog botherer ...

The Coalition under Angus Taylor has started to reset its policies and rhetoric, particularly on immigration, net zero, taxation and national cohesion. Yet poll watchers will be frustrated if they look for quick corrections.

What do the reptiles want? Say it again ...

Give the beefy boofhead time, and he'll come around to the lizard Oz policy agenda.

Monoculture now (perhaps dressed as "national cohension"), furriner bashing, a flat tax (Easytax for billionaires), and climate science denialism ... and who knows, soon enough we'll be at one with mad King Donald ... and talking sensibly about tariffs and a flat earth ...

Meanwhile, on another planet entirely unknown to the reptiles ...

In which Jimbo takes centre stage in a 'leet penguin suit, and Rowan refuses to STFU and crawl under a rock ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 22:18:48 +0000

Shattered.

Without a by-your-leave, or a word of explanation, early this morning there was no sight or sound from Our Henry.

The pond had to check that it was Friday, and then looked Our Henry up, and yes, it was a bigly week since he'd helped out the Australian Daily Zionist News with Overpaid vice-chancellors parade their ignorance.

What did the reptiles produce as an alternative to this wreckage, this dereliction of duty, this studied insult?

Jimbo!

Just Jimbo ... and not that Jimbo, this Jimbo ...

And worse it was double barrelled Jimbo, as the reptiles reverted to a favourite ploy of having Jimbo offer a column over on the far right of the digital rag, and then have a reptile hack regurgitate its contents as an EXCLUSIVE as the news lead of the day ...

The reptile hack of the day was Geoff, assigned the task of pretending he'd done something to earn the EXCLUSIVE ...

The pond dipped into it for the sheer pleasure, the impossible absurdity, of seeing one more time Jimbo posed at the top of the piece, as if a manifestation of the cultural 'leets the reptiles purport to despise ...

For the rest of that astonishing EXCLUSIVE, go here ...

EXCLUSIVE
Trashing free society: Paterson’s repudiation of Hanson
James Paterson calls for reforms to unis and the judiciary to stop threat of Hanson and populist right
The senior Liberal conservative says the ‘age of disruption and rise of populism’ threatens the Australian way of life.
By Geoff Chambers

But why drink at Geoff's EXCLUSIVE hack trough when you can go to the original horse's mouth?

The header: Lies, conspiracies, anger: Don’t let populism trash our fragile inheritance; We should be very wary of those on the right who want to import foreign concepts of cultural uniformity to Australia.

The caption, featuring a new angle on Jimbo in a penguin suit, a manifestation of the cultural 'leets the reptiles purport to detest and despise: James Paterson delivering his speech to the Ramsay Centre at the State Library of NSW. Picture: Chris Pavlich / The Australian

The Ramsay centre's now based at the State Library?

Nah, it's just a mangling, just like the way that Jimbo had to spend a bigly eight minutes mangling blather about Western Civilisation (remember the caps!), as he goose stepped around the way that Gina's pet actually embodied pretty much every position favoured by the lizard Oz, and the Liberal and National parties, this past decade or so.

This called for an exceptional form of pomposity, while pandering to the nonsense the Ramsay centre embodies ...

The unique inheritance of Western civilisation is not just the great books, art, music and science, although they certainly have shaped our culture in a profound way. It is the institutions of Western civilisation that are truly unique and consequential. Institutions such as our Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, our common law system of courts and an independent judiciary, and our universities.
For Australia, these institutions were primarily, though not exclusively, inherited, developed, and refined from the British, and translated to our continent at settlement.

Say what? No mention of the classic onion muncher ploy of attributing it to a Judaeo-Xian tradition emanating from the middle east, as peddled by a swarthy type of dubious Semitic appearance?

Never mind ...

We should never assume just because we inherited these remarkable institutions from previous generations that transferring them to future generations is assured.
Because we are living in an age of disruption and populism. And the institutions we may have taken for granted in the past do not have the near universal support and approval they might have once enjoyed.
They are fragile. In many quarters they are under outright attack.
The populist challenge
A poll this week laid bare the bleak outlook for our fellow citizens. A record 68 per cent believe our country is heading in the wrong direction; 44 per cent say they are experiencing personal financial distress; 47 per cent believe they are worse off than their parents were at the same stage of life.
They are right to be angry. Australia’s post-pandemic economic performance has been dismal. Real wages have fallen by 5 per cent since 2021, when the average OECD member has seen a 5 per cent increase. It is understandable why distrust in our institutions rises when people feel like it is not delivering for them materially. But the danger is these anti-establishment parties don’t just mine grievance about poor economic performance. Whether on the populist left or right, they bring with them a much broader wagon of grudges and resentments.
Right now, they also have a helping hand from some foreign state and non-state actors, who see strategic advantage and even profit from weaponising our distrust and amplifying our divisions. It is easier than ever before for them to do so.

One thing's certain. The reptile obsession with the monster they've created - after all, Gina's pampered pet has found most of her policies within the pages of The Australian - will only draw more attention to her, and make her stronger ... One Nation senators Malcolm Roberts and Pauline Hanson in the Senate chamber.

After all, that prize loon Malcolm Roberts is just one of a long line of climate science deniers following the hive mind line ...

Jimbo handily decided not to go there ...and sought safety in other topics ...

Once, they would have had to mount a sophisticated human intelligence operation to influence journalists, editors or producers who controlled access to the public square in democracies. Now they can pump our public square full of propaganda by hijacking Western-headquartered social media platforms using inauthentic accounts or by covertly paying mercenary influencers to promote their agenda.
Even easier is secretly putting their thumb on the scale of the algorithm of foreign authoritarian-controlled applications to serve content that divides and distracts us.
The risk today is that understandable discontent with Australia’s recent economic performance – a solvable policy problem – is used as a vehicle to trash our political, legal and social institutions.
Australians struggling with the cost of living have not suddenly embraced conspiracy theories about chemtrails, the Federal Reserve, school shootings, 9/11 and pharmaceutical companies. But populism is a package deal.
Voting to express your reasonable frustrations with the established parties of government brings with it a lot of baggage. Those of us who want to preserve what is great about our Western society and way of life have two tasks.
First, address our economic underperformance to remove the main driver of populist discontent. Second, defend and, where necessary, reform the institutions of Western civilisation so they can survive this disrupted era.
The most fundamental idea of the “small c” conservative philosophy is that institutions must evolve gradually over time through the accumulation of wisdom. There are three institutions I will focus on: universities, the rule of law and pluralism.
Our universities
There is no institution more critical to the progress and success of Western civilisation that is more vulnerable in a populist era than our universities. The prosperity, progress and advancement of our civilisation in science, art and culture cannot be separated from the teaching, research and thinking conducted in our universities over centuries.
Right now, though, many universities feel underfunded and under-appreciated. They warn policymakers their business models are unsustainable, and the lack of public funding and interventions such as the Job-Ready Graduates Scheme, are leading them to cut staff and courses. I know many universities and their defenders believe these policies are the cause of their current malaise.
But this gets their dilemma exactly backwards. The reason why universities are not better funded and supported by our political system is because they have lost the broad social licence to sustain public support. And the reason for that is that a significant proportion of society feel estranged from our system of higher education.

Actually the universities have never recovered from the school of "what we need is plumbers and sparkies", and if you want an arts education be prepared to sacrifice your first born child brand offered to them by SloMo and his mates.

Remember Jimbo?

It’s time to axe the Morrison-era policy strangling Australia’s humanities degrees (sorry, that's a Crikey paywall)
‘Unless we have lawyers from all class backgrounds, we will have a legal system that is shaped by a particular narrow set of perspectives and assumptions and blind spots.’
Varsha Yajman

I enrolled in an arts and law bachelor’s degree in 2020 and left with a HECS debt of around $40,000. Students who started the same degree in 2021 and after will have left owing around $85,000. The blame for this lies at the feet of the Morrison-era Job-ready Graduates Package (JRGP).
While Australia was battling the COVID-19 pandemic, the Morrison government tried to encourage students to enrol in areas of “national need” that would help “drive economic recovery”, slashing fees for STEM and nursing while more than doubling the cost of humanities degrees, with law and commerce becoming the most expensive.
But research has shown that the JGRP, rather than furthering the Australian economy, will likely worsen skills shortages. In 2024, the Australian Universities Accord stated the policy “should be replaced” and that it had “tilted the overall cost burden of higher education further onto students and away from the Australian government”.

And so on, and of course the current Labor government has been equally tardy on this matter, but so much for all that blather about the glories of Western Civilisation.

In traditional Australian Daily Zionist News fashion, the reptiles slipped in a standard demonic snap comporting to Australian Daily Zionist News standards... An anti-Israel protest at Melbourne University. Picture: Jason Edwards

How to get out of the Western Civilisation bind? Pretend it's all about the long march through the institutions by lefties!

And so it was on to Jimbo trying to bs his way through the pricing of the humanities out of the marketplace ...

Classical liberals and conservatives believe their perspectives are unwelcome, at least in the humanities departments at universities across Australia. Australian data is limited, but there is no reason to think our universities differ much from American higher education, and there the data is stark and extensive. I don’t believe cabinet would have agreed to a Job-Ready Graduates Scheme that deprioritised the teaching of humanities, or allowed their fees to rise significantly, if they felt that they had a stake in what is taught there. But most Coalition MPs would tell you they regard what is exclusively taught at universities as openly hostile to their beliefs, and many of their constituents agree.
And if universities think that’s bad, the movement that seeks to replace centre-right politics in this country makes a Coalition government look like a walk in the park for higher education.
These are people who often display open contempt for expertise, and gleefully indulge in the most absurd conspiracy theories in the face of all evidence.
Universities should be alarmed that four years of centre-left government has seen no meaningful increase to their funding, no changes to the Job-Ready Graduates Scheme, cuts to their international student numbers and a massively increased regulatory burden. The recent, troubling antisemitism crisis on campus has not helped.
Universities need to do two things. First, make a meaningful attempt to ensure there is a diversity of views, especially in their humanities faculties. If any other group in society were as under-represented among their faculty as conservatives and classical liberals, every university would establish a working group to fix it.
Second, prioritise research in the national interest, and tell the Australian people – who ultimately fund it – about this critical contribution.

So you're now whining about how there's been no changes to the JRGP policy your government, with you in that government, implemented?

When it came to the 2020 vote, nobody rebelled against their party...

It's always the hypocrisy that gets to the pond.

Speaking of Western Civilisation...

And now at last the hypocrite in full flower, and so to another ginger dance...

The rule of law
The second institution I am gravely concerned about is the rule of law. One of the few things that separates a free and ordered society from domestic anarchy is the belief that a justice system will ensure wrongdoers are punished fairly. And yet decisions of our justice system are more routinely becoming sensationalised.
As you know, there is a high-profile prosecution of a former Australian soldier currently before the courts, following allegations of war crimes. Unlike some of my parliamentary colleagues, I do not want to run the risk of contempt of court. But we have recently seen this case become so politicised that a photo of an accused person was displayed at polling booths as a tactic to generate votes.

The reptiles followed up that peculiar foot dance with a snap of an alleged war criminal, Ben Roberts-Smith.

What with being gormless and gutless, Jimbo showed such bravery that Roberts-Smith's name never passed his lips, at least in the Oz-edited version:

Public support for the rule of law and, critically, an independent judiciary, is undermined when sentencing fails to meet community expectations. There have been too many cases, especially with violent and sexual crimes, where perpetrators are given light sentences. While we do not sentence criminals by opinion poll, and the individual circumstances of each case are relevant, too often the legal system appears out of touch with the people whose justice it is supposed to administer.
Nothing fuels populist discontent in our justice system more than the perception their justified outrage at its failings is being carefully managed to resist necessary reform. In May, Justice Beech-Jones launched a bizarre attack on a small voluntary legal association, the Samuel Griffith Society, and its American equivalent, the Federalist Society. He accused the Society of misappropriating Samuel Griffith’s legacy and being engaged in “ominous” activism on university campuses.
The Justice was particularly concerned about a paper presented to an SGS conference by my former Senate colleague, Amanda Stoker, who advocated taking greater care to consider the judicial philosophy of potential candidates for the bench before appointing them. For this, she is accused of “court stacking” and associated with a North Korean judicial college.

Does Jimbo have the first clue about the Federalist Society and what they wrought?

It's a bit like Faux Noise and the way they've prodded the disunited states into a black hole of madness ...

C.f. the both siderist NY Times ...

The Federalist Society Is Torn Between Its Legal Philosophy and Trump’s Demands
Guided by Leonard Leo, the society built a pipeline for traditional conservative judges. But that might not be enough for President Trump in his second term.

So what if they were hoist on their own petard.

They'd helped stack the Supreme Court, which promptly gave mad King Donald a grand form of immunity, and now here we are ...and Jimbo thinks Mandy has the first clue about all that?

And this guy should take the rap? Justice Robert Beech-Jones at Sydney’s Queen Square Courthouse. Picture: Oscar Colman

And so Jimbo ends up sounding just like Gina's pet ...

To justify his attack, Justice Beech-Jones commented extensively on US domestic public policy issues, including gun control, and said: “Ordinarily all this would be none of my business but these methods are being advocated for in Australia … To adapt a phrase, they have driven into my lane and they have driven into yours. If anyone thinks this particular US style of court stacking and judicial decision-making is a good idea, then go and live there.”
The problem, as the Justice surely knows, is that judicial appointments are not “his lane”. He may wish to live in a country where a cozy club of judges chooses its own colleagues. But in a common law democracy such as ours, judicial appointments are solely a matter for the elected governments of this country. I don’t want to live in a country where the decisions of judges begin to be called into question because of their unwise interventions into political debate.

And so the dance continued, what with Jimbo trying to sound like Pauline, but not really Pauline ...

Pluralism
Another of those intangible, philosophical institutions that has been so critical to the functioning of our harmonious and free society is the principle of pluralism.
There has been a lot of debate in recent weeks about how we practise multiculturalism in Australia. Two things can be true at the same time: That Australia is a multicultural country. Also that it’s reasonable to disagree about whether the policies that underpin multiculturalism are working well, or not. One thing that would be totally alien to our history and political culture would be a government-imposed monoculture. We should be very wary of those on the right who want to import foreign concepts of cultural uniformity to Australia.
This has never been part of the Australian tradition. I do not agree with those who argue that “diversity is our strength”. Diversity in and of itself is not a strength. There are many diverse countries today that are not strong at all. Our strength is that despite our diversity, we have generally been a harmonious and cohesive society. This is thanks to pluralism. We have a live-and-let-live philosophy. Most Australians are comfortable that their neighbour may observe their own cultural traditions and have their own religious beliefs. But pluralism is not relativism.

For no particular reason, the reptiles flung in a visual reminder of that classic loon Mandy, useless in office and even more useless out of it, and now reduced to Oodgeroo toad status, Amanda Stoker.

Jimbo then performed a classic twist and pike:

In an Australian context, that means we can – and should – insist on the respect for and adherence to shared Australian values as part of any successful embrace of multiculturalism. If we don’t, we run the very serious risk of descending into a nation of tribes.
That is why I would never support our migration system discriminating against someone on the basis of their race, religion or nationality, as some have advocated, and I am more than comfortable with it being discerning about their values.
Frankly, the explosion of antisemitism in Australia in recent years is partly because we have failed to do this. We cannot practise multiculturalism in a way that tears us apart. We should never be afraid to insist that people who make a life here be from among the many in the world who share our values and want to sustain them, not those who want to change them.
Senator James Paterson is opposition defence spokesman. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered to the Ramsay Centre on Thursday evening in Sydney.

And if discerning their values isn't about their race and religion and nationality, what on earth is it about? If it's about sharing "our values", then Jimbo's all the way with Pauline banning those damned Islamics and Asians from the country.

And there's the Liberal party's (and the lizard Oz's) current dilemma in a nutshell. Too gutless to take on Gina's pet, too dedicated to their myopic brand of bigotry, fear and loathing, patented over decades, only to see it snatched away and rebranded as a form of generic populism they can't control ...

In that context, dressing up in a penguin suit is the least of Jimbo's thought crimes ...

Is there a reptile who manages to sound even more pathetic?

Of course there is ...

PM’s latest obsession is one he refuses to name
Similar to his approach linking Peter Dutton with Donald Trump, Anthony Albanese has adopted a Voldemort ‘she who must not be named’ approach to Pauline Hanson.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Just a thought? How is not naming Gina's pet the same as naming the mutton Dutton and linking him to the named and clearly barking mad King Donald?

The pond will concede a couple of things.

This Geoff is a prolific chamberer of rounds.

And the reptiles know which side their sales are buttered on. Just as the media was entranced, fell into a swoon at the sight of mad King Donald in his early days, so the reptiles have now fallen hard for Pauline, purveyor of their policies ...

She sells, bigly ... just like that bloody woke movie ...

And speaking of that bigotry, hate and fear mongering, the reptiles were at it again today ...

The pond refuses to indulge the reptiles in their TG jihad ...

Luckily the pond also felt no need to go here ...

Take that, chatbot: why I’m bringing back handwritten exams
AI will neither be as catastrophic as the pessimists fear nor as beautiful as the futurists imagine.
By Mark Edele
Contributor

Who on earth is this loon?

Mark Edele is Hansen Professor in History and head of the history program at the University of Melbourne. He developed the idea for this essay in a notebook, using a pen.

The University of Melbourne?!

The pond should have guessed it.

Did he want to make Jimbo sound sensible on the matter of academia?

The pond's handwriting looks like a spider had wandered too close to an inkwell ... it makes Molesworth look like a master of calligraphy, and it was 'rooned by academics demanding that the pond transcribe their insights, imagining them to be dollops of gold ...

And that's about it for the far right this day, though the pond must mention this rant ...

The hot-take economy is poisoning the public square
Who is entitled to demand public space to promote their personal views on areas beyond their expertise or particular knowledge?
By Rowan Callick

First a credential ...

Rowan Callick is an expert associate at the Australian National University’s National Security College.

Somehow that makes Rowan think he has the right to rant and rage away in the lizard Oz.

The opening snap was pure projection ...

Roll that line around on your tongue:

I am not convinced that my own views on these and other travesties are so compelling that they might command precious space in the realm of public discourse.

So why are you ranting?

Why don't you just STFU, crawl under a rock, go away?

The pond saved the rant to the intermittent archive, what with it being such a strange and puzzling insistence that we should all shut up, mind that we should stick to our lanes and not say boo to a goose and all would be well ...

It was peak rhetorical indignation and absurdity ... and so the pond presents the remainder of the text unencumbered by visual distraction or commentary ...

...Should all people of Chinese ethnicity, who might have been born in Australia or somewhere else outside China, and who are not members of the Chinese Communist Party, be expected as a condition of their gaining access to a public platform for whatever unrelated reason to use that platform to make very clear that they do not support the relentless subjugation of the Muslim Uighur population by the Chinese party-state, or that they are critical of the deaths in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution?
Not only that; should they on any occasion when they approach the public realm, online or offline, repudiate all wrongdoings on the part of the CCP, and keep doing so?
What of our fast-growing ethnically Indian population? Should we demand that they publicly disavow Prime Minister Narendra Modi over accusations of escalating religious tensions? Are Australians of Russian descent going to be held to account for the many horrors of Vladimir Putin?
Our citizens of Myanmar origin may almost all have escaped persecution – but perhaps they too should be held to account for the tyrannical military junta that they fled. One does not need to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome to be troubled by Donald Trump – so surely Americans living in our midst must confess his sins as their own?
The promotion of guilt by association has become widespread in Australia. For instance, if you are deemed to look Jewish, you’re held responsible by some Australians for the claimed genocide in Gaza. The only source of possible if still partial exculpation is public dissociation.
One fears that next in line for such guilty sentences might be Chinese, Indian, Russian, Myanmar, American, and any other people with connections – however innocent on their own part – to people or groups who have behaved badly.
Despite our efforts to achieve, we are increasingly defined in some social arenas not by accomplishment, experience or character, but by race, birthplace, and other “identity” categories. Unless we opt very publicly out of our identity markers, shedding connections and relationships, we are assumed to be collusive with enemy outlooks, dispositions, or simply with the enemy itself.
This applies not only to individuals but also to organisations – and thus, in addition, to those who might be associated with such organisations in any way. If an institution fails to attack publicly those deemed to be enemies of a particular peer group, then that group will demand that the institution and related individuals must be shunned.
For failure to attack publicly leaders, countries or causes with which an individual and their peer group disagrees – or the opposite – is perceived as tantamount to complicity. To fail to express, in public, concern about the impacts of climate change risks denunciation as a “climate sceptic”, even if that person does indeed share such anxiety while not sharing assuredness that a public proclamation would ameliorate the situation.
This expectation is not universal. Who is entitled – even required – to demand public space to promote their personal views on areas beyond their expertise or particular knowledge? Artists, writers, musicians, actors, academics – culture-work professionals, essentially.
We do not see a commensurate insistence from pharmacists, mining engineers or accountants, for instance, that before filling a script or shipping copper or signing an audit, they are provided online space or offline time to deliver their views on current political debates.
Last year, Doechii, a hip-hop performer, said on stage in receiving an award: “It is my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people, for black people, for Latino people, for trans people, for the people in Gaza.”
I might use this space to critique hip-hop, and to speak up for purveyors of traditional folk and blues music, or for Baroque recorder ensembles. But that would be beyond my responsibility.
Rowan Callick is an expert associate at the Australian National University’s National Security College.

Make of that what you will.

What did the pond make of it?

As before. If only Rowan would take his own advice, and STFU ...disappear up his fundament, head off to a black hole of his choice, and take climate change with him.

And now this ...

As always the answer lies in the detail, because kick anything out of doors to send the rats scuttling ...

And now this ... oh America ...

In which the pond returns to discover the swishing Switzer and a certain Zoe, and wished it had stayed oblivious in the big smoke ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:12:55 +0000

And why not help Saudi Arabia with nukes?

Israel has got nukes, Iran wants them, so why not smooth the way for even more?

The pond had expected the reptiles to at least make a note, but top of the digital page ma, this morning, came this yarn ...

EXCLUSIVE
Jihadi Tareq Kamleh’s survival was a secret ALP sat on for years
Labor kept Tareq Kamleh’s survival secret for years despite being briefed multiple times, as his father speaks for the first time.
By Paul Garvey and Mohammad Alfares

Nah, hard pass. If he comes back, prosecute him according to the law. (And think of the hay the reptiles would be able to reap with that never ending jihad!)

Down below that, the obsession with Gina's pet continued, with three stories all in a row ...

EXCLUSIVE
Swan’s warning: One Nation is Labor’s biggest electoral threat
As Wayne Swan sounds the alarm over Pauline Hanson, Linda Burney says Aboriginal constitutional recognition is still possible in Australia’s future.
By Greg Brown

COMMENTARY
I was the true brains behind One Nation. Here’s why Pauline is in strife
Everyone has an opinion of what One Nation is – mostly, they’re wrong.
By David Oldfield

Did the pond need to spend time with another irrelevant loon of the Oldfield kind? And his delusions of Svengali grandeur?

Nah, hard pass ...

Perhaps the reptiles covered it yesterday, but this should have been the angle ...

Geoff was on hand to chamber another round and concoct a radical conspiracy theory ...

Commentary by Geoff Chambers
This time round, Albanese’s got them by the Shorten curlies
Anthony Albanese tried to disrupt the last ALP conference in Adelaide – now he’s the master
Expect well-orchestrated faux debates enshrining motions at this Labor conference that are ultimately designed to help the PM push ahead with new policies, some potentially even radical.

Sheesh, that's a pun that made the pun-addicted pond flinch.

Sorry, Geoff didn't actually mention Gina's pet, but whatever, it was inserted into the Gina pet's stew, a bit of trading off trolling, with that alarmist fear-mongering unexplained and left to a darkening final sentence ...

Expect well-orchestrated, stage-managed, faux debates enshrining motions that are ultimately designed to help Albanese push ahead with new policies, some potentially even radical, aimed at helping Labor win a third term in 2028.

"Potentially even radical"?

The pond's mother used to say that if you had nothing to say, best to say nothing, but Geoff apparently hadn't heard the saying, and squeezed out two minutes of drivel.

Well played Geoff, but nah, time to head over to the far right for a serve of the swishing Switzer ...

The header: Do celebrity activists really hold any political influence? The celebrity chorus may dominate the headlines. In the end, it never gets the final vote.

The caption suggesting that the swishing Switzer was shamelessly trading off on someone who still had way more box office clout than him: Paul Hogan carrying dead crocodile in bar in a scene from the film Crocodile Dundee, 1986.

One of my favourite sideshows of modern politics is the celebrity chorus: the actors, singers and writers among whom ideological conformity is as thick as Beijing smog.
Paul Hogan recently added another layer to that smog when he criticised Pauline Hanson for suggesting Australia should be a monoculture. “She’s a pelican. Outrageous, so racist. It sounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, Trump,” the Los Angeles-based actor and comedian complained.
Hanson responded in kind, with her hilarious Please Explain video accusing Hoges of lecturing Australians while living in California and asking why someone who no longer lives here should presume to tell Australians how to run their country.
Fair enough. Both were entitled to have their say. But the exchange raises a broader question: how much political influence do celebrity interventions really have?

Such an inane and deeply stupid man, and apparently infatuated with Gina's pet's cartoons ...

The Pelican - Please Explain
Pauline Hanson's Please Explain

Nah, the pond isn't going to bother with a YouTube link.

And it took a lot of summoning of energy to continue with the swishing Switzer, what with evidence of at least one celebrity intervention that has had much political influence, much of it malign ...

But do go on, in a superficial and vapid way, picking low hanging fruit ...

For decades, in Australia, Britain and especially the US, actors, musicians and writers have sought to influence political debate – usually with far less success than they imagine.
Start with Australia. In the lead-up to the 1998 federal election, veteran broadcaster Phillip Adams declared that John Howard’s Australia was poised to occupy “the proud place vacated by pre-Mandela South Africa”. Not to be outdone, novelist and playwright Bob Ellis warned that Australia would become “an international pariah like South Africa, with no way back”. Howard won (again).
Three elections later, actor Toni Collette lamented: “I think I’ll slit my wrists if Howard gets in again.” Howard did get in again. Two decades later, Collette is happily still with us.
In 2015, a group of entertainment figures – including Geoffrey Rush, Guy Pearce and Brendan Cowell – launched the #saveourboys campaign against Tony Abbott over the impending executions of drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in Indonesia. They urged the Prime Minister to “grow some balls”, “show some ticker”, “be a leader” and do more to help the Bali duo.
The campaign changed nothing. Chan and Sukumaran were executed, and Abbott preserved Australia’s crucial relationship with Indonesia.

Now there's a triumph, and then for some reason the reptiles slipped back in time... Hanson is set to meet with Nigel Farage during her time in the UK. Picture: NewsWire / John Gass

She's set to meet? During her time in the UK?

Will someone tell the reptiles about her return? Will they ever wonder who paid for the junket?

Preserve the pond in aspic and persevere...

The pattern repeated itself during the 2023 voice referendum. John Farnham allowed his anthem You’re the Voice to be used by the Yes campaign, joined by figures including Shaquille O’Neal, Jimmy Barnes and Missy Higgins. The referendum was defeated decisively.
Across the democratic world, celebrities have repeatedly ventured into politics, usually with little to show for it.
Scottish tennis star Andy Murray backed independence ahead of Scotland’s 2014 referendum. The No campaign prevailed. Two years later, a galaxy of actors, musicians and writers implored Britons to remain in the EU. Brexit won instead.
If celebrity politics has a natural home, however, it is the US. Politics may be described as show business for ugly people, but America’s beautiful people have long shown an enthusiasm for nailing their colours to the mast – usually Democratic blue.
Take the 2004 election when virtually all of Hollywood’s stars backed John Kerry against Republican president George W. Bush. Indeed, celebrity activism had generated such public irritation that it became the target of the satirical film Team America: World Police. Puppet versions of Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon and Matt Damon joined forces with Kim Jong-il before meeting spectacularly grisly ends, to the delight of cinema audiences.
The same campaign produced an even more revealing episode. Britain’s Guardian newspaper urged its readers to write to voters in Clark County, Ohio – one of the pivotal counties in a pivotal swing state – explaining why they should reject Bush. Among those lending their names to the effort were Antonia Fraser, John Le Carre and other celebrated progressive writers.

Here's the thing. It's all about the vibe. Some care what celebrities think, some don't. Some care about the drivel the swishing Switzer scribbles, some don't.

Some realise that the real point of this piece is to mock anyone speaking out who might have some visibility, especially if they can be shown to disagree with the reptile monoculture that the reptiles want to impose on the world... Robert De Niro speaks in support of US President Joe Biden outside of Manhattan Criminal Court. Picture: Charly Triballeau / AFP

And so to the inevitable bout of mad King Donald triumphalism (and hasn't that worked out well?):

The response from Ohio was not what The Guardian had hoped. Many recipients told the newspaper that “real Americans aren’t interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions”. Clark County, which had narrowly backed Al Gore in 2000, swung decisively behind Bush in 2004. Local Republicans later credited the campaign with energising conservative voters rather than persuading them.
The pattern was even more pronounced in the 2016 contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Middle America was inundated with lectures from Hollywood’s cultural elite – actors, comedians and musicians who seemed united in their conviction that Trump was unfit for office. Meryl Streep, Madonna and Robert De Niro were among the most outspoken. De Niro declared that he wanted “to punch him in the face”. Trump won anyway.
Eight years later, almost every major figure in Hollywood and the music industry lined up behind Kamala Harris, from Taylor Swift and Katy Perry to George Clooney. De Niro again became one of Trump’s fiercest critics, Bruce Springsteen branded him “a moron” and Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone spoke of moving to Europe if Trump returned to the White House. None of it mattered. Trump won. Stone remained in the US. Television host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife did “get the hell out” of Trump’s America only to relocate to (of all places) post-Brexit Britain.

Did it occur to the swishing Switzer that mad King Donald was a reality TV star, famous for his starring roles?

It's a Hollywood circus, cf the both siderist NY Times, How Donald Trump Used Hollywood to Create 'Donald Trump' ...(*intermittent archive link)

So all the swishing Switzer is doing is putting one celebrity up against others...ones with their own kind of charisma, ready to go into the entertainment game after serving their time handing out gongs ... Barack Obama presents actress and comedian Ellen DeGeneres with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Eventually there had to come a billy goat butt, but it was a minor one, though it suggested that at last the swishing Switzer was realising that there might be something to getting the vibe ...

None of this is to suggest that celebrities are invariably wrong. Gough Whitlam’s 1972 It’s Time campaign enlisted an array of entertainers, such as Little Pattie – and it helped capture the national mood. Nor were celebrities mistaken in opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At that year’s Academy Awards, dozens of Hollywood’s biggest stars wore silver “dove of peace” pins to signal their opposition to a war that proved a costly strategic blunder.

But, billy goat butting away, it might have been a costly strategic blunder, but did they stop it?

Does anybody have a way to stop mad King Donald and his impotent, if testosterone laden, sycophants, conducting an incredible folly in Iran?

So why did the swishing Switzer give mad King Donald a pass, but crack down on George Bush?

All anyone can do is say their piece, and add to the vibe, and hope that appearing with a crocodile in a bar might boost a lizard Oz columnist, even if it's an appearance from the 1980s ... (is that the real time for the lizard Oz demographic?)

The lesson is not that celebrities should stay out of politics. Like everyone else, they are entitled to their opinions. The point, though, is that celebrity interventions rarely change electoral outcomes and can even provoke a backlash when cultural elites appear to lecture voters, who are more concerned about cost of living and national sovereignty.
Hogan’s intervention is fair enough. Yet it also serves as a reminder of an enduring democratic truth: in liberal democracies, political authority belongs not to actors, musicians or bestselling authors but to citizens casting ballots. The celebrity chorus may dominate the headlines. In the end, it never gets the final vote.
Tom Switzer is presenter of the Switzerland YouTube podcast.

The real point? Appearances by dull pedants in rags like the lizard Oz can provoke a backlash when these cultural 'leets declare war on other cultural 'leets ...

The celebrity did get the final vote, and the last disunited states ruining vote ...

What a useless tool he is, another four minutes of the pond's time down the drain, never to be recovered ...

Please allow the pond a chance to catch up with today's infallible Pope ...

As for the rest, it was a dull early morning stint in the hive mind, with a bit of legalese ...

‘Fleeting facts’ make comments a comedy
A Federal Court judge has handed Rebel Wilson a defamation victory, finding Instagram posts are too ‘fleeting’ to damage a person’s reputation.
By Jenna Clarke
Culture Writer

NSW DPP Sally Dowling should not be allowed to play covert games
Scrutiny of the NSW DPP wouldn’t undermine justice — it would protect it. After what this inquiry uncovered, greater oversight seems hard to argue against.
By Stephen Lawrence

The pond felt vaguely guilty it had to turn to Zoe for the bonus.

The header: The green energy transition: soaring bills, dead eagles; It is time Australia’s leaders stop pretending the current paradigm is working.

The caption for the terrifying image: “When it comes to energy sources, we need every option on the table,” writes Zoe Hilton.

Zoe could only manage a three minute serve, but the moment the pond saw that snap of wind farms, the pond knew she knew what would sell to the reptiles of Oz and their hive mind.

When it comes to energy sources, we might need every option on the table, but dammit, we don't need those bloody windmills.

So Zoe plucked up her best Don Quixote impression and tilted at them ...

Two recent stories from NSW wind farms have exposed the failure of the energy transition before our eyes. Far from saving the environment while lowering power bills, the attempt to transform a mostly coal-powered grid to one running on 96 per cent wind and solar by 2050 has shown no signs of doing either.
The first story reveals wind farm developers have been unable to make their projects stack up economically, even with federal underwriting, and are now setting their rent-seeking sights on a state scheme.
The federal Capacity Investment Scheme provides taxpayer underwriting to wind, solar and battery projects. But for wind developers even this generous subsidy scheme isn’t enough for them to turn a profit. After the federal government rejected their plea for more taxpayer money, some developers in NSW are now trying to secure even more subsidies, this time through NSW’s Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap.
Subsidies doled out through the roadmap are charged to NSW consumers, not taxpayers. That means consumers are being hit with a double tax – once through their tax bill and again through their energy bill, all to benefit renewables investors in the name of government targets; targets that have completely failed to deliver affordable energy for Australians.
Power prices have more than tripled since the mid-2000s, with prices rising 21 per cent in the past year alone.
The effects are devastating. One in five households is in energy hardship or on the brink. The same number have been forced to skip meals because of financial strain. Forty-one per cent of Australian seniors are rationing heating in the winter and cooling in the summer, and 340,000 customers are in long-term energy debt, averaging $1367.

The source of this data?

Go whistle in the wind, and maintain that fear of windmills...Lotus Creek Wind Farm (central Queensland). Picture: Steven Nowakowski

In lieu of reptile links, the pond did find one beat up at Nine ... Millions of Aussies going cold as electricity bills bite

More than half of Australians are minimising heating in their homes this winter to avoid paying hefty electricity bills, new research released today shows.
Many households are also buying cheaper heaters, despite experts warning the budget buys consume more electricity, according to the survey by comparison website Canstar.
The findings were based on 700 people who had purchased an electric heater this winter to stay warm.
While their main concern was keeping power bills down, less than half of are carrying out basic measures to stay warm, such as pulling on a jumper and socks before switching their heater on, keeping their room warm by closing windows and doors and fixing a draught stopper on their doors.

That's a survey? Sure, and this is a knife.

The pond scented the stench of AI in that ...

As for Zoe, it's like she'd spent the last 18 months swallowing reptile talking points...

And it’s not just households paying the price. Rising energy costs are now the No.1 factor affecting the finances of small businesses, with one in five reporting difficulties in paying their energy bills. Australia has lost 39,400 manufacturing jobs in the past two years alone.
Government energy policy has failed to put affordability at the centre for too long.
That’s why I’m launching the Affordable Energy Australia campaign. We are calling on our country’s leaders to prioritise affordable, reliable energy. We are calling for every party to commit to prioritising energy affordability and sustainability.
When it comes to energy sources, we need every option on the table. It is time to put engineering before ideology – because ideology is not lowering power bills or saving the environment.
The second story revealed a single NSW wind farm killed 20 wedge-tailed eagles in 18 months. This is only the tip of the iceberg of the impacts many wind farms are having on wildlife across the country.

The pond did chase that story down.

Here's the thing.

The data came from the developer, and was picked up by the AFR (*intermittent archive link), and remedial measures were put in place ...

Inter alia ...

Well yes, it should be possible to pat climate change tummy and chew conservation gum at the same time, but Zoe was intent on a litany of fear...

In Queensland, pristine rainforest and the habitats of endangered koalas are being blown up to make way for the infrastructure required by wind farms. Bird and bat deaths from wind turbine blades are commonplace, and reported numbers are likely underestimating the death toll because carcass surveys are being carried out only on a monthly basis.
Destroying the environment to save it is nonsensical.

How did the pond know this was pure reptile? It came with this line:

At 1 per cent of global emissions, Australia does not have any control over our own climate.

Oh that's all right then, do nothing, and carry on regardless ...and make sure you confuse and conflate action in relation to conservation with climate change, and disregard entirely the impact that climate change is already having on all parts of the planet, humans and creatures alike...

What we do have control over is the direct impacts we have on our environment at the local level.
We need a rethink of our approach to environmental policy. For every industrial project, there is a trade-off between its economic benefits and the effects it has on the environment.
Wind farms are not providing the predicted net economic benefits to Australia. In fact, they are often a net cost to society as they cannot survive without ever-growing subsidies. On top of that, many are destroying the environment they were meant to preserve. Yet the federal government still plans to more than double the amount of wind capacity in the eastern grid by 2050.
It is clearer than ever that governments’ renewables targets cannot help secure cheap energy for Australia, nor will they preserve our unique natural heritage.
Australian families and businesses deserve better. It is time Australia’s leaders stop pretending the current paradigm is working. They must prioritise affordable, reliable energy so our energy system serves the needs of all Australians – not just the rent-seekers profiting off the public purse.
Zoe Hilton works at Affordable Energy Australia.

The pond felt titillated enough to check out "Affordable Energy Australia" and discovered its site was just a shell (and that of late Zoe has been picked up by the likes of Sky Noise and petulant Peta) ...

Eek, he's a 'Gong-ite. The pond bowed its head in shame, and it turned out that Zoe had other connections ...

CIS?

See its wiki and the opening lines...

The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) is an Australian think tank founded in 1976 by Greg Lindsay. The CIS specialises in public policy research and publishes material in areas such as economics, education, culture and foreign policy. Although there are no explicit ties between the CIS and the centre-right Liberal Party, the CIS is politically aligned with the Liberal Party, praising Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies, hosting various Liberal Party politicians and holding very critical views of the Labor Party.

So Zoe is a mover and a shaker, a tilter at windmills, and the pond offered up a Herbert 'toon as an act of contrition ...

And here's what a TV celebrity will give you ...

In which the pond offers a serve of Akker Dakker as place marker pablum...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Back in the day, the pond vividly remembers its first stay in Sydney, free of parents or the need to pander to the rellies out Kogarah way (as much losers as the current St George thugby league team).

In order to do some research at the Mitchell library, the pond decided to stay, as rustic folk were wont to do, at the Gresham, an elaborate Miss Havingsham kind of Victorian wedding cake concoction ...

It's since been rebadged and repurposed.

It was dirt cheap, suitable to a student budget, but that meant the rooms were rustic basic, and when checking under the bed to see nothing had escaped when packing to leave, the pond discovered a used condom.

This was big smoke sophistication at its finest, and the pond felt quite Parisian, in a brothel sort of way.

The pond relived that rustic spirit the last time it was in Sydney, preferring the downmarket vibe of the Great Southern Hotel to expensive inns with a harbour view.

The pond knows this is the sort of place that cockies, squatters and Tamworth types like to stay ... and it pretty much still looks like it did back in the 1940s ...

It has a twenty bucks all-in bacon and eggs breakfast, and a shower and toilet cubicle of a size to give anyone claustrophobia.

And it has a sub-Shining vibe - the lobby/foyer area is littered with snaps of the hotel in its grand 1940 era, and there are still some hints of the past.

The night the pond stayed, there was a giant exhaust fan blasting away, perhaps for the restaurant downstairs, but it shut down early enough in the night to allow a little sleep (unless you had a fear of being trapped in the rabbit warren if a fire broke out). (After all, country folk must eat no later than seven, and be in bed by eight, in order to get up with the sun).

The noise reminded the pond of the air conditioner racket that ran all night when the pond stayed at the Tamworth Hotel (just across the way from the railway station).

That too was a bit of nostalgia, because the pond's father had paid for that hotel back in the day when it was known as the Town Talk (aka the Railway), brick by brick, fermenting ale glass by glass, until he was completely awash in amber fluid ...

And the pond is staying at the Great Southern again, it being the cheapest, price friendly, home away from home available to rustics and tourists, and that's why the pond isn't able to offer an update this day for herpetologists devoted to the lizard Oz.

Enough of exploring ancient remnants of near forgotten Sydney, at least the pond can offer a token distraction before hopefully returning to the real business at hand tomorrow.

How about another serve of Akker Dakker?

Though the pond has shamefully ignored him in recent years, back in ancient times the pond always had a taste for the Gresham hotel-like festoonings that littered the Akker Dakker brain.

He was big on fear and loathing of the NBN ...

Akker Dakker tried every scare and bit of fear-mongering imaginable - the cables ruining the fine aesthetics of inner west Sydney, death stalking the land ...

Since the pond has moved to the mighty 'Gong, it's experienced the joys of fibre to the home, what with an earlier Labor government pandering to its base by making the 'Gong a trial run, and what a mighty fine thing it is ...

The pond now looks with pity on those who were deprived of the real thing by the shameless Malware doing it down on orders from the onion muncher and News Corp (desperate to see its box model for streaming survive in the new age. Silly reptiles).

The pond hesitates to provide a link to this Akker Dakker outing, what with it hooking up with news.com.au, but some might want more ...

And so on. 2009, and a visionary even then!

Others have been devoted to Akker Dakker.

Here he is in a piece by Graham Readfearn back on Wednesday 30th March 2022, under the header A cut-and-paste attack on electric vehicle batteries and renewables is spanning the globe. But is it right?

If you followed the link, you might have come up against a Daily Terror paywall, so here it is ...

Those younglings are just the sort to give Akker Dakker nightmares - but then Akker Dakker's always been a 'green nightmares, we must nuke the country to save the planet' sort of reptile ...

We've been there before, and still go there each day ...

There wasn't anything Akker Dakker wouldn't tackle in order to keep the country back in the Mesozoic era ...

The Finkel report will burn us just like a Canadian wildfire? Or perhaps like the forthcoming Australian summer bushfire season?

Such a visionary.

Wait, the pond should probably finish off that other Akker Dakker outing ... especially as it evoked memories of that ancient dinosaur, Shane Stone ...

The fat owl of the remove was possibly shattered when the NRRA was merged with the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), with Stone ankling his baby, and with Murray Watt eventually coming to hold ministerial responsibility for it ...

Sic transit Akker Dakker, knock 'em down Humpty Dumpty glory ...

Is it any wonder that the pond once was devoted to Akker Dakker?

Why, the vibe's just the same, and the pond has always loved ancient vibes ...

Sorry, that's possibly a little too modern for Akker Dakker ...

And still he burbles on, at it again last Sunday in the Terror ... and so at last to the real place marker pablum ...

The header: Piers Akerman: Bowen’s silly electric truck plan running out of road while EV users don’t pay for the damage; Australia would need 14,000 extra trucks on its roads if Chris Bowen’s electric prime mover policy succeeds – and Piers Akerman says that is only part of the problem.

The thing about the fat owl of the remove is that he only manages a couple of minutes for a read, though perhaps even that's stretching the attention span of the rag's thugby league demographic, notoriously known for thinking that a full minute is quality time for a woman.

The reptiles have been down on EVs for some considerable time, so it was inevitable the fat owl of the remove would have a go at trucks ...

Veteran radio host Ray Hadley reacts to the Labor government’s push for electric trucks. “The arrant nonsense about B-doubles … and road trains being run on electricity,” Mr Hadley told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “Anyone who thinks that is going to happen in the next 100 years is stark raving mad. “They need fossil fuels to run.”
A scientific poll conducted under strict guidelines has found Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is the stupidest member of the Albanese Labor government’s cabinet – except for Anthony Albanese.
OK, the poll was probably not that scientific. It involved asking groups at bus stops, in coffee shops, waiting at check-outs and sporting stadiums one question: Who do you rate as the biggest idiot in the government? The answer was Bowen every time, with some saying the Prime Minister was almost as dumb for keeping him in the cabinet.
When further explanation was sought, those who followed up pointed to Bowen’s denial of obvious facts, including the reality the price of electricity has soared since he insisted that rolling out so-called renewables, including wind and solar factories, would reduce energy prices to homeowners and businesses.
As one member of an impromptu focus group said, anyone who thinks the global climate can be altered by increasing taxes, subsidising electric vehicle purchases, importing solar panels and carbon fibre windmill blades from China or eating less red meat, hasn’t a clue.

Classic, sublimely stupid Akker Dakker, a form of self-projection of a kind that can be found throughout his scribbles, because he's a vox pop ssort of dude of the first water, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. In a street poll, Bowen was rated the biggest idiot in the government, with Albanese almost as dumb for keeping him in the cabinet. Picture: NewsWire/Nathan Smith

The pond notes that battery-powered heavy duty trucks still need work.

But the pond can remember the days when reptiles at the lizard Oz tried to introduce range anxiety to the hive mind.

And yet these days Chinese manufacturers are promising EV cars which can do Sydney to Melbourne on a charge.

Too rich for the pond, but dare to dream. Who knows, the next scratchie might be the answer. And if battery technology continues at its current pace, there'll be plenty to drop the cash on.

The pond remembers the days when EV vans were dismissed as out of the question.

And yet when the pond rocks up to IKEA for a charge, there's always a flock of vans on view ...

Ditto buses, at least if the wretchedly inept Minns government ever gets its act together ...

The pond understands that not everyone is ready for an EV, or can afford one, or wants the singular pleasure of hooking up their EV to a trickle charger, and watch the car load up during the day for free courtesy of solar charging ...

But dare to dream, the pond says, in a way that luddites never can ...

These things are so apparent that no further examples of his stupidity should be necessary but, in the course of the research, the question of the government’s subsidy for electric prime movers – the big trucks that thunder across the nation’s highways – was raised.
Both federal and state governments underwrite the cost of heavy-truck electrification. LinFox received a $19.63m package, $755,000 a vehicle, to cover the gap in truck costs and the upgrade needed for charging stations, for example. Subsidised green financing is spewing money, but trucking firms aren’t convinced EVs are the answer. One trucking company executive bluntly says Bowen’s EV truck policy won’t work west (or east) of the Great Divide.

Akker Dakker was inevitably agitated at the sight of an EV van rocking across the bridge... Subsidised green financing is spewing money, but trucking firms aren’t convinced EVs are the answer.

Worried by the state of the strait of Hormuz? Worried that oil might hereafter be more a political football than a means of getting about?

In Akker Dakker's world, you just suck it up ... (in much the same way that mug punters must do without a FTTH connection) ...

“There just aren’t the charging stations and EV prime movers need charging every three to four hours, for hours at a time,” he says.
A regular prime mover carries enough fuel for 24 hours of operation. EVs’ hefty batteries put a 9-tonne weight on the front axle; regular diesel-powered prime movers are restricted by regulation to a 6-tonne weight limit.
This is a free pass for EVs, an additional penalty for the majority of trucks that crisscross the country. An articulated vehicle, a semi-trailer or a B-double truck with an electric powertrain weighs five tonnes more than a diesel truck. Logically, a wheat carter driving a single trailer EV could only cart 20 tonnes, a diesel would carry 25 tonnes legally.
There are 105,000 articulated vehicles on the road every day, and if the big trucks all went electric, there would need to be an extra 12-15 per cent more vehicles on the road just to carry the same payload as the current fleet.

Regarding the impossibility of it all, why not repeat that line so that the thugby league readership will fall in line, and stay with their gas guzzlerd ... There are 105,000 articulated vehicles on the road every day, and if the big trucks all went electric, there would need to be an extra 12-15 per cent more vehicles on the road to carry the same payload.

Should the pond revert to calling the fat owl full Bunter?

He's always had the same preening, supercilious air about him.

And so to the closing gobbet ...

That’s roughly an extra 14,000 trucks to carry the same loads. Australia can’t get enough truckies now; perhaps Bowen or the hopeless Immigration Minister Tony Burke will retrain returning ISIS fighters as heavy-vehicle operators.
The huge batteries would need to be changed by forklift vehicles because recharging the monsters would take too long.
Freight costs would soar and the effect on our climate would be zero. The extra cost would ensure greater inflation in almost every productive sector of the economy, and it would be more difficult to compete on the export market because all our agriculture, wheat, rice and cotton rely on road transport.
Our truckies pay for the damage they cause to roads through a 52c-a-litre excise, of which they can reclaim 20c a litre.
EV road users don’t pay for the damage their heavier vehicles cause.
With new Euro-standards being introduced, diesel trucks will use more fuel, pay more tax, and produce fewer emissions.
It’s a big country outside Canberra. Bowen and Albanese need to be reminded.

Hopefully this sort of carry-on will get slotted into the Daily Terror's campaign in favour of tungsten light bulbs.

Hopefully Akker Dakker will meet his match when invited to play a challenging game of chess ...

It's no longer Monday, but it seems like it's always Monday in America ...

Despite a flurry of lizard Oz teaser trailers, the good oil from the bromancer and Dame Groan is there to be found ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:44:33 +0000

First a housekeeping note: the pond must head off to the big smoke again, and so perforce will have to leave a place holder in place tomorrow, in lieu of proper lizard Oz herpetology studies. Hopefully the pond will escape a Sydney mugging and return to normal duties the following day.

Now carry on with wild abandon.

Lately the lizard Oz seems to have turned into the Geoff Chambers show.

There he was again early in the morning, top of the digital page ma, with an EXCLUSIVE and a Commentary...

Luckily the intermittent archive was to hand ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Left-leaning voters not so spooked on China threat
Partisan divides are emerging in the electorate despite Beijing’s increasing aggression towards Australia.
By Geoff Chambers

Geoff was bitterly disappointed by this, so he chambered yet another round, what with the war with China by Xmas a long standing, highly prized and favoured reptile jihad:

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Apathy, ‘Beijing blindness’ are not options
The threat to Australia posed by Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army has never been greater.

Teaser trailers should entice correspondents into those reptile chambers, at least those with nothing better to do...

Splendid reptile stuff, and with the war on China taken care of, another favourite theme was given the Pike treatment ...

EXCLUSIVE
Bowen splurges $4.2m on five-star Fiji resorts for COP talks
Chris Bowen’s department sets aside $4.2m to reserve luxury Fiji resorts for COP delegates
Foreign bureaucrats attending the climate change meeting will be treated to beachfront resorts and golf courses – all on the Australian taxpayer’s tab.
By Elizabeth Pike

Liz piked him good and hard ...

So Pauline had dropped off the reptile jihad charts? The fixation might be failing?

What a pity...

All well and good, but the pond takes its foreign affairs and climate science advice from the bromancer.

Sadly, in his welcome return he showed the same apathy as left-leaning and university educated voters by ignoring China and focusing on the couch molester who is inclined to be aroused by suggestive, provocative ice cream eating.

The header: Critics have misread JD Vance. Don’t rule him out in 2028;What an astonishing figure Vance is, surely the most unlikely and distinctive personality to be Veep since Theodore Roosevelt.
The caption for the snap: JD Vance speaks at the 128th Air Refueling Wing Hangar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Picture: Scott Olson / Getty Images

Where some see an ambitious, deeply weird loon, the bromancer was entranced, bedazzled by the couch molester and his magnificent theology.

After all, if one can resort to Satan's site:

Let the bromancer help JD put that recalcitrant papal tyke in his place:

As the US-Iran war races up the escalation ladder, one thing that has failed is the peace deal Vice-President JD Vance negotiated. The memorandum of understanding was simple. Vance explains it much better than Donald Trump does. Iran was to open the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping in exchange for sanctions relief. Then Washington and Tehran would subsequently try to negotiate an agreement on nuclear issues.
The deal failed not because of Vance, but because Iran, instead of opening the Strait of Hormuz, fired on commercial shipping. Which makes it bizarre that in a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan, Vance went out of his way to criticise America’s ally, Israel, for allegedly spending money on a public diplomacy/social media campaign to criticise the deal as too soft on Tehran. Incidentally, the lobbyist involved swears he never campaigned against the MOU, only against Iran.
In any event, any money Israel spends trying to influence US opinion is a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars Arab countries spend similarly.
Vance’s remarks are even more surprising given that in his new book, Communion, Vance records that his murdered Christian friend, Charlie Kirk, was gravely concerned that young American men were becoming anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.

There came a certification that established the couch molester as being one of the UFC people, always ready for a rumble in the heathen jungle...US vice president JD Vance has appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast. Picture: YouTube

Why he's a veritable young Ted, a sort of outdoor type for the ages, compelling if you happen to be a bromancing bro ...

But let’s leave Iran and remark what an astonishing, and oddly compelling, figure Vance is, surely the most unlikely, diverse and distinctive personality to be Veep since Theodore Roosevelt occupied that office more than a century ago. I’ve just finished reading Communion, which recounts how Vance lost the evangelical Christian faith of his childhood, was for some years atheist, and came back to Christianity through Catholicism. Oddly enough, Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, charted an exactly parallel but opposite journey. Pence was brought up Catholic, lapsed into atheism and came back to belief as an evangelical Christian.

As a dedicated tyke, the bromancer is right behind JD, and might even be inclined to be a little Peter Thiel curious ...

I interviewed and profiled Pence at length in my book, How Christians Can Succeed Today, and have no doubt of the depth and sincerity of his Christianity. Having read Communion, I feel the same about Vance.
I can’t believe how vituperative many reviews of Communion have been. For this is a brilliant, absorbing and challenging book, with only one big flaw. It has very little politics (that’s not the flaw). Mostly, it’s the story of Vance’s struggle to get to belief, to possess an attitude of life’s biggest questions that is meaningful and sustainable, and to lead a decent life. Vance’s previous book, Hillbilly Elegy, was one of the great memoirs, as good as Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father, but with deeper sociological insights.
Vance squarely faces the many times he hasn’t done the right thing. There’s nothing false or humble/brag in his self-accusations: “In my life, too, getting drunk and acting like a jerk had filled the void left by God.” Vance’s personal search for God is a quest for decency, and for understanding.
As he later observes: “Human nature is one of contradictions: of the animal merging with the divine … The secular view was that consciousness and civilisation were a sort of accident of evolution … The creation story (in Genesis) tells us that we are both animal and divine on purpose – a purpose, to be fair, we can’t fully understand.”
This is a rich book. Vance has read deeply in Christian scriptures, and especially in Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the dazzling scholar Rene Girard, who unpacked the secrets of human desire and the need for a scapegoat in the context of the story of Jesus. And of course Vance is also influenced by CS Lewis and GK Chesterton. None of this is fake. Vance has clearly internalised so much of it.

Indeed, and if only the Catholic church wasn't so stupid, and had appointed a stupid pope, why JD himself might stand as a profound guide to Catholic theology, and Catholic school students be made to read the new JD bible, JD Vance has written a new book, Communion, about his path back to faith

JD has had his troubles ...not least the way he helped kill off one pope ...

Vance's new book published June 16, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, chronicles his conversion to Catholicism and his Easter 2025 meeting with Pope Francis is featured prominently. The Catholic vice president uses the story to open up his reflections on the perceived tensions between his views on migration and the Vatican's moral teaching. The pope died the following day of a stroke and cardiovascular collapse.
But while details of that meeting are sparse, the vice president is sharply critical of his meeting the previous day with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, and other Vatican diplomats, describing their discussion of migration as "too abstract to be helpful."
After what he described as a "substantive" conversation on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Vance said the subsequent discussion on migration was "unsettling" because Vatican officials did not make any specific requests.
"Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes," he wrote. (NCR here)

Speaking of trite platitudes, the bromancer had plenty of his own ...

As I say, I can’t understand the determined, vicious hostility with which the book has been so much received. I’d recommend the first 200 pages without hesitation. Vance links his beliefs to the culture around him, and the breakdown of key institutions, but his religious belief is not essentially a matter of the culture wars.
Vance honours all the Christian denominations. But he’s found his home in the Catholic Church: “The Christian tradition was so rich, the Bible so big and difficult to master, that I began to see the structure of Catholicism as a benefit, not a burden. That the Church spoke with literally thousands of years of tradition behind it, that it had long-established processes for evolving doctrine and responding to new realities …”
He explores the role of doubt in faith: “No matter what we see, we are all tempted by doubt. The Peter whom Jesus pulled out of the sea is the same Peter who denied Christ three times shortly before His crucifixion.”
Most of the last third of the book is about politics but only in a very general way. Vance is inspired by Catholic social teaching, especially the balanced view of the social reality of humanity described in Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), the historic encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891.
Vance relates this all to his own life. The therapeutic idea that he could blame his own shortcomings on childhood abuse and dislocation was profoundly unappealing. It robbed him of agency and denied his own moral responsibility. His gratitude to his grandmother, his love of his wife, radiate from the page. He embraces the Catholic practice of confession – it offers him reflection on his own shortcomings, genuine personal responsibility for them, and forgiveness. This is certainly not for everyone, but it’s not nothing.

Inspired by social teachings? The ones about shooting all furriners on sight?

Not nothing? Comes a fly in the bromancer ointment, Donald Trump and JD Vance salute during a ceremony at Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. Picture: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

There's simply no avoiding him ...

Finally the bromancer had to bite the mad King Donald bullet with a mild remonstrance, a gentle billy goat butt, only to provide a masterly retort, a JD supporting epic billy goat butt ...

The one glaring omission in Vance’s book is how he reconciles this genuine Christianity with serving in the Trump administration. There is a reasonable defence of this, I think. Democrats, at least as much as Republicans, have made a mess of America. There was a solid case for thinking Trump a less bad alternative than Kamala Harris at the last election. Therefore, trying to make the best of Trump is an ethically reasonable response.
Nonetheless, Vance certainly sometimes goes too far down the Trump road. Yet his versatility is astonishing. In his podcast with Rogan half an hour is spent on the niceties of caged fighting, half an hour on Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, half an hour on whether aliens are demons, and so on. Lots of four-letter words. Yet mostly Vance is moderating Rogan, jovially pointing him to reality. Vance is quite different in his appearance on The View, responding politely, patiently, reasonably and convincingly to five vocal, hostile women.
But to see the best of Vance, watch his hour-long conversation with Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire. A brilliant, subtle, hopeful dialogue on faith, purpose and society.
Is it a strength or a weakness that Vance is so at home in such contradictory environments? He’s presently unpopular. But he may yet resemble his boss in being protean, persistent, limitlessly energetic, easily underestimated, always formidable. Don’t rule Vance of out for 2028 just yet.

Strangely the bromancer ignored not just the war with China by Xmas, but the coming of Andy ...

That was left to the malignant Magnay, sounding very Iron Lady Margie about idle munificence...

Time to put up, now Mancunian is in Downing Street
Scaring away businesses won’t help prop up the extraordinary welfare situation, where large families on benefits have more disposable income than schoolteachers.
By Jacquelin Magnay
Europe Correspondent

Day 1 and the rats were in the street ...

Sadly the pond had to pass by, but the intermittent archive abided and that's surely enough.

The intermittent archive also took care of ancient Troy ...

Breaking with history: why this ALP conference will be different
Labor’s national conference will be a highly stage-managed event with little debate, even less dissent, and an emphasis on unity.
By Troy Bramston
Senior Writer

Keeping to teaser trailers left just enough room for Dame Groan, present to remind Australians that they were deeply stupid...

...and would certainly be rooned by Xmas ...

The header: End of an era: How we fell from exceptional nation to outpost of mediocrity; All those years of hard-fought reforms, of accepting the important trade-offs, were simply forgotten.

The caption for the uncredited collage showing a gaggle of Tory heroes: Former Liberal leaders Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and John Howard.

Sheesh, the pond couldn't believe it.

There the pond was thinking that all the promotional work for nattering "Ned's" tome had been done and dusted, and straight up front the old biddy put in a plug for it ...

I have been reading the excerpts of Paul Kelly’s new book, The Twilight of Exceptionalism, with great interest. But it did occur to me that instead of using the noun “twilight”, I might have been inclined to use “end”.
Kelly’s book covers the period of the federal Coalition government between 2013 and 2022. In that time, we had three prime ministers, each very different from the other. It was a time of monumental lost opportunity, of parties that couldn’t quite figure out their common mission.
It’s worth outlining what Australia’s exceptionalism involved. Both the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello governments take the credit for this outcome. By and large, it was a long period of outstanding policy, of careful economic management and unparalleled outcomes. Annual economic growth rates in the high 3s and into the 4s were common. Productivity growth averaged above 2 per cent per year. The change to per capita incomes moved Australia up the world league ladder, with Australia’s GDP per person exceeding all the G7 countries apart from the US by the middle of the 2000s.
When it came to budgetary policy, the results were truly remarkable. As Peter Costello points out: “By 2004, after seven cash surplus budgets, the commonwealth government was debt-free in net terms. No other comparable Western country got anywhere near that, not the US, the UK, the Europeans, the Japanese.”

To match Dame Groan's carry on, the reptiles slipped in another reminder to buy the book before it hits the remainder shelves, Paul Kelly speak at the book launch for The Twilight of Exceptionalism in Sydney. Picture: John Feder / The Australian

Now on with the important business of revising history and explaining why we're all rooned ...

In August 2006, the Financial Times editorial concluded: “Australia continues to live up to its much overused sobriquet, the lucky country. But as the OECD observes, a big reason for its good fortune is that it has been adept at making its own luck.” The fact Australia was feted at international economic forums was no surprise.
The election of the Abbott government came after the chaotic years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. Plenty of poison pills were left by Labor, representing a real challenge for any incoming government. Some of these pills were dealt with – abolishing the absurd mining tax and bringing illegal migration under control by turning back the boats. But when it came to economic policy, the outcomes were extremely disappointing.
Promises not to cut spending in key program areas stymied the Abbott government from the start. It was a time that spending on the misconceived Gonski school funding model and the NDIS could have been reined in, with future expenditures locked into sustainable trajectories. We are now paying a very high price.
The fact Joe Hockey as treasurer pushed for the abolition of the debt ceiling – and succeeded – was more than passing strange. Having promised fiscal restraint, this action made no sense. It has relieved future treasurers from the worry of having to argue the case for expanding the debt ceiling.

The reptiles spared no expense and wheeled out some lavish artwork by Emilia, which the pond had mistaken as a tonal AI rendering, John Howard and Peter Costello. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

What an excellent evocation of a lying rodent and a man without the ticker.

End times devotees then got exactly what they wanted, so they could embark on their day knowing that it was all futile ...with all that nonsense about climate science central to the ruination ...

Twenty years on from zero net debt, we are now on the hook for $600bn of net government debt, with gross debt fast approaching the trillion-dollar mark. It is surely ironic that the commonwealth’s biggest asset is the Future Fund.
After the disaster of the 2014 budget – the only “achievement” was a temporary income tax surcharge on the highest earners – the Coalition simply dropped the ball on fiscal management.
Some key ministers began to argue debt and deficits didn’t matter, and the voting public quickly absorbed the new messaging. With inflation seemingly under control – this had a great deal to do with the goods deflation associated with expanding exports from China – the old trade-offs seemed to have vanished.
Measures to deal with climate change took a central role, with Abbott being the prime minister when Australia signed on to the Paris climate agreement. Under Malcolm Turnbull, climate change assumed an even higher priority, with a series of interventions put in place. They included the commissioning of the disastrous Snowy 2.0, which was seen as a giant battery that could underpin the shift to renewable energy. Note also that it was the Coalition government that first introduced the Safeguard Mechanism, which is effectively a carbon tax on our largest industrial emitters.
To be sure, there was some pushback to the attention being given to climate change – who can forget Scott Morrison bringing a lump of coal into parliament?

Who could forget it? Was there ever a better example of a profound insight into climate science?

Strangely the reptiles decided to ignore that as a visual illustration, and decided to go full boring...Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull at the conclusion of Question Time in the House of Representatives. Picture: Sam Mooy / AAP Image

Dame Groan seemed to be showing weird signs of a yearning for the clap happy SloMo ...

But come 2021, Morrison had become convinced the Coalition would lose the election unless his government adopted the position of net zero by 2050. Coupled with some debatable arguments that Australia would face high tariffs imposed by climate-compliant countries and be starved of international capital, the cabinet went along with the change. The Nationals, whose instincts were to oppose the motion, were rewarded with the promise of billions of dollars of compensation.
At the same time, Covid played havoc with the budget as government spending went from $478bn in 2018-19 (24.5 per cent of GDP) to $654bn (31.3 per cent of GDP) in 2020-21. Of course, a great deal of this spending was unavoidable given the uncertainties surrounding the severity and course of the pandemic. The decisions by some of the states to impose prolonged lockdowns also forced the hand of the federal government.
But having grown accustomed to very low rates of inflation, the Coalition massively underestimated the danger of igniting inflationary pressures, particularly in the context of frozen supply chains. Many of the programs that were initiated at that time were both badly designed and badly implemented.
The HomeBuilder program, for instance, led to a surge in building costs that continued well after the pandemic had ceased to be a problem. The JobKeeper program was far too generous and allowed firms that didn’t meet the criteria to keep the assistance.

Oh dear, so it was actually the clap happy one that set the country on the road to ruin? That surely deserves a snap ...Scott Morrison speaks during a press conference.

Tears streaked down Dame Groan's weathered visage - bonjour tristesse - as she pounded out her last gobbet of doom ...

There was never any indication given by the government that the temporary financial assistance given to households and businesses would need to be repaid. Research undertaken by world-renowned economist Greg Kaplan has established that this failure to foreshadow repayment in the US contributed to the price level rising by some 16 per cent. There is every reason to think a similar conclusion applies here.
Exceptionalism was replaced by sloppy thinking and mediocrity. Handing out favours, spending more on programs, putting everything on the tab – this was the modus operandi of the Coalition government when it was voted out in 2022. All those years of hard-fought reforms, of accepting the important trade-offs in managing the budget and the ever-looming threat of inflation, which is the ultimate tax – they were simply forgotten.
The Labor government is arguably much worse as it focuses almost entirely on redistributing our shrinking wealth. But the rot had set in when it won the 2022 election. Productivity growth is barely above zero and real wages are where they were in 2012. From top of the pops to clear laggard in less than 20 years – it is a very sad story.

So sad, such tristesse ...

If only Dame Groan could look on the bright side, and the opportunities all around us, as Wilcox showed her how to do it ...

It turns out that everything is currently an odyssey ...

So why haven't the reptiles gone all in on the fully woke show that's ruining the planet?

In which the flood water whisperer shows signs of fearing bottle red heads, while Killer Creighton cheerfully goes on nuking the country...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 22:04:10 +0000

Doom and gloom.

It's the daily diet the reptiles offer the hive mind.

Geoff was top of the digital doom machine this early morning, as he chambered yet another round ...

Thank the long absent lord the intermittent archive was working ...

EXCLUSIVE
Mining royalties, tax payments crash by $25bn
$25bn mining plunge leaves Labor and state governments in jeopardy
The figures revealed in new modelling come as Labor mulls a push to increase taxes on the resources sector at this week’s national conference.

And what a busy possum he is.

After Gina's pet's problematic overseas junket, palling around with felons and far right loons (not to mention exquisite fashions), Geoff did his best to restore faith in Pauline...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Hanson, Taylor climb as Labor’s support sinks
Newspoll: Pauline Hanson regains ground and Liberals rise, as Labor falls to equal lowest point since 2022
Core support for Labor fell to 30 per cent, which reflects the ALP’s lowest point since the Gillard government.

More EXCLUSIVES than a possum could shake a stick at.

It felt like Geoff was the primo reptile peddler of doom and gloom ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Reports of One Nation’s demise are greatly exaggerated
One Nation is not dead yet: Labor and the Coalition cannot write off Pauline Hanson
Senior Labor and Coalition sources say the idea One Nation’s support will drop off or fade quickly are wrong.

Hang on, hang on, hold Geoff's beer, because the Caterist is also in town and the header suggested he was smitten by the bottle red head ... what with Gina's puppet filling a gap in the political landscape, in much the same way as you might celebrate a mad King Donald or even a Mussolini...

The header: How Pauline Hanson fills the gap in our political landscape; A Hanson-led conservative government in which the Liberal and National parties are the junior partners is an absurd proposition.
The caption for the snap which suggests some reptiles spend too much time on social media with a screen capper: One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson speaks at the 2026 CPAC Conference in London. Picture: YouTube

Relax, the pond was just teasing, a little trolling, as a way of beguiling correspondents into suffering along with the Caterist.

The Caterist was alert, but also somewhat alarmed, as he began by reluctantly admitting it wasn't Gough wot done it ...

Some Australians will agree with Pauline Hanson that Australia’s immigration policy turned bad in 1973 when Gough Whitlam scrapped the White Australia policy and opened the doors to all comers. More informed readers know the policy was abolished six years earlier by the Liberal Party, but let’s not quibble on detail.

For a "let's not quibble" outing, the flood whispering Caterist had a lot of quivering quibbles, as he did his best to stand by the beefy boofhead:

Whether “some” voters constitute a majority of 50 per cent plus one is doubtful. Many may agree with Hanson that immigration is out of control but will reject her ugly allusions to skin colour and religion. They will be repelled by her clumsy attempts to scapegoat Muslims as the chief rorters of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and her refusal to distinguish the many patriotic Muslim Australians who like the country how it is and the radicalised few who want to change it.

Sheesh, it's like the reptile hive mind has turned full bizarro, compleat topsy turvy?

Has the pond wasted an entire clumsy lizard Oz lifetime learning how Islamics were ruining the country and lazy, uppity, difficult blacks didn't deserve a Voice?

Seems so, sounds like the quarry whisperer has gone a little bit woke ...

Which is why Angus Taylor was expressing the views of two-thirds of the country and possibly more when he told The Australian recently that One Nation is unfit to govern.
One Nation may one day eclipse the Liberal-National Coalition as the principal force on the centre right but it will never form government while Hanson remains its leader. Not while its internal structure remains nebulous and immature and the mechanism for the leader’s removal is entirely in her own hands. Not when the party’s future as a parliamentary force lies in the hands of inexperienced MPs and senators.

The reptiles didn't help by pumping up the visual volume, Pauline Hanson meets up with Nigel Farage. Picture: Facebook/ Pauline Hanson

Even Nige found her meeting up with felon Tommy a tad too far, though no doubt he otherwise agreed with Gina's pet, refused to apologise for being white, and thought Australians were stupid, and fell into line with the lizards of Oz and Pauline that the country was way too woke ...

The Caterist did his best to cope and suggest solutions ... (though the unfortunate reptile habit of blathering on about the woke wasn't one needing reform)...

Those home truths aside, however, it is a fantasy to suggest Hanson’s ill-considered decision to hang out with Tommy Robinson in London is the beginning of the end for One Nation. The groundswell of support for Hanson cannot be explained by reductionist this-leads-to-that explanations.
The populist wave overturning business-as-usual politics around the world is driven by demand, not supply. A gaping hole has opened up in the centre of the political landscape which, this being a democracy, would sooner or later be occupied.
Hanson’s One Nation didn’t create this space, nor did it appear to be the natural candidate to fill it after the last election, when it emerged with a primary vote of 6 per cent.
Yet One Nation has scooped up the none-of-the-above votes scattered like confetti in 2025 and pushed the boundaries still further by becoming the home for a substantial subsection of the disgruntled Liberal base as well as the working-class voters Anthony Albanese has shaken off as Labor reinvents itself as the party of the technocratic elite.
For Hanson’s accidental army, One Nation is as much an emotional home as a serious political choice. A survey of the comments on any article in The Australian remotely critical of One Nation (including most probably this one) reveals how passionately supportive they are. Former Liberal voters who switch allegiance to One Nation are not simply changing their votes. They are changing tribes. Their internal narrative changes from “I support the Liberal Party” to “I’m one of the people who finally woke up”.
If Hanson reveals her weaknesses as a prospective national leader, they can resolve any internal contradictions by (a) admitting they were wrong or (b) persuading themselves that Taylor is worse.

Sheesh, is the Caterist suggesting it's a cult? Is he also suggesting that the lizard Oz hive mind is a cult, but Gina's pet has attracted some of its cult membership to its very own cult tribe?

Whatever, it seems times are tough for the reptiles who've devoted so much time encouraging their cult, and the beefy boofhead they'd like their cult to love, if only he was remotely loveable, what with some not infatuated with one of the duller knives in the drawer, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor speaking at the LNP conference in Brisbane. Picture: John Gass

How the reptiles love the beefy boofhead, mouth open and in full gesticulation mode.

At last it was time to take down Gina's pet so that the beefy boofhead might shine like a 20 watt bulb ...

Option (b) is the psychologically cheaper choice since admitting error imposes a high cost on self-esteem. It requires acknowledging not only Hanson’s flaws, but also personal poor judgment, and in an era when one’s political opinions are broadcast on social media that is an awkward pill to swallow.
Politically engaged voters are inclined towards what social psychologists call motivated reasoning, selectively assimilating evidence that reinforces prior beliefs and discounting discordant evidence. Perversely, as Hanson reveals her imperfections, hostility towards Taylor – and by extension the Liberal Party – hardens.
Hanson need not become more impressive to retain these voters. She simply has to remain less unacceptable than the Liberal alternative. Taylor must overcome this asymmetry if the Liberal Party is to recover its position as an effective political force.
Taylor must also overcome the uniparty narrative that One Nation employs to great effect. When the political and philosophical divide between the Coalition and Labor is at its widest point for at least half a century, Liberal and National supporters feel an understandable sense of indignation at this slur, which was imported from the US.
Yet the uniparty slander remains powerful as an encapsulation of the new political divide between the governing establishment and those who feel their values are not respected by the graduate elite.
In his 2022 book Values, Voice and Virtue, British political scientist Matthew Goodwin makes a strong case that the exposure of this fault line in Britain predates the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The speed of Farage’s ascendancy, like the sudden rise of populist movements in other European democracies, owes less to his political attributes than the gap in the market for a movement that respects the view of the non-graduate majority.
Reform was the result rather than the cause of the populist mood, fuelled by resentment over the pursuit of pet projects such as multiculturalism and the mitigation of climate change that diverted government attention from the everyday problems of working families, small businesses and retirees.

And there in a nutshell is the Caterist and the reptile problem.

All Gina's pet has done is take on board the policies espoused by them - the climate science denialism, the fear of furriners, and so on - and the notion that a messiah might come along to save them.

Faux Noise and mad King Donald for example, though perhaps not the beefy boofhead or Kemi ...Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch delivers a speech on the economy at the Victory Services Club. Picture: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

After all, the reptiles were dedicated to Brexit, and had a splendid time stripping the Voice of its capitalisation, and lathered themselves up into a fever pitch of outrage and indignation.

What could possibly have gone wrong with the rage machine?

In Britain, the populist revolt manifested itself most clearly in the Brexit vote. In Australia it was the voice referendum.

There you go, that's what the pond's talking about. The reptiles might offer a capital V for Goodwin's Values, Voice and Virtue, but damned if they'll offer a V for that pesky, difficult, uppity black Voice.

Why they created the policies Gina's pampered pet is promoting, but where's the respect, where's the acknowledgement, where's the capital V for their long standing voice for bigotry and prejudice?

In both countries the established conservative parties seemed at first to be on the right side of the argument. Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party appeared to gain ground, just as the Conservatives did in Boris Johnson’s landslide election win in 2019. In both cases, the alignment with anti-establishment voters was short-lived. Neither Johnson nor Dutton could overcome the tensions in their own party.
For Taylor and British Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, the solution is not as simple as many commentators suggest. The seemingly contradictory solutions of moving to the right or recovering the vacant centre ground understate the challenge.
The task is to relearn the language and recover the trust of the disillusioned voters attracted to Hanson or Farage simply because they represent the least imperfect candidates among the none-of-the-above.
Whether Hanson’s European misadventures put a ceiling on One Nation’s vote at about 30 per cent or, as is equally probable, it begins testing the high 30s hardly matters.
A Hanson-led conservative government in which the Liberal and National parties are the junior partners is an absurd proposition. Eighteen months out from an election, with Albanese’s support in some polls in the high 20s, arguments about whether Taylor or Hanson would make a better prime minister are entirely theoretical. Unless something breaks this stalemate, and breaks it quickly, neither will be given a chance.

Sheesh, the pond had promised doom and gloom, but somehow ended up with the Caterist prophesying doom and gloom for Gina's pet, all in aid of the struggling beefy boofhead?

The infallible Pope had just the cartoon to celebrate on the weekend ...

And so to send the Major to the intermittent archive, because some days the pond baulks at the relentless serves of Zionism offered up by the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Social media the tool of Hamas spreading hatred about Jews
How Hamas’s disinformation campaign is fuelling a global surge in antisemitism
Content posted online found a community here and around the world already conditioned by Hamas’s propaganda from the day its fighters invaded Israel.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

The pond just didn't feel up to yapping about Zionism yet again.

Correspondents have read it all before, and are free to read it again - relax, things are going tremendously well in Gaza if you follow the Major - and for Benji too ...

Okay, apparently it might have been for the wrong reason, it might have been to get more barking mad fundamentalists into the IDF, but what the heck, enjoy the moment all the same ...

And have a 'toon to celebrate ...

But what to do for a bonus?

The pond was over AI, so sent simpleton Simon off to the cornfield, even though only the pond cared enough to do the saving...

We need to sort AI’s moral risks before it’s too late

The speed of the race appears to be overtaking the foundational rules that must accompany such a technology.

By Simon Benson

Political analyst

A 'toon would suffice for that ...

Luckily Killer Creighton was to hand, doing what the IPA does best ... fuming and fulminating about renewables, and matching AI at devising ways to do over the planet ...

The header: Fudging language of energy transition won’t stop its political reckoning; ‘Involuntary load shedding’ is the new blackout: the deliberate disconnection of customers to keep the grid functional.

The caption for the terrifying snap: Miners taking part in wind turbine operation training listen to an instructor next to one of the wind turbines at the Gorzyca Wind Farm. Picture: Wojtek Radwanski / AFP

Killer only took three minutes, but surely that shocking snap of a windmill dominating the landscape and ruining mad King Donald's day - not to mention the beefy boofhead's fear of the infernal machines down Goulburn way - as a tremendous kick starter for the standard serve of rage ...

Just as grandfathering has been rebranded as grandparenting by Jim Chalmers so as not to offend, blackouts appear to have been excised from the official vocabulary.

Absent an obvious replacement colour, the Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest grand plan for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 comes up with a variety of obscure phrases to describe how to deal with insufficient electricity in our largely sun and wind-dependent grid.

It all sounds almost fun. Consumers will be playing “an increasingly active role” in ensuring the power system remains stable, AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman writes in the foreword to the latest Integrated System Plan released on June 25. “First Nations” communities will be “empowered”.

“Involuntary load shedding” is the new blackout: the deliberate disconnection of customers to keep the grid functional. This may arise in times of “unserved energy”, when the power system simply cannot meet the electricity demanded.

About 1 per cent of the national electricity market is expected to depend on “demand-side participation” by 2050, where households or businesses agree in advance to have their power turned down or switched off in exchange for financial compensation. The old electricity grid once served households; now households and businesses increasingly serve the grid.

Consumers are supposed to be “virtual power plants”, handing control of their home batteries and electric vehicles to third parties that can draw on them when required. Rather than generating more reliable power, the system increasingly seeks to “reduce the total energy drawn” from the grid.

The pond smugly set its EV to trickle charge - it being a sunny day and the solar standing by to kick in - while the reptiles served up a snap of that diabolical wretch Jimbo, looking just as smug in a quizzical way, Jim Chalmers during Question Time at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

No doubt haunted by Jimbo, Killer was in a foul IPA mood ... though perhaps it was tinged with a fear of impending hellfire, with shades of a Canadian wildfire...

Nah, a cartoon wasn't going to stop Killer.

He had a Killer IPA job to do, and the lizard Oz was a perfect IPA propaganda machine, and dammit, he was going to do it ...

The huge strides in living standards across the past century have been predicated on using more energy, not less. In any case, none of this is likely to happen.

AEMO’s latest ISP is solving a problem created by unrealistic political targets.

Increasingly – and laughably – it continues to assume Australia will achieve an 82 per cent renewable electricity grid by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. The plan is described as the “least cost” pathway, but only in the sense that the genuinely low-cost alternatives have been ruled out.

The 36 per cent of suitable Australian dwellings that have installed rooftop solar did so largely because governments showered households with billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies across the past two decades.

Those subsidies, largely taken up by higher-income households, are barely acknowledged in the ISP’s cost estimates. The same applies to the nation’s roughly 600,000 household batteries.

Importantly, such subsidies are also unlikely to continue indefinitely given the rapidly deteriorating fiscal position of state and federal governments.

Does anyone seriously think Victoria’s Yallourn coal-fired power station, which still supplies about 15 per cent of the state’s electricity and helps insulate South Australia against disaster on cloudy, still days, will close in less than two years as the ISP assumes?

Moreover, about 120 gigawatts of additional large-scale wind and solar capacity must be constructed by 2050, roughly five times today’s installed level in less than 25 years.

Construction has not begun on even one of the 83 offshore wind projects slated for completion across coming decades, according to online tracker TGS, and investment has collapsed globally.

Another 6000km of transmission lines also must be built to connect remote wind and solar developments to existing cities, which is certain to invite fierce community opposition.

It's doom and gloom all the way, and yet there's a solution to all this, a way to save the planet, though everyone knows that the planet doesn't need saving, what with Killer having demolished many times all that nonsense that's scribbled about climate change by alleged climate scientists entirely lacking Killer's scientific credentials.

Correspondents will already know the solution, can chant it by heart.

If only we'd nuke the country ...

Curiously, nuclear energy is not mentioned once in the ISP’s 141 pages, despite the fact the Liberal Party, the Nationals and One Nation all support the one proven technology capable of delivering reliable, dispatchable, low-emissions electricity at scale.

Amazingly in response to this klarion Killer kall, the reptiles didn't deploy one of their much loved snaps of a nucklear plant nuking away, and instead settled for a man at a gabfest ...Daniel Westerman speaking at the Energy Nation 2025 forum in Sydney. Picture: Nikki Short

It was on to an impassioned Killer spiel for the urgent need to nuke the country, even if the planet didn't actually need saving ...

We’ll will happily dig up uranium, put it on a ship to India and congratulate itself when it produces reliable zero-emissions electricity there. The only place we apparently can’t use Australian uranium is, of course, Australia.

The Coalition should be making hay with the rank hypocrisy and absurdity of the targets but has barely said boo about dumping net zero since last year’s recantation through gritted teeth.

Countries such as South Korea and China have demonstrated that modern nuclear plants can be built relatively cheaply. A genuine planning exercise at least would model it alongside the alternatives rather than pretend it does not exist. More fundamentally, the whole exercise rests on an extraordinary assumption: that anyone can accurately map Australia’s electricity system a quarter of a century into the future.

A decade ago almost nobody foresaw the explosion of artificial intelligence and the demand for data centres, or the shale gas revolution. Who knows what technologies will emerge during the next 25 years? The ISP increasingly resembles less an engineering blueprint than a work of central planning, complete with heroic assumptions about consumer behaviour, technological progress, political consensus and construction timetables extending all the way to 2050.

At least the latest CSIRO GenCost report, released alongside the ISP, acknowledges what was once heresy, conceding that net zero costs 5 per cent to 39 per cent more than abandoning the target altogether.

Rebranding blackouts as “involuntary load shedding” and power shortages as “demand-side participation” may delay the political reckoning but it will not prevent it. Physics and economics have an inconvenient habit of ignoring government communications strategies.

Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Haven't had enough?

Perhaps you should visit the IPA and read Killer exposing the way that climate science is just a religion ...The moral imperative that doesn’t ring true ... and then you might want to nuke something ...

Just gotta love a little beneficial warming. Why there's nothing like a Canadian wildfire to gladden a Killer heart, not to mention splendid South American super charged El Niño inspired floods.

And so on and so forth and Killer fun and Killer times for all ...

Shouldn't that read "welcome to a white Australian climate science denying fear of furriners" reptile hive mind?

Never mind, what an inspiration little England is for bottle red heads and bin men ...

In which Polonius's prattle sets the pace, and bellyaching Bella joins in, but there's also much more by way of hive mind coverage ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:00:00 +0000

With the intermittent archive a headache, the pond looked elsewhere for entertainment, and fell like a famished wolf on Marina Hyde's The White House’s guide to manhood: pop some T, restart a war and do WHAT with a corn dog?

The pond could have done the Weekly Beast, and Tommy and Gina's pet living the reptile dream, and garrulous Gemma of the lizard Oz - a whole 10 minutes late - but some things are beyond satire.

The lizard Oz reptiles, and so the had studiously avoided Pete Kegsbreath's latest folly, but not the marinating Marina ...

...in a competitive field, the most eye-catching reaction to the new testosterone initiative came from Fox News anchor Jesse Watters. Do you know Jesse? He presents as the guy who missed out on the Cialis ad booking – he simply looks too beaten inside – but talks like a real man’s man of the world. “You know what’s going to happen?” chortled Watters of Hegseth’s military testosterone rollout. “The guys that DON’T need it are going to take it. Triple boost! And then they’re going to get out there, and, women on base – you guys better be careful!” Wow. OK. “Port calls, women in Asia – you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be WILD ANIMALS, and you better WATCH OUT!” Well now. I allow myself just one thousand-yard stare a day about the United States of America, and that clip has just produced today’s.

A reminder: that's the Emeritus Chairman's Faux Noise she's cracking jokes about, and who could resist her crack at JD, as the couch molester went full Freudian yet again ...

Yesterday’s came courtesy of JD Vance, who is out on the promo circuit pushing his latest memoir. This week he went on Joe Rogan’s show, where he explained that the thing he couldn’t get over about Joe Biden was the way the former president ate ice-cream. “It’s like they would get him eating ice-cream in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable,” revealed Vance. Is it? Mate, I’m not sure it is. I’m looking at various clips of it and he seems to always use his teeth. I mean, I don’t mean to kink-shame, but … Biden’s a biter, JD. Do you … find that suggestive? Anyway, there was more. Vance also revealed he would never eat a corn dog in public. Rogan showily didn’t care about doing that for all to see; in fact, he thought it was sad people were “so afraid of anything that looks like a dick”. Over to you, Mr Vice -President. “I try, I try to eat my corn dogs …” floundered Vance. “That’s – that’s between me and my kitchen.” Oh, OK. JD Vance sucks off corn dogs in his kitchen. Tell your friends.

How could the pond resist? Of course it was going to remind its correspondent friends of the fun to be had marinating with Marina. There's nothing like JD 69, way better than than JD 6-7.

And now down to business with the local Murdochians, close kissing cousins with the Faux Noise mob, compliant munchers on their own kind of corn dogs.

The pond has already updated yesterday's post with intermittent archive links, and was determined to keep on ignoring them for today's Sunday meditation, but for those who missed the update ...

EXCLUSIVE
Islam ‘based on terror’: Hanson sparks concern inside One Nation
Pauline Hanson says a lot of Islam is ‘based on terrorism’ in one of her biggest attacks yet on the religion, prompting Barnaby Joyce to disagree with his leader
By Greg Brown

EXCLUSIVE
‘At what cost?’: Green energy project threatens 66 species
NSW renewable energy project could hasten 66 species to extinction, scientists warn
The agency tasked with delivering NSW’s renewable energy future has been accused of bulldozing the very ecosystems the clean energy transition is meant to protect.
By Christine Middap

DEFAMATION VOW
‘Demonisation’: JK Rowling hits back at Amnesty report
JK Rowling vows to fund lawsuits against Amnesty over trans ‘hate’ report
Even John Cleese has taken aim at Amnesty International which once pitted itself against tyrants over trans rights.
By Stephen Rice

Mr Williams, tear down this stonewalling partisanship
All credit to the ABC chairman for fronting up to my Sky News show but his denial of Aunty’s biased, error-ridden coverage was astonishing.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)

And while on that theme, there was more Gawenda, an interminable six minutes ...

As campus life turned ‘hellish’ for Jewish students, uni leaders did nothing
Vice-chancellors facing the royal commission still could not agree on what antisemitism means, almost three years after October 7.
By Michael Gawenda

The Australian Daily Zionist News never rests, and sothere was this one to add to that list, which the pond personally archived because where would the lizard Oz be without a Islamic jihad to add to its taste for TG jihads?

SOCIAL COHESION
PM says no to ‘anti-Palestine’ probe in Islamophobia response
The Prime Minister’s response follows questions about the need for an Islamophobia envoy, with critics saying the issue is not as intense as the antisemitism surge that led to the Bondi massacre.
By Richard Ferguson and James Dowling

Want that decoded? You can never get social cohesion with difficult, uppity Islamics. And you can't mention Gaza or Palestine because they're "less intense".

Or so it seems so, if this teaser trailer is any guide ...

And snappy Tom, doing his ersatz Dame Groan impression, with relevant filmic reference:

Our budget delusions for a perilous odyssey
This post-budget season has been different because a handful of measures ran into a populist insurgency.
Tom Dusevic
Columnist

After all that reading, some herpetology students might want a break ...

And so to Polonius, still holding top dog pride of place - what with him being something of a furry - in the pond's Sunday meditation.

Such is the importance of the reptiles to stay in touch with Gina's pampered pet that Polonius took up the challenge with his prattle:

The header: One Nation’s most educated politician could become its weakest link; The more important One Nation becomes, the more of a problem Senator Malcolm Roberts will become.

The caption for the snap: Senator Malcolm Roberts has a history of making over-the-top statements. Picture: Martin Ollman

The pond doesn't mind Polonius spending a bigly four minutes taking down the barking mad Roberts, but before that unfolds, the pond confesses to having dipped back into the Graudian's The Australian's environment editor, Graham Lloyd, sued over Peruvian eco-retreat; A former partner in an Amazonian conservation project with Lloyd and his partner Vanessa Hunter is claiming more than $600,000 in damages and costs

It's an old yarn, sordid, unseemly but also funny, and incidentally therein you will find ...

...According to the Australian, Lloyd is a “fearless reporter of all sides of the environment debate”. He has had a long career with the Australian as an editorial writer, among other senior roles, and has been championed by the former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell.
Mitchell called him the smartest environment writer in the country “by light years” and said he could “run rings around clowns like Tim Flannery in any forum on knowledge of the science”.
He has been named by the Queensland One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts as one of the journalists who “show the courage to research the evidence” for climate change, alongside Alan Jones, News Corp and the Sky News commentator Andrew Bolt, and his colleague Chris Kenny at the Australian.

Yes, in the old days, mad Malcolm and the reptiles of Oz were all a happy bunch of Vegemite climate science denialists ...

Sure enough if you head off to the aph.gov.au site (pdf), you discover a 2017 report put together by assorted Senate loons, including Roberts ...

The pond wanted to remind correspondents that these birds of a feather frequently flocked together, because you might otherwise read Polonius as doing a straightforward hatchet job, when really he's in two minds about one of the hive mind's own ...

It remains to be seen whether Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has peaked. In any event, it is still a long time to the next election.
But, clearly, One Nation is under some pressure that it did not experience before Christmas last year. And before the Bondi Beach massacre aimed at the Australian Jewish community on the Jewish festival of Hanukkah – which was also an attack on Australian society.
The small One Nation frontline is well known to those who follow Australian politics – Hanson, the MP for New England Barnaby Joyce (formerly of the Nationals) and James Ashby (who is one of the best-known staffers in Australian political history).
Then there is Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts, plus the new MP for Farrer, David Farley, who scored a significant victory at the by-election on May 9. One Nation senators Sean Bell (NSW) and Tyron Whitten (Western Australia) are not yet well-known public figures.
Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald on July 1, economics editor Ross Gittins asked readers whether anything struck them about the Hanson-Joyce pair. He added: “They’re not the sharpest tools in the drawer. It’s hard to imagine how anyone who’d completed high school could be stupid enough to just wave away all the scientific evidence that global warming is real.”

Read that sentence again ...

It’s hard to imagine how anyone who’d completed high school could be stupid enough to just wave away all the scientific evidence that global warming is real.”

Come on Ross. It's not hard to imagine at all, leastwise if you imagine the likes of the Bolter, the dog botherer, Lloydie of the Amazon, the Riddster, and many others who turn up regularly in the lizard Oz...

Spend years reading the reptiles and you get ... Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce enjoy a laugh at a June 12 fundraiser in South Melbourne. Picture: David Crosling

Naturally Polonius was indignant at Ross, targeting One Nation types and braying in intellectual snobby mode.

Polonius had to cede that when it came to climate science denialism, the One Nation mob were great climate scientists, and they were right on the money ...

This would suggest that, in recent weeks, Gittins must have come to regard at least some of his readers as dumb. After all, last Monday his newspaper published a Resolve Political Monitor poll. It revealed that 39 per cent of Australians agreed that “net zero should be dropped, with a focus on fossil fuels over renewables in the future”. Thirty three per cent were undecided or neutral and only 27 per cent disagreed.
What Gittins, in intellectual snobbery mode, declines to accept is that there is no direct correlation between education and intelligence. Moreover, any fair assessment of Hanson and Joyce would not regard either as unintelligent. By the way, Joyce has a degree in accounting.
Meanwhile, it has come to pass that many of One Nation’s current problems begin with Roberts. I met Roberts once when I was a panellist on the ABC TV Insiders program some years ago. He did not appear unintelligent.
Moreover, Roberts has tertiary degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Queensland and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
On January 28 this year, Nine columnist Peter FitzSimons threw the switch to sneering. He posted on X: “Would you trust Malcolm Roberts to change a light bulb, let alone come up with a coherent energy policy?” Well, mechanical engineers can change light bulbs.
Moreover, what a coherent energy policy amounts to at a time of rising power bills affecting homes and businesses alike is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Yes, yes, he can change light bulbs and do mechanical engineering, and if that doesn't say "expert climate scientist", what on earth does?

Speaking of the eye of the beholder, at this point the reptiles flipped a switch and decided to go all personal in an attack on Gina's pet performing seals...

Polonius also flipped a switch.

While mad Malcolm might be right on the money when it came to climate science - you know a mechanical engineering degree makes for top notchc limate scientists - there were luckily a few other ways to have a go at him ... especially when he refused to accept the guidance of the Australian Daily Zionist News...

Despite his high-level education and training in the energy industry, Roberts expresses with confidence some untenable beliefs while occasionally going into denial about current and historical events. To rework a prevailing cliche, Roberts has seldom come across an extreme right-wing conspiracy theory that he did not embrace. Or at the very least consider it to be plausible. This is proving politically dangerous to One Nation now that there is talk that it could get close to, or even be in, government at some time.
Roberts has a history of making over-the-top statements. In recent times, they have been noticed increasingly as One Nation’s profile develops and extends beyond Hanson. Some recent examples illustrate the point.
I believe that (writing in these pages on May 9) I was the first to reveal that, in an interview with comedian Lisa Jane Spencer, Roberts said he did not have the evidence as to whether the Bondi Beach massacre was a false-flag event. My attention to this was drawn by a young friend.
The idea that Jewish agents were involved in murdering Jews and some others at Bondi Beach in December last year is preposterous. Yet Roberts told Spencer: “I haven’t got the evidence. I doubt whether it’s a false flag but it could be.” Not long after, Hanson had to clean up the mess and emphatically deny the false-flag fantasy.

So it's one thing to blather inanely about a global climate change conspiracy, and yet entirely insane to take up an anti-Semitic conspiracy?

And Gina's pet had to clean one of these messes, but not the other, the one that accorded with reptile thinking? The One Nation leader has had to clean up the mess. Picture: Martin Ollman

Polonius followed up with other examples of mad Malcolm's loonacy, but remember when it comes to climate science, in the Polonial universe, even a broken loon clock might be capable of getting it right:

On July 13, Nine newspapers journalist Rob Harris reported that Roberts had been interviewed by notorious extreme-right American conspiracist Alex Jones in October 2024. Roberts told Jones that his (Jones) credibility was “very, very high”. Jones is the man who claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut was a false-flag event or staged by actors. The attacker murdered 20 children and six adults.
In the interview, Roberts referred to “globalists” who were “unelected parasites”. An apparent antisemitic slur, concerning which Roberts may or may not be aware.
Writing in The Australian on July 16, Jack Quail reported that Roberts had said in a video that it was “highly likely” the US Air Force was spraying chemtrails. This conspiracy maintains that the US military is releasing deadly toxins as a means of depopulating the planet. Really.
And there’s more. Roberts told Efrat Fenigson’s You’re the Voice podcast in May 2024 that the United States was “the world’s greatest terrorist organisation now”. He said the US government “has been hijacked by the global parasites since 1913, and probably before”. Another implied allegation that the Jews dominate the world. Despite the fact there is not a skerrick of evidence that the US was responsible for the two world wars – concerning which it was neutral when the guns started firing on both occasions.
Roberts has also praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who graduated to President of Russia from the ranks of the Soviet Union’s secret police – the KGB. Roberts regards Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as another “globalist”. Zelensky happens to be Jewish, you see.
Hanson has distanced herself from some of Roberts’ statements. What’s more, in an interview on Radio National Breakfast on Thursday, Joyce demonstrated evident unease when asked to discuss Roberts’ political views.
The more important One Nation becomes, the more of a One Nation problem Roberts will become. He is a real difficulty for the Hanson-Joyce duo – and for Australia if he ever gains a significant office. How ironic that One Nation’s most educated politician is its weakest link.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Climate change right on, chemtrails, globalists of the lizard Oz kind, and Vlad the impaler a step too far!

How many times have how many reptiles moaned and whined about the way that Australia has gone woke? And yet there's Pauline in London rabbiting on to a small London audience, even smaller than the hive mind, about the woke.

As with Dame Slap and her kind, so with Gina's pet.

At a loose end, the pond noticed at the bottom of Polonius's offering a proposal for additional reading, and why not? The pond likes to set additional assignments for diligent herpetologists ... and some displayed canny reptile behaviour worth noting.

More Coverage

For once I agree with Pauline Hanson. I don’t want to live in Luton either
Pauline Hanson zeroes in on ‘super diverse’ UK town Luton for campaign to ‘protect’ Australia
Inside the ‘super diverse’ British town that the One Nation leader chose as the centrepiece of an anti-immigration campaign, the reality is more complicated.

The trick about this one is for the tinkling Trinca to make it all about the town of Luton, and not so much Gina's pampered pet spending time with a far right bigot ...

What a devoted follower the tinkling Trinka is ...

HANSON UK TOUR
Hanson speaks at London CPAC following controversial UK tour
The One Nation leader addressed the conservative conference amid domestic backlash over her comments on Islam and immigration.
By Helen Trinca

Oh that diversity rag, so insufferable ...

In a separate podcast recorded in April in Australia, Hanson declared that a lot of Islam is “based on terrorism”. It prompted Barnaby Joyce to disagree with his leader in an escalation of the chaos within One Nation.
Hanson has also courted controversy by breaking her tour and attending a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show in Sicily with billionaire backer Gina Rinehart. She also took a private tour of Blenheim Palace with former Neighbours actor Holly Vallance before visiting the satellite town of Luton with Robinson as part of a documentary to be shown on Australian TV on Sunday night. In the documentary, she says she was “gobsmacked” because Luton – which has a big population of British Asians and Blacks, did not look like Great Britain.

Also in that Polonial "more coverage" reading list?

Geoff chambering another shot ...

‘Do you slowly’: Labor’s plan to crush One Nation
Gearing up for a 2028 election, the PM takes a leaf from Paul Keating’s script in his plan to wrest votes from One Nation as support for Pauline Hanson’s party surges to a record high.

And the trick here is to pump up the perils provided by Gina's pampered pet by turning to crusader Joel, a man at the heart of the action...

Lessons our leaders must embrace to halt the One Nation juggernaut
One Nation won’t go away – here’s why that matters
Populism is not the problem. The real threat is much closer to home.

But the best trick in the "more coverage" read is to remind the hive mind just how much Polonius repeats himself these days.

Hop into the hive mind time machine:

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.

That "more coverage" routine is a heck of away to keep punters deep inside the hive mind ...

Here, have a break.

After all that, the pond had neither the stomach nor the room for a bonus, but dammit, whenever the pond hears the siren song of Bella and the cry of Western Civilisation, room must be made ...

The header: Ramsay’s $35m to fund courses where students will be taught to resent the very civilisation the fund was created to celebrate; In a betrayal of legacy, tens of millions of dollars earmarked to champion a cultural inheritance under fire will now pay for courses that actively do the opposite.

The caption for the cheap as chips illustration from the archives, showing an astonishingly accurate and true portrait taken from real life: William Page's Shakespeare Reading (1873-74). In Melbourne University’s Shakespeare in Performance course, the Bard is framed through, among other things, ‘issues of cultural politics and power’. Picture: Smithsonian Art Museum

Crusader Bella spent a bigly four minutes in agonising, agonised turmoil ...and the pond suffered with her ...

This week, university academics began the final phase of appropriating a significantly large bequeathment intended to finance the study of Western civilisation and spending it on indoctrinating students with the usual leftist dogma instead.
The money is from the $3bn estate of health industry doyen Paul Ramsay, who died in 2014, part of which he wanted to be spent on studying and promoting Western civilisation, arts and humanities.
The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was created in 2016, promising solid financial support for any university that adopted courses focusing on the Western canon. For its first seven years, the centre flourished under chief executive Simon Haines, a genuine humanities scholar who had spent decades teaching and thinking about literature, culture and human values.
Haines established courses at three universities – Australian Catholic University, the University of Wollongong and the University of Queensland – where newly hired departments of largely early-career lecturers and their students followed a classic great books style liberal arts curriculum, in stark contrast to the “politically correct” mindset that increasingly had been consuming humanities faculties since the late 1960s.

There has to be a villain in any lizard Oz column, and here he is, Martin Fahy, formerly the CEO of Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia.

What a sinister sort, and as for that blue tie, here no Western Civilisation, no Western Civilisation here. Efstoons, whatever happened to a taste for pantaloons?

Then came the despair, the outrage ...

However, his successor, Martin Fahy, announced this week that $35m of the centre’s funds soon will be directed to the University of Melbourne in the form of scholarships. This appears to be a good thing until you read the fine print: “All elements of the scholarship program will be administered and delivered by the University of Melbourne and no new degrees or majors will be developed,” the university announced.
In other words, the money will go chiefly to the Ramsay scholars, who will be funnelled into courses run by the usual suspects, teaching all-too-familiar tendentious material such as: Decolonising Art and Its Histories; Race and Gender: Philosophical Issues; and Britain’s Empire: Power and Resistance.
Could any one of these staff possibly deliver a lecture about the timelessness of Homer, the power of Shakespeare’s language or the complexity of Dostoyevsky’s thought? Or will they simply see and present Western civilisation through the same lenses as everything else: white colonial guilt, First Nations nobility, identity politics and environmental catastrophism?

Indeed, indeed.

The pond knew what was going down here, thanks to Dr Emily Hauser in the Graudian ...

A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard; Matt Damon’s sensitive and repentant Odysseus might come as a surprise to Homer, likewise some significant omissions concerning the poem’s female characters

...Turning the Odyssey into Odysseus’s troubled journey to become an empathic leader of men and a reluctant agent of the onward march of history isn’t just a Hollywood reorientation to the kind of flawed genius we’ve seen in Oppenheimer – it fundamentally tells us what Nolan sees, and wants us to see, as a hero. For audiences who are looking for a box-office smash with stunning visual action, epic proportions and a hero at the heart of it all, they will get it. Every reworking of Homer says what it wants to the people it is speaking to.
In the gap between the sung verses of Homer and Matt Damon declaiming to an Imax camera, what this Odyssey offers us, by way of a hero and the grandiloquent experience of epic cinema, is a man who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for a civilisation’s fall. Make of that, in the current climate, what you will.

Dammit, another serve of white imperial guilt coming from a minor king ...

The pond was reminded of other heroes, representing all that's decent, dinkum and right in Western Civilisation ...

Carry on bellyaching Bella ...

The English and theatre studies courses reveal the prevailing dogmatism of the university’s humanities curriculum. In Literary Canons: Then and Now, students are to “critically engage with the framework of the literary canon” and encouraged to understand the canon as a “hotly contested container for values, tastes, and traditions”, subject to “radical reorganisation and revaluation with time”.
Students expecting relief from critical theory will not find it in Romanticism, Feminism, Revolution, where they must read Byron, Blake, Bronte and Shelley through the prism of the “construction of modern notions of literature, culture, sexuality, emancipation and revolution”. In Shakespeare in Performance, the Bard is framed through, among other things, “issues of cultural politics and power”.

The pond was startled to learn that Melbourne University’s faculty of arts has long been dominated by an intellectual culture hostile to the West. Picture: University of Melbourne

This will surely come as a surprise to the Lynch mob, a noble member of Melbourne Uni's faculty of arts, but perhaps he is just an impotent wretch munching silently on corn dogs in some forgotten closet ...

And so to the final gobbet of despair ... the Anglosphere done down again, what with the Anglosphere full of contributions from the likes of Homer and Dostoyevsky, genuine Anglophiles, full of Anglish-ness ...

If this is the future that Fahy and his board are plotting for the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation then we must start preparing ourselves for its slow demise, at least in its current form. The consequences of this are profound. Any society that despises its own cultural heritage as much as our universities do, and as they teach their students to, is surely doomed.
Nothing in the Ramsay Centre’s published biography of Fahy suggests any scholarly background in Western civilisation, the Western canon, history, philosophy or the humanities in general.
Before Fahy took over the centre in 2024, his executive career was spent at Accenture, the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia and KPMG. His academic career was in accountancy-related fields far removed from the great books tradition the centre was established to defend. He may be exceptionally well qualified to oversee a technology transformation or implementation of an enterprise resource planning system, but it is difficult to see what in his background prepared him for the rather different task of inculcating in young Australians a love and understanding of their Western heritage.
No single student will walk away from Melbourne University’s Western civilisation scholarship program with a love or true understanding of Western civilisation.
What they will walk away with is a deep suspicion, resentment and even loathing of it. Like all humanities faculties across Australia, and indeed across the Anglosphere, the University of Melbourne’s faculty of arts has long been dominated by an intellectual culture hostile to the West, one that regards much of its legacy as oppressive and its inherited knowledge as illegitimate.
One of Ramsay’s major preoccupations, and the reason his executors allocated a portion of his $3bn endowment to establish the centre, was his belief that the humanities had been hijacked by academics who did not love the West.
And here we are, handing over tens of millions of dollars to the academic establishment that Ramsay understood to be part of the destructive apparatus eroding the civilisation he loved so much.
This is a betrayal of Ramsay’s legacy and of the spirit in which his extraordinary gift was made. But most tragically it is a betrayal of the young Australians for whom that gift was intended. They have already been deprived of so much of their cultural inheritance by an education system embarrassed by, or openly hostile to, the civilisation that formed them. Ramsay wanted to give some of that inheritance back. To take his fortune and use it to fund the intellectual culture he sought to counter would be the most bitter irony of all.

There came a reminder of Bella's taste for apocalyptic end times ...

Bella d’Abrera is the author of Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation (Wyborn Press, 2026).

Lost, rooned and only the Murdochians to hand to save the planet, climate change excepted.

And so to a couple of bonuses to the bonus, because the pond contends that the lizard Oz editorialist is the best guide to the heart of the hive mind ...

Poor beefy boofhead, how the reptiles hound him. And if not him, mad King Donald remains a Faux Noise marvel ...

And with that time for a few final 'toons celebrating the very best in Western Civilisation, worthy of a course run by the Lynch mob ...

What a lark, what a grift ...

And again ...