In which the flood water whisperer shows signs of fearing bottle red heads, while Killer Creighton cheerfully goes on nuking the country...

 

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 ...

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 ...

In which there's just a serve of the Bjørn-again one, AI and nattering "Ned", but isn't that more than enough?

A minor form of tragedy struck the pond's lizard Oz coverage this morning with the intermittent archive deciding to go fully intermittent, AWOL if you like, or MIA. (Sorry, it hadn't come good at the time the pond went live).

UPDATED: intermittent archive links added.

Usually the pond would assign dedicated students additional reading, safe in the knowledge that anyone wanting brain damage could follow the link to read Brownie's EXCLUSIVE about Gina's handsomely perked and pampered puppet, and poor Barners, Tamworth's endless shame:

EXCLUSIVE
Islam ‘based on terror’: Hanson sparks concern inside One Nation (*updated)
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

Moi, fearless medieval crusader?

The best the pond could do was offer the URL in the hope that the intermittent archive would come good, with the promise that the pond will check back in later in the day to see if the archive has returned to the fold:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Fpolitics%2Fislam-based-on-terror-pauline-hanson-sparks-concern-inside-one-nation%2Fnews-story%2Fc6beec346a3c5900e70f407026b295c5?amp

Ditto several more stories, what with the reptiles always ready to seize on any renewables angle to terrify the hive mind and always ready to give TG folk a hearty bashing:

EXCLUSIVE
‘At what cost?’: Green energy project threatens 66 species (*updated)
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

Aw, look at the liddle frog, how cute, and how caring are these reptiles, such dedicated environmentalist, and nothing at all to do with their deep desire to do down renewables, net zero and the whole damn thing, but sorry, this is all the pond has by way of access:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business%2Frenewable-energy-economy%2Fnsw-renewable-energy-project-could-hasten-66-species-to-extinction-scientists-warn%2Fnews-story%2F6e5205fc8f35d8466ed03ea1e1dc7c2d?amp

And the pond's refusal to indulge in TG bigotry means the latest example of Rice on the boil must go un-noted:

DEFAMATION VOW
‘Demonisation’: JK Rowling hits back at Amnesty report (*updated)
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

Again apologies:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world%2Fjk-rowling-vows-to-fund-lawsuits-against-amnesty-over-trans-hate-report%2Fnews-story%2F5a4cf587d181002a0fe549ed6e71ea1a?amp

There was one true thing noted in the story:

Amnesty International Australia also supports the Trans Justice Project, an organisation founded by campaigner Jackie Turner, who claims that The Australian, among other mainstream media outlets, is part of the “anti-trans lobby”.

Well yes, and so anyone who can't access that boiling Rice can relax, because there'll be another TG hit piece on the morrow. When you're deep into transphobia, one serve of the Kool-aid is never enough.

Unfortunately the pond also tends to refuse to go along with items fresh from the Australian Daily Zionist News, what with this dog botherer offering typical:

Mr Williams, tear down this stonewalling partisanship (*updated)
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)

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Fpolitics%2Fmr-williams-tear-down-this-stonewalling-partisanship%2Fnews-story%2Faae4458e77c85223fb695ec80f195205?amp

Astonishing really, that blather about "stonewalling partisanship" from a rag full of reptiles who offer nothing but.

Sometimes just looking at the headlines revealing the lizard Oz's singular monoculture can be truly depressing.

One thing that was missing from the top of the digital edition? 

King Donald going full conspiracy theory loopy:

Thank you immortal Rowe for that chance to singalong, and now to get down wit it ...

The pond supposes all those reptile hacks hacking away constitutes a form of projection, but now would like to turn to another old favourite singalong, the Bjørn-again one, and in the process, also have a bash at Google's AI:

The header: Climate change isn’t taking food off your table; The headlines say climate change is wiping out your coffee and olive oil. The long-term data says the opposite.
One thing's certain: that image shows that AI is coming for the lizard Oz graphics department: The message is unmistakeable: Global warming is coming for your family’s dinner table.

What's the trouble with this? Apart from it being only three minutes long, so the distilled essence of BS was such a small portion?

Well if you look at the opening two sentences of the Bjørn-again one's screed...

No morning ritual is safe from climate alarm. The journal Nature just declared that coffee is “critically threatened by climate change” and described scientists racing to save your espresso from “extinction”. The New York Times blames sky-high coffee prices on climate-driven supply crunches in Brazil and Vietnam.

... you might end up being immediately triggered, and embark on a search, and this is what you will score, or at least it was the AI swill served up to the pond ...

And down below that you'll get links, and pretty pictures taken straight from the lizard Oz, and reminders of just how the Bjørn-again one circulates through the intertubes like algae in a reflecting pool...

What you won't get is a link to the Nature article referenced by the Bjørn-again one.

The reptiles resolutely refuse to do links to the outside world, they don't want anyone to leave the hive mind, but here's a teaser trailer for those who do ...

And you certainly won't get a link to an earlier Nature story, which in the usual way would have been saved to the archive, but is currently MIA ...

NEWS
16 January 2019
Wild coffee species threatened by climate change and deforestation (*sorry, not intermittent archive friendly, but try this paper, High extinction risk for wild coffee species and implications for coffee sector sustainability, and this ABC summary)

The extinction of wild species could jeopardize the viability of commercial coffee varieties.

Now the pond could keep doing this all day, but decided not to bother with doing the same to the Bjørn-again one's "olive" angle. 

The point is that both the Bjørn-again one, and little Sir Echo AI, are in the business of polluting the full to overflowing intertubes ...

And your olive oil? CNN and Bloomberg wail about a seemingly permanent “crisis”, with Mediterranean droughts foretelling a future in which an everyday staple vanishes for good.
The message is unmistakeable: Global warming is coming for your family’s dinner table, and only sweeping climate policy can save it. The message is also wrong.
Cut through the hype, and food is not only more plentiful but its inflation-adjusted cost also is near historic lows relative to any time since 1900.
Start with coffee, supposedly on its deathbed. This year, global coffee production is expected to set yet another record – more than double the world’s output of 50 years ago. Crops on the brink of extinction don’t deliver record harvests. And despite recent price bumps, the real price of coffee has trended downward since 1960. Adjusted for inflation, coffee this century has cost on average half of what it cost in the past century.

The reptiles compounded all this nonsense by reverting to the most banal stock images they could find admittedly a match for the nonsense being peddled by the Bjørn-again one, No morning ritual is safe from climate alarm. Picture: Getty Images

The Bjørn-again one kept on pushing the line of 'adaptation and improvement', as if that was the answer to it all, as if was the only way forward:

How do outlets such as The New York Times get it so wrong? By inexcusably ignoring inflation – comparing coffee prices from the 1970s, expressed in the dollars of that day, with prices expressed in today’s dollars.
By that standard, everything is at a record high, always.
Even Nature’s own reporting on coffee undercuts its ominous headline detailing “how scientists are fighting to save it from extinction”. Ethiopia keeps more than 12,000 arabica plants in living gene banks for breeding heat and drought-tolerant varieties.
“I believe we have enough gene pool to fight climate change,” the Ethiopian plant geneticist leading the effort says.
Farmers in hotter regions already are switching to hardier coffee species that professional tasters can’t distinguish from fine arabica. That isn’t extinction. It is what agriculture has always been: adaptation and improvement.
The supposed olive oil crisis collapses under the same scrutiny. According to UN food statistics, global olive oil production has tripled since 1961 and doubled since 1990. Last year and this year, together with the exceptional 2018 harvest, mark record highs for production of olive oil. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted prices have not increased and have even slightly declined since 1990.

The reptiles decided that a banal cup of coffee wasn't enough ... so they flung in a banal snap of olives fresh from the cheapest of stock footage archives ... The supposed olive oil crisis collapses under scrutiny. Picture: Getty Images

And yet in an idle moment the pond asked AI about olive growing in Greece and Spain, and this is what came back ...

This is how the world will end, not with a bang, but an AI whimper serving whatever swill has struggled to the surface, aided by the Bjørn-again one and the lizard Oz flooding the zone with BS.

A nanosecond after getting back to the Bjørn-again one, the pond was again triggered ...

Again, better farming and expanded cultivation outweigh any climate effect.

In that line the reptiles provided a link, naturally to a yarn within the lizard Oz hive mind, which the pond can only provide a URL for ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business%2Ftechnology%2Fdata-centre-boom-puts-21bn-of-prime-australian-farmland-at-risk%2Fnews-story%2F0e5dfa6728eae3c86aa0f2678480f678?amp

The pond can at least provide a teaser trailer ... and it can now provide an intermittent archive link...

WTF?

How does that help the Bjørn-again one's case, or make a case for AI?

And so to more both siderism, and a standard billy goat butt:

Food scare stories follow a formula: Take an isolated weather event, attribute it to global warming, skip inflation adjustment and ignore the long-term data. Natural year-to-year swings driven by economics, trade policy and subsidies get repackaged as apocalyptic trends. Rarely mentioned: Much of the real price pressure on food comes from fertiliser and transport costs – inflated, ironically, by climate policies that raise fossil fuel energy bills for the essentials of farming.
Never mentioned: the ways climate change helps crops. Carbon dioxide is plant food, which is why commercial growers pump extra carbon dioxide into greenhouses to produce more tomatoes.
NASA satellites show that the planet has been greening for four decades, meaning the world has added additional leaves with an area equivalent to that of at least two times the Amazon rainforest.
Climate change, on balance, will hurt agriculture. But its impact is dwarfed by rising productivity. One highly cited study in Nature finds that without any climate change, global food-calorie production will increase 51 per cent between 2010 and 2050. With extreme, unrealistic warming, it still increases by 49 per cent.
Across all models and scenarios, the difference in calories available per person amounts to one-tenth of 1 per cent.
That’s because humanity keeps getting better at growing food. Cereal production has more than quintupled across the past century while real food prices have more than halved. The Green Revolution of the 1960s turned famine-prone nations into exporters through the widespread adoption of high-yield crop varieties, alongside expanded use of chemical fertilisers and improved irrigation.

The reptiles kept up their pathetic visuals ... Cereal production has more than quintupled across the past century. Picture: Getty Images

And the Bjørn-again one rounded off his denialist screed ...

India, once written off as a basket case dependent on food aid, quadrupled its rice production between 1961 and 2023 and is today the world’s largest rice exporter. Daily calorie availability per person has climbed from less than 2200 in 1961 to more than 2900 now. Global undernourishment has plummeted from roughly one in four people in the developing world in the early 1990s to fewer than 10 per cent today.
The task now is to finish the job. Innovation should extend to under-researched crops such as sorghum, cassava and millet – staples for two billion people in the developing world that have been largely ignored by commercial breeders. Investment in biotech, precision agriculture and drought-resistant crop varieties will do far more for the world’s poor – and for your grocery bill – than any emissions target.
We can keep feeding more people, better, by doubling down on what actually works: innovation.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.

Not that old crap about innovation as the answer to it all.

The pond felt in the need of a bath, with that reading a bit like listening to mad King Donald ...

And so to the real reason the pond couldn't look at everything this day.

After a week of flogging his tome,  there again came "Ned", and even dedicated herpetologists might well stick up their hand and ask to leave the room.

The pond knows the reptiles deemed it important, because early on the weekend, it was top of the digital world ma ...

But as soon as the pond clicked on it, there came that familiar feeling of nausea at having to endure an endless bout of "Ned's" natter...

The header: Liberals’ looming battle for nation’s future; Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s path back to government depends on a gamble that hasn’t been tried before: differentiation.
The caption for the credited truly feeble collage. Just stop it Emilia, stop it: Angus Taylor’s dilemma is that he cannot get clear political air to attack Anthony Albanese because the stage is dominated by Pauline Hanson – yet if he cannot win the battle with Hanson to dominate the centre-right of politics then his ability to criticise Albanese is ruin­ed anyway. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

This "Ned" Everest climb took at least 11 minutes to wade through and had some 12 visual distractions of some kind, and all because Gina's puppet Pauline had taken the lizard Oz agenda - climate science denialism, fear of furriners, dislike of uppity blacks, and assorted other forms of bigotry - and run with them, and now the reptiles and their pet, the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, didn't know how to cope.

The next election should become a defining choice on what sort of economic and social model the Australian people want for their future. But this assumes the election will be a contest between the competing agendas of Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor – a situation far from guaranteed.
Taylor’s dilemma is that he cannot get clear political air to attack the Albanese government because the stage is dominated by Pauline Hanson – yet if he cannot win the battle with Hanson to dominate the centre-right of politics then his ability to criticise Albanese is ruin­ed anyway.

At this point in the saucy doubts and fears saga came the second of the visual interruptions: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has advised Opposition Leader Angus Taylor to stand up to One Nation during Question Time on Tuesday. “My job isn’t to give advice to this bloke,” Mr Albanese said. “But my advice is, how about you stand up to One Nation on something?”

It was like enduring a therapy session:

Virtually every public performance by Taylor is bedevilled by this dilemma. Taylor, marketing his economic policy, is fighting on two fronts – as the formal opposition against the Albanese government and against Hanson, whose polling support threatens the survival of the Liberals.
This raises the question: how much should Taylor attack Hanson’s party and its policies? Some Liberals worry that being more aggressive against One Nation just alienates Hanson’s voters and keeps them locked into her.
In reality, the Liberals cannot ignore Hanson’s policy incapacity to meet the challenges facing Australia and that means they must prosecute an aggressive line against One Nation – along with the freak show being exposed on the party’s fringes from the activities of One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts.

But, butt, gigantic butt, billy goat, Malcolm Roberts is just a logical extension of the Bjørn-again one, the Riddster, Lloydie of the Amazon and all the other climate science deniers featured over the past couple of decades in the lizard Oz ... Hanson was called to repudiate Malcolm Roberts – who has frequently espoused fringe views during his parliamentary career – after it was revealed this week that he promoted the works of a renowned Holocaust denier in an essay. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Those aren't fringe views, those are the sorts of views you'll encounter every day in the lizard Oz when the reptiles take on the task of being One Nation's official policy newspaper ...

Virtually every political commentator recognises Taylor’s cut-through problem with his messaging. But Taylor will be the beneficiary of two big trends shaping the next 12 months. The first is the more intense scrutiny being applied to Hanson’s policies and behaviour, with evidence of a degree of internal unravelling likely to result over time in a further fall in her party’s vote.
The second is the grim economic outlook, with the entrenched structural defects from Labor’s policies now far more apparent, leading to weak economic growth, declining real wages, subdued produc­tivity and persistent inflation accentuated by the Middle East war that is exposing our vulnerabilities.
RedBridge director corporate affairs Tony Barry told Inquirer: “At present the Coalition is coming third. It needs to be coming second to be competitive. We are starting to see the contours shifting around the One Nation vote. I think we’ve seen the ceiling of her vote at 31 per cent but that the floor of her vote is going to be higher than people realise. I would think it is still in the teens and that it won’t collapse back to the 6 to 8 per cent levels.
“A recent poll we did showed 63 per cent saying Australia was heading in the wrong direction. The focus groups have people saying ‘my kids won’t have it as good as I did’ and that’s a statement about what’s happening now. There’s a protracted pessimism in the electorate. The key rule in politics is to differentiate from your opponent but the Liberals have still not sufficiently done this.”

If "Ned" cares so much, why do the reptiles always use a snap of the beefy boofhead that verges on the defamatory? Taylor is completely right to go bold on policy, but there are now signs of a tactical mistake by delaying rather than unveiling fresh initiatives. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Coach "Ned" thought the beefy boofhead had turned radical and far right, but really all he's doing is fitting in with the lizard Oz and its One Nation policies ...

Differentiation – this is now Taylor’s focus. Indeed, he is betting the future of the Liberal Party on his plan to build an economic, tax, immigration and climate policy that offers a dramatic structural difference from Labor’s ideology, possibly one of the sharpest policy differences for several decades.
This was apparent in Taylor’s recent speech to the Sydney Institute. It spanned four domains dominated by structural policy changes: lower personal income tax by indexing the rates – that’s an annual tax cut; smaller government driven by a Future Generations Fund that locks away 80 per cent of commodity revenue windfalls annually, which means they can’t be spent, with the proceeds going to debt reduction; tying lower immigration levels to housing construction; and dismantling Labor’s net-zero policies, its renewable energy targets, its EV tax rebate and its extensive bureaucracy, the Capacity Investment Scheme, the Rewiring the Nation Fund and its Net Zero Economy Authority.
This will develop as a comprehensive attack on the ideological foundations of Labor’s economic policy – the complete reversal of the Coalition’s 2025 election agenda. The strategy is to regain the lost Liberal Party strengths on the economy, tax and living standards. The purpose is to challenge Labor front-on and to marginalise Hanson’s party as irrelevant.
It is already obvious, this is a radical agenda with more to come. For instance, the combination of tax indexation and the Future Generations Fund means that fiscal drag is returned to individual taxpayers and commodity revenue surges are largely locked into debt reduction – eliminating the rivers of revenue gold that have financed Labor’s big government.
Like all radical agendas it comes with electoral risk. Taylor is completely right to go bold on policy, but there are now signs of a tactical mistake by delaying rather than unveiling fresh initiatives. Taylor, moreover, has made only limited progress with the public. He lacks skill and impact as a retail politician able to market the policy ideas his leadership has generated. The best policy agenda doesn’t work without communication cut-through.

Of course Gina's pandered pet and pawn makes for an easy target, as does Tamworth's eternal, never ending shame ... One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was this week spotted alongside Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart at a $2500-a-night resort on the Sicilian coast; One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce in June. Mr Joyce has produced a party definition of an acceptable monoculture. Picture: Getty Images

But they're just doing what comes naturally to the mad King Donald, Nige and Emeritus Chairman class ... and "Ned's" cluck-clucking and tut-tutting won't change that ...

The past week has further exposed Hanson as unsuited to any role in executive government. Hopes that Hanson might change her behaviour to appeal to a wider public have been spectacularly trashed. There has always been a recklessness about Hanson, who has long traded on the shock value in her populism, and this is confirmed yet again.
Pity Barnaby Joyce in his quest to impose discipline and coherence on One Nation’s policies, a task even more forlorn.
In Britain, Hanson teamed up with convicted criminal, thug and racist Tommy Robinson in a campaign of mutual praise and support, provoking a devastating critique from Sky News host Andrew Bolt. It is past time Hanson was held to account for her behaviour. Can you imagine the calls for their resigna­tion as leaders if Albanese or Taylor behaved like this? It prompts another question: For how long will a number of prominent Australians persist with their support or apologies for Hanson as an acceptable figure in a future government?

Sheesh, no rebrand yet for Sky Noise down under, and yet it's home to the weird sight of the far right Bolter berating Gina's pet for being far right? Sky News host Andrew Bolt accuses One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson of failing to effectively address the issues of multiculturalism and mass immigration. “Pauline Hanson has blown it, and I am so frustrated. Mass immigration and multiculturalism, we finally had a chance to discuss these important issues seriously,” Mr Bolt said. “What an opportunity is being thrown away. I mean, who seriously thinks the Liberals will now dare to talk about multiculturalism … I think the air is going out of the Hanson balloon. “Things may change … but they will change a lot unless Hanson drops the stunts and learns that for her to just be normal will now be mad enough.”

She's a failure because she doesn't know how to do Bolter bigotry the right way?

Only in lizard Oz la la land.

The reality is that the beefy boofhead, and the reptiles, don't know how to deal with a wild card who's taken the reptile agenda on board, and run with it ...

Hanson retreated from Britain to Sicily for a luxury break associating with her prime financial backer, Gina Rinehart, while lamenting the cost-of-living pressures on ordinary people. Hanson has become a cultural celebrity, revelling in its benefits but highly vulnerable to its risks. Above all Hanson, while politically clever, never changes her core character.
Don’t doubt, however, the obstacle she poses to the Liberal Party’s revival. Interviewed last Monday by Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s 7.30, Taylor kept hesitating before finally ruling out any prospect the Liberals would consider a form of coalition government with One Nation. “There is no plan,” Taylor kept saying, “no plan for a deal with One Nation to form government”.
There is no more critical question for the Liberal Party’s future. Would the Liberals govern with One Nation, as many Hanson supporters delude themselves into believing? Taylor won’t even entertain such an idea. Finally, he told Ferguson: “I’m ruling it out.”

As if you could believe any ruler this man touched, let alone whether he's using the ruler to rule things in or out ... Opposition Leader Angus Taylor addresses his attack on Pauline Hanson’s policies, claiming a One Nation government would deliver an “eternity of pain” for Australians.

The pond doesn't blame the beefy boofhead, who isn't the sharpest long horn in the back paddock. The pond blames the festering far right culture the reptiles have fostered ...

The only plan is for a Liberal and National Coalition. Frankly, Taylor needs to keep ruling it out until everybody gets the point. The Liberals have an obligation to make clear to the Australian people who they are prepared to govern with and who they won’t govern with.
That means a veto on governing with Hanson. If that upsets some One Nation voters it can’t be helped. It also means rebutting Labor’s propaganda that the Liberals would only form a government in partnership with Hanson. Of course, having One Nation offer confidence to a Liberal-National Coalition government is a separate and understandable position; likewise preferences arrangements.
Nobody could doubt Taylor’s real attitude towards One Nation given his Sydney Institute speech. Having declared Australia is “in the grip of an economic crisis”, Taylor lumped Hanson with Labor and the Greens as leading a party that will “only make things worse”.
His message was defining and defiant – that One Nation is the problem, not the solution. Taylor listed One Nation’s policy sins: that the party “would send us broke”, that its real beliefs reside in “big government interventionism” (like Labor) and spending tantamount to an extra $1 trillion over 10 years, that its promises would trigger higher inflation, the jacking up of interest rates, punishing the household budgets of ordinary workers and provoking a financial crisis with an explosion of spending and debt. Taylor warned voters that “an eternity of pain” would follow a One Nation government. He invoked a truism: when governments cannot finance their policies it is the citizens “who ultimately suffered the consequences”.
Most reactions to Taylor’s speech missed the point. Many people seemed to think he was merely putting some tactical distance between himself and Hanson – and that this was most unwise. Yet his real point was obvious: the Liberals would not tolerate Hanson’s economic policies. This was a rejection of One Nation on policy and philosophical grounds.

Oh pull the other philosophical leg, as the reptiles visually defamed the beefy boofhead again ... The implication from Taylor’s remarks is that One Nation’s economics are worse than Labor’s. Picture: John Gass

How desperate did it get?

Comparing Gina's pet to the greenies? Even "Ned" had to come up with a distancing You can agree or disagree with Taylor...

Taylor said Hanson’s party was “a lot like the Greens” – they made irresponsible promises because they had no governing mentality. You can agree or disagree with Taylor, but there’s no dispute about what he meant. Casting One Nation as a problem for Australia meant any prospect of forming a coalition government with Hanson was inconceivable. While Taylor didn’t say this, the implication from his remarks is that One Nation’s economics are worse than Albanese’s.
In the moral and intellectual turmoil of centre-right culture, many people will no doubt conclude such sentiments mean Taylor should be ditched as Liberal leader. Yet the warning signs are flashing on Labor policies where it is trapped by its beliefs. Its commitment to bigger government has throttled productivity levels. The recent budget revealed Australia locked into slow economic growth fluctuating about 2 per cent but this weak performance now looks too optimistic.
The recent Deloitte Access Economics report predicted the longest stretch of sub 2 per cent growth since the 1990s recession and identified the vulnerabilities of rising inflation, weak living standards and the resurgent energy crisis from the Iranian war.
Deloitte partner Stephen Smith highlighted the nation’s structural weakness: “For too long, strong population growth has masked a weak underlying productivity performance and lifted aggregate growth while doing less to improve living standards. Years of insufficient investment in housing, infrastructure, energy and the economy’s productive capacity have left the supply side of the economy struggling to keep pace with demand. The result is an economy more prone to inflation pressures at lower rates of growth.”

Still the entirely meaningless visual distractions kept flowing, Australia’s consumer confidence has fallen. Picture: NewsWire / John Appleyard

Coach "Ned" did his best to help the beefy boofhead:

The OECD has recently found that since 2021 Australia’s post-Covid decline in real wages reached 5 per cent, one of the worst results among developed nations. Australia desperately needs a productivity boost, hence Albanese’s new commitment to artificial intelligence – yet the same risks are apparent: regulatory overkill that limits the benefits.
Pivotal to Labor’s entrenched legacy is its prioritisation of redistribution over growth, an instinct that seems embedded in contemporary Labor; witness the recent budget. Meanwhile the Parliamentary Budget Office has punched a hole in the budget’s credibility, warning that even the long wait to return to surplus in 2034-35 is unlikely and based on unrealistic assumptions.
All these are rich political targets for Taylor and the Liberals. How could they get this wrong? Well, we know the answer from past failures.
Taylor holds the Albanese government to account for initiating “a radical restructuring of Australian society”, its nexus being how much bigger government embeds low productivity and stagnant living standards.

And then came the explicit endorsement of the climate science denialism that Gina's pet has run with .. There has been a seismic shift in the electorate’s thinking about climate and energy policy since the second Trump administration and the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.

You might think that "Ned" would want to talk about the way that mad King Donald has helped focus minds on EVs, just as assorted heat domes and climate disasters and wild fires in Canada have focussed minds on climate change, but no, Gina's pet has the policies that Dan "the man" Tehan also loves ...

Come on down, Dan "the man", help out "Ned":

The convoluted state of our politics seems to misread a truth about the Albanese government – that Albanese plays the long game. While the left and many progressives agitate about Albanese being too cautious and devoid of uplifting reforms that excite the true believers, his method is the steady, slow march to reorient the nation.
If Albanese serves three full terms, have no doubt that Australia at the end of this period will be a far different nation from 2022 and stamped with an indelible Labor brand.
Hence Taylor’s campaign to attack what he sees as the root cause of our malaise – the shift from free enterprise to a command-and-control model. He says the public wants change, but the key question is: What sort of change? Taylor identifies three options: sticking with the evolving Labor model; falling for the Hanson trap and blowing up the joint; or backing an aspirational Liberal agenda of lower tax, lower immigration, restrained spending and lower energy costs.
Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan told Inquirer the Liberals would engineer a sweeping new energy policy: “I believe energy sovereignty has become a key factor in the public’s attitude. There has been a seismic shift in the electorate’s thinking about climate and energy policy since the second Trump administration and the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Labor’s energy policy means higher prices and is making the nation poorer. Under our policy, the EV tax rebate (providing an FBT exemption for electric vehicles) will be abolished as well as the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard that is basically a carbon tax (to boost the supply of fuel-efficient and electric vehicles).
“We have oil, gas, coal and uranium reserves that we are more than happy to sell to the rest of the world but put serious limits on their use in Australia. This doesn’t make sense. We will lift the ban on nuclear and establish a commission to advise on a private sector led nuclear industry with strict government controls over safety and capital. We won’t pursue the policy from the last election of six nuclear power plants, government-funded and run.

Still with nuking the country to save the planet, except that in reptile bizarro world the planet doesn't need saving, and according to "Ned", it seems that mad King Donald hasn't been dissuaded from his latest bit of off-the-cuff policy making ... Economists warn Donald Trump's plan to charge a 20 per cent levy on cargo shipped through the Strait of Hormuz could increase the price of fuel by at least 10c per litre in Australia.

Luckily mad King Donald backed away from making liddle Marco, JD and all the rest blathering about international law sound like epic fools,

And luckily that was the last illustration, the last collage, and luckily it was uncredited, because it's likely AI, another way the reptiles are trying to ruin the planet ...

"Ned" left it with Dan "the man" Tehan, sounding like he was channeling Gina's pampered pet ...

“On coal, our policy is to sweat the existing plants as is being done by some state governments. We will let the market be the determinant on new coal, the point being our policy will be absolutely technologically neutral.
“We reject Labor’s ideological pursuit of 82 per cent of renewables by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Nobody believes the 82 per cent is achievable. While the Albanese government wants us to lead on emission reductions, our policy is to run emission reductions consistent with what OECD nations are doing. That means we will wait some time and only go into the details closer to the election since many nations are not meeting their targets.”
Tehan said the Capacity Investment Scheme would be abolished. He branded it “a secret fund set up by Labor where taxpayers had no knowledge and no understanding of the liabilities being incurred” given the scheme operated as a commercial-in-confidence support for selected projects.
Branding the scheme a “disgrace” Tehan said in office a Liberal government would make public its overall liabilities (not of individual projects). He said the opposition wanted a policy not just for wind and solar but that prioritised baseload power and technological neutrality.
He said the Net Zero Economy Authority and the Rewiring the Nation Fund would go. Tehan said the RTN providing low-cost finance to build new transmission lines operated “without any social licence and had governments riding roughshod over communities”.
“The bigger point here is that this government won’t put an estimate on the cost of getting to net zero by 2050,” Tehan said. “It pursues an ideological agenda, won’t reveal its cost to the economy and shows no concern about the cost.”

And so the spirit of Gina, Pauline, and the Bjørn-again one continues to run rampant through the lizard Oz ... as if the reptiles were taking their cues from mad King Donald and Faux Noise ...

And here's an oddity the pond's logarithms turned up ...