Desperate times.
How desperate?
Look at the top of the lizard Oz early this weekend morning ...
Make coal great again or China gets your data: Hanson
Pauline Hanson has warned Australian data centres will collapse without coal power, as the Coalition faces internal pressure over its dramatic net-zero backflip.
By Geoff Chambers and Elizabeth Pike
Shock intervention as UN enters Woodside LNG battle
UN rapporteur intervenes in Federal Court case over Woodside's gas project
In a dramatic first for Australian courts, a UN climate expert has stepped into the legal fights over Woodside’s massive gas project extension.
By Paul Garvey
All those EXCLUSIVES did was remind the pond of a yarn in Crikey yesterday by Daanyal Saeed ...Inside News Corp’s Senate grilling, as the company denies it denies climate change, News Corp bosses faced the heat of a Senate inquiry into information integrity on climate change and energy in a Sydney hotel. Naturally, Crikey went along. (sorry, paywall)
The hearing, held at the city’s Grace Hotel, started slightly behind time owing to Nationals Senator Matt Canavan’s traffic woes, but quickly devolved into an interrogation of News Corp’s coverage of natural disasters over the past decade, the views of the Murdoch family on climate change, and whether News Corp employs climate deniers.
Asked about submissions to the inquiry from academics and scientists that had suggested News Corp had “mainstreamed climate misinformation or disinformation for decades”, Miller said “a lot of those papers are based on the opinions of others”.
“I defend their right to have those opinions, I don’t necessarily agree with those opinions,” he said, before going on to explain that he didn’t accept the premise that News Corp platforms climate disinformation.
Asked about a blistering leaked internal News Corp email from 2020, addressed to Miller, that accused the company of a “misinformation campaign” on climate change amid the Black Summer bushfires, Miller said that what the email referred to specifically was a question for the author — a former commercial finance manager named Emily Townsend.
In respect of the criticism that the company platformed theories that arson was primarily responsible for the Black Summer bushfires, Miller said the company had published 3,335 stories about the bushfires between September 1, 2019 and January 23, 2020, 12% of which discussed climate change, and 3% that mentioned arsonists.
“I take the assertions seriously … I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t correct,” he said.
“We cover a diversity of views, whether it be news.com.au, which is our biggest news brand, or whether it be The Australian, whether it be the Hobart Mercury, or the NT News. There are a range of views that are expressed across our various mastheads, and not just the views of our columnists and opinion writers. That is fine because healthy democracies are built on healthy debate.”
Following the Townsend affair, James Murdoch, son of News Corp emeritus chair Rupert, criticised his family’s news outlets as perpetuating “ongoing denial” of climate change in its Australian outlets. At the time, the younger Murdoch was on the board of News Corp, but later that year resigned over “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions”.
Asked about James Murdoch’s position, Miller said he was “on the record” that “climate change is real”.
“So has Rupert Murdoch, so has Lachlan Murdoch”, he said, referring to the two more conservative and powerful members of the Murdoch family. Lachlan is widely considered his father’s favourite owing to his politics being more aligned.
Miller told the committee that, as he said in 2020, he didn’t “believe that James Murdoch was reading our titles to come to that conclusion, he was possibly reading social media”.
“If he picked up the phone and asked [me], I would have given him a more detailed answer.”
Asked directly about News’ coverage of the bushfires, Miller said “our journalists did a fantastic job, as a lot of Australian media did, in supporting the communities that were impacted by those bushfires.
“We gave vital information, we provided care, and we went to the front line when others didn’t go there. I’m going to stand up for our journalists, and the journalists of many media, who did a great job covering a global event.”
Reid, a former editor of two News Corp Australia mastheads and a four-decade loyalist of the company, stepped in and said, to his recollection, “there was never an assertion made by any of our publications that arson was responsible for this event”. Reid is now a group executive of corporate affairs, policy and government relations for News Corp Australia...
Hold it right there, shameless liars gotta lie, distort, dissemble and offer disinformation ... but please ...
Sure it got past the panderers, forelock tuggers and knee benders at the Press Council ... but look who's doing climate science denialist duties today.
And so, as denialist denial of denialism night must pass, so must come denialist day doing what denialists must do.
Come on down, unreformed seminarian and professional denialist Ughmann ...
The header: Net zero is a blueprint for poverty that repeats the folly of zero-Covid, Australia's ambitious net-zero targets face the same reality check that demolished zero-Covid predictions, with mounting evidence they cannot be achieved.
The caption for the snap designed to evoke a Killer of the IPA fear of masks (and possibly vaccines): None of the apocalyptic Covid forecasts came to pass. Australia reopened, the health system worked, society normalised and immunity strengthened. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling
The Ughmann opened with a Killer flourish:
Remember the zero-Covid crowd? Where are they now? Do they have Zoom call reunions where everyone wears their favourite mask as they chant “Staying apart keeps us together” before bemoaning a world awash with a disease it now, mostly, ignores?
Actually the pond wishes that occasionally users of public transport in Australia followed the example of Japanese mask-wearers.
When the pond first visited Japan, the pond was astonished, and delighted, to discover that it was the custom for those who felt sick - especially during crowded rush hours - to wear a mask, a form of politeness towards fellow travellers.
The government lifted mandatory mask requirements in March 2023 but polite Japanese people continue the custom, and nothing wrong with that.
It might have stopped the pond from catching a bout of flu when sitting next to a heedless coughing, spluttering boofhead on a 428 bus.
But no doubt the Ughmann is delighted to spread flu, colds and other ailments together with a serve of denialism ...
In December 2022 the group wrote an open letter to national cabinet warning that its planned easing of restrictions, after two years of wrenching intrusions into people’s lives, was “unconscionable”. It claimed that immunity from vaccination and infection could not protect the community as measures were lifted, that Covid could never be treated like other respiratory illnesses, and that the health system would buckle unless mask mandates, laboratory-based testing and a bevy of other controls were maintained.
“Australia is doomed to worsening acute and chronic disease and mortality,” the group wrote. This was said at a time when 95 per cent of Australians aged 16 and over had received two vaccine doses, one of the highest coverage rates in the world.
Note the terrifying windmills, note the hot burning sun destined never to be harnessed in a reptile world.
No one can predict the future. And the past shows most of the lingering damage from Covid came from the alleged cures, not the disease. If we had continued listening to expert demagogues, even more harm would have been heaped on the community.
The alleged cures? He doesn't have the courage to come out in full Robert Kennedy anti-vax mode, but the pond gets the message.
Is it too much to ask the Ughmann to read about the impact of Long Covid?
Probably, a bit like asking him to do actual climate science research, get out into the field and scribble the odd peer-reviewed paper, because after that Covid flourish, Ughmann cultists know what's to follow ...
But, as the energy analysts at Doomberg like to say, zero is an emotional number, and many are deeply attached to its carbon elimination iteration, net zero, though not one person in a thousand could tell you what it means. This goal is an even more insidious drive to re-engineer society than zero Covid, built on the same dogma that complex systems can be bent to political will and that populations can be coerced into compliance.
To help with the shift from Covid to climate science denialism, the reptiles flung in a snap of that solar-worshipping Satanist, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Then it was on with the usual:
Covid was a brutal illustration of what it takes to cut carbon emissions in a world that runs on fossil fuels. In the past three decades emissions have only paused their relentless upward march twice: during the global financial crisis, and when the world economy was shuttered for the disease.
Recessions cut emissions because the wealth of the world is directly linked to the energy it consumes. That is why the Goldilocks temperature set as the baseline for measuring global warming is the pre-industrial era. History teaches one iron law: nations with abundant energy get rich; those without it are poor.
The major achievement in a quarter of a century of trying to limit emissions is to shift the point of production. China grew wealthy and powerful as the West outsourced the furnaces of industry. It now consumes 56 per cent of the world’s coal. In the decade to 2024 it was responsible for more than two-thirds of global demand growth for oil and one-third of the global increase in demand for natural gas. And in 2024 the world burned more coal, oil and gas in a single year than ever before in human history.
China now produces 32 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions but that signal of energy abundance helped Beijing secure one-third of the globe’s manufacturing. According to the German Economic Institute, 150 out of 181 countries had a merchandise trade deficit with China in 2023.
So far, the energy transition is a giant Ponzi scheme and the net result is rising emissions and a strategically stupid gift of industrial, economic and military power to Beijing. Despite the evidence, highly intelligent people living in a world marinated in fossil fuel cannot make the connection between the lifestyle they enjoy and the energy that fuels it.
Then came a reminder that the lettuce was staying strong, and it was elbows up in the run down to the war on Xmas, MST Financial Senior Energy Analyst Saul Kavonic says Australians have watched the Liberal Party “dismantling themselves internally” over the net-zero 2050 target.
Did anyone expect the Ughmann to reference COP30?
It's been completely invisible, a non-presence in the reptile universe, and so it remains in the Ughmann universe ...
“To meet the near-term emissions benchmarks necessary to avoid substantially exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, each successive edition of the Net Zero Emissions Scenario has featured more rapid near-term emissions reductions, stretching feasibility to its limits,” the report says.
How could that unfeasible target be hit? “In the Net Zero Emissions Scenario, global final energy consumption drops by four exajoules a year on average over the next decade, with 75 per cent of the decline occurring in advanced economies,” the report says.
That cut is the equivalent of erasing roughly two-thirds of Australia’s annual energy use from the globe, and doing it every year for 10 years. On this pathway, advanced economies would have to cut their final energy use by roughly one-fifth in a decade. Efficiency gains on this scale have no historical precedent, and slamming on the brakes would trigger depression-level economic trauma. In the real world, net zero by 2050 means smaller economies, deindustrialisation and falling living standards. If this is the plan, it is a blueprint for poverty.
The Ughmann is canny in his denialism ...
Climate change is a problem ...
Oh come on, you didn't take that seriously did you?
It was only so a gigantic billy goat butt could follow, featuring the reptile denialists' latest favourite, Mr Clippy himself ...
...but, as Microsoft founder Bill Gates now concedes, it is not an existential threat to human civilisation. We should try to cut emissions in a measured way, in step with what the rest of the world is prepared to do. We should not be driven by visions of the apocalypse. One of the world’s best analysts of climate scenarios, Professor Roger Pielke Jr, notes the good news that the dire projections a decade ago, which focused on scenarios of 4-6 degrees of warming by 2100, have shifted down to central estimates below 3 degrees. Alas, alarmists have simply rebased the catastrophe threshold and every weather event is now branded “unprecedented” and linked to climate change.
As a student wrote for The Hill ...
The three truths he frames the article around are “climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization, temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate, (and) health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change”
What I find interesting is that his argument is logical and backed up with facts but reveals a real lack of understanding. Because he treats the climate as a solely technological challenge, Gates draws incorrect conclusions.
For instance, his thesis that disease is more harmful than climate change is illogical when you consider that climate change is worsening disease. A 2022 study in Nature concluded that 58 percent of infectious diseases “have been at some point aggravated by climatic hazards.” A great example is how rising temperatures give mosquitos a wider habitat range to spread malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and West Nile virus.
If Gates wants to pivot to solving disease, that’s fine by me, but he can’t do it without also addressing the climate crisis. Neither exists in a vacuum, and it’s incorrect to treat them as completely separate problems.
The same goes for poverty. Gates admits that the climate crisis will have the biggest impact on “people in the poorest countries” so it is strange that he later pivots to arguing we need to divert resources from climate to poverty reduction. If they are connected, why is the argument that we must choose one? When we invest in climate change, we invest in vulnerable communities. Let’s do both.
There is a lot wrong with the memo, and most of it is hidden behind legitimate statements, data and examples of innovation. Arguably the most ridiculous generalization is the statement that “climate change will not end civilization.” This is a prediction framed as a truth.
No one person, not even Gates, can predict what will be the “end of civilization.” He does not have the ability to see the future. He also does not have a degree or background in climate science, but that’s a separate issue.
Climate change being framed as alarmism or “doomism,” as Gates put it, is nothing new. But it is incredibly frustrating.
COP 30 is approaching, and as Gates calls for a switch in resources, I have a different take: We are not doing enough on climate.
America, under Trump’s leadership, has abandoned climate goals and international agreements. Wealthy countries are paying a fraction of the amount needed to alleviate damages, and are offering less each year.
Last month, a Category 5 hurricane left a “trail of destruction” in Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti. When Gates looks into his crystal ball, he doesn’t see a climate-induced doomsday. However, for people in Jamaica, doomsday was in October. For families that lost their homes in the Los Angeles fires, doomsday was in January. For residents of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, doomsday is every new diagnosis.
How many doomsdays must frontline communities suffer before Gates’s crystal ball shows their reality?
I don’t believe Gates’s memo was intended to cause harm, but it perpetuates a dangerous narrative on the climate crisis. We are at a continual crossroads on climate, and every step in the wrong direction becomes harder to correct. That is the real tough truth.
Well yes, all that and more, but what a tremendous excuse this Mr Clippy gave to denialists of the Ughmann kind ...
Whether the Liberal Party can sell its decision to abandon the fantasy is a question of competence. Recent history suggests competence is not a muscle the party has exercised with any intent for some years so the chances of this being botched is high.
But facts and physics are on the Coalition’s side, and where there is life there is hope. As one of Australia’s leading theologians once told me: “God’s will is what you make it.” If the Liberals can set aside their deep divisions, then there is more than sufficient evidence to back their stand. The test will be if they can, finally, make the government the target.
What a stupid unreformed seminarian he is ... and as for the rest of that Crikey piece, here's another sample, now suffused with the irony of the Ughmann read...
Rupert Murdoch said in a 2019 annual meeting that there were “no climate change deniers” at the company. Asked about that proposition, Miller agreed, and cited Andrew Bolt on the existence of climate change.
Pushed on whether the company acknowledged not only that climate change existed, but that it caused harm and needed addressing on an urgent basis, Miller said “individual editors have differing audiences and will make differing editorial decisions”, and deferred to Reid.
Reid said that the debate in Australia had moved on from whether climate change existed, and onto “the nation’s energy future”, noting to some laughs and a wry smile from Nationals Senator Matt Canavan that it was “what’s tearing the Liberal Party apart”.
“The vast majority of our readers are primarily concerned about the cost of living, and a huge part of that is how much they pay for their energy bills. I think those same readers are extremely concerned about the state of the planet and the right way to a solution here is the debate the country is currently having.”
Asked by Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson about the company’s practice of “platforming” climate sceptic opinion and analysis writers, Miller said “I hope you’re not suggesting we should censor them”, adding “we need to be able to have a debate in this country”.
Pushed on News Corp’s close relationship with conservative think tanks such as the Institute for Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies, and whether that was a coordinated effort to voice particular opinions, Miller said plainly “no”.
Reid added: “Having spent 40 years trying to get various people at News Corporation to agree on what day it is, I can absolutely assure you that there is no coordination on what opinions are surfaced by different channels. Each masthead — each opinion editor on each masthead — is entirely in control of their relationships, and their comment section.”
Uh huh ... he cited the Bolter on the existence of climate change?
He might just as well have cited the Ughmann, though the entire point is to make sure nothing is done about it ...
As for that Graudian story, just look at the reptiles' devoted readership, how their denialism spreads around the world like a suppurating plague ...
Still, it could be worse ...
And so to the bonus, and the pond thought it had really finished with Gough and the reptiles with yesterday's outing with Our Henry.
What else could be said after the hole in bucket man had finished his referential, learned piece?
How foolish of the pond, how little the pond knows of the endless capacity for the hive mind to go over the same turf, an endless murmuration of starlings, keen to keep sh*tting in the same nest (*blogger bot approved).
And yet the pond must always pay attention to the Lynch mob, if only because it helps defame and shred what little remaining reputation the University of Melbourne possesses ...
The header: Whitlam is memorialised as a political failure — but he’s won the culture war. His motives were often pristine to the point of naivety. That’s now our problem.
The caption for the hideous, truly dire artwork, credited to Emilia, because Emilia refuses to take the pond's advice and blame it on AI: We memorialise him as a political failure. It might be better to consider him a long-term cultural success. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella
The Lynch mob managed a terminal 8 minute read, not bad for a Yank blow in determined to sound off like a Yank blow hard ...
Since Whitlam, and because of him, progressives have deified the international and relegated the national. “Progressive patriotism” should not be a misnomer; it is becoming a contradiction in terms. Progressivism has become the subordination of Australian history (unless it started between 65,000 and 237 years ago) and power (literally with its war on coal) to the moral priorities of an “international community” – an entity almost universally understood to represent left-wing elites.
And it has worked. While the half century transnational turn has met resistance in American MAGA and UK Reform movements, in Australia it stomps unchecked across our institutions and on the Liberal Party. Whitlam lost a political battle in 1975; he is surely winning the culture war in 2025.
If I had a cent for every student I have taught across my career, who wants to work at the United Nations, I’d have $7.39. In Victoria, the number of children studying Australian History in years 11 and 12 has collapsed (to about one in 100). Global Politics is four times larger and growing. We are teaching our young “the international” before they have formed a grasp of the national part.
Legal Studies, which is increasingly progressive and internationalist in its focus, is larger still (about 17 per cent of VCE students). Psychology, a subject which in its modern guise is seemingly designed to make young women unhappy (while simultaneously attracting them in large numbers), enrols about a third of Victoria’s 16-year-olds.
Dear sweet long absent lord, must the Lynch mob remind the pond of the suffering of his students?
The pond is currently going through its own guilts, what with a class photo of the pond standing next to students, having recently surfaced, having long been buried.
How hideous to be reminded that right at this moment, students are paying for the privilege to have their minds rotted by the Lynch mob ...
It should not be a surprise that the ABC, staffed by these young men and women, is run according to a strict internationalism.
Strict internationalism?
Did he mean to write about the rootless cosmopolitans? Passportless wanderers? The cosmopolitan elite? The rootless internationalists? The rooting cosmos?
Is he trying out for a guest spot on a Nick Fuentes podcast?
The BBC combines a globalist outlook, disdainful of British imperial history, with a deep anti-Americanism; look at how they edited Donald Trump’s January 6 speech. The current President has enabled the BBC to indulge a long-held contempt for the American experiment.
These taxpayer-funded national broadcasters are proof of the late historian Robert Conquest’s Second Law: that any institution that is not explicitly right wing will become left wing.
J’accuse Whitlam in all this – not exclusively but significantly. We memorialise him as a political failure. It might be better to consider him a long-term cultural success. His transnational turn eventually redefined left-wing morality. It made for a much more conducive terrain for the ALP to fight on – and has met little LNP resistance. Whitlam’s progressive patriotism has not catalysed an alternative conservative nationalism. The vocabulary of the latter enjoys really no status at all in Australian public life. But we are all globalists now.
Whitlam used international law and treaties as instruments for domestic reform. These were not universally bad. Extradition treaties with Sweden and Austria, for example, enabled co-operation on international crime.
His environmentalism was similarly inspired by some excellent motives. Who doesn’t love a good wetland? The consequence was a set of federal statutes that took their letter and spirit from international law, with all the evasions of democratic control such law entails.
Climate change dominates political discourse in Australia because Whitlam entrenched a deep reverence for international legal machinations around the environment. The ALP continues to prosper from this and the LNP to suffer.
At this point the reptiles resorted to the archive ... Ousted PM Gough Whitlam waves to supporters outside federal parliament in Canberra the day after his government was dismissedin 1975. Picture: Ross Duncan.
It was on human rights that Whitlam’s internationalism had the most marked cultural impact. He passed 15 significant human rights treaties. One of them, the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (1975), according to former justice of the High Court Michael Kirby, “is one of the most significant human rights treaties ever joined by Australia”.
Again, this turn was not all bad. He abhorred racism. But he took measures to tackle it that have resulted in a progressive obsession with race and “white supremacy”.
Not all Whitlam’s fault. But he made the international morally superior to the merely national. Our nationalism has grown more suspect, our acknowledgments of Indigenous people displaced by it, longer and increasingly mandatory – with no obvious material pay-off for them. He invited consequences he could not foresee. And some that he would revel in: the inability of the Australian centre right to counter a progressive cultural takeover.
Observe how the Liberals have torn themselves apart for years, and again this week, trying to reconcile their instinctive patriotism with a climate change theory that demands the negation of national interests. The affordable energy which has made Australia great must be abandoned to meet approval of a global elite.
Transnationalism, human rights, climate change, truth telling and treaty.
The smugness of Energy Minister Chris Bowen is evidence that the adaptation of Whitlam’s agenda has worked politically. Labor has a stonking majority, and the Coalition are years away from power. There is no issue on which a comparable smugness among conservatives can be observed. The situation is almost an exact inversion of 1975. Then, Labor was dismissed and bereft and, 36 days later, the Coalition secured one of the largest majorities in its history.
If you are a conservative, how long ago that false dawn was. I call it a false dawn because 50 years later it is the Australian left that enjoys a political and cultural dominion that Whitlam could never have imagined but laid the foundations for.
Whitlam did not go away. He had only 1100 days in office. His cultural legacy lasted much longer. If we review the last 50 years, at least among the major English-speaking democracies, there is a cursorily good news story for the right: neoliberalism had routed the left. What this “End of History” triumphalism ignored was culture.
Conservatives assumed economics would take care of everything else. What they ignored was the manipulation by their domestic opponents of an emerging global infrastructure. Progressives used to decry international institutions as vehicles of global capitalism. Now the European Union and the United Nations, and every agency in between, is seen as a base for progressivism.
At this point came a pun which was incredibly irritating ...
Australia’s Great Awokening
Stop right there ...
Now to slip in a plug for ancient Troy's tome, the entire point of this relentless reptile campaign ...
The Great Awokening of this century augmented during a nominally conservative ascendancy. While the right satisfied itself that its Cold War victory would eventually expand into the culture, progressives begged to differ.
Australia was a good illustration of this. For decades, a trade union left had resisted mass immigration as a threat to native workers and their wages. Whitlam’s Universal Migration Policy (1973) shifted the progressive conception of immigration as a political tool.
Not tired of snaps of Satan's solar and windmill worshipping helper?
That's just as well ... The smugness of Energy Minister Chris Bowen is evidence that the adaptation of Whitlam’s agenda has worked politically. . Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
And so to a smug, self-satisfied academic perched in his well-paid ivory tower, deploring ivory towers ...
Their American and British peers have found their voice on immigration. Trump and Nigel Farage took strong positions and prospered. British Tories and Australian Liberals didn’t and haven’t.
MAGA (in power) and Reform (on the cusp of it) may, however, be another false dawn for conservatives. Their battles are intense because the left’s cultural capture is deep.
Leftist ideas, seemingly defeated when the USSR collapsed, have never gone away. In Australia, Whitlamism (in substance if not in style – Albanese learned that lesson) looked vanquished 50 years ago. Now it is pre-eminent. His internationalism dictates the acceptable terms of institutional debate – when there is any debate at all.
Naturally there was a billy goat butt ...
Margaret Thatcher said the facts of life are conservative; millions of east Europeans proved her right by throwing off their communist oppressors. But the facts of culture seem persistently progressive. Marx was wrong. History advances by culture, not economics.
My argument is not that Whitlam should be seen as a conservative nemesis or culture warrior. Not everything he did was bad. His motives were often pristine to the point of naivety. And this was the problem for the generations of the left that assimilated them. He was right to replace the White Australia policy with an overdue multiculturalism. The long-term consequence was a left not colourblind, but race-obsessed.
Making higher education cheaper increased access to it, especially among women. A good result. Decades later, our campuses have become enormous bastions not of working-class mobility and gender equality but of managerial hegemony with too little viewpoint diversity.
According to Helen Andrews, an American conservative commentator, universities in the West have been “feminised” and filled with young women, according to sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, angry at the dwindling number of educated men with which to partner.
Again, hard to pin this on Whitlam. Robert Menzies also expanded university places. Are we to blame them both for the growing class and gender imbalances in our modern universities? There was certainly nothing in Whitlam’s public policy which aimed to downgrade the life chances of young men. And yet there is something in the symbolism of his university reforms which remains powerful to those progressives who see the campus as their ideological laboratory.
What can you expect of a Yank, deeply clueless about what went down in the 1950s and 1060s in Australia?
Just pity the poor students, as the reptiles reminded the pond yet again that the lettuce just needed to keep hanging in, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley cannot easily replicate the Triple F – faith, family, flag – that has worked so well for Trump. Picture: NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone
Things are working well for Trump and the disunited states?
Whitlam’s Family Law Act copied Ronald Reagan’s in California and abolished at-fault divorce. The collapse of stable households for poorer children was faster in America than here. But Australia also saw a rise in fatherless homes which many on the left applauded as “more diverse family structures”.
Lone-parent households – the family structure statistically most likely to retard a child’s life chances – doubled in the intervening half century (from 7 per cent of homes to 16).
Gough’s fault? No. His supporters’? Perhaps. Attributing blame is less important than recognising the cultural transformation this family breakdown presaged. It provided an enabling environment for the gender revolution – from trans ideology to intersectionality – that gives contemporary progressive politics its air of moral superiority.
At time of writing, Sussan Ley is leader of the Liberal Party. She shares one key challenge with her predecessors: she cannot easily replicate the Triple F – faith, family, flag – that has worked so well for Trump. She (and her successors) must somehow prosper within a political and cultural order that prioritises an atheistic internationalism (masquerading as progressive patriotism). Nine years of a supposedly Liberal ascendancy, 2013-22, did little to change this. Malcolm Turnbull accelerated it (and now tours campuses advertising the fact) and Scott Morrison saddled us with net zero – a key objective of the global left.
We should credit (or blame) Gough Whitlam for changing the terms of the game so fundamentally.
We should blame the University of Melbourne, no credit available ...
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
Such a stupid man, such a reminder of the uselessness of academics.
What with him and the Ughmann, a double barrelled serve of reptile stuff and nonsense as a way to begin the weekend on a downer.
And so to end with a Rowe, celebrating where the Hansonites, the reptiles, Barners, the pastie Hastie, and the Canavan caravan have taken Susssan (and given the lettuce a fighting chance) ...
What a fine portrait of devoted WWI fighter, stuck back in 1915, when the first monoplane, the Fokker Eindecker, took to the air, synchronised in a way that allowed a machine gun to fire through the propellor at passing climate scientists ...
