Slop chasing slop ... and the pond apologises for promoting AI.
Aka Cholesterol Corner (apparently because of the number of fast food joints, though they seem sparse compared to Sydney), or Fairly Ghetto, or Pixie Paddock, or if you will, Fairy Meadow (the pond refuses to indulge the homophobic versions that do the rounds in unrefined circles, which aren't allowed in this 'leet blog).
Hopefully this will be the last time ever that the pond must do a shift - life is short and the pond is old - but as a result, postings in the near future will be intermittent, and on days when the tech support tries to get the pond back online, non-existent ...
The best the pond can do is fling up the odd morsel at odd times to satisfy the insatiable appetite of devoted herpetology students ...and as the pond must be out and about today, that's why Dame Groan is the chief morsel in this abbreviated coverage.
How could the pond avoid showing off a Groaning? Could anyone possibly guess what's buzzing around in the old dame's noggin?
Hands up those who expected a rousing defence of freedom of the press, a stern condemnation of the conduct of mad King Donald in banning sundry news organisations?
Or hands up those hoping for a serious explanation of the issues surrounding AI?
Hands down those who thought it would be another bog standard bit of blather about the way that furriners were rooning us all?
Why should the pond reward smart alecks who always manage to be right?
The pond has had to resort to screen caps so it can quickly fling up the groaning and go about its other business this day, but as it's just the old biddy shrieking about mass migration, where's the harm?
Apart from a little preening self-congratulation at the way the government kow-towed to her and other bigots, is there anything much new?
There was only a gobbet to go ... and sure enough, Gina's pampered pet was front and centre, with her and the Groaner in trinitarian mode, an encompassing one-ness ...
There you go.
Were it not for Pauline.
The Groaner is being exceptionally modest. Were it not for the hysteria emanating from her and the rest of News Corp this past decade, faithfully recycled and regurgitated by the ABC - always ready to drum up a scare story about the dangers of Chinese EVs and other fears of furriners - there might have been a little sanity in the land.
Here, have a break and instead of a Kit-kat, have a 'toon ...
The immortal Rowe sets the tone for the next reptile.
Speaking of hysteria, this quick throwing up of screen caps allowed the pond the time to indulge the bromancer, the ban the screens, the repent and turn to pen and ink man, who was in fine form ...
It goes without saying that the bromancer was going to express a deep fear and loathing of AI ...after all, if you think banning screens and reverting to long hand is the educational solution, you're going to be down on everything beyond the dipping of girlie pigtails in inkwells (please, don't ask about those days).
The pond can remember any number of fatuities given unto the world by the bromancer, decades of contradictions and stupidities, imbued with the fairy tales exuding from Xianity, but sadly doesn't have time to go into them, save to wonder what Dame Groan might have made of his devotion to the Indonesian language, when of course furriners are rooning the country ...
Who can forget the reptiles denouncing broadband, and doing their level best to ruin the NBN?
One of the direst conditions that afflicts the reptile mind is that somehow we must arrive at a Valhalla, which is usually some golden age long in the past.
For the reptiles, this is usually the 1950s under Ming the Merciless. Return to that ancient time and we'll achieve the dizzy heights of a nirvana, slough off the unfortunate trough of failure ...perhaps even enter unto the gates of a heaven on earth, pending arrival at the 19th hole in the great land above the sky.
With this mindset, rather than expecting and acknowledging that everything will change, some things for the better, some things for worse, the reptile mind is always set to a keening wail of endless horrors ...
Ye ancient cats and ancestral dogs, once again the bromancer proved the pond wrong.
It wasn't the vision of the 1950s that was tormenting him, it was the bloody 1890s, and of all things, a sideswipe at pig iron Bob, without ever actually mentioning his name or his worship of Herr Adolf ...
Have another 'toon ...
The pond couldn't resist turning to Mein Gott for a bonus.
Yes, he was out and about yesterday, an eternity in reptile time, quickly fading back into the morass of many other reptile jihads ... but the pond has long argued that the lizard Oz and Pauline are one, and Mein Gott provided even more proof ...
Mein Gott giving credence to Tamworth's endless shame?
Mein Gott joining in the blather about wind and solar and renewables and all that stuff?
Mein Gott yammering on about the renewables disaster as if he'd dressed in drag and was doing a Pauline pantsdown?
The pond being rhetorical in a pointless way about the bleeding obvious?
Did the reptiles interrupt at this point to promote a forum which is inherently nonsensical?
Was there more of this carry on?
At last a question that could be answered with a screen cap ...
Did anyone expect Mein Gott to include any discussion of the rapid pace of climate change in the world, and the dangers flowing from that?
There was more at the link, but was there a single correspondent expecting Mein Gott to take notice or pay heed?
Was that single correspondent of the Conan Doyle kind, expecting to find fairies at the bottom of the garden, hoping that Mein Gott might concede that while some mistakes had been made, the mission of reducing the impacts of climate change was a noble one?
Cue those fairies in the garden ...
The pond just had to leave that last widget in, what with "Ask The Australian" the latest indication that while the bromancer might rant, the corporation itself was more than a little AI Curious.
Please, AI tool, tell the pond how much its costing to get an AI confirmation that the reptiles of Oz, with Mein Gott leading the way, think nuking the country is a solution to saving the planet, when any goose who's spent a nanosecond in the hive mind knows that climate science is a hoax, and sweet virginal Oz coal is the answer.
That in this context, nuking the country is just an idle distraction, a way of avoiding all talk about the ways and means of helping change the direction of the planet.
And just how much water and energy was expended in arriving at the answer? Who knows, but likely the AI Curious Oz won't have a half-way decent answer ...
The pond apologises for the way that this has been flung together, and unfortunately screen caps will be again all the go on the morrow ...
Just look at all the migrant and EV bashing the pond had to pass up on ... with the reptiles regurgitating the ABC, which routinely regurgitates the reptiles, setting up a most un-virtuous circle ...
In the meantime, the pond offers this for the consideration of The Australian Daily Zionist News ...
Of all the tragedies in life, it's only a minor one that these days the pond can't watch bear to watch repeats of Curb Your Enthusiasm ... only because whenever Cheryl Hines appears, the pond's enthusiasm is deeply curbed.
Curb Your Enthusiasm star Jeff Garlin has revealed to Obsessed: The Podcast that show creator Larry David was “very hurt” after their co-star of 24 years, Cheryl Hines, became a MAGA supporter. Hines is married to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and she was the only major star from Curb who didn’t appear on David’s new HBO sketch series Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, which Barack and Michelle Obama produced. Garlin is quick to assert that the former president and first lady “had nothing to do with” Hines’ exclusion. “No, this would be Larry’s choice,” Garlin said. “And I know he is very hurt by Cheryl. Her husband, a big ball of ‘no, thank you.’ Always, even when she was dating him. Even I recognized it in him. I thought he was a sick... Not even ‘No, thank you.’ ‘No,’ period.
it's one weird thing to develop a deep affection for Mr Measles, entirely another to go full MAGA.
Expert trolling, or old-fashioned dementia?
How is it that the pond can flinch at the sight of this folly, and still swallow lizard Oz crap on a daily basis?
It's one of the great mysteries, what with the mad King, RFK (pretending to be Jr), and the reptiles selling junk and distributing poison to the world ...
Speaking of poison, it's time for a Monday dose ...and waddya kno, the Major, expert troller, was out and about doing a full Pauline...
The thumb splash showed off the hook ...
Not coal again ... not more fossilised fools at play ...but here the pond was for the umpteenth time ...
The header: By Chris Mitchell Labor clings to aggressive grid overhaul despite revised climate forecasts and shortfalls
The promise of an automated voice read: Listen to this article
7 min
The caption for a snap that sets the Major's loins on fire: A coal train crosses South Australian on its way to Port Augusta prior to its powerstation being decomissioned. (sic)
The pond doesn't propose to argue with the Major.
Simply sitting down and listen to this ancient mariner ramble on is more than enough ...
Politicians and journalists of the left show a propensity to believe the latest fashionable ideas, sometimes without a deep understanding of the subject. Fads in economics and climate change stand out, but inevitably end up hurting the living standards of those who can least afford new policy proposals. This column has mocked Labor treasurers who loved Capital, the 2012 global anti-capitalist bestseller by French economist Thomas Piketty. More recently Albanese government ministers have been spruiking 2025’s Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, respectively journalists at The New York Times and The Atlantic. How many Labor MPs who loved these two have read Adam Smith’s The Wealth Of Nations, let alone Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes or even Friedrich Hayek? It’s the same with energy and climate. Why plunge into the latest fad whatever the cost to working people?
The main point? The pond suspects it was summarised in this promo widget ... Energy Nation marketing promo
There are people in the land who think the reptiles have something to offer on an energy future? Forget it Jake, the pond will continue to keep enjoying the benefits offered by solar.
On with the Major - huzzah, no Zionism today - and how soon before "alarmist" and "alarming" were trotted out?
Left-wing journalists and politicians such as Energy Minister Chris Bowen ridicule any scientist, writer or economist not fully on board with Greta Thunberg-style alarmism. Yet the most alarming climate pathways Thunberg and King Charles claimed only a few years ago would destroy life as we know it if not turned back by 2030 have been abandoned officially by the UN.
Inevitably there was a snap of Satan's helper ... Energy Minister Chris Bowen is dismissive of any commentary that doesn’t embrace climate change alarmism. Picture: Martin Ollman
Then came more of the usual lies from the usual sources ...
Some commenters here criticise this column for regularly quoting climate scientist Judith Curry, climate economist Roger Pielke or Copenhagen Consensus chief Bjorn Lomborg. All have led their fields for decades and accept man-made global warming. The latest UN-accepted climate pathways suggest these three have been closer to reality than the hysterical claims by Greens politicians globally and even local Liberals such as former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former NSW Liberal treasurer Matt Kean. Pielke and Curry have argued the carbon intensity of industry globally has been falling for half a century. Lomborg believes it is the energy poor in Africa and parts of Asia who face the real dangers of burning poor-quality fuels such as wood and dung in unventilated housing. These are the people really suffering as climate activists demand international banks and aid agencies pull financing for fossil fuel projects. Pielke, on his Substack called The Honest Broker, wrote last week that the midpoint of likely climate modelling suggests a rise of 2.1C since pre-industrial times by 2100. This is a rise of 0.7C from now. As this column pointed out on June 8, the pathway revisions had been ignored by environment writers at The Guardian, Nine’s newspapers and ABC, which for years were pushing the extreme RCP8.5 scenario under which man-made temperature rise would reach 5C by 2021. To deal with future warming about half of total warming to date over the past 150 years, Bowen proposes closing all our coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable generation supported by more than 10,000km of new poles and wires with battery, hydro and gas backup that may end up replicating 100 per cent system capacity. It looks like a giant sledge hammer to crack a small nut: We produce only 1 per cent of global emissions but the big emitters responsible for 60 per cent of CO2 between them -
The reptiles interrupted with a mournful snap of a giant done down ... The Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley of Victoria was permanently shut down in 2017. Picture: AAP
Would the world be better off if the Major simply stayed out on the golf links?
China, the US, India and Russia – are continuing to use coal-fired power. Despite spending of more than $US2 trillion ($2.8 trillion) a year globally on renewables, CO2 emissions are still rising. With the growth of AI and data centres that rise is likely to continue. But Bowen remains committed, whatever the facts. And the latest fact last week published here on Wednesday shows Bowen’s plan will reach 53 per cent renewables by 2030, despite insisting many times he was on course for 82 per cent. If you wonder why we would bother destroying our industrial base and pushing up prices for a rise of 0.7C over the next 74 years you might enjoy a lengthy interview with US Energy Secretary Chris Wright in The Free Press. It may help explain why much of the rest of the world is not following Australia and Europe. Wright told journalist Lucy Biggers on September 14: “Energy is the transformative agent that created the modern world. Human life expectancy at birth was around 30 years 20,000 years ago, and it was still around 30 years 200 years ago. The arrival of coal and oil took that to 70 years. But across the world about seven billion people had not benefited to the same degree as those in the West.” Wright says when he was appointed by President Donald Trump, the Biden team’s energy scoreboard “was how many coal plants they could shut”. The Democrats had planned to shut 46 gigawatts of coal capacity over five years, enough firm power for 40 million homes. “The world has spent $US10 trillion on wind, solar, batteries and ... transmission ...Yet wind and solar still provide only a small percentage of global primary energy. “Countries that have pursued them most vigorously – including Germany, the United Kingdom and Denmark – have among the highest electricity prices in the world.” He criticised these countries for claiming they had reduced greenhouse gas emissions when they had in fact only exported their industry and emissions to China and India where coal continues to dominate production processes, even in EV manufacture. “Is the world ever going to run on solar panels and wind turbines? Absolutely not,” he said. “Even after the UK went all in on wind and solar it still gets the large majority of its energy from gas and oil. “Building solar panels, wind turbines and batteries also requires hydrocarbons. You need tremendous amounts of high-temperature heat for manufacturing and energy for mining, and many of the materials themselves are made from hydrocarbons.” Wright believes in man-made climate change. “We’ve increased the atmospherc (sic, so and thus) concentration of CO2 from 0.03 per cent to a little over 0.04 per cent ... (this) is contributing to the warming of the planet.It’s a real issue. It’s just not remotely close to the world’s biggest problem. If you were honest, I don’t think it would make the top 10 list.” People desperate to believe a 0.7C temperature rise is an existential threat to humanity will of course point out Wright was founder and CEO of the second-biggest gas fracking company in America, Liberty Energy. True, but who better to understand the energy world than an energy professional with a stack of business qualifications and several engineering degrees. Maybe someone like Bowen, who has never worked outside politics and became Labor mayor of Fairfield in western Sydney at 25 after being elected a councillor at 22? Lomborg and former World Bank chief Indermit Gill nailed the damage climate activism is doing to the world’s poor in The Wall Street Journal on September 1. “The past 75 years have brought the greatest improvement in human welfare in history,” he said. “But over the past decade much of that improvement has stalled. This happened at the same time the rich world shifted its attention to climate change.” Leftist obsessions with climate, renewables, economic redistribution and global refugee flows are creating a populist backlash across the Western world. No surprise, really.
That was a complete waste of time ... but while it might be tossed off in the same way as the mad king's trolling, if you looked below, you could find a swarm of true Major believers swarming in the hive mind ...
Not only was "John A" crazy about brown coal, he was so crazy that he posted his comment twice, and the pond decided to cut short the craziness ...
At the top of the rag, the reptiles were conducting a familiar jihad, and the intermittent archive was there to cover it ...
Sadly, in the battle of the bots, the archive couldn't handle everything ...
What did turn up was dismal ...
COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS Albanese faces a summer of discontent Labor insiders believe the party’s tanking primary vote and the Prime Minister’s negative approval ratings will get worse by Christmas.
Deprived of the archive, the pond realised it couldn't cover everything.
Was it enough to simply take a couple of gobbets from simpleton Simon, in a deep state of hysteria?
What would correspondents think of the pond skipping ahead, cheating, and turning to the last gobbet?
The pond took the view that a snap of a demonic Jimbo would be enough to establish that it was just a standard form of gibberish aimed at the hive mind ...
What does simpleton Simon want?
An uncaring economy?
A 'couldn't give a flying f*ck about caring' economy?
Never mind, speaking of AI, a recent infallible Pope ...
At this point the pond decided the easiest way to cover two other favourite reptiles was by way of screen caps.
Come on down flood waters whispering man ...
Would anyone care if the quarry whisperer was covered in three gobbets?
Any correspondent could still marvel at the way that the flood waters fool quoted Paul Krugman, the way a parrot might recite the bible.
The pond hates to do it, but promised that it would be done.
A full serve of Ughmann.
Last weekend the reptiles dropped the Ughmann into the mix later on the weekend, thereby missing the pond deadline.
It was a big splash:
Top of the digital page ma!
The pond immediately regretted not covering it, and now seeks to rectify the set back to herpetology students:
The header: Call it Argentinisation, but Australia’s economic decline is entirely self-inflicted; Like Argentina last century, we’re squandering the prosperity built on abundant natural resources, enterprise and ingenuity.
The caption for the cornball collage. Take a bow Sean, AI couldn't have done it worse: How would you set this nation on a highway to hell? Artwork: Sean Callinan
It was the headline that caught the pond's eye:
Australia’s economic decline is entirely self-inflicted
Entirely? In mad King Donald's economics wilderness?
Such a silly former seminarian, but the pond knows where the thinking comes from and it deserves a Donne rebuke ...
No country is an island entire of itself; Some say Australia is a continent; every man (and womyn) is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Australia is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's (orwomyn's) death diminishes me, because I am involved in dinkum kind. And therefore never send to know for whom mad King Donald's bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
And that's a round about way of saying credit where credit is due, because the likes of Vlad the sociopath and mad king Donald have done much to stuff the world economy, and so Australia's ...
And so on, and will mad king Donald and his minions manage to bankrupt the planet in the same way he bankrupted casinos and is currently bankrupting the Kennedy centre because he craves having his name next to JFK's?
The pond lives in hope, but digresses:
At the turn of the 20th century Australia and Argentina were among the richest countries on Earth. One would broadly fulfil its promise. The other would endure a century of economic pain. Bad politics played no small part in the difference. Call it Argentinisation, where politicians contrive to beggar a rich country. This would be yeoman’s work in 21st-century Australia because we have such a rich inheritance. Early on Australia decided to be a high-wage economy. That was a good thing. The 1907 Harvester judgment established the principle of a basic wage and it became part of the Australian settlement. Wealth was widely shared and, despite the imperfections of our history, this country built one of the fairest and most prosperous societies in the world. We could afford to do that because Australia was blessed with abundant and cheap energy. Victoria built an electricity system on vast, dirt-cheap brown coal reserves and tapped the oil and gas in Bass Strait. NSW and Queensland have enormous amounts of high-quality black coal. Later, Western Australia harnessed massive gas reserves. The wheels of industry hummed. We were also gifted with abundant resources, rich agricultural land and inventive people. Wool and wheat grew on our farms and gold, iron ore, coal, oil and gas lay beneath our feet. From the stump-jump plough to the black box flight recorder, Australians devised practical solutions to practical problems. There was enterprise, ingenuity and optimism. Squandering all this would take time and almost supernatural ineptitude. But with dedication it could be done. So, how would you set this nation on a highway to hell? Well, begin with wilfully increasing the cost of energy and making it scarce. To ensure serious harm, embed rising costs in the architecture of the electricity system by replacing dense, predictable generation with a vastly larger agglomeration of taxpayer-subsidised, wildly dispersed, weather-dependent energy gatherers. String it together with thousands of kilometres of transmission lines hooked up to a life-support system of batteries and stability services. Then build enough dispatchable backup to meet 100 per cent of demand for those inevitable times when the wind does not blow, the sun does not shine and the batteries run flat. The total system cost of this electricity Frankenstein is almost impossible to calculate but it must be paid. And that’s what drives the retail energy bill ever higher.
Of course it had to be renewables, and could it possibly be a lizard Oz yarn without a comical snap? The total system cost of this electricity Frankenstein is almost impossible to calculate. Picture: NewsWire/ Martin Ollman
The alternative would have been a snap of diabolical windmills, for the tilting at thereof.
This is familiar turf for the Ughmann, and he had his litany down pat:
The artistry of misallocating hundreds of billions of dollars into an electricity system that produces less power for every dollar invested is that it wires declining productivity into the nation’s central nervous system. Once done, it can’t easily be undone.
For some reason the reptiles decided the next little grab was worth doing in indented italics, not replicated here:
Australians devised practical solutions to practical problems. There was enterprise, ingenuity; and optimism. Squandering all this would take time and almost supernatural ineptitude. But with dedication it could be done.
It didn't seem worth the fuss, as the Ughmann went into his usual solar frenzy:
Then subsidise rooftop solar and batteries whose supply chains run overwhelmingly through China. The diabolic genius of this is that Australia mines lithium while China dominates its processing and the manufacture of the batteries we buy back. As China would say, win, win. Translation: China wins twice. And someone else always pays. The solar subsidy lands in electricity bills while taxpayers pick up the battery subsidy. So export the resources, import the finished products, bankroll better-off homeowners to buy them and leave renters, apartment dwellers and the poor paying the lion’s share of the cost of a grid that everyone still needs. Then massively increase distribution and transmission costs paid for by the kilowatt-hour charge embedded in every electricity bill. Only a policy virtuoso could devise a scheme so regressive. Then attack the businesses that produce energy and those that make and move things. This is best done by turning carbon emissions into a cost for large miners, manufacturers, transport operators and oil and gas producers. Then watch those costs work their way through every supply chain they touch. Create government-issued carbon credits that businesses can buy, sell and surrender to meet their obligations. Call the whole apparatus something comforting, purposeful and planet-saving, like the safeguard mechanism. Best not to ask what, precisely, is being safeguarded. This instrument of self-harm works best when Australian producers face carbon costs that competitors overseas do not. That way local industry gets the expense while foreign companies get the advantage.
There was a guest appearance by that notorious dog bothering climate science denialist:
Sky News host Chris Kenny lashes out against Labor’s green left energy “revolution”. “They are spending money on household batteries, subsidizing wind farms and solar factories and there’s electric car subsidies,” Mr Kenny said. “They are giving them billions of your dollars so they can keep going despite the energy mess.”
At this point, the Ughmann devolved into standard rant, a litany of complaints, and the pond found it so tedious and predictable that it decided to let the Ughmann run off at the mouth, rant away ...
Next, create sovereign risk. Change taxes, royalties, approval conditions and obligations after investors have committed their capital. The point is to lift the risk premium of doing business here. Eventually grubby extractive industries will take their dirty money somewhere else. You will know you have hit paydirt when a major player such as, say, Woodside spends $24bn somewhere like Louisiana or Santos starts diverting its cash from Australia to Papua New Guinea. Then tax capital formation. Reduce the after-tax reward for investment, entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Capital is notoriously mobile, so make sure Australia becomes investment’s ugly stepsister. The best measure of whether this is working will be when fund managers advise their clients to send their savings offshore in search of better returns. The final triumph comes when Australians themselves decide Australia is not worth investing in. This works particularly well when business investment is already weak. Investment buys the machinery, technology, software and equipment that allow each worker to produce more. The Reserve Bank says investment has failed to keep pace with employment growth. Less capital behind each worker means weaker productivity. Productivity is simply getting more out of every hour of work. Without it higher incomes eventually become higher prices rather than higher living standards. Next, entrench deficits. Borrow in good times and bad, and lock permanent spending commitments into the budget that grow faster than the revenue needed to pay for them. Given that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, attach woefully designed programs to sacred causes: disability support, the care economy, social inclusion, community resilience. Demonise any attempt to question the cost as an attack on the vulnerable. Don’t means-test anything. A parent on $500,000 a year is still a mother or a father. Welfare should be class-blind. Think of the children. Always assume money will be cheap. Governments raise cash by selling bonds, which are essentially IOUs. On September 21, $39.4bn worth of Australian government debt falls due. It was issued at the vanishingly small interest rate of just 0.5 per cent. Alas, money is no longer nearly free. Government borrowing rates are now around 5 per cent, driven by persistent inflation, higher official interest rates and growing competition for capital as governments around the world pile on debt. The trick is to make sure there is plenty more borrowing to come. The Australian Office of Financial Management expects to issue about $125bn in government bonds this financial year. Gross commonwealth debt is forecast to rise from $982bn in 2025-26 to almost $1.2 trillion by the end of the decade. Nothing dramatic needs to happen. That is the beauty of it. Just keep rolling cheap old debt into more expensive new debt while borrowing more on top. More tax revenue goes to paying for yesterday and less is available to build tomorrow. Do it for long enough and eventually the bond market starts writing your budget. As borrowing grows and yields rise, investors will demand an ever-higher price to keep buying the debt. Push it far enough and the question is no longer what interest rate government wants to pay, but what rate the market demands. Then attack the nation’s comparative advantages. If you have enormous mineral resources, make developing them absurdly difficult. Lengthen approvals, multiply conditions, increase charges and create a minefield of environmental laws. If your nation is also a great agricultural producer, make farming increasingly difficult while creating incentives to turn productive land over to carbon sinks. Make it more profitable to stop producing food than to grow it. Make every mine, factory, apartment block, road, transmission line, data centre and major project slower, harder and more expensive to approve. No single regulation need be fatal. No one regulation to rule them all, just a million rules to bind them. At this point it would be useful to ladle taxpayer cash on to activist lawyers to tie developments up in court. Give them an unimpeachable name. Something like the Environmental Defenders Office. Then destroy productivity with regulation. This project is going well. The Productivity Commission says company directors reported spending 55 per cent of their time on compliance in 2025. A decade earlier it was 24 per cent. That’s progress. Make it prohibitively expensive to build anything. Layer planning laws over environmental approvals, heritage requirements over building codes and leave ample room for appeals. Lift minimum home energy ratings from six stars to seven, then keep going. The sky is the limit and each increasingly marginal gain in efficiency can add thousands to construction costs. Ensure everyone has a veto but nobody has responsibility for getting anything built. Given government is the solution to every problem, it should always grow faster than the productive economy, consuming an ever-increasing share of labour and capital. Make sure your bureaucrats are among the highest paid in the world and don’t demand they actually come to work. Then build more government offices in Canberra for this ghost workforce. Turn industrial relations into a minefield of cost and compliance. Reward complexity. Restrict flexibility. Multiply obligations. Make hiring someone a legal relationship so baroque that small business owners lie awake at night wondering whether hiring another employee is worth the ordeal.
After all that the reptiles reverted to indented italics, but why bother?:
Attach woefully designed programs to sacred causes: disability support, the care economy, social inclusion, community resilience. Demonise any attempt to question the cost as an attack on the vulnerable. Don’t means-test
There's nothing like the sight of a reptile in the grip of hysteria, and still it didn't end ...
Endlessly multiply the opportunities to take paid leave and enshrine private sector working from homein law. Multiply the days on which businesses pay hefty penalty rates by creating more public holidays for worthy causes, such as Victoria’s Friday before the AFL grand final. Each entitlement may seem modest on its own. The trick is never to add up the cost of them all. That’s the job of business, not government. Then make big businesses instruments of government ideology. Require them to measure and report their progress on climate and gender equality. This is actually a job creation scheme because each will need another layer of lawyers, accountants, consultants, compliance officers and human resources specialists. None will make a tonne of steel, grow a tonne of wheat, build a house or produce a kilowatt of electricity. Housing is rich with opportunity. Promise to make houses more affordable while reassuring homeowners that their houses won’t lose value. Try not to dwell on the contradiction. Then constrain supply while subsidising demand and marvel as prices rise. Pour more money into helping people buy houses without ensuring there are enough houses to buy. Once you have helped young Australians buy at inflated prices with as little as 5 per cent equity, make a surprise change to negative gearing and capital gains tax. Then watch the youngsters stop spending on everything else as they fret over a term they have only just learned: negative equity.
It was a relief to get to an AV distraction:
Assistant Productivity and Treasury Minister Andrew Leigh claims the Labor government is “building more social and affordable” housing. “We’re the government that is most engaged in housing … than any government in the past half century,” Mr Leigh told News24. “We’re working with states and territories [to] engage with those policies at the state and local level which have impeded building. “We’re building more social and affordable housing through the Housing Australia Future Fund.”
The Ughmann let out a final howl of pain:
This should dovetail nicely with higher rents because making rental housing less attractive to investors leaves fewer properties available to rent. Renters will also have less money to spend as more is chewed up in just keeping a roof over their head. With any luck, the ensuing consumption strike will help dampen demand across the entire economy. Call the whole shebang a housing affordability strategy. Next, create an industry in subsidy harvesting. Governments are clearly best placed to decide which technologies and industries deserve investment. Socialise enough risk that investors learn it is more profitable to understand government policy than customers. Capital will begin chasing regulatory advantage over economic return. And everyone can play the subsidy game. One federal MP helpfully publishes a 145-page bulletin listing more than 450 grants, scholarships and funding opportunities. Let skills deteriorate. Downgrade academic rigour, become suspicious of excellence and spend endless hours arguing about what children should believe while ignoring whether they can read, write, calculate and reason. Make sure the population grows faster than productive capital, housing and infrastructure. This produces a particularly useful statistical trick. Headline GDP rises while GDP per person stagnates. Clever governments can boast that the economy is growing while the people living in it wonder why they feel poorer. Finally, never call spending spending. Describe every new program as an “investment”. The word sounds so much better than “cost”. None of these measures alone will ruin a rich country. That is the beauty of the plan. Each regulation has a justification. Each subsidy has a beneficiary. Each spending program serves a worthy purpose. Each tax raises necessary revenue. Each environmental restriction protects something valuable. Each sounds progressive in a press release. The trick is accumulation. Keep loading the saddlebags, one seemingly modest burden at a time, until the economy buckles under the weight of government. It will take time and effort, but we can wreck Australia. Today we are running on the fumes of inherited wealth. But, with the right policies, one day we may wake up and discover that our only industries are selling coffee and houses to each other.
The Ughmann then produced a closing line of such cleverness and wit that the pond wilted, as if exposed to dazzling sunlight:
I’ll have a double decaf soy latte in a keep cup, please.
Well, he knows the jargon, and likely he places that kind of order on a daily basis, while whining weekly that the end is nigh...
The pond reckons that herpetology students will celebrate long into the night at this Ughmann treat, a bit like the relief the pond felt last week when the dentist finally fixed a gaping hole in a tooth.
Here, have a celebratory cartoon about how to bankrupt a casino, a centre and quite possibly the planet ...
And so to yesterday's offering, and the pond thought that it would stick to screen grabs to keep it simple.
The Ughmann started off with some Islam and furriner bashing, pretty much standard for a reptile treatise.
Naturally the ranga, Pauline's pampered pet, set the tone, because long gone are the days when bigotry and racism were deemed impolite, and perhaps even unsayable ...
We woke up in a foreign land?
The pond must live in a different country, called Australia, but perhaps that's because way back when the Chinese restaurant across the road used to regularly treat the lumpenproletariat family to a handsome serve of 'luck' soup ...and the same Chinese family ran a fruit and vegie shop in the main drag and treated the poor with a little kindness... (and the Chinese basket weaver at the back of the pond's aunt's Carlton house kept giving everyone woven bamboo what nots, to the point where there was no room left, a bit like those multiplying brooms in Fantasia).
As for the next gobbet, the Ughmann managed to sound like a Vaucluse ponce, deeply up himself, with sniffy talk of "too many of the wrong kind of people".
What a prize git. More tone deaf than an out of tune piano.
Is there a Karl Rove in the house to offer some advice?
Maybe the Ughmann is keeping company with the wrong kind of people:
After that came some good news.
Correspondents will already be aware that the pond became a squillionaire by scoring thrupences and sixpences whenever a reptile referred to "the left's long march through the institutions", and the Ughmann kindly added to the pond's wealth.
Sadly it came with a bit of transphobia, but as Osgood, the wondrous Joe E. Brown said at the end of Some Like it Hot,"Well, nobody's perfect":
Actually it is progress because the pond has made it past the transphobia, and now it's on to the Ughmann fighting ancient wars all over again...
One thing's certain, the Ughmann is deeply intolerant, and simply won't tolerate any form of tolerance, as you might expect of an unreformed seminarian, deeply fearful of furriners and trans people, and seems entirely to have forgotten the bible, as unredeemable faux Xians are wont to do:
Romans 14:1-4: Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations. For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him. Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.
1 Corinthians 6: 1-4:Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters? Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life? If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church.
John 8: 1-11: Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
Dear sweet long absent lord, how the pond loves quoting biblical verses celebrating tolerance to irascible and deeply intolerant Xians ...
And with that it was on to the last Ughmann gobbet, and at the very end came a summary of bigotry, fear and loathing ...
Always the way with this sort of projection, seething with anger, peddling fear about the other and the different, and despising those lacking a warrior mentality, without any sign that they themselves decided that they'd be patriotic warriors proud to die for the flag. Not when there's an easy living to be made scribbling for the lizard Oz.
The pond is pleased however to celebrate those who serve, even from beyond the grave ...
And here's an immortal Rowe the pond almost missed, celebrating a man full of humble tolerance (the one on the left)...
